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• Can working exclusively with niche apps or tech hurt your career in software development? How to get out of the cycle? [closed]

  - by Keoma

  I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle. I've been at a pretty comfortable IT group for almost a decade. I got my start here working on web development, mostly CRUD, but have demonstrated the ability to figure out more complex problems. I'm not a rock star, but I have received many compliments on my programming aptitude, and technologists and architects have commented on my ability to pick things up (for example, I recently learned a very popular web framework that shall remain nameless since I don’t want to be identified). My problem is that, over time, my responsibilities have been shifting towards work such as support or ‘development’ with some rather niche products (afraid to mention here due to potential for being identified). Some of this work, if it includes anything resembling coding, is very menial scripting in languages such as Powershell or VBScript. The vast majority of the time, however, a typical day consists of going back and forth with the product’s vendor support to send them logs and apply configuration changes or patches they recommend. I’m basically starved for some actual software development. However, even though I’m more than capable of doing that development work (and actually do a much better job at it than anything else), our boss is more interested in the kind of work I mentioned above, her reasoning being that since no one else in the organization wants to do it, it must mean job security. This has been going on for close to 3 years, and the only reason I have held on is on the promise that we would eventually get more development projects assigned to us. Well, that turned out not to be true at all. A recent talk with the boss has just made it more explicitly clear, as she told me in no uncertain terms that it’s very likely that development work (web or otherwise) would go to another group. The reason given to me is that our we don’t have enough resources in our group to handle that. So now I find myself in the position that I either have to stay in what has essentially become a dead end IT job that is tied to the fortunes of a niche stack of apps, or try to find a position that will be better for my long term career. My problem (is it a problem?), however, is that compared to others, my development projects in the last three years are very sparse in number. To compound things, projects using the latest and most popular frameworks, amount to the big fat number of just one—with no work of that kind in the foreseeable future. I am very concerned that this sparseness in my resume is a deficit, and that it will hurt my chances of landing a different job. I’m also wondering how much it will hurt me, and whether that can be ameliorated with hobby projects of my own. I guess I’m looking for opinions. Thank you very much for reading.

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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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• Is code like this a "train wreck" (in violation of Law of Demeter)?

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Browsing through some code I've written, I came across the following construct which got me thinking. At a first glance, it seems clean enough. Yes, in the actual code the getLocation() method has a slightly more specific name which better describes exactly which location it gets. service.setLocation(this.configuration.getLocation().toString()); In this case, service is an instance variable of a known type, declared within the method. this.configuration comes from being passed in to the class constructor, and is an instance of a class implementing a specific interface (which mandates a public getLocation() method). Hence, the return type of the expression this.configuration.getLocation() is known; specifically in this case, it is a java.net.URL, whereas service.setLocation() wants a String. Since the two types String and URL are not directly compatible, some sort of conversion is required to fit the square peg in the round hole. However, according to the Law of Demeter as cited in Clean Code, a method f in class C should only call methods on C, objects created by or passed as arguments to f, and objects held in instance variables of C. Anything beyond that (the final toString() in my particular case above, unless you consider a temporary object created as a result of the method invocation itself, in which case the whole Law seems to be moot) is disallowed. Is there a valid reasoning why a call like the above, given the constraints listed, should be discouraged or even disallowed? Or am I just being overly nitpicky? If I were to implement a method URLToString() which simply calls toString() on a URL object (such as that returned by getLocation()) passed to it as a parameter, and returns the result, I could wrap the getLocation() call in it to achieve exactly the same result; effectively, I would just move the conversion one step outward. Would that somehow make it acceptable? (It seems to me, intuitively, that it should not make any difference either way, since all that does is move things around a little. However, going by the letter of the Law of Demeter as cited, it would be acceptable, since I would then be operating directly on a parameter to a function.) Would it make any difference if this was about something slightly more exotic than calling toString() on a standard type? When answering, do keep in mind that altering the behavior or API of the type that the service variable is of is not practical. Also, for the sake of argument, let's say that altering the return type of getLocation() is also impractical.

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• Any ideas on reducing lag in terrain generation?

  - by l5p4ngl312

  Ok so here's the deal. I've written an isometric engine that generates terrain based on camera values using 2D perlin noise. I planned on doing 3D but first I need to work out the lag issues I'm having. I will try to explain how I am doing this so that maybe someone can spot where I am going wrong. I know it should not be this laggy. There is the abstract class Block which right now just contains render(). BlockGrass, etc. extend this class and each has code in the render function to create a textured quad at the given position. Then there is the class Chunk which has the function Generate() and setBlocksInArea(). Generate uses 2D perlin noise to make a height map and stores the heights in a 2D array. It stores the positions of each block it generates in blockarray[x][y][z]. The chunks are 8x8x128. In the main game class there is a 3D array called blocksInArea. The blocks in this array are what gets rendered. When a chunk generates, it adds its blocks to this array at the correct index. It is like this so chunks can be saved to the hard drive (even though they aren't yet) but there can still be optimization with the rendering that you wouldn't have if you rendered each chunk separately. Here's where the laggy part comes in: When the camera moves to a new chunk, a row of chunks generates on the end of the axis that the camera moved on. But it still has to move the other chunks up/down in the blocksInArea (render) array. It does this by calculating the new position in the array and doing the Chunk.setBlocksInArea(): for(int x = 0; x < 8; x++){ for(int y = 0; y < 8; y++){ nx = x+(coordX - camCoordX)*8 ny = y+(coordY - camCoordY)*8 for(int z = 0; z < height[x][y]; z++){ blockarray[x][y][z] = Game.blocksInArea[nx][ny][z]; } } } My reasoning was that this would be much faster than doing the perlin noise all over again, but there are still little spikes of lag when you move in between chunks. Edit: Would it be possible to create a 3 dimensional array list so that shifting of chunks within the array would not be neccessary?

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• Criteria for selecting timeout value?

  - by stijn

  Situation: a piece of software reads frames of data from a file in a seperate thread and puts it on a queue, emptied by another thread. That second thread periodically checks on the queue and fails rather gracefully, by showing an error message stating the read timed out, if no data is available within a certain amount of time. Initially this timeout was set to 200mSec. There was no real reasoning behind that constant though, but it worked fine. We measured on a couple of machines and for large data frames, larger than what would be used by customers, a read took like 20mSec whith no other load on the machine. However one customer now gets timeout errors now and then (on the second try all is fine, probably the file is in cache or the virus scanner leaves it alone). The programmers are like 'well, yeah, but that customer's machine is full of cruft, virus scanners, tons of unneeded background processes etc'. Of course the customer is like 'hey this should just work, shouldn't it'? While the programers have a point, since the software is heavy enough to validate the need for a dedicated machine, that does not make the customer happy. Increasing the timeout to 2 seconds, for example, solves the problem. But I'd like to make a proper decision now instead of just randomly pick some magic constant that is probably ok in 99% of cases. What criteria should be used for that? We could just pick a large number, but that feels wrong. (and then we end up with a program that has the horrible bahaviour of hanging when trying to read from a disconnected drive for instance, whereas we'd rather make it show an error right away). Or we could make the timeout value a user setting, but then we need to ducument it clearly and even then not all customers are tech savy enough to really understand what it does. Or we could try and wait until another customer reports timeouts and increase the value again. And again. Until we find something ok for 99.99% of the cases.. Any good practice for this type of situation?

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• "static" as a semantic clue about statelessness?

  - by leoger

  this might be a little philosophical but I hope someone can help me find a good way to think about this. I've recently undertaken a refactoring of a medium sized project in Java to go back and add unit tests. When I realized what a pain it was to mock singletons and statics, I finally "got" what I've been reading about them all this time. (I'm one of those people that needs to learn from experience. Oh well.) So, now that I'm using Spring to create the objects and wire them around, I'm getting rid of static keywords left and right. (If I could potentially want to mock it, it's not really static in the same sense that Math.abs() is, right?) The thing is, I had gotten into the habit of using static to denote that a method didn't rely on any object state. For example: //Before import com.thirdparty.ThirdPartyLibrary.Thingy; public class ThirdPartyLibraryWrapper { public static Thingy newThingy(InputType input) { new Thingy.Builder().withInput(input).alwaysFrobnicate().build(); } } //called as... ThirdPartyLibraryWrapper.newThingy(input); //After public class ThirdPartyFactory { public Thingy newThingy(InputType input) { new Thingy.Builder().withInput(input).alwaysFrobnicate().build(); } } //called as... thirdPartyFactoryInstance.newThingy(input); So, here's where it gets touchy-feely. I liked the old way because the capital letter told me that, just like Math.sin(x), ThirdPartyLibraryWrapper.newThingy(x) did the same thing the same way every time. There's no object state to change how the object does what I'm asking it to do. Here are some possible answers I'm considering. Nobody else feels this way so there's something wrong with me. Maybe I just haven't really internalized the OO way of doing things! Maybe I'm writing in Java but thinking in FORTRAN or somesuch. (Which would be impressive since I've never written FORTRAN.) Maybe I'm using staticness as a sort of proxy for immutability for the purposes of reasoning about code. That being said, what clues should I have in my code for someone coming along to maintain it to know what's stateful and what's not? Perhaps this should just come for free if I choose good object metaphors? e.g. thingyWrapper doesn't sound like it has state indepdent of the wrapped Thingy which may itself be mutable. Similarly, a thingyFactory sounds like it should be immutable but could have different strategies that are chosen among at creation. I hope I've been clear and thanks in advance for your advice!

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• How to run software, that is not offered though package managers, that requires ia32-libs

  - by Onno

  I'm trying to install the Arma 2 OA dedicated server on a Virtualbox VM so I can test my own missions in a sandbox environment in a way that lets me offload them to another computer in my network. (The other computer is running the VM, but it's a windows machine, and I didn't want to hassle with its installation) It needs at least 2, and preferably 4GB of ram, so I thought I would install the AMD64 version of ubuntu 13.10 to get this going. 'How do you run a 32-bit program on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu?' already explained how to install 32bit software though apt-get and/or dpkg, but that doesn't apply in this case. The server is offered as a compressed download on the site of BI Studio, the developer of the Arma games. Its installation instructions are obviously slightly out of date with the current state of the art. (probably because the state of the art has been updated quite recently :) ) It states that I have to install ia32-libs, which has now apparently been deprecated. Now I have to find out how to get the right packages installed to make sure that it will run. My experience level is like novice-intermediate when it comes to these issues. I've installed a lot of packages though apt-get; I've solved dependency issues in the past; I haven't installed much software without using package managers. I can handle myself with basic administrative work like editing conf files and such. I have just gone ahead and tried to install it without installing ia32-libs through apt-get but to install gcc to get the libs after all. My reasoning being that gcc will include the files for backward compatibility coding and on linux all libs are (as far as I can tell) installed at a system level in /libs . So far it seems to start up. (I can connect with the game server trough my in-game network browser, so it's communicating) I'm not sure if there's any dependency checking going on when running the game server program, so I'm left with a couple of questions: Does 13.10 catch any calls to ia32libs libraries and translate the calls to the right code on amd64? If it runs, does that mean that all required libraries have been loaded correctly, or is there a change of it crashing later on when a library that was needed is missing after all? Is it necessary to do a workaround such as installing gcc? How do I find out what libraries I might need to run this software? (or any other piece of 32-bit software that isn't offered through a package manager)

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• POST and PUT requests – is it just the convention?

  - by bckpwrld

  I've read quite a few articles on the difference between POST and PUT and in when the two should be used. But there are still few things confusing me ( hopefully questions will make some sense ): 1) We should use PUT to create resources when we want clients to specify the URI of the newly created resources and we should use POST to create resources when we let service generate the URI of the newly created resources. a) Is it just by convention that POST create request doesn't contain an URI of the newly created resource or POST create request actually can't contain the URI of the newly created resource? b) PUT has idempotent semantics and thus can be safely used for absolute updates ( ie we send entire state of the resource to the server ), but not also for relative updates ( ie we send just changes to the resource state ), since that would violate its semantics. But I assume it's still possible for PUT to send relative updates to the server, it's just that in that case the PUT update won't be idempotent? 2) I've read somewhere that we should "use POST to append a resource to a collection identified by a service-generated URI". a) What exactly does that mean? That if URIs for the resources were generated by a server ( thus the resources were created via POST ), then ALL subsequent resources should also be created via POST? Thus, in such situation no resource should be created via PUT? b) If my assumption under a) is correct, could you elaborate why we shouldn't create some resources via POST and some via PUT ( assuming server already contains a collection of resources created via POST )? REPLY: 1) Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from your post and from the link you've posted, it seems: a) The Request-URI in POST is interpreted by server as the URI of the service. Thus, it could just as easily be interpreted as an URI of a newly created resource, if server code was written to recognize Request-URI as such b) Similarly, PUT is able to send relative updates, it's just that service code is usually written such that it will complain if PUT updates are relative. 2) Usually, create has fallen into the POST camp, because of the idea of "appending to a collection." It's become the way to append a resource to a list of resources. I don't quite understand the reasoning behind the idea of "appending to a collection" and why this idea prefers POST for create. Namely, if we create 10 resources via PUT, then server will contain a collection of 10 resources and if we then create another resource, then server will append this resource to that collection ( which will now contain 11 resources )?! Uh, this is kinda confusing thank you

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 13

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the advantages of using a large number of registers Discuss the way in which compilers optimize register usage Discuss the evolution of CISC machines Describe the characteristics of RISC architecture Discuss the RISC vs. CISC controversy Describe the way in which RISC and CISC design principles can be combined Instruction Execution Characteristics To understand the the line of reasoning of RISC advocates, we need a brief overview of instruction execution characteristics. These include… Operations Operands Procedure Calls These three sections can be studied in depth in the textbook at pages 503 - 505 A number of groups have come up with the conclusion that the attempt to make the instruction set architecture closer to HLLs (High Level Languages) is not the most effective design strategy. Rather HLL’s can be best supported by optimizing performance of the most time-consuming features of typical HLL programs. Generally 3 main characteristics came up to improve performance… Use a large number of registers or use a compiler to optimize register usage Careful attention needs to be paid to the design of instruction pipelines A simplified (reduced) instruction set is indicated The use of a large register optimization One of the most important design principles of RISC machines is the use of a large number of registers. The concept of register windows and the use of a large register file versus the use of cache memory are discussed. On the face of it, the use of a large set of registers should decrease the need to access memory. The design task is to organize the registers in such a fashion that this goal is realized. Read page 507 – 510 for a detailed explanation. Compiler-based register optimization   Reduced Instructions Set Architecture There are two advantages to smaller programs… Because the program takes up less memory, there is a savings in that resource (this was more compelling when memory was more expensive) Smaller programs should improve performance, and this will happen in two ways – fewer instructions means fewer instruction bytes to be fetched and in a paging environment smaller programs occupy fewer pages, reducing page faults. Certain characteristics are common to RISC processors… One instruction per cycle Register-to-register operations Simple addressing modes Simple instruction formats RISC vs. CISC After initial enthusiasm for RISC machines, there has been a growing realization that RISC designs may benefit from the inclusion of some CISC features CISC designs may benefit from the inclusion of some RISC features

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• Getting my younger brother started on programming

  - by SmartLemon

  My younger brother is 13 years old, I started programming when I started to develop Android applications when I was 15, last year my brother gained an interest in it and he would always pestering me about letting him make something himself, so I wrote him a few tutorials and he built himself a small application that had a few buttons that did something, I think you put in your dob and it would tell you what day you were born on, he took a couple of days building up to his final application, maybe even a week, learning everything he needed. Since then he hasn't really done much more because I have been engulfed in work and such where I have my own programming problems to sort out. I told him that when he was my age (I am 17) that he should be better then me, he was a bit sceptical about this however. I dont think he has as much logical reasoning as I would think he needs to solve more complex problems, but shouldnt that just develop over time as it did with me? He has been pestering me for the past week or something to write him more tutorials, but I didn't have time. All I had with me was a playlist I had downloaded from the new boston from youtube for C++, it's about 73 videos. He is currently about 20-30 videos in, he has come to ask me a few questions about it and thats it. Should I have really properly started him with C++? Should I stop him now and start him again on python or ruby? I know that C++ shouldn't really be a beginners language, especially for someone who is only 13, by the time this question is answered will probably be up to learning about inheritance or something. Some people may see this as not a real question, but it is, and should be used as a reference for others. I want to know, should I start him on a different language whch is more easy? What language then? And would it be better for me to teach him myself (I would make time) or just continue him with the new boston? There are a few more questions throughout this question but these are the main ones. Part of the question people seem to be neglecting is me asking whether I should change what language he is learning to another, or since he is already pretty far through the tutorials should I just leave him with C++ and he can learn the other languages freely by himself?

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• How to install Konica Minolta PagePro 1300W to Windows 7 64-bit?

  - by jsalonen

  I recently switched to Windows 7 (Home Pro, 64-bit) to discover that my Konica Minolta PagePro 1300W printer no longer works. When connected, Win7 prompts that it can not install a driver for the device. I have done a lot of googling to solve this problem, with no luck so far. From Konica Minolta official website, I can find drivers only for Windows XP/2000. My current reasoning is that they currently don't and most likely are not going to support Win7 let alone 64-bit version of it for this rather old printer. So my question is: does anyone have any good tips on how to make this printer work on my system? Is there any other place I could look for drivers, or in generally, do you know any workarounds that could let me printer work? One of the workaround I have been considering is to install a Windows XP / Ubuntu Linux on a virtualbox and use that system when I really really need to printer. This is of course not the optimal solution, but would let me possibly to use the printer until I buy a newer model.

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• OS/X 10.6 Bizarre login bug: Making alternative "Others..." appear. Why does this happen?

  - by bjornl

  I am studying at NUS in Singapore, and they have a mac-equipped computer lab here at school. All users (students) have our own personal accounts that we use to log in to the computers with. Sometimes when you approach a computer to log in only the alternative "thinkmac", which is the school's administrator account, I presume. Some other computers have the alternative "thinkmac" as well as "Others..." where you can input your own login credentials. One day as I sat down by a computer and there was only the "thinkmac" alternative. I was about to get up and find another one when the guy sitting next to me says - Just click 'thinkmac' - the computer will ask for your password - then hit escape to get back to the login screen. Repeat until "Others..." appear. So: If you click any user account, hit ESC to get taken back to the login screen, repeat for 5-10x, eventually the alternative "Others..." will appear. Why is this? Is there an internal counter that keeps track on how many times you have clicked a/any given user account, and after a certain threshold it displays the "Others"? What is the logical reasoning behind this?

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• Parallel Environment (PE) on Sun Grid Engine (6.2u5) won't run jobs: "only offers 0 slots"

  - by Peter Van Heusden

  I have Sun Grid Engine set up (version 6.2u5) on a Ubuntu 10.10 server with 8 cores. In order to be able to reserve multiple slots, I have a parallel environment (PE) set up like this: pe_name serial slots 999 user_lists NONE xuser_lists NONE start_proc_args /bin/true stop_proc_args /bin/true allocation_rule $pe_slots control_slaves FALSE job_is_first_task TRUE urgency_slots min accounting_summary FALSE This is associated with the all.q on the server in question (let's call the server A). However, when I submit a job that uses 4 threads with e.g. qsub -q all.q@A -pe serial 4 mycmd.sh, it never gets scheduled, and I get the following reasoning from qstat: cannot run in PE "serial" because it only offers 0 slots Why is SGE saying "serial" only offers 0 slots, since there are 8 slots available on the server I specified (server A)? The queue in question is configured thus (server names changed): qname all.q hostlist @allhosts seq_no 0 load_thresholds np_load_avg=1.75 suspend_thresholds NONE nsuspend 1 suspend_interval 00:05:00 priority 0 min_cpu_interval 00:05:00 processors UNDEFINED qtype BATCH INTERACTIVE ckpt_list NONE pe_list make orte serial rerun FALSE slots 1,[D=32],[C=8], \ [B=30],[A=8] tmpdir /tmp shell /bin/sh prolog NONE epilog NONE shell_start_mode posix_compliant starter_method NONE suspend_method NONE resume_method NONE terminate_method NONE notify 00:00:60 owner_list NONE user_lists NONE xuser_lists NONE subordinate_list NONE complex_values NONE projects NONE xprojects NONE calendar NONE initial_state default s_rt INFINITY h_rt 08:00:00 s_cpu INFINITY h_cpu INFINITY s_fsize INFINITY h_fsize INFINITY s_data INFINITY h_data INFINITY s_stack INFINITY h_stack INFINITY s_core INFINITY h_core INFINITY s_rss INFINITY h_rss INFINITY s_vmem INFINITY h_vmem INFINITY,[A=30g], \ [B=5g]

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• Is basing storage requirements based on IOPS sufficient?

  - by Boden

  The current system in question is running SBS 2003, and is going to be migrated on new hardware to SBS 2008. Currently I'm seeing on average 200-300 disk transfers per second total across all the arrays in the system. The array seeing the bulk of activity is a 6 disk 7200RPM RAID 6 and it struggles to keep up during high traffic times (idle time often only 10-20%; response times peaking 20-50+ ms). Based on some rough calculations this makes sense (avg ~245 IOPS on this array at 70/30 read to write ratio). I'm considering using a much simpler disk configuration using a single RAID 10 array of 10K disks. Using the same parameters for my calculations above, I'm getting 583 average random IOPS / sec. Granted SBS 2008 is not the same beast as 2003, but I'd like to make the assumption that it'll be similar in terms of disk performance, if not better (Exchange 2007 is easier on the disk and there's no ISA server). Am I correct in believing that the proposed system will be sufficient in terms of performance, or am I missing something? I've read so much about recommended disk configurations for various products like Exchange, and they often mention things like dedicating spindles to logs, etc. I understand the reasoning behind this, but if I've got more than enough random I/O overhead, does it really matter? I've always at the very least had separate spindles for the OS, but I could really reduce cost and complexity if I just had a single, good performing array. So as not to make you guys do my job for me, the generic version of this question is: if I have a projected IOPS figure for a new system, is it sufficient to use this value alone to spec the storage, ignoring "best practice" configurations? (given similar technology, not going from DAS to SAN or anything)

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• Optimal file system type and mount options for an rsnapshot dedicated drive

  - by Nimmy Lebby

  We have an external USB 2 drive that we are using as a backup drive for our configuration. We use rsnapshot for the backups. It uses a few standard commands for managing snapshots: rm -rf: deletes expired snapshots mv: moves older snapshots down a slot cp -al: duplicates last snapshot to new slot rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative: synchronizes new snapshot As you could see by the log below, the majority of the time is spent on the rm -rf and the cp -al steps: [25/Dec/2010:14:00:02] rsnapshot hourly: started [25/Dec/2010:14:00:02] echo 21012 > /var/run/rsnapshot.pid [25/Dec/2010:14:00:02] rm -rf /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.5/ [25/Dec/2010:14:15:48] mv /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.4/ /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.5/ [25/Dec/2010:14:15:48] mv /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.3/ /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.4/ [25/Dec/2010:14:15:48] mv /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.2/ /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.3/ [25/Dec/2010:14:15:48] mv /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.1/ /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.2/ [25/Dec/2010:14:15:48] cp -al /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.0 /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.1 [25/Dec/2010:14:23:32] rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative /etc /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.0/sm4/ [25/Dec/2010:14:23:52] touch /mnt/extdrive/snapshots/hourly.0/ [25/Dec/2010:14:23:52] rm -f /var/run/rsnapshot.pid [25/Dec/2010:14:23:52] rsnapshot hourly: completed successfully My questions: I'm currently using ext4 for the filesystem. Maybe this is not the best choice from those available in Red Hat. Anyone have any recommendations that would speed up the process? The partition's mount options are sync,dirsync 1 2. Is there a way to optimize this since it's solely used for rsnapshot? Of course, reasoning would be greatly appreciated.

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• Which version control should I use for my configuration files?

  - by rakete

  I want to store some of my configuration files (~/.emacs.d/, .Xdefaults, etc. linux $HOME stuff) in version control so I can easily sync them with my notebook/workplace and see my past changes and revert to them should the need arise. So far it seems to me that there are quite some people using git for this and I think that I too want to use a distributed vcs for this (if only to get more used to them) but I can't say that I am very experienced with all things dvcs. I did use darcs and git briefly and so far I can say that I really like the way git handles branches, and I think the possibility to have different branches within the same directory is especially useful for my use case. Darcs on the other hand has cherry picking of patches, which too is quite the convenient feature when managing configuration files (at least I assume it is). So, what would you recommend to use? And what would be your reasoning for your recommendation? What other vcs with nice feature that I haven't mentioned exist and would make a good vcs to store configuration files and why?

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• Why does Windows/Microsoft Updates always take such a long time to detect available updates?

  - by RLH

  It's a common task for many of us who work in any form of IT position using Windows. Eventually you have to install/re-install a version of Windows and what follows is a very long OS updating process. For a long time I have accepted the fact that this is a slow process and that's all there is to it. There is a lot to download, and some updates require restarts followed by further updates... Ugh! This morning I had to go through the process of installing Windows XP with SP3. I'm installing the OS on a VM on an SSD and I've been working on this thing for over 6 hours. Although, think there are many ways to knit-pick this process for improvements, there is one step that is always particularly slow and I can not figure out a good reason why. That step is the detection step on a manual update. Specifically, when navigate to the Windows (or Microsoft) Updates page, and then click the 'Custom' button to detect your updates. It appears that your PC just sits there for a painful amount of time. Check your Task Manager and it looks like your PC is, in fact, locked because your CPU isn't cooking but that's certainly not the case. Somethings happening but I have no clue what's going on? What is the updating software doing? If the registry was being searched, shouldn't my CPU usage peak? Does anybody know what's happening? I can loosely justify why some of the steps in the update process take so long. However, this one doesn't seem to have any reasoning.

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• Platform to allow users to suggest and vote for ideas

  - by Simon

  I head up a support team for a software product. I am in the process of setting up a blog (Wordpress.org), a forum (PHPBB or maybe Vanilla), a means to view bugs (probably expose Jira), but would also like to allow our customers to suggest enhancement requests. Currently we have this as a 'contact form' via the blog, which feeds into a dedicated inbox, which the product manager reviews and may include some of these ideas into the product. However, I would like to give the clients more power/visibility over this. Have a look at ideas.arcgis.com. There are plenty of other similar sites as well. Users can suggest new ideas Other users can vote these ideas up or down (similar to Stack Exchange sites) Ideas that are voted highly will be given a higher priority over lower ones. We can report back on the # of ideas we implement, and potentially reject ideas with reasoning. Has anyone seen any platforms (ideally free) which would replicate something similar to this? I was half thinking of embedding Vanilla within a wordpress page, but need to look into it more.

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• Why does Google Analytics use two domains?

  - by AKeller

  I'm building a distributed widget that is comparable to Google Analytics. Users will add a <script> tag to their site that references my widget's JavaScript file. The Google Analytics tracking code looks like this: var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function () { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Can anyone explain the reasoning behind separate HTTP and HTTPS hostnames? My instinct is to just secure the www address and then use the protocol-less syntax, like //www.google-analytics.com/ga.js. But I'm sure the Google Analytics architects put a lot of thought into this approach. I'd love to understand their logic before I follow/ignore their model.

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• Does Xenapp require Windows Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) licenses?

  - by John Virgolino

  We have a Xenapp 5.x server running for over a year now. It does not have any purchased Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) licenses installed. It is running on a Windows 2008 Server box. I am aware that Terminal Services runs fine for about 3 months and then supposedly stops issuing licenses. On occasion, Xenapp stops working and we see lots of License errors in the event log, although not necessarily every time. In most cases, a reboot or 2 resolves the problem. We figured it was because of the lack of TS licenses. I spoke with Citrix and they said we had to have the licenses, but it begs the question that if we have to have the licenses, how does it work the majority of the time without them!!?? I have not received a straight answer yet and before I tell my client to shell out more money, I need to understand the technical reasoning for how this is actually working if we are breaking the rules here. We will buy the licenses if necessary, but there has to be an explanation for this. I am hoping the community can help where Citrix apparently cannot. Thanks much!

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• Exchange 2007 Backup - For a newbie

  - by mew3900

  I am trying to setup an exchange 2007 backup solution. After doing a lot of reading, Microsoft have decided in server 2008 unless you are willing to spend a great deal on a 3rd party solution you are pretty stuck! Essentially what I have been asked to do is perform an off-line file backup of our current exchange server and replicate this onto a new 2nd server. The reasoning behind this is that we need to upgrade our current installation of exchange 2007 to SP2 so that the exchange plug-in for windows server backup will be available to us. From this I can then actually take an exchange aware backup weekly and take it off site. Ideally then also we can migrate to this new server and keep the old one as a fail over. Is there a way I can copy across the files required onto a second server, although I doubt very much it is that simple. I may be barking up completely the wrong tree, however I have very limited knowledge with Exchange and any help and advice on how I would resolve this would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance

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• Performance and Optimization Isn’t Evil

  - by Reed

  Donald Knuth is a fairly amazing guy.  I consider him one of the most influential contributors to computer science of all time.  Unfortunately, most of the time I hear his name, I cringe.  This is because it’s typically somebody quoting a small portion of one of his famous statements on optimization: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I mention that this is only a portion of the entire quote, and, as such, I feel that Knuth is being quoted out of context.  Optimization is important.  It is a critical part of every software development effort, and should never be ignored.  A developer who ignores optimization is not a professional.  Every developer should understand optimization – know what to optimize, when to optimize it, and how to think about code in a way that is intelligent and productive from day one. I want to start by discussing my own, personal motivation here.  I recently wrote about a performance issue I ran across, and was slammed by multiple comments and emails that effectively boiled down to: “You’re an idiot.  Premature optimization is the root of all evil.  This doesn’t matter.”  It didn’t matter that I discovered this while measuring in a profiler, and that it was a portion of my code base that can take “many hours to complete.”  Even so, multiple people instantly jump to “it’s premature – it doesn’t matter.” This is a common thread I see.  For example, StackOverflow has many pages of posts with answers that boil down to (mis)quoting Knuth.  In fact, just about any question relating to a performance related issue gets this quote thrown at it immediately – whether it deserves it or not.  That being said, I did receive some positive comments and emails as well.  Many people want to understand how to optimize their code, approaches to take, tools and techniques they can use, and any other advice they can discover. First, lets get back to Knuth – I mentioned before that Knuth is being quoted out of context.  Lets start by looking at the entire quote from his 1974 paper Structured Programming with go to Statements: “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.” Ironically, if you read Knuth’s original paper, this statement was made in the middle of a discussion of how Knuth himself had changed how he approaches optimization.  It was never a statement saying “don’t optimize”, but rather, “optimizing intelligently provides huge advantages.”  His approach had three benefits: “a) it doesn’t take long” … “b) the payoff is real”, c) you can “be less efficient in the other parts of my programs, which therefore are more readable and more easily written and debugged.” Looking at Knuth’s premise here, and reading that section of his paper, really leads to a few observations: Optimization is important  “he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code” Normally, 3% of your code – three lines out of every 100 you write, are “critical code” and will require some optimization: “we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%” Optimization, if done well, should not be time consuming: “it doesn’t take long” Optimization, if done correctly, provides real benefits: “the payoff is real” None of this is new information.  People who care about optimization have been discussing this for years – for example, Rico Mariani’s Designing For Performance (a fantastic article) discusses many of the same issues very intelligently. That being said, many developers seem unable or unwilling to consider optimization.  Many others don’t seem to know where to start.  As such, I’m going to spend some time writing about optimization – what is it, how should we think about it, and what can we do to improve our own code.

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• Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released

  - by terje

  Our free extension to Visual Studio , the folder based Build Explorer Version 1.1 has now been released, and uploaded to the Visual Studio Gallery and Codeplex. We have collected up a few changes and some bugs, as follows: Changes: Queue Default Builds can now be optionally fully enabled, fully disabled or enabled just for leaf nodes (=disabled for folders).  If you got a large number of builds it was pretty scary to be able to launch all of them with just one click.  However, it is nice to avoid having the dialog box up when you want to just run off a single build.  That’s the reasoning between the 3rd choice here. Auto fill-in of the builds at start up and refresh  This was a request that came up a lot, and which was also irritating to us.  When the Team Project is opened, the Build explorer will start by itself and fill up it’s tree. So you don’t need to click the node anymore. There was also quite a bit of flashing when the tree filled up, this has been reduced to just a single top level fill before it collapses the node. The speed of the buildup of the tree has also been increased. The “All Build Definitions” node is now shown on top of the list Login box appeared in certain cross domain situations. This was a fix for the TF30063 authentication problem we had in the beginning.  Hopefully the new code has that fixed properly so that both the login box and the TF30063 are gone forever.  Our testing so far seems to indicate it works.  If anyone gets a real problem here there are two workarounds: 1) Turn off the auto refresh to reduce the issue. If this doesn’t fix it, then 2) please reinstall the former version (go to the codeplex download site if you don’t have it anymore)  Write a comment to this blog post with a description of what happens, and I will send a temporary fix asap. Bug fixes: The folder name matching was case sensitive, so “Application.CI” and “application.CI” created two different folders.  View all builds not shown for leaf odes, and view builds didn’t work in all cases.  There was some inconsistencies here which have been fixed. Partly fixed:  The context menu to queue a new build for disabled builds should be removed, but that was a difficult one, and is still on the list, but the command will not do anything for a disabled build. Using the Queue Default Builds on a folder, and if it had some disabled builds below an error box appeared and ruined the whole experience. As a result of these fixes there has been introduced some new options, as shown below:   The two first settings, the Separator symbol and the options for how to handle Queuing of default builds are set per Team Project, and is stored in the TFS source control under the BuildProcessTemplates folder, with the name Inmeta.VisualStudio.BuildExplorer.Settings.xml The next two settings need some explanations.  They handle the behavior for the auto update of the build folders.  First, these are stored in the local registry per user, at the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software\Inmeta\BuildExplorer. The first option Use Timed Refresh at Startup, if turned off, you will need to click the node as it is done in Version 1.0.  The second option is a timed value, the time after the Build explorer node is created and until the scanning of the Build folders start.  It is assumed that this is enough, and the tests so far indicates this.  If you have very many builds and you see that the explorer don’t get them all, try to increase this value, and of course, notify me of your case, either here or on the Visual Gallery site.

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• Common business drivers that lead to creating and sustaining a project

  Common business drivers that lead to creating and sustaining a project include and are not limited to: cost reduction, increased return on investment (ROI), reduced time to market, increased speed and efficiency, increased security, and increased interoperability. These drivers primarily focus on streamlining and reducing cost to make a company more profitable with less overhead. According to Answers.com cost reduction is defined as reducing costs to improve profitability, and may be implemented when a company is having financial problems or prevent problems. ROI is defined as the amount of value received relative to the amount of money invested according to PayperclickList.com.  With the ever increasing demands on businesses to compete in today’s market, companies are constantly striving to reduce the time it takes for a concept to become a product and be sold within the global marketplace. In business, some people say time is money, so if a project can reduce the time a business process takes it in fact saves the company which is always good for the bottom line. The Social Security Administration states that data security is the protection of data from accidental or intentional but unauthorized modification, destruction. Interoperability is the capability of a system or subsystem to interact with other systems or subsystems. In my personal opinion, these drivers would not really differ for a profit-based organization, compared to a non-profit organization. Both corporate entities strive to reduce cost, and strive to keep operation budgets low. However, the reasoning behind why they want to achieve this does contrast. Typically profit based organizations strive to increase revenue and market share so that the business can grow. Alternatively, not-for-profit businesses are more interested in increasing their reach within communities whether it is to increase annual donations or invest in the lives of others. Success or failure of a project can be determined by one or more of these drivers based on the scope of a project and the company’s priorities associated with each of the drivers. In addition, if a project attempts to incorporate multiple drivers and is only partially successful, then the project might still be considered to be a success due to how close the project was to meeting each of the priorities. Continuous evaluation of the project could lead to a decision to abort a project, because it is expected to fail before completion. Evaluations should be executed after the completion of every software development process stage. Pfleeger notes that software development process stages include: Requirements Analysis and Definition System Design Program Design Program Implementation Unit Testing Integration Testing System Delivery Maintenance Each evaluation at every state should consider all the business drivers included in the scope of a project for how close they are expected to meet expectations. In addition, minimum requirements of acceptance should also be included with the scope of the project and should be reevaluated as the project progresses to ensure that the project makes good economic sense to continue. If the project falls below these benchmarks then the project should be put on hold until it does make more sense or the project should be aborted because it does not meet the business driver requirements.   References Cost Reduction Program. (n.d.). Dictionary of Accounting Terms. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/cost-reduction-program Government Information Exchange. (n.d.). Government Information Exchange Glossary. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from SSA.gov Web site: http://www.ssa.gov/gix/definitions.html PayPerClickList.com. (n.d.). Glossary Term R - Pay Per Click List. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from PayPerClickList.com Web site: http://www.payperclicklist.com/glossary/termr.html Pfleeger, S & Atlee, J.(2009). Software Engineering: Theory and Practice. Boston:Prentice Hall Veluchamy, Thiyagarajan. (n.d.). Glossary « Thiyagarajan Veluchamy’s Blog. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from Thiyagarajan.WordPress.com Web site: http://thiyagarajan.wordpress.com/glossary/

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• The Value of SOA Specialization - Fujitsu

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Thanks for the nice ink The Value of Specialization In my last post  I talked about Fujitsu's achievement in obtaining SOA and other specializations, but I have heard murmurings from other partners about what just is the value? I think Oracle have to do more to advertise the benefits to customers, we need to see customers asking for specialization for it to really work, but Oracle have made great promises about only recommending those partners who are specialized. For us there was another benefit. Oracle was sponsoring the 3rd Annual SOA Symposium in Berlin and invited us as their first specialized partner to take part. There is a great blog about the symposium on the SOA community blog site. This is real commitment from Oracle and we have other marketing opportunities being worked on with Jürgen. This does generate leads so my message to other Oracle Partners is, you need to do this, it is worthwhile.   Fujitsu - First SOA Specialized Partner Globally Just before Oracle Open World I found out that Fujitsu had achieved the first SOA Specialization globally. I think most partners know what the requirements are for Specialization and that in itself is challenging but the bureaucracy around the actual submission is an exercise in tenacity. I won’t go into that now; I have had my dig at Oracle this month, but enough to say the process could be improved. As a platinum partner we needed 5 specializations and we decided to go for SOA first. The reasoning behind this is that our Oracle Practice is known for being applications centric. We have always had an excellent technical capability but no one ever talked about that, it was just part and parcel of an implementation. However today we have just as many bids that are technology lead as there is applications lead, so it seemed a good plan to work on the areas we were not known for. We appointed a capability lead to be responsible for putting the team through the training and testing and Rosemary (Kell) was excellent, she ensured that everyone was on track and that it wasn’t just getting put into the ‘to do list’. In Fujitsu everyone in the Oracle Practice has an objective to achieve the competency tests in their area, so achieving the 2 pre sales, 2 sales and 1 support was no problem at all. We actually had 22 with the support capability proficiency.  The implementation specialist exams are much harder, more like OCP in the database area. We had help from the Oracle SOA Community; Jürgen Kress who runs this in EMEA is really motivational. At the time we started SOA was a beta exam which means you do not get the results immediately but again we put forward more than we needed. Manjit Chopra, Sukhraj Sahota, Emely Patra, Ian Scorrer and Sunny Sidhu all took the exam and eventually got the results they wanted they had passed. Congratulations. Here is Jurgen expalining why specialization is important. After the tests came the submissions where you need to include deals and experience, this was my bit, and persuading Oracle we really deserved the specialization. Finally we got the news we had been awarded the specialization, and a few days later that we were first globally. I am very proud. However there is no rest for the wicked and we plodded on to make the 5 specializations needed for Platinum and now we are working on the new Diamond status and I think SOA will be one of our 5 ‘super specializations’. This is a global Fujitsu initiative and I work closely with my colleague in Germany Jessika Weiss. It was nice to be able to have a press release about this and a comment from Judson Althoff  head of Oracle Alliances. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA,SOA Community,OPN,Oracle,Fujitsu,Debra Lilley,Jürgen Kress,Specialization,SOA Specialization

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