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  • Selectively Exposing Functionallity in .Net

    - by David V. Corbin
    Any developer should be aware of the principles of encapsulation, cross-tier isolation, and cross-functional separation of concerns. However, it seems the few take the time to consider the adage of "minimal yet complete"1 when developing the software. Consider the exposure of "business objects" to the user interface. Some common situations occur: Accessing a given element requires a compound set of calls that do not "make sense" to the User Interface. More information than absolutely required is exposed to the user interface It would be much cleaner if a custom interface was provided that exposed exactly (and only) the information that is required by the consumer. Achieving this using conventional techniques would require the creation (and maintenance!) of custom classes to filter and transpose the information into the ideal format. Determining the ROI on this approach can be very difficult to ascertain, and as a result it is often ignored completely. There is another approach, which is largely made practical by virtual of the Action and Func delegates. From a callers point of view, the following two samples can be used interchangeably:     interface ISomeInterface     {         void SampleMethod1(string param);         string SamepleMethod2(string param);     }       class ISomeInterface     {         public Action<string> SampleMethod1 {get; }         public Func<string,string> SamepleMethod2 {get; }     }   The capabilities this simple changes enable are significant (and remember it does not cange the syntax at the call site): The delegates can be initialized to directly call the proper method of any target class. The delegates can be dynamically updated based on the current state. The "interface" can NOT be cast to the concrete class (which often exposes more functionallity). This patterns By limiting the interface to the exact functionallity required, the reduced surface area will typically result in lower development, testing and maintenance costs. We are currently in the process of posting a project on CodePlex which illustrates this (and many other) techniques which have proven helpful in creating robust yet flexible solutions that are highly efficient2 and maintainable. This post will be updated as soon as the project is published. 1) Credit: Scott  Meyers, Effective C++, Addison-Wesley 1992 2) For those who read my previous post on performance it should be noted that the use of delegates is on the same order of magnitude (actually a tiny amount faster) as conventional interfaces.

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  • Getting away from a customized Magento 1.4 installation - Magento 1.6, OpenCart, or others?

    - by Phil
    I'm dealing with a Magento 1.4.0.0 Community Edition installation with various undocumented changes to the core (mostly integration with an ERP system), an outdated Sweet Tooth Points & Rewards module and some custom payment providers. It also doubles as a mediocre blogging/CMS system. It has one store each for 3 different languages, with about 40 product categories for a few hundred products. [rant] With no prior experience with any PHP e-commerce systems, I find it very difficult to work with. I attempted to install Magento 1.4.0.0 on my local WAMP dev machine, it installs fine, but the main page or search do not show any products no matter what I do in the backend admin panel. I don't know what's wrong with it, and whatever information I googled is either too old or too new from Magento 1.4. Later I'm given FTP access to the testing server, which neither my manager or I have permission to install XDebug on, as apparantly it runs on the same server as the production server (yikes). Trying to learn how Magento works is torture. I spent a week trying to add some fields into the Onepage Checkout before giving up and went to work on something else. The template system, just like the rest of Magento, is a bloated mishmash of overcomplicated directory structures, weird config xml files and EAV databases. I went into 6 different models and several content blocks in the backend just to change what the front page looks like. With little-to-none helpful and clear documentation (unlike CodeIgniter) and various breaking changes between minor point revisions which makes it hard to find useful information, Magento 1.4 is a developer killer. [/rant] The client is planning to redesign the site and has decided it might as well as move on from this unsustainable, hacky, upgrade-unfriendly, developer-unfriendly mess. Magento 1.4 is starting to show its age, with Magento 1.7 coming soon, the client is considering upgrading to Magento 1.6 or 1.7 if it has improved from 1.4. The customizations done to the current Magento 1.4 installation will have to be redone, and a new license for the Sweet Tooth Points & Rewards module will have to be bought. The client is also open to other e-commerce systems. I've looked at OpenCart and it seems to be quite developer friendly with a fairly simple structure. I found some complaints regarding its performance when the shop has thousands of categories or products, but this is not an issue with the current number of products my client has. It seems to be solid ground for easy customization to bring the rewards system and ERP integration over. What should the client upgrade to in this case?

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • Rights and use of developed software

    - by Nils Munch
    I have been working on a piece of software for a company, that they wish to resell. There was an mail-based agreement upon a flat hourly rate for my work, and eager me chose to accept a rather low fee. Due to the stress and tempo of the task, a direct contract was never formed or signed. The software was developed locally on my machine, and I was pretty much alone with it, except by excellent help from StackOverflow when I got stuck. Now, the software is nearing completion, I suddenly hear that they have hired a new developer to make the same piece of software as me, and that I was expected to resign within long. Confused I ask around, and realize that the CEO of the company had informed the rest of the company that I was terminally ill and had cancer, and was expected to leave the company soon. Since I'm perfectly healthy, this confused me even more, until I realized what was going on. When I confronted my boss with this, I was no longer seen as a member of the company, and I left the same day, never to return. Later, I raised the question about my missing pay, since I had been working for quite a bit, and not received any payment for my software. I saw that they had already sold a fair copy of my software, and since it's not exactly sold cheap, the company should have plenty of gold to pay me. The company refused, and said that they owned the software, and everything it contained. That was a lot of drama, but my question is this: Who has the rights to the software ? The source code had my personal watermarks and copyrights inprinted, but they have since simply deleted it. The company claim that they have all the rights, because they have a website made about the product, where they write that they have "All rights reserved" in the bottom. My instinct tells me that if a company buys a service like this, and then refuses to pay their developer, then they should not be allowed to keep, and much less resell the product. I have not signed any agreements about giving the company the use of this product, I have made it in my own time and without help from the rest of the company. This all takes place in Denmark, Europe, but I would guess that the rules about this is somewhat universal. Im not the strongest person to legal-talk, so I might be wrong.

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  • Enhance Your Gmail Account in Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you tired of items like the Chat and Invite Boxes cluttering up your Gmail account? Then join us as we look at the Better Gmail extension for Google Chrome. Before Here are some examples of items that you may be tired of looking at in your Gmail account such as the “Footer” below your “Inbox”, the “Chat Box”, and the “Invitation Box”. Perhaps you would also like to have the “New Window, Print all, & Create a document Commands” moved elsewhere. And of course there is everyone’s “favorite” sponsored links… Time to do some cleaning up and reorganizing. Better Gmail in Action As soon as you have installed Better Gmail a new tab will automatically open and present you with the available options. Place a “checkmark” in the box for each option that you would like activated and click on “Save” when finished. Note: The final option entry is a tie-in with two other “linked” extensions (Folders4Gmail & HTML Signature) while the middle listing is a link to an article for disabling Google Buzz. Once you have saved your changes in the “Options” you will be prompted to refresh your Gmail tab to see the changes. Going back to our “Inbox Area” everything looks so much more streamlined and clean now. Goodbye clutter! The “New Window, Print all, & Create a document Commands” definitely look a lot nicer as a small toolbar above our e-mail. And the right side…you can see for yourself just how much better that looks. No more distractions there to bother you as you read your e-mail. Conclusion If you have been wanting to get rid of the undesirable elements visible in your Gmail account then hurry over to the Better Gmail page, grab the extension and enjoy the better view. Links Download the Better Gmail extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Figure out which Online accounts are selling your email to spammersAdd a Remember The Milk Task Pane to Gmail in ChromeHow to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail AccountAdd Your Gmail To Windows Live MailOpen Your Gmail Account in a Popup Window TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet

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  • Missing Indexes DMV Report, 3 billion Impact!

    - by Tara Kizer
    We’ve been having some major performance issues with one of the applications that I support.  The database is on SQL Server 2005 and is about 150GB in size.  We’ve identified a couple of issues already on the database side.  The first issue is that some query (or maybe several queries) is getting a bad execution plan at some point in time during the day.  When it occurs, database performance comes to a grinding halt.  We know it’s a bad execution plan as running DBCC FREEPROCCACHE immediately resolves the problem system-wide.  As we have not yet identified the problematic query, we’ve put a temporary solution in place that frees the procedure cache on an hourly basis via a SQL Agent job.  This is not ideal, but it is getting us through the day without a major problem.  We are actively working on identifying the problematic query and hope to disable the SQL Agent job soon. Earlier this week, we had a major slowdown for one of the processes of this application.  I was unable to find any database performance issues, but I continued to investigate it.  One of things that I typically do when investigating database performance issues is run the “Missing Indexes DMV Report” (that’s what I call it at least).  When analyzing the output of that report, I immediately dismiss anything under 1 million “Impact” as I want to target the “low-hanging fruit” initially.  When I ran the report earlier this week, I was shocked to find a suggested index with an impact of over 3 billion! Do I win a prize for the highest impact?  Has anyone seen a value higher than mine?  My exact value was 3154284120.67765. The performance issue from earlier this week ended up being an application problem, but it also brought to light a much needed index.  I had previously seen this index come up in that report but always with a much lower impact.  I had never considered it as the index’s selectivity is very low.  It’s a composite index with three columns.  The first column is not selective, the first two columns are not selective, and the three columns together are not selective.  In fact, no matter how I order it, the index will not be selective at all.  I briefly discussed this with Kimberly Tripp, and she said that this was okay for covering indexes.  Selectivity is irrelevant for a covering index.  She indicated that she’s even created indexes with gender as the first column in the index.  I’ve got lots to learn still!

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  • Databases and Beer

    - by Johnm
    It is a bit of a no-brainer: Include the word "beer" in a subject line of an e-mail or blog post title and you can be certain that it will be read. While there are times this practice might be a ploy to increase readership, it is not the case for this blog post. There is inspiration that can be drawn from other industries to which we, as database professionals, can apply in our industry. In this post I will highlight one of my favorite participants of the brewing industry. The Boston Beer Company started in the 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts. Others may be more familiar with this company through their Samuel Adams Boston Lager and other various seasonal beers. I am continually inspired by their commitment to mastery of the brewing process to which they evangelize frequently in their commercials. They also are continually in pursuit of pushing the boundaries of beer as we know it while working within traditional constraints. A recent example of this is their collaboration with Weihenstephan Brewery of Munich, Germany to produce the soon to be released Infinium beer. This beer, while brewed as an ale, is touted as something closer to something like Champaign - all while complying with the Reinheitsgebot. The Reinheitsgebot is also known as the "German Beer Purity Law" which was originated in 1516. This law states that beer is to consist of water, barley, hops and yeast. That's it. Quite a limiting constraint indeed. and yet, The Boston Beer Company pushed forward. Much like the process of brewing, the discipline of database design and architecture is one that is continually in process and driven by the pursuit of mastery. While we do not have purity laws to constrain us, we have many other types: best practices, company policies, government regulations, security and budgets. Through our fellow comrades, we discuss the challenges and constraints in which we operate. We boil down the principles and theories that define our profession. We reassemble these into something that is complementary to the business needs that we must fulfill. As a result, it is not uncommon to see something amazingly innovative in a small business who is pushing the boundaries of their database well beyond its intended state. It is equally common to see innovation in the use of features available in the more advanced features of databases that are found in large businesses. The tag line for The Boston Beer Company is: "Take Pride In Your Beer.", I would like to offer an alternative and say "Take Pride In Your Database." So, As you pour your next Boston Lager into a frosted glass, consider those who spend their lives mastering the craft of brewing and strive to interject their spirit into everything that you do as a database professional. Cheers!

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  • IRM and Consumerization

    - by martin.abrahams
    As the season of rampant consumerism draws to its official close on 12th Night, it seems a fitting time to discuss consumerization - whereby technologies from the consumer market, such as the Android and iPad, are adopted by business organizations. I expect many of you will have received a shiny new mobile gadget for Christmas - and will be expecting to use it for work as well as leisure in 2011. In my case, I'm just getting to grips with my first Android phone. This trend developed so much during 2010 that a number of my customers have officially changed their stance on consumer devices - accepting consumerization as something to embrace rather than resist. Clearly, consumerization has significant implications for information control, as corporate data is distributed to consumer devices whether the organization is aware of it or not. I daresay that some DLP solutions can limit distribution to some extent, but this creates a conflict between accepting consumerization and frustrating it. So what does Oracle IRM have to offer the consumerized enterprise? First and foremost, consumerization does not automatically represent great additional risk - if an enterprise seals its sensitive information. Sealed files are encrypted, and that fundamental protection is not affected by copying files to consumer devices. A device might be lost or stolen, and the user might not think to report the loss of a personally owned device, but the data and the enterprise that owns it are protected. Indeed, the consumerization trend is another strong reason for enterprises to deploy IRM - to protect against this expansion of channels by which data might be accidentally exposed. It also enables encryption requirements to be met even though the enterprise does not own the device and cannot enforce device encryption. Moving on to the usage of sealed content on such devices, some of our customers are using virtual desktop solutions such that, in truth, the sealed content is being opened and used on a PC in the normal way, and the user is simply using their device for display purposes. This has several advantages: The sensitive documents are not actually on the devices, so device loss and theft are even less of a worry The enterprise has another layer of control over how and where content is used, as access to the virtual solution involves another layer of authentication and authorization - defence in depth It is a generic solution that means the enterprise does not need to actively support the ever expanding variety of consumer devices - the enterprise just manages some virtual access to traditional systems using something like Citrix or Remote Desktop services. It is a tried and tested way of accessing sealed documents. People have being using Oracle IRM in conjunction with Citrix and Remote Desktop for several years. For some scenarios, we also have the "IRM wrapper" option that provides a simple app for sealing and unsealing content on a range of operating systems. We are busy working on other ways to support the explosion of consumer devices, but this blog is not a proper forum for talking about them at this time. If you are an Oracle IRM customer, we will be pleased to discuss our plans and your requirements with you directly on request. You can be sure that the blog will cover the new capabilities as soon as possible.

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  • Using runtime checking of code contracts in Visual Studio 2010

    - by DigiMortal
    In my last posting about code contracts I introduced how to check input parameters of randomizer using static contracts checking. But you can also compile code contracts to your assemblies and use them also in runtime. In this posting I will show you simple example about runtime checking of code contracts. NB! If you want to play with code and try out things described here feel free to download example solution. if you are speaker and want to use this solution as a part of your sessions then feel free to do so, but don’t forget to refer me and this blog as source of this solution. And please let me know about your session. As a speaker I am very interested about it. :) To see how code contracts are checked at runtime we have to enable runtime checking from project properties. Make sure you have checked the box “Perform Runtime Contract Checking” and make sure you select “Full” from dropdown. These parts are in red box on the screenshot below. Visual Studio 2010 settings for code contracts. Runtime Checking is turned on and checks are made only in public surface. Click on image to see it at original size.  Save project settings. Then compile code and run it. As soon as code execution hits the call to GetRandomFromRangeContracted() exception is thrown. If you are not currently playing with solution referred above take a look at the following screenshot. Visual Studio 2010 runtime checking of code contracts. Exception of type ContractException is thrown when contract is violated. Click on image to see it at original size.  The exact type of exception is ContractException and it is defined in System.Diagnostics.Contracts.__ContractsRuntime namespace. In our example the message of exception is following: "Precondition failed: min < max  Min must be less than max" Besides the description we inserted for the case contract violation the message also contains violated contract type. In this case the type of contract is Precondition. Conclusion Using runtime checking of code contracts enables you to take code contracts with your code and have them checked every time when your methods are called. This way you can assure that all conditions are met to run method or exception is thrown and calling system has to handle the situation.

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  • Networking works on Live CD but not after installation.

    - by user9054
    Hi Friends, I have got this issue with Ubuntu 10.10. I have been with ubuntu 8.04 and then decided to try out ubuntu 10.10 . I booted with a LiveCD and was able to configure the wireless network painlessly using the livecd, so happily I installed ubuntu 10.10. As soon as ubuntu came up it detected the wireless network and i was able to assign a static IP to eth1 (i dont use DHCP option on my ADSL router) and enter a wap key and use pppoeconf to configure the dialer. The net was on and i was able to surf the net. All hunky dory so far. However on the next boot the fun started . It did not detect the wireless network. I could not see the network manager icon in the systray. I used ifconfig and saw that the entry for eth1 was missing. I used ifup eth1 and it said that eth1 was already up. Then i installed wifi-radar. Wifi-Radar detected the wireless network. I configured wifi-radar for the detected wireless network , set the wap driver as wext and used the manual IP settings. However on clicking connect wifi-radar started looking for a DHCP IP. I cannot understand why wifi-radar is using DHCP when I have specified manual settings. Then I decided to use the wired network to surf the net looking for a solution. So I plugged in the network cable from my modem , configured eth0 , used pppoeconf and connected the net. Then I foolishly decided to reboot my PC. And wonders of wonders , the same problem appeared. I cannot see eth0 in my ifconfig anymore. I used pon and it said something about network error or something. Now my ifconfig shows only lo .Can anybody help me on this. PS : 1) I tried linux mint 10 and had the same issue . on rebooting wireless network was not getting detected. 2) I have made myself the administrator so that there is no issue of rights or anything.

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  • What if you could work on anything you wanted?

    - by red@work
    This week we've downed our tools and organised ourselves into small project teams or struck out alone. We're working on whatever we like, with whoever we like, wherever we like. We've called it Down Tools week and so far it's a blast. It all started a few months ago with an idea from Neil, our CEO. Neil wanted to capture the excitement, innovation, and productivity of Coding by the Sea and extend this to all Red Gaters working in Product Development. A brainstorm is always a good place to start for an "anything goes" project. Half of Red Gate piled into our largest meeting room (it's pretty big) armed with flip charts, post its and a heightened sense of possibility. An hour or so later our SQL Servery walls were covered in project ideas. So what would you do, if you could work on anything you wanted? Many projects are related to tools we already make, others are for internal product development use and some are, well, just something completely different. Someone suggested we point a web cam at the SQL Servery lunch queue so we can check it before heading to lunch. That one couldn't wait for Down Tools Week. It was up and running within a few days and even better, it captures the table tennis table too. Thursday is the Show and Tell - I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has come up with. Some of the projects will turn into new products or features so this probably isn't the time or place to go into detail of what is being worked on. Rest assured, you'll hear all about it! We're making a video as we go along too which will be up on our website as soon. In the meantime, all meetings are cancelled, we've got plenty of food in and people are being very creative with the £500 expenses budget (Richard, do you really need an iPad?). It's brilliant to see it all coming together from the idea stage to reality. Catch up with our progress by following #downtoolsweek on Twitter. Who knows, maybe a future Red Gate flagship tool is coming to life right now? By the way, it's business as usual for our customer facing and internal operations teams. Hmm, maybe we can all down tools for a week and ask Product Development to hold the fort? Post by: Alice Chapman

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  • Agile PLM Highlights from Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Kerrie Foy
    Thank you to everyone who joined us at Oracle OpenWorld this year, either in person or virtually (thanks for tweeting #oowplm)!  From customer presentations to after-hours networking opportunities, there was a lot to see and do during the entire conference. Sessions It was our pleasure to feature several customer speakers during our PLM sessions at OpenWorld from such companies as Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Facebook, Eli Lilly, and many more.  Each had a unique perspective to share and fascinating insight into how they successfully leverage Agile PLM to facilitate profitable innovation, protect brand integrity, streamline operations, manage compliance, launch faster, etc.  For example, during the Product Value Chain keynote session, CIO Chris Bedi of JDSU shared how they implemented Agile PLM to support business imperatives around rapid innovation, centralizing product information, collaboration, and eliminate the “Excel gymnastics” required to obtain global portfolio visibility. In just 120 days after implementing, JDSU employees reported significant improvements around product record management, new product introduction, engineering collaboration and more, which created a better work environment to enable critical innovation. I could write on and on about the almost 20 sessions! So to spare yourselves, please visit launch.oracle.com/?plmopenworld2012; it’s a curated selection of PLM presentations from the OpenWorld Content Catalog and available on-demand. Enjoy! Agile Innovation Management During OpenWorld, we announced an exciting new addition to the Agile PLM applications called Innovation Management that redefines the industry’s scope of product lifecycle management.  Our broad vision of complete enterprise PLM for the entire Product Value Chain already broke new ground by helping organizations extend PLM disciplines downstream by connecting product design to commercialization processes; now we are helping executives look farther upstream in the early innovation phases to ultimately close the gap between strategy and execution that so commonly nags innovation initiatives.  More on this coming soon so stay tuned! Unique Networking Opportunities  We know it can be challenging during OpenWorld to find time to productively connect and network with your industry peers, so we hosted an Agile PLM “Birds of a Feather” networking brunch for the second year in a row.  At a fine restaurant close to Moscone we hosted nine tables, each with only ten seats to encourage active conversation.  Furthermore, guests could select from a list of predetermined table topics sponsored by a specialized PLM partner to guarantee – even more so – that they were seated with like-minded company and optimizing their time at the conference.  Everyone enjoyed the opportunity to easily connect with other PLM users during OpenWorld in a more casual setting. What’s Next? Thank you again to all who joined us!  If you haven't yet, mark your calendar to join us for the next Oracle Agile PLM conference at the Value Chain Summit in San Francisco, February 4-6 in 2013!  We’ll have 40 sessions of PLM content in four tracks. Don’t miss it! You can sign up to be notified when official registration opens by visiting www.oracle.com/goto/vcs. 

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  • How to force a new Notification in notify-osd to show up without waiting for the earlier one to exit?

    - by Nirmik
    I have made a script(and a .desktop shortcut leading to this script) for starting and stoping xampp... It checks the status of xampp and accordingly either starts or stops xampp. Now i have assigned a notification as soon as the script is started to display "Starting xampp..." or "Stopping xampp..." and then when xampp is started or stopped,it displays "Xampp started..." or "Xampp stopped..." I've used notify-send to show notification as seen in the script below Now the thing is that here,the second notification waits for the 1st one to disappear and then pops up even if xampp has started/stopped. I want the new notification to appear immediately by forcing the earlier one to exit before the completion of its life-cycle. This can be seen to take plce when you activate/deactivate wireless/networking immediately... For example the "Wireless enabled" comes up on selecting enable wireless and if you immediately select disable wireless,the "Wireless disabled" notification comes up without waiting for "Wireless enabled" notification to complete its life-cycle. So how do i achieve this? #!/bin/sh SERVICE='proftpd' if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $SERVICE /dev/null then notify-send -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "Stopping XAMPP..." && gksudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop && notify-send -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo- small.gif "XAMPP Stoped." else notify-send -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "Starting XAMPP..." && gksudo /opt/lampp/lampp start && notify-send -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "XAMPP Started." fi On the man page for notify-send I found --urgency=LEVEL or -u where levels are low, normal, critical. Is this of any use? making it critical? Also I tried it with the command- notify-send -u=critical"Testing" but that dint work...it gives the error- Unknown urgency criticalTesting specified. Known urgency levels: low, normal, critical. or if I give the command notify-send -u=LOW"Testing" it gives me error missing argument to -u Any relation??

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  • Choose Custom New Tab Pages in Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    For most people the default New Tab Page in Chrome works perfectly well for their purposes. But if you would prefer to choose what opens in a new tab for yourself then you will definitely want to have a look at the “Define your own new tab!” extension for Google Chrome. Before Unless you are using a Speed Dial (or similar) extension each time you click on the “New Tab Button” you get the same old page. It would certainly be a lot more satisfying if you could choose custom webpage(s) to open as new tabs. After Once you have the extension installed the best thing to do is click on the “New Tab Button”. That will open up the “Options Page” where you can enter one or two custom website URLs of your choosing. Once you have your custom URLs entered click on “Save”. As soon as you click on the “New Tab Button” your new custom webpage(s) will open. If you chose two webpages the first choice will open focused on the “right side” instead of the “left”. Clicking on the “Home Button” will also open the webpage(s) that you chose. The webpage(s) that you chose will also open as your starting “Home Pages” each time that you start your browser. Conclusion If you have wanted to choose your own custom “New Tab Page” then this is the extension that you have been waiting for. Links Download the Define your own new tab! extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Find Similar Websites in Google ChromeAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy WayEnable Vista Black Style Theme for Google Chrome in XPSet Custom Reload Times for Individual Webpages in ChromeEnable Auto-Paging Goodness in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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  • Microsoft Virtual Academy

    Carpe Diem It's been since a while that I could write an article for this blog but alas, I was (and still am) very busy with customer's work. Which is actually good. So, what is this article going to tell you? Well, in general, just what I already tweeted, that life is constant process of learning - especially as software craftsman. Due to an upcoming new customer project in ASP.NET I had to seize the opportunity to get my head deeper into latest available technologies, like Windows Azure and SQL Azure. I know... cloud computing and so on is not a recent development and already available since quite a while but I never any means to get myself into this since roughly two weeks ago. Microsoft Virtual Academy I can't remember exactly what guided me towards the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), oh wait... Yes, it was a posting on Facebook from an old CLIP community friend. He posted a shortened URL with #MVA tag that caught my attention. Thanks for that Thomas Kuberek. After the usual sign in or registration via Live ID I was a little bit surprised that Mauritius is not an available country option... Quick mail exchange with the MVA Decan, and yeah, apologies for the missing entry. So, currently I'm learning about Microsoft products and services, and collecting points under "Not Listed Country" until Mauritius is going to be added. Hopefully soon, as MVA honors your effort with different knowledge ranks that are compared to other students with public profiles. I think it's a nice move to add some game and competition factor into the learning game. The tracks and their different modules are mainly references to publicly available material online, namely on either MSDN, TechNet, Channel9, or other Microsoft based sites. The course material therefore also varies in different media and formats, ranging from simple online articles over downloadable documents (.docx or .pdf) to Silverlight / Windows Media streams with download options. Self-assessment and students ranking Each module in a track can be finished by taking part in a self-assessment. Up to now, the assessment I did (and passed) were limited to 10 minutes available time, and consisted of six to seven questions on the module training material. Nothing too serious but it gives you a glimpse idea how Microsoft certification exams are structured. Conclusion Nothing really new but nicely gathered, assembled and presented to the MVA students. At the moment, I wouldn't dare to compare the richness and quality of those courses with professional training offers, like Pluralsight .NET Training, LearnDevNow, VTC, etc. at all, but I think that MVA has potential. Give it a try, and let me know about your opinions.

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  • Getting Started with Kinect for Windows.

    - by Vishal
    Hello folks,      Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day.   Minority Report Movie clip.           Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and recently on Feb 1st 2012, Microsoft released the official Kinect for Windows SDK. That’s just 10 years from the movie release. Although, the product is in it early stages but with developer creativity and continuously improving hardware, those features shown in the movie are not very far away from becoming a reality. Soon after releasing the SDK, Microsoft again announced in March the release of its new Kinect for Windows SDK version 1.5 which is coming out in sometime May. More history about Kinect. Anyways, so for a newbie with Kinect, where would you start. Here is what I would suggest you can do. Watch the Kinect for Windows Quick start Series by Den Fernandez. Download the Kinect for Windows SDK and start playing around with the demos in it. It also comes with some basic Kinect documentation. Coding4Fun Kinect Projects | Lot many more videos and open sources projects information. Kinect for Windows Session at Techdays NL demo by Jesus Rodriguez. Book: Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK.  | I did go through few of the chapters in this book and based on that, it does talk deeply about core Kinect concepts but in very easy to understand way. I would definitely suggest this book for any Kinect developers. I liked the way it explained the Gestures recognition in Chapter 6. Buy your Kinect device from either Amazon or NewEgg. You will get it cheaper then buying it from Microsoft Store. Personally, I love Newegg.com as I never had any order related or shipping issues with them. I always hate developing UI application but well, you would need to get your hands dirty with WPF too in order to work with Kinect. So get started with WPF concepts too. I will keep adding stuff to the list once I come across them but so far the above list would definitely get you started building your first Kinect apps. Till then Happy Kinecting…!!!!! Thanks, Vishal Mody

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  • Stop Saying "Multi-Channel!"

    - by David Dorf
    I keep hearing the term "multi-channel" in our industry, but its time to move on. It kinda reminds me of the term "ECR" or electronic cash register. Long ago ECR was a leading-edge term, but nowadays its rarely used because its table-stakes. After all, what cash register today isn't electronic? The same logic applies to multi-channel, at least when we're talking about tier-1 and tier-2 retailers. If you're still talking about multi-channel retailing, you're in big trouble. Some have switched over to the term "cross-channel," and that's a step in the right direction but still falls short. Its kinda like saying, "I upgraded my ECR to accept debit cards!" Yawn. Who hasn't? Today's retailers need to focus on omni-channel, which I first heard from my friends over at RSR but was originally coined at IDC. First retailers added e-commerce to their store and catalog channels yielding multi-channel retailing. Consumers could use the channel that worked best for them. Then some consumers wanted to combine channels with features like buy-on-the-Web, pickup-in-the-store. Thus began the cross-channel initiatives to breakdown the silos and enable the channels to communicate with each other. But the multi-channel architecture is full of duplication that thwarts efforts of providing a consistent experience. Each has its own cart, its own pricing, and often its own CRM. This was an outcrop of trying to bring the independent channels to market quickly. Rather than reusing and rebuilding existing components to meet the new demands, silos were created that continue to exist today. Today's consumers want omni-channel retailing. They want to interact with brands in a consistent manner that is channel transparent, yet optimized for that particular interaction. The diagram below, from the soon-to-be-released NRF Mobile Blueprint v2, shows this progression. For retailers to provide an omni-channel experience, there needs to be one logical representation of products, prices, promotions, and customers across all channels. The only thing that varies is the presentation of the content based on the delivery mechanism (e.g. shelf labels, mobile phone, web site, print, etc.) and often these mechanisms can be combined in various ways. I'm looking forward to the day in which I can use my phone to scan QR-codes in a catalog to create a shopping cart of items. Then do some further research on the retailer's Web site and be told about related items that might interest me. Be able to easily solicit opinions and reviews from social sites, and finally enter the store to pickup my items, knowing that any applicable coupons have been applied. In this scenario, I the consumer are dealing with a single brand that is aware of me and my needs throughout the entire transaction. Nirvana.

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  • MPEG-2 playback inconsistent

    - by DustByte
    Many years ago I gave up on Linux because video playback was choppy. Now I'm back, and video playback is still playing up... I have two MPEG files: good.mpg bad.mpg. Here is some information about the two files, using avprobe: My machine is Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz x 2, 64-bit. I do not know what graphics card I have. I run Ubuntu 12.04. So far I have had no problems with YouTube and playback of various video files, including playback of the file good.mpg, included in the avprobe snapshot above. However, the file bad.mpg gives me headache! The file bad.mpg is produced by a respectable "Old-video-tapes-to-DVD" company. I converted over 10 Video-8 tapes to MPEG through them, and today I collected my hard drive containing the MPEG files. Unfortunately I have problem watching them! Here are some details: Using Totem Movie Player 3.0.1 works well for several seconds, then it gets choppy and the playback is not at all smooth. Also the player easily freezes for a while when trying to jump to another position in the file. Most strangely though, the total time is shown as 0:42 (42 seconds) instead of the true 00:39:11: The VLC media player is doing a better job. It shows the correct total length, but as soon as I jump in the video to a new position, it stalls. Playback also stalls after 30 seconds if I press play and leave it. Using Handbrake and choosing bad.mpg as the source, gives me: There is only one title to choose, and it is 6 min 53 seconds. I would have guessed the full 39 minutes of the video should have shown. Lastly, putting the file bad.mpg in Dropbox and viewing it on my iPad with the Dropbox app seems fine (disregard the lack of easy jumping forward due to real-time encoding when streaming it). My question is simple: What is going on?! Why do I have problem to play the MPEG-2 files I just paid good money for (the issue with bad.mpg applies to all files I had encoded)? Is it an issue with my particular Linux machine? The graphics card? But why has everything worked fine so far, and why does not the good.mpg file cause any problems?

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-19

    - by Bob Rhubart
    BPM Process Accelerator Packs – Update | Pat Shepherd Architect Pat Shepherd shares several resources relevant to the new Oracle Process Accelerators for Oracle Business Process Management. Oracle BI EE Management Pack Now Available for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12cR2 | Mark Rittman A handy and informative overview from Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman. WebSockets on WebLogic Server | Steve Button "As there's no standard WebSocket Java API at this point, we've chosen to model the API on the Grizzly WebSocket API with some minor changes where necessary," says James "Buttso" Buttons. "Once the results of JSR-356 (Java API for WebSocket) becomes public, we'll look to implement and support that." Oracle Reference Architecture: Software Engineering This document from the IT Strategies from Oracle library focuses on integrated asset management and the need for efffective asset metadata management to insure that assets are properly tracked and reused in a manner that provides a holistic functional view of the enterprise. The tipping point for cloud management is nigh | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld "Businesses typically don't think too much about managing IT resources until they become too numerous and cumbersome to deal with on an ad hoc basis—a point many companies will soon hit in their adoption of cloud computing." — David Linthicum DevOps Basics: Track Down High CPU Thread with ps, top and the new JDK7 jcmd Tool | Frank Munz "The approach is very generic and works for WebLogic, Glassfish or any other Java application," say Frank Munz. "UNIX commands in the example are run on CentOS, so they will work without changes for Oracle Enterprise Linux or RedHat. Creating the thread dump at the end of the video is done with the jcmd tool from JDK7." Frank has captured the process in the posted video. OIM 11g R2 UI customization | Daniel Gralewski "OIM user interface customizations are easier now, and they survive patch applications--there is no need to reapply them after patching," says Fusion Middleware A-Team member Daniel Gralewski. "Adding new artifacts, new skins, and plugging code directly into the user interface components became an easier task." Daniel shows just how easy in this post. Thought for the Day "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated." — Poul Anderson (November 25, 1926 – July 31, 2001) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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  • Engine Rendering pipeline : Making shaders generic

    - by fakhir
    I am trying to make a 2D game engine using OpenGL ES 2.0 (iOS for now). I've written Application layer in Objective C and a separate self contained RendererGLES20 in C++. No GL specific call is made outside the renderer. It is working perfectly. But I have some design issues when using shaders. Each shader has its own unique attributes and uniforms that need to be set just before the main draw call (glDrawArrays in this case). For instance, in order to draw some geometry I would do: void RendererGLES20::render(Model * model) { // Set a bunch of uniforms glUniformMatrix4fv(.......); // Enable specific attributes, can be many glEnableVertexAttribArray(......); // Set a bunch of vertex attribute pointers: glVertexAttribPointer(positionSlot, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, stride, m->pCoords); // Now actually Draw the geometry glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, m->vertexCount); // After drawing, disable any vertex attributes: glDisableVertexAttribArray(.......); } As you can see this code is extremely rigid. If I were to use another shader, say ripple effect, i would be needing to pass extra uniforms, vertex attribs etc. In other words I would have to change the RendererGLES20 render source code just to incorporate the new shader. Is there any way to make the shader object totally generic? Like What if I just want to change the shader object and not worry about game source re-compiling? Any way to make the renderer agnostic of uniforms and attributes etc?. Even though we need to pass data to uniforms, what is the best place to do that? Model class? Is the model class aware of shader specific uniforms and attributes? Following shows Actor class: class Actor : public ISceneNode { ModelController * model; AIController * AI; }; Model controller class: class ModelController { class IShader * shader; int textureId; vec4 tint; float alpha; struct Vertex * vertexArray; }; Shader class just contains the shader object, compiling and linking sub-routines etc. In Game Logic class I am actually rendering the object: void GameLogic::update(float dt) { IRenderer * renderer = g_application->GetRenderer(); Actor * a = GetActor(id); renderer->render(a->model); } Please note that even though Actor extends ISceneNode, I haven't started implementing SceneGraph yet. I will do that as soon as I resolve this issue. Any ideas how to improve this? Related design patterns etc? Thank you for reading the question.

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  • TFS Hosting: discountasp.net TFS

    - by Enrique Lima
    In the last month or so I have been able to test and experience first hand the offering from discountasp.net for hosted TFS 2010. This first part is a description of the setup process for the account itself and getting some additional information on what you will find through the portal on their site. Not long ago, I posted a little tidbit on hosting TFS.  Through it I also did a shameless plug to my employer, our services and the type of hosting we recommend.  So, wouldn’t me running on discountasp.net be an issue?  Actually? NO. Ok, enough rambling.  Let’s get some details here. It is a Software as a Service model.  Through it we get Source Control, Version Control, Work Item Tracking and such.  What about Build?  If your need includes Build Management and such, you may need to look at some other options.  But, still this is a great offering for those that are moving from SourceSafe.  Or organizations who have 3 to 5 developers on staff, and do not foresee getting larger anytime soon.  Can it support more than 5 developers?  Yes, but then we need to get into how are you using TFS.  Do you need more than just Basic?  For example, SharePoint and Reporting Services integration. The signup process was seamless! Very easy to follow, complete and transition to Visual Studio to start working. An email followed the signup process, it contained details on how to get to the Team Foundation Server Control Panel login.  Once there, here is what I saw after the initial setup process of naming my Team Project Collection: So, moving on … once I clicked the area to get my server info, I got the following: Then it was a matter of getting the first user in there: Then on to connecting Visual Studio to my hosted TFS. Getting the server information, and the user account created I will configure those options in Visual Studio. Using Team Explorer, I am adding a new server configuration. Once this is provided, click OK, I will be challenged for a username and password, provide them and you will land on the following screen. Then Click Close. You will now be connected to your server and Team Project Collection. Since this will likely be the first time connecting, you will have no Projects (I already have 2 going). Click Connect, and you will be back in Team Explorer. My next post in the topic will be on Creating your First Team Project and uploading a Project Template to the server.

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  • How do you manage extensibility in your multi-tenant systems?

    - by Brian MacKay
    I've got a few big web based multi-tenant products now, and very soon I can see that there will be a lot of customizations that are tenant specific. An extra field here or there, maybe an extra page or some extra logic in the middle of a workflow - that sort of thing. Some of these customizations can be rolled into the core product, and that's great. Some of them are highly specific and would get in everyone else's way. I have a few ideas in mind for managing this, but none of them seem to scale well. The obvious solution is to introduce a ton of client-level settings, allowing various 'features' to be enabled on per-client basis. The downside with that, of course, is massive complexity and clutter. You could introduce a truly huge number of settings, and over time various types of logic (presentation, business) could get way out of hand. Then there's the problem of client-specific fields, which begs for something cleaner than just adding a bunch of nullable fields to the existing tables. So what are people doing to manage this? Force.com seems to be the master of extensibility; obviously they've created a platform from the ground up that is super extensible. You can add on to almost anything with their web-based UI. FogBugz did something similiar where they created a robust plugin model that, come to think of it, might have actually been inspired by Force. I know they spent a lot of time and money on it and if I'm not mistaken the intention was to actually use it internally for future product development. Sounds like the kind of thing I could be tempted to build but probably shouldn't. :) Is a massive investment in pluggable architecture the only way to go? How are you managing these problems, and what kind of results are you seeing? EDIT: It does look as though FogBugz handled the problem by building a fairly robust platform and then using that to put together their screens. To extend it you create a DLL containing classes that implement interfaces like ISearchScreenGridColumn, and that becomes a module. I'm sure it was tremendously expensive to build considering that they have a large of devs and they worked on it for months, plus their surface area is perhaps 5% of the size of my application. Right now I am seriously wondering if Force.com is the right way to handle this. And I am a hard core ASP.Net guy, so this is a strange position to find myself in.

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  • Detect, Analyze, Act – Fast!

    - by Ajay Khanna
    In fast changing business environment, it becomes crucial to identify business opportunities and business issues as soon as possible. If identified at the right time, business managers can address issues before they escalate to serious problems and can take advantage of the new opportunities before the competition does. Moreover, they have to be efficient to do this at the right cost. Success depends on how responsive organization is to emerging events and changing environment. These events can be customer issues, competition moves, changes in regulations, or changes in company policies. In order to be responsive in such situations, organizations need to first identify and track these situations. They can do that via business activity monitoring (BAM) and complex event processing (CEP). A unified monitoring dashboard helps put together a comprehensive picture of the situation in hand and provides deep insight to take proper actions. With CEP, businesses can connect all the relevant events, detect event patterns and take immediate actions using Business Process Management system.   So to be responsive we need: Real-Time Visibility with Business Activity Monitoring You can use BAM technology to monitor progress, track performance, meet service-level agreements (SLAs), manage exceptions, and issue alerts to an employee or application when a process is not functioning properly—all in real time. A unified monitoring dashboard helps you maintain a complete picture of each situation so you can take action effectively. BAM works hand in hand with BPM software to discover the significant activities that drive business success.   Real-Time Sense and Respond An event-driven BPM solution enables each step in a business process to be informed not only by the previous step, but also by any other step, data, and pattern of behavior deemed relevant to that step. This gives the company the ability to “sense and respond.” You can describe interesting event patterns and event correlations and monitor the business in real-time. Whenever a pre-defined pattern emerges you can take actions like raising alerts, notifications, or kicking off another business process. This synergy possible by integrating activity monitoring, event processing, and BPM makes it possible for managers to keep a finger on the pulse of their business. Business managers can now respond to customers faster, respond to competition faster, reduce fraud and do more cross-selling. Read more about being responsive in the whitepaper “The Instantly Responsive Enterprise: Integrating BPM and Complex Event Processing” in BPM Resource Kit.

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  • More Efficient Data Structure for Large Layered Tile Map

    - by Stupac
    It seems like the popular method is to break the map up into regions and load them as needed, my problem is that in my game there are many AI entities other than the player out performing actions in virtually all the regions of the map. Let's just say I have a 5000x5000 map, when I use a 2D array of byte's to render it my game uses around 17 MB of memory, as soon as I change that data structure to a my own defined MapCell class (which only contains a single field: byte terrain) my game's memory consumption rockets up to 400+ MB. I plan on adding layering, so an array of byte's won't cut it and I figure I'd need to add a List of some sort to the MapCell class to provide objects in the layers. I'm only rendering tiles that are on screen, but I need the rest of the map to be represented in memory since it is constantly used in Update. So my question is, how can I reduce the memory consumption of my map while still maintaining the above requirements? Thank you for your time! Here's a few snippets my C# code in XNA4: public static void LoadMapData() { // Test map generations int xSize = 5000; int ySize = 5000; MapCell[,] map = new MapCell[xSize,ySize]; //byte[,] map = new byte[xSize, ySize]; Terrain[] terrains = new Terrain[4]; terrains[0] = grass; terrains[1] = dirt; terrains[2] = rock; terrains[3] = water; Random random = new Random(); for(int x = 0; x < xSize; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < ySize; y++) { //map[x,y] = new MapCell(terrains[random.Next(4)]); map[x,y] = new MapCell((byte)random.Next(4)); //map[x, y] = (byte)random.Next(4); } } testMap = new TileMap(map, xSize, ySize); // End test map setup currentMap = testMap; } public class MapCell { //public TerrainType terrain; public byte terrain; public MapCell(byte itsTerrain) { terrain = itsTerrain; } // the type of terrain this cell is treated as /*public Terrain terrain { get; set; } public MapCell(Terrain itsTerrain) { terrain = itsTerrain; }*/ }

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  • TechCast Live: "Java and Oracle, One Year Later" Replay Now Available

    - by Justin Kestelyn
    Earlier this week I had the opportunity to chat with Ajay Patel, Oracle's VP leading the Java Evangelist team, about "the state of the union" wrt Oracle and Java. Take a look: And here are some choice quotes, some paraphrased, as helpfully transcribed by Java evangelist Terrence Barr: "One key thing we have learned ... Java is not just a platform, it is also an ecosystem, and you can't have an ecosystem without a community." "The objectives, strategically [for Java at Oracle] have been pretty clear: How do we drive adoption, how do we build a larger, stronger developer community, how do we really make the platform much more competitive." "It's about transparency, involvement. IBM, RedHat, Apple have all agreed to working with us to make OpenJDK the best platform for open source development ... it is a sign that the community has been waiting to move the Java platform forward." "It's not just about Oracle anymore, it's about Java, the technology, the community, the developer base, and how we work with them to move the innovation forward." "Java is strategic to Oracle, and the community is strategic for Java to be successful ... it is critical to our business." On JavaFX 2.0: "... is coming to beta soon, with a release planned in second half [of 2011] ... will give you a new, high-performance graphics engine, the new API for JavaFX ... you will see a very strong, relevant platform for levering rich media platforms." On the JDK and SE: "... aggressively moving forward, JDK 7 is now code complete ... looking good for getting JDK 7 out by summer as we promised. Started work on JDK 8, Jigsaw and Lambda are moving along nicely, on track for JDK 8 release next year ... good progress." On Java EE and Glassfish: "... Very excited to have Glassfish 3.1 released, with clustering and management capabilities ... working with the JCP to shortly submit a number of JSRs for Java EE 7 ... You'll see Java EE 7 becoming the platform for cloud-based development." "You will see Oracle continue to step up to this role of Java steward, making sure that the language, the technology, the platform ... is competitive, relevant, and widely adopted." Making progress!

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