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The Incremental Architect´s Napkin – #3 – Make Evolvability inevitable

- by Ralf Westphal

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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Much Ado About Nothing: Stub Objects

- by user9154181

The Solaris 11 link-editor (ld) contains support for a new type of object that we call a stub object. A stub object is a shared object, built entirely from mapfiles, that supplies the same linking interface as the real object, while containing no code or data. Stub objects cannot be executed — the runtime linker will kill any process that attempts to load one. However, you can link to a stub object as a dependency, allowing the stub to act as a proxy for the real version of the object. You may well wonder if there is a point to producing an object that contains nothing but linking interface. As it turns out, stub objects are very useful for building large bodies of code such as Solaris. In the last year, we've had considerable success in applying them to one of our oldest and thorniest build problems. In this discussion, I will describe how we came to invent these objects, and how we apply them to building Solaris. This posting explains where the idea for stub objects came from, and details our long and twisty journey from hallway idea to standard link-editor feature. I expect that these details are mainly of interest to those who work on Solaris and its makefiles, those who have done so in the past, and those who work with other similar bodies of code. A subsequent posting will omit the history and background details, and instead discuss how to build and use stub objects. If you are mainly interested in what stub objects are, and don't care about the underlying software war stories, I encourage you to skip ahead. The Long Road To Stubs This all started for me with an email discussion in May of 2008, regarding a change request that was filed in 2002, entitled: 4631488 lib/Makefile is too patient: .WAITs should be reduced This CR encapsulates a number of cronic issues with Solaris builds: We build Solaris with a parallel make (dmake) that tries to build as much of the code base in parallel as possible. There is a lot of code to build, and we've long made use of parallelized builds to get the job done quicker. This is even more important in today's world of massively multicore hardware. Solaris contains a large number of executables and shared objects. Executables depend on shared objects, and shared objects can depend on each other. Before you can build an object, you need to ensure that the objects it needs have been built. This implies a need for serialization, which is in direct opposition to the desire to build everying in parallel. To accurately build objects in the right order requires an accurate set of make rules defining the things that depend on each other. This sounds simple, but the reality is quite complex. In practice, having programmers explicitly specify these dependencies is a losing strategy: It's really hard to get right. It's really easy to get it wrong and never know it because things build anyway. Even if you get it right, it won't stay that way, because dependencies between objects can change over time, and make cannot help you detect such drifing. You won't know that you got it wrong until the builds break. That can be a long time after the change that triggered the breakage happened, making it hard to connect the cause and the effect. Usually this happens just before a release, when the pressure is on, its hard to think calmly, and there is no time for deep fixes. As a poor compromise, the libraries in core Solaris were built using a set of grossly incomplete hand written rules, supplemented with a number of dmake .WAIT directives used to group the libraries into sets of non-interacting groups that can be built in parallel because we think they don't depend on each other. From time to time, someone will suggest that we could analyze the built objects themselves to determine their dependencies and then generate make rules based on those relationships. This is possible, but but there are complications that limit the usefulness of that approach: To analyze an object, you have to build it first. This is a classic chicken and egg scenario. You could analyze the results of a previous build, but then you're not necessarily going to get accurate rules for the current code. It should be possible to build the code without having a built workspace available. The analysis will take time, and remember that we're constantly trying to make builds faster, not slower. By definition, such an approach will always be approximate, and therefore only incremantally more accurate than the hand written rules described above. The hand written rules are fast and cheap, while this idea is slow and complex, so we stayed with the hand written approach. Solaris was built that way, essentially forever, because these are genuinely difficult problems that had no easy answer. The makefiles were full of build races in which the right outcomes happened reliably for years until a new machine or a change in build server workload upset the accidental balance of things. After figuring out what had happened, you'd mutter "How did that ever work?", add another incomplete and soon to be inaccurate make dependency rule to the system, and move on. This was not a satisfying solution, as we tend to be perfectionists in the Solaris group, but we didn't have a better answer. It worked well enough, approximately. And so it went for years. We needed a different approach — a new idea to cut the Gordian Knot. In that discussion from May 2008, my fellow linker-alien Rod Evans had the initial spark that lead us to a game changing series of realizations: The link-editor is used to link objects together, but it only uses the ELF metadata in the object, consisting of symbol tables, ELF versioning sections, and similar data. Notably, it does not look at, or understand, the machine code that makes an object useful at runtime. If you had an object that only contained the ELF metadata for a dependency, but not the code or data, the link-editor would find it equally useful for linking, and would never know the difference. Call it a stub object. In the core Solaris OS, we require all objects to be built with a link-editor mapfile that describes all of its publically available functions and data. Could we build a stub object using the mapfile for the real object? It ought to be very fast to build stub objects, as there are no input objects to process. Unlike the real object, stub objects would not actually require any dependencies, and so, all of the stubs for the entire system could be built in parallel. When building the real objects, one could link against the stub objects instead of the real dependencies. This means that all the real objects can be built built in parallel too, without any serialization. We could replace a system that requires perfect makefile rules with a system that requires no ordering rules whatsoever. The results would be considerably more robust. We immediately realized that this idea had potential, but also that there were many details to sort out, lots of work to do, and that perhaps it wouldn't really pan out. As is often the case, it would be necessary to do the work and see how it turned out. Following that conversation, I set about trying to build a stub object. We determined that a faithful stub has to do the following: Present the same set of global symbols, with the same ELF versioning, as the real object. Functions are simple — it suffices to have a symbol of the right type, possibly, but not necessarily, referencing a null function in its text segment. Copy relocations make data more complicated to stub. The possibility of a copy relocation means that when you create a stub, the data symbols must have the actual size of the real data. Any error in this will go uncaught at link time, and will cause tragic failures at runtime that are very hard to diagnose. For reasons too obscure to go into here, involving tentative symbols, it is also important that the data reside in bss, or not, matching its placement in the real object. If the real object has more than one symbol pointing at the same data item, we call these aliased symbols. All data symbols in the stub object must exhibit the same aliasing as the real object. We imagined the stub library feature working as follows: A command line option to ld tells it to produce a stub rather than a real object. In this mode, only mapfiles are examined, and any object or shared libraries on the command line are are ignored. The extra information needed (function or data, size, and bss details) would be added to the mapfile. When building the real object instead of the stub, the extra information for building stubs would be validated against the resulting object to ensure that they match. In exploring these ideas, I immediately run headfirst into the reality of the original mapfile syntax, a subject that I would later write about as The Problem(s) With Solaris SVR4 Link-Editor Mapfiles. The idea of extending that poor language was a non-starter. Until a better mapfile syntax became available, which seemed unlikely in 2008, the solution could not involve extentions to the mapfile syntax. Instead, we cooked up the idea (hack) of augmenting mapfiles with stylized comments that would carry the necessary information. A typical definition might look like: # DATA(i386) __iob 0x3c0 # DATA(amd64,sparcv9) __iob 0xa00 # DATA(sparc) __iob 0x140 iob; A further problem then became clear: If we can't extend the mapfile syntax, then there's no good way to extend ld with an option to produce stub objects, and to validate them against the real objects. The idea of having ld read comments in a mapfile and parse them for content is an unacceptable hack. The entire point of comments is that they are strictly for the human reader, and explicitly ignored by the tool. Taking all of these speed bumps into account, I made a new plan: A perl script reads the mapfiles, generates some small C glue code to produce empty functions and data definitions, compiles and links the stub object from the generated glue code, and then deletes the generated glue code. Another perl script used after both objects have been built, to compare the real and stub objects, using data from elfdump, and validate that they present the same linking interface. By June 2008, I had written the above, and generated a stub object for libc. It was a useful prototype process to go through, and it allowed me to explore the ideas at a deep level. Ultimately though, the result was unsatisfactory as a basis for real product. There were so many issues: The use of stylized comments were fine for a prototype, but not close to professional enough for shipping product. The idea of having to document and support it was a large concern. The ideal solution for stub objects really does involve having the link-editor accept the same arguments used to build the real object, augmented with a single extra command line option. Any other solution, such as our prototype script, will require makefiles to be modified in deeper ways to support building stubs, and so, will raise barriers to converting existing code. A validation script that rederives what the linker knew when it built an object will always be at a disadvantage relative to the actual linker that did the work. A stub object should be identifyable as such. In the prototype, there was no tag or other metadata that would let you know that they weren't real objects. Being able to identify a stub object in this way means that the file command can tell you what it is, and that the runtime linker can refuse to try and run a program that loads one. At that point, we needed to apply this prototype to building Solaris. As you might imagine, the task of modifying all the makefiles in the core Solaris code base in order to do this is a massive task, and not something you'd enter into lightly. The quality of the prototype just wasn't good enough to justify that sort of time commitment, so I tabled the project, putting it on my list of long term things to think about, and moved on to other work. It would sit there for a couple of years. Semi-coincidentally, one of the projects I tacked after that was to create a new mapfile syntax for the Solaris link-editor. We had wanted to do something about the old mapfile syntax for many years. Others before me had done some paper designs, and a great deal of thought had already gone into the features it should, and should not have, but for various reasons things had never moved beyond the idea stage. When I joined Sun in late 2005, I got involved in reviewing those things and thinking about the problem. Now in 2008, fresh from relearning for the Nth time why the old mapfile syntax was a huge impediment to linker progress, it seemed like the right time to tackle the mapfile issue. Paving the way for proper stub object support was not the driving force behind that effort, but I certainly had them in mind as I moved forward. The new mapfile syntax, which we call version 2, integrated into Nevada build snv_135 in in February 2010: 6916788 ld version 2 mapfile syntax PSARC/2009/688 Human readable and extensible ld mapfile syntax In order to prove that the new mapfile syntax was adequate for general purpose use, I had also done an overhaul of the ON consolidation to convert all mapfiles to use the new syntax, and put checks in place that would ensure that no use of the old syntax would creep back in. That work went back into snv_144 in June 2010: 6916796 OSnet mapfiles should use version 2 link-editor syntax That was a big putback, modifying 517 files, adding 18 new files, and removing 110 old ones. I would have done this putback anyway, as the work was already done, and the benefits of human readable syntax are obvious. However, among the justifications listed in CR 6916796 was this We anticipate adding additional features to the new mapfile language that will be applicable to ON, and which will require all sharable object mapfiles to use the new syntax. I never explained what those additional features were, and no one asked. It was premature to say so, but this was a reference to stub objects. By that point, I had already put together a working prototype link-editor with the necessary support for stub objects. I was pleased to find that building stubs was indeed very fast. On my desktop system (Ultra 24), an amd64 stub for libc can can be built in a fraction of a second: % ptime ld -64 -z stub -o stubs/libc.so.1 -G -hlibc.so.1 \ -ztext -zdefs -Bdirect ... real 0.019708910 user 0.010101680 sys 0.008528431 In order to go from prototype to integrated link-editor feature, I knew that I would need to prove that stub objects were valuable. And to do that, I knew that I'd have to switch the Solaris ON consolidation to use stub objects and evaluate the outcome. And in order to do that experiment, ON would first need to be converted to version 2 mapfiles. Sub-mission accomplished. Normally when you design a new feature, you can devise reasonably small tests to show it works, and then deploy it incrementally, letting it prove its value as it goes. The entire point of stub objects however was to demonstrate that they could be successfully applied to an extremely large and complex code base, and specifically to solve the Solaris build issues detailed above. There was no way to finesse the matter — in order to move ahead, I would have to successfully use stub objects to build the entire ON consolidation and demonstrate their value. In software, the need to boil the ocean can often be a warning sign that things are trending in the wrong direction. Conversely, sometimes progress demands that you build something large and new all at once. A big win, or a big loss — sometimes all you can do is try it and see what happens. And so, I spent some time staring at ON makefiles trying to get a handle on how things work, and how they'd have to change. It's a big and messy world, full of complex interactions, unspecified dependencies, special cases, and knowledge of arcane makefile features... ...and so, I backed away, put it down for a few months and did other work... ...until the fall, when I felt like it was time to stop thinking and pondering (some would say stalling) and get on with it. Without stubs, the following gives a simplified high level view of how Solaris is built: An initially empty directory known as the proto, and referenced via the ROOT makefile macro is established to receive the files that make up the Solaris distribution. A top level setup rule creates the proto area, and performs operations needed to initialize the workspace so that the main build operations can be launched, such as copying needed header files into the proto area. Parallel builds are launched to build the kernel (usr/src/uts), libraries (usr/src/lib), and commands. The install makefile target builds each item and delivers a copy to the proto area. All libraries and executables link against the objects previously installed in the proto, implying the need to synchronize the order in which things are built. Subsequent passes run lint, and do packaging. Given this structure, the additions to use stub objects are: A new second proto area is established, known as the stub proto and referenced via the STUBROOT makefile macro. The stub proto has the same structure as the real proto, but is used to hold stub objects. All files in the real proto are delivered as part of the Solaris product. In contrast, the stub proto is used to build the product, and then thrown away. A new target is added to library Makefiles called stub. This rule builds the stub objects. The ld command is designed so that you can build a stub object using the same ld command line you'd use to build the real object, with the addition of a single -z stub option. This means that the makefile rules for building the stub objects are very similar to those used to build the real objects, and many existing makefile definitions can be shared between them. A new target is added to the Makefiles called stubinstall which delivers the stub objects built by the stub rule into the stub proto. These rules reuse much of existing plumbing used by the existing install rule. The setup rule runs stubinstall over the entire lib subtree as part of its initialization. All libraries and executables link against the objects in the stub proto rather than the main proto, and can therefore be built in parallel without any synchronization. There was no small way to try this that would yield meaningful results. I would have to take a leap of faith and edit approximately 1850 makefiles and 300 mapfiles first, trusting that it would all work out. Once the editing was done, I'd type make and see what happened. This took about 6 weeks to do, and there were many dark days when I'd question the entire project, or struggle to understand some of the many twisted and complex situations I'd uncover in the makefiles. I even found a couple of new issues that required changes to the new stub object related code I'd added to ld. With a substantial amount of encouragement and help from some key people in the Solaris group, I eventually got the editing done and stub objects for the entire workspace built. I found that my desktop system could build all the stub objects in the workspace in roughly a minute. This was great news, as it meant that use of the feature is effectively free — no one was likely to notice or care about the cost of building them. After another week of typing make, fixing whatever failed, and doing it again, I succeeded in getting a complete build! The next step was to remove all of the make rules and .WAIT statements dedicated to controlling the order in which libraries under usr/src/lib are built. This came together pretty quickly, and after a few more speed bumps, I had a workspace that built cleanly and looked like something you might actually be able to integrate someday. This was a significant milestone, but there was still much left to do. I turned to doing full nightly builds. Every type of build (open, closed, OpenSolaris, export, domestic) had to be tried. Each type failed in a new and unique way, requiring some thinking and rework. As things came together, I became aware of things that could have been done better, simpler, or cleaner, and those things also required some rethinking, the seeking of wisdom from others, and some rework. After another couple of weeks, it was in close to final form. My focus turned towards the end game and integration. This was a huge workspace, and needed to go back soon, before changes in the gate would made merging increasingly difficult. At this point, I knew that the stub objects had greatly simplified the makefile logic and uncovered a number of race conditions, some of which had been there for years. I assumed that the builds were faster too, so I did some builds intended to quantify the speedup in build time that resulted from this approach. It had never occurred to me that there might not be one. And so, I was very surprised to find that the wall clock build times for a stock ON workspace were essentially identical to the times for my stub library enabled version! This is why it is important to always measure, and not just to assume. One can tell from first principles, based on all those removed dependency rules in the library makefile, that the stub object version of ON gives dmake considerably more opportunities to overlap library construction. Some hypothesis were proposed, and shot down: Could we have disabled dmakes parallel feature? No, a quick check showed things being build in parallel. It was suggested that we might be I/O bound, and so, the threads would be mostly idle. That's a plausible explanation, but system stats didn't really support it. Plus, the timing between the stub and non-stub cases were just too suspiciously identical. Are our machines already handling as much parallelism as they are capable of, and unable to exploit these additional opportunities? Once again, we didn't see the evidence to back this up. Eventually, a more plausible and obvious reason emerged: We build the libraries and commands (usr/src/lib, usr/src/cmd) in parallel with the kernel (usr/src/uts). The kernel is the long leg in that race, and so, wall clock measurements of build time are essentially showing how long it takes to build uts. Although it would have been nice to post a huge speedup immediately, we can take solace in knowing that stub objects simplify the makefiles and reduce the possibility of race conditions. The next step in reducing build time should be to find ways to reduce or overlap the uts part of the builds. When that leg of the build becomes shorter, then the increased parallelism in the libs and commands will pay additional dividends. Until then, we'll just have to settle for simpler and more robust. And so, I integrated the link-editor support for creating stub objects into snv_153 (November 2010) with 6993877 ld should produce stub objects PSARC/2010/397 ELF Stub Objects followed by the work to convert the ON consolidation in snv_161 (February 2011) with 7009826 OSnet should use stub objects 4631488 lib/Makefile is too patient: .WAITs should be reduced This was a huge putback, with 2108 modified files, 8 new files, and 2 removed files. Due to the size, I was allowed a window after snv_160 closed in which to do the putback. It went pretty smoothly for something this big, a few more preexisting race conditions would be discovered and addressed over the next few weeks, and things have been quiet since then. Conclusions and Looking Forward Solaris has been built with stub objects since February. The fact that developers no longer specify the order in which libraries are built has been a big success, and we've eliminated an entire class of build error. That's not to say that there are no build races left in the ON makefiles, but we've taken a substantial bite out of the problem while generally simplifying and improving things. The introduction of a stub proto area has also opened some interesting new possibilities for other build improvements. As this article has become quite long, and as those uses do not involve stub objects, I will defer that discussion to a future article.

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Sniffing out SQL Code Smells: Inconsistent use of Symbolic names and Datatypes

- by Phil Factor

It is an awkward feeling. You’ve just delivered a database application that seems to be working fine in production, and you just run a few checks on it. You discover that there is a potential bug that, out of sheer good chance, hasn’t kicked in to produce an error; but it lurks, like a smoking bomb. Worse, maybe you find that the bug has started its evil work of corrupting the data, but in ways that nobody has, so far detected. You investigate, and find the damage. You are somehow going to have to repair it. Yes, it still very occasionally happens to me. It is not a nice feeling, and I do anything I can to prevent it happening. That’s why I’m interested in SQL code smells. SQL Code Smells aren’t necessarily bad practices, but just show you where to focus your attention when checking an application. Sometimes with databases the bugs can be subtle. SQL is rather like HTML: the language does its best to try to carry out your wishes, rather than to be picky about your bugs. Most of the time, this is a great benefit, but not always. One particular place where this can be detrimental is where you have implicit conversion between different data types. Most of the time it is completely harmless but we’re concerned about the occasional time it isn’t. Let’s give an example: String truncation. Let’s give another even more frightening one, rounding errors on assignment to a number of different precision. Each requires a blog-post to explain in detail and I’m not now going to try. Just remember that it is not always a good idea to assign data to variables, parameters or even columns when they aren’t the same datatype, especially if you are relying on implicit conversion to work its magic.For details of the problem and the consequences, see here: SR0014: Data loss might occur when casting from {Type1} to {Type2} . For any experienced Database Developer, this is a more frightening read than a Vampire Story. This is why one of the SQL Code Smells that makes me edgy, in my own or other peoples’ code, is to see parameters, variables and columns that have the same names and different datatypes. Whereas quite a lot of this is perfectly normal and natural, you need to check in case one of two things have gone wrong. Either sloppy naming, or mixed datatypes. Sure it is hard to remember whether you decided that the length of a log entry was 80 or 100 characters long, or the precision of a number. That is why a little check like this I’m going to show you is excellent for tidying up your code before you check it back into source Control! 1/ Checking Parameters only If you were just going to check parameters, you might just do this. It simply groups all the parameters, either input or output, of all the routines (e.g. stored procedures or functions) by their name and checks to see, in the HAVING clause, whether their data types are all the same. If not, it lists all the examples and their origin (the routine) Even this little check can occasionally be scarily revealing. ;WITH userParameter AS ( SELECT c.NAME AS ParameterName, OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) + '.' + OBJECT_NAME(c.object_ID) AS ObjectName, t.name + ' ' + CASE --we may have to put in the length WHEN t.name IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN '(' + CASE WHEN c.max_length = -1 THEN 'MAX' ELSE CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), CASE WHEN t.name IN ('nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN c.max_length / 2 ELSE c.max_length END) END + ')' WHEN t.name IN ('decimal', 'numeric') THEN '(' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.precision) + ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.Scale) + ')' ELSE '' END --we've done with putting in the length + CASE WHEN XML_collection_ID <> 0 THEN --deal with object schema names '(' + CASE WHEN is_XML_Document = 1 THEN 'DOCUMENT ' ELSE 'CONTENT ' END + COALESCE( (SELECT QUOTENAME(ss.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sc.name) FROM sys.xml_schema_collections sc INNER JOIN Sys.Schemas ss ON sc.schema_ID = ss.schema_ID WHERE sc.xml_collection_ID = c.XML_collection_ID),'NULL') + ')' ELSE '' END AS [DataType] FROM sys.parameters c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID WHERE OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) <> 'sys' AND parameter_id>0)SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(80),objectName+'.'+ParameterName),DataType FROM UserParameterWHERE ParameterName IN (SELECT ParameterName FROM UserParameter GROUP BY ParameterName HAVING MIN(Datatype)<>MAX(DataType))ORDER BY ParameterName so, in a very small example here, we have a @ClosingDelimiter variable that is only CHAR(1) when, by the looks of it, it should be up to ten characters long, or even worse, a function that should be a char(1) and seems to let in a string of ten characters. Worth investigating. Then we have a @Comment variable that can't decide whether it is a VARCHAR(2000) or a VARCHAR(MAX) 2/ Columns and Parameters Actually, once we’ve cleared up the mess we’ve made of our parameter-naming in the database we’re inspecting, we’re going to be more interested in listing both columns and parameters. We can do this by modifying the routine to list columns as well as parameters. Because of the slight complexity of creating the string version of the datatypes, we will create a fake table of both columns and parameters so that they can both be processed the same way. After all, we want the datatypes to match Unfortunately, parameters do not expose all the attributes we are interested in, such as whether they are nullable (oh yes, subtle bugs happen if this isn’t consistent for a datatype). We’ll have to leave them out for this check. Voila! A slight modification of the first routine ;WITH userObject AS ( SELECT Name AS DataName,--the actual name of the parameter or column ('@' removed) --and the qualified object name of the routine OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(ObjectID) + '.' + OBJECT_NAME(ObjectID) AS ObjectName, --now the harder bit: the definition of the datatype. TypeName + ' ' + CASE --we may have to put in the length. e.g. CHAR (10) WHEN TypeName IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN '(' + CASE WHEN MaxLength = -1 THEN 'MAX' ELSE CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), CASE WHEN TypeName IN ('nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN MaxLength / 2 ELSE MaxLength END) END + ')' WHEN TypeName IN ('decimal', 'numeric')--a BCD number! THEN '(' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), Precision) + ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), Scale) + ')' ELSE '' END --we've done with putting in the length + CASE WHEN XML_collection_ID <> 0 --tush tush. XML THEN --deal with object schema names '(' + CASE WHEN is_XML_Document = 1 THEN 'DOCUMENT ' ELSE 'CONTENT ' END + COALESCE( (SELECT TOP 1 QUOTENAME(ss.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sc.Name) FROM sys.xml_schema_collections sc INNER JOIN Sys.Schemas ss ON sc.schema_ID = ss.schema_ID WHERE sc.xml_collection_ID = XML_collection_ID),'NULL') + ')' ELSE '' END AS [DataType], DataObjectType FROM (Select t.name AS TypeName, REPLACE(c.name,'@','') AS Name, c.max_length AS MaxLength, c.precision AS [Precision], c.scale AS [Scale], c.[Object_id] AS ObjectID, XML_collection_ID, is_XML_Document,'P' AS DataobjectType FROM sys.parameters c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID AND parameter_id>0 UNION all Select t.name AS TypeName, c.name AS Name, c.max_length AS MaxLength, c.precision AS [Precision], c.scale AS [Scale], c.[Object_id] AS ObjectID, XML_collection_ID,is_XML_Document, 'C' AS DataobjectType FROM sys.columns c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID WHERE OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) <> 'sys' )f)SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(80),objectName+'.' + CASE WHEN DataobjectType ='P' THEN '@' ELSE '' END + DataName),DataType FROM UserObjectWHERE DataName IN (SELECT DataName FROM UserObject GROUP BY DataName HAVING MIN(Datatype)<>MAX(DataType))ORDER BY DataName Hmm. I can tell you I found quite a few minor issues with the various tabases I tested this on, and found some potential bugs that really leap out at you from the results. Here is the start of the result for AdventureWorks. Yes, AccountNumber is, for some reason, a Varchar(10) in the Customer table. Hmm. odd. Why is a city fifty characters long in that view? The idea of the description of a colour being 256 characters long seems over-ambitious. Go down the list and you'll spot other mistakes. There are no bugs, but just mess. We started out with a listing to examine parameters, then we mixed parameters and columns. Our last listing is for a slightly more in-depth look at table columns. You’ll notice that we’ve delibarately removed the indication of whether a column is persisted, or is an identity column because that gives us false positives for our code smells. If you just want to browse your metadata for other reasons (and it can quite help in some circumstances) then uncomment them! ;WITH userColumns AS ( SELECT c.NAME AS columnName, OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) + '.' + OBJECT_NAME(c.object_ID) AS ObjectName, REPLACE(t.name + ' ' + CASE WHEN is_computed = 1 THEN ' AS ' + --do DDL for a computed column (SELECT definition FROM sys.computed_columns cc WHERE cc.object_id = c.object_id AND cc.column_ID = c.column_ID) --we may have to put in the length WHEN t.Name IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN '(' + CASE WHEN c.Max_Length = -1 THEN 'MAX' ELSE CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), CASE WHEN t.Name IN ('nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN c.Max_Length / 2 ELSE c.Max_Length END) END + ')' WHEN t.name IN ('decimal', 'numeric') THEN '(' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.precision) + ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.Scale) + ')' ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN c.is_rowguidcol = 1 THEN ' ROWGUIDCOL' ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN XML_collection_ID <> 0 THEN --deal with object schema names '(' + CASE WHEN is_XML_Document = 1 THEN 'DOCUMENT ' ELSE 'CONTENT ' END + COALESCE((SELECT QUOTENAME(ss.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sc.name) FROM sys.xml_schema_collections sc INNER JOIN Sys.Schemas ss ON sc.schema_ID = ss.schema_ID WHERE sc.xml_collection_ID = c.XML_collection_ID), 'NULL') + ')' ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN is_identity = 1 THEN CASE WHEN OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id, 'IsUserTable') = 1 AND COLUMNPROPERTY(object_id, c.name, 'IsIDNotForRepl') = 0 AND OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id, 'IsMSShipped') = 0 THEN '' ELSE ' NOT FOR REPLICATION ' END ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN c.is_nullable = 0 THEN ' NOT NULL' ELSE ' NULL' END + CASE WHEN c.default_object_id <> 0 THEN ' DEFAULT ' + object_Definition(c.default_object_id) ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN c.collation_name IS NULL THEN '' WHEN c.collation_name <> (SELECT collation_name FROM sys.databases WHERE name = DB_NAME()) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS THEN COALESCE(' COLLATE ' + c.collation_name, '') ELSE '' END,' ',' ') AS [DataType]FROM sys.columns c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID WHERE OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) <> 'sys')SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(80),objectName+'.'+columnName),DataType FROM UserColumnsWHERE columnName IN (SELECT columnName FROM UserColumns GROUP BY columnName HAVING MIN(Datatype)<>MAX(DataType))ORDER BY columnName If you take a look down the results against Adventureworks, you'll see once again that there are things to investigate, mostly, in the illustration, discrepancies between null and non-null datatypes So I here you ask, what about temporary variables within routines? If ever there was a source of elusive bugs, you'll find it there. Sadly, these temporary variables are not stored in the metadata so we'll have to find a more subtle way of flushing these out, and that will, I'm afraid, have to wait!

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iPhone SDK vs. Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 2: MoveMe

In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series. My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can. This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. If youre seeing this series for the first time, check out Part 1: Hello World. A note on methodologyin the prior post there was some feedback about lines of code not being a very good metric for this exercise. I dont really disagree, theres a lot more to this than lines of code but I believe that is a relevant metric, even if its not the ultimate one. And theres no perfect answer here. So I am going to continue to report the number of lines of code that I, as a developer would need to write in these apps as a data point, and Ill leave it up to the reader to determine how that fits in with overall complexity, etc. The first example was so basic that I think it was difficult to talk about in real terms. I think that as these apps get more complex, the subjective differences in concept count and will be more important. MoveMe The MoveMe app is the main end-to-end app writing example in the iPhone SDK, called Creating an iPhone Application. This application demonstrates a few concepts, including handling touch input, how to do animations, and how to do some basic transforms. The behavior of the application is pretty simple. User touches the button: The button does a throb type animation where it scales up and then back down briefly. User drags the button: After a touch begins, moving the touch point will drag the button around with the touch. User lets go of the button: The button animates back to its original position, but does a few small bounces as it reaches its original point, which makes the app fun and gives it an extra bit of interactivity. Now, how would I write an app that meets this spec for Windows Phone 7 Series, and how hard would it be? Lets find out! Implementing the UI Okay, lets build the UI for this application. In the HelloWorld example, we did all the UI design in Visual Studio and/or by hand in XAML. In this example, were going to use the Expression Blend 4 Beta. You might be wondering when to use Visual Studio, when to use Blend, and when to do XAML by hand. Different people will have different takes on this, but heres mine: XAML by hand simple UI that doesnt contain animations, gradients, etc., and or UI that I want to really optimize and craft when I know exactly what I want to do. Visual Studio Basic UI layout, property setting, data binding, etc. Blend Any serious design work needs to be done in Blend, including animations, handling states and transitions, styling and templating, editing resources. As in Part 1, go ahead and fire up Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (yes, soon it will take longer to say the name of our products than to start them up!), and create a new Windows Phone Application. As in Part 1, clear out the XAML from the designer. An easy way to do this is to just: Click on the design surface Hit Control+A Hit Delete Theres a little bit left over (the Grid.RowDefinitions element), just go ahead and delete that element so were starting with a clean state of only one outer Grid element. To use Blend, we need to save this project. See, when you create a project with Visual Studio Express, it doesnt commit it to the disk (well, in a place where you can find it, at least) until you actually save the project. This is handy if youre doing some fooling around, because it doesnt clutter your disk with WindowsPhoneApplication23-like directories. But its also kind of dangerous, since when you close VS, if you dont save the projectits all gone. Yes, this has bitten me since I was saving files and didnt remember that, so be careful to save the project/solution via Save All, at least once. So, save and note the location on disk. Start Expression Blend 4 Beta, and chose File > Open Project/Solution, and load your project. You should see just about the same thing you saw over in VS: a blank, black designer surface. Now, thinking about this application, we dont really need a button, even though it looks like one. We never click it. So were just going to create a visual and use that. This is also true in the iPhone example above, where the visual is actually not a button either but a jpg image with a nice gradient and round edges. Well do something simple here that looks pretty good. In Blend, look in the tool pane on the left for the icon that looks like the below (the highlighted one on the left), and hold it down to get the popout menu, and choose Border: Okay, now draw out a box in the middle of the design surface of about 300x100. The Properties Pane to the left should show the properties for this item. First, lets make it more visible by giving it a border brush. Set the BorderBrush to white by clicking BorderBrush and dragging the color selector all the way to the upper right in the palette. Then, down a bit farther, make the BorderThickness 4 all the way around, and the CornerRadius set to 6. In the Layout section, do the following to Width, Height, Horizontal and Vertical Alignment, and Margin (all 4 margin values): Youll see the outline now is in the middle of the design surface. Now lets give it a background color. Above BorderBrush select Background, and click the third tab over: Gradient Brush. Youll see a gradient slider at the bottom, and if you click the markers, you can edit the gradient stops individually (or add more). In this case, you can select something you like, but wheres what I chose: Left stop: #BFACCFE2 (I just picked a spot on the palette and set opacity to 75%, no magic here, feel free to fiddle these or just enter these numbers into the hex area and be done with it) Right stop: #FF3E738F Okay, looks pretty good. Finally set the name of the element in the Name field at the top of the Properties pane to welcome. Now lets add some text. Just hit T and itll select the TextBlock tool automatically: Now draw out some are inside our welcome visual and type Welcome!, then click on the design surface (to exit text entry mode) and hit V to go back into selection mode (or the top item in the tool pane that looks like a mouse pointer). Click on the text again to select it in the tool pane. Just like the border, we want to center this. So set HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to Center, and clear the Margins: Thats it for the UI. Heres how it looks, on the design surface: Not bad! Okay, now the fun part Adding Animations Using Blend to build animations is a lot of fun, and its easy. In XAML, I can not only declare elements and visuals, but also I can declare animations that will affect those visuals. These are called Storyboards. To recap, well be doing two animations: The throb animation when the element is touched The center animation when the element is released after being dragged. The throb animation is just a scale transform, so well do that first. In the Objects and Timeline Pane (left side, bottom half), click the little + icon to add a new Storyboard called touchStoryboard: The timeline view will appear. In there, click a bit to the right of 0 to create a keyframe at .2 seconds: Now, click on our welcome element (the Border, not the TextBlock in it), and scroll to the bottom of the Properties Pane. Open up Transform, click the third tab ("Scale), and set X and Y to 1.2: This all of this says that, at .2 seconds, I want the X and Y size of this element to scale to 1.2. In fact you can see this happen. Push the Play arrow in the timeline view, and youll see the animation run! Lets make two tweaks. First, we want the animation to automatically reverse so it scales up then back down nicely. Click in the dropdown that says touchStoryboard in Objects and Timeline, then in the Properties pane check Auto Reverse: Now run it again, and youll see it go both ways. Lets even make it nicer by adding an easing function. First, click on the Render Transform item in the Objects tree, then, in the Property Pane, youll see a bunch of easing functions to choose from. Feel free to play with this, then seeing how each runs. I chose Circle In, but some other ones are fun. Try them out! Elastic In is kind of fun, but well stick with Circle In. Thats it for that animation. Now, we also want an animation to move the Border back to its original position when the user ends the touch gesture. This is exactly the same process as above, but just targeting a different transform property. Create a new animation called releaseStoryboard Select a timeline point at 1.2 seconds. Click on the welcome Border element again Scroll to the Transforms panel at the bottom of the Properties Pane Choose the first tab (Translate), which may already be selected Set both X and Y values to 0.0 (we do this just to make the values stick, because the value is already 0 and we need Blend to know we want to save that value) Click on RenderTransform in the Objects tree In the properties pane, choose Bounce Out Set Bounces to 6, and Bounciness to 4 (feel free to play with these as well) Okay, were done. Note, if you want to test this Storyboard, you have to do something a little tricky because the final value is the same as the initial value, so playing it does nothing. If you want to play with it, do the following: Next to the selection dropdown, hit the little "x (Close Storyboard) Go to the Translate Transform value for welcome Set X,Y to 50, 200, respectively (or whatever) Select releaseStoryboard again from the dropdown Hit play, see it run Go into the object tree and select RenderTransform to change the easing function. When youre done, hit the Close Storyboard x again and set the values in Transform/Translate back to 0 Wiring Up the Animations Okay, now go back to Visual Studio. Youll get a prompt due to the modification of MainPage.xaml. Hit Yes. In the designer, click on the welcome Border element. In the Property Browser, hit the Events button, then double click each of ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta, ManipulationCompleted. Youll need to flip back to the designer from code, after each double click. Its code time. Here we go. Here, three event handlers have been created for us: welcome_ManipulationStarted: This will execute when a manipulation begins. Think of it as MouseDown. welcome_ManipulationDelta: This executes each time a manipulation changes. Think MouseMove. welcome_ManipulationCompleted: This will execute when the manipulation ends. Think MouseUp. Now, in ManipuliationStarted, we want to kick off the throb animation that we called touchAnimation. Thats easy: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationStarted(object sender, ManipulationStartedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: touchStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Likewise, when the manipulation completes, we want to re-center the welcome visual with our bounce animation: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationCompleted(object sender, ManipulationCompletedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: releaseStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note there is actually a way to kick off these animations from Blend directly via something called Triggers, but I think its clearer to show whats going on like this. A Trigger basically allows you to say When this event fires, trigger this Storyboard, so its the exact same logical process as above, but without the code. But how do we get the object to move? Well, for that we really dont want an animation because we want it to respond immediately to user input. We do this by directly modifying the transform to match the offset for the manipulation, and then well let the animation bring it back to zero when the manipulation completes. The manipulation events do a great job of keeping track of all the stuff that you usually had to do yourself when doing drags: where you started from, how far youve moved, etc. So we can easily modify the position as below: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e) 2: { 3: CompositeTransform transform = (CompositeTransform)welcome.RenderTransform; 4: 5: transform.TranslateX = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.X; 6: transform.TranslateY = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.Y; 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Thats it! Go ahead and run the app in the emulator. I suggest running without the debugger, its a little faster (CTRL+F5). If youve got a machine that supports DirectX 10, youll see nice smooth GPU accelerated graphics, which also what it looks like on the phone, running at about 60 frames per second. If your machine does not support DX10 (like the laptop Im writing this on!), it wont be quite a smooth so youll have to take my word for it! Comparing Against the iPhone This is an example where the flexibility and power of XAML meets the tooling of Visual Studio and Blend, and the whole experience really shines. So, for several things that are declarative and 100% toolable with the Windows Phone 7 Series, this example does them with code on the iPhone. In parens is the lines of code that I count to do these operations. PlacardView.m: 19 total LOC Creating the view that hosts the button-like image and the text Drawing the image that is the background of the button Drawing the Welcome text over the image (I think you could technically do this step and/or the prior one using Interface Builder) MoveMeView.m: 63 total LOC Constructing and running the scale (throb) animation (25) Constructing the path describing the animation back to center plus bounce effect (38) Beyond the code count, yy experience with doing this kind of thing in code is that its VERY time intensive. When I was a developer back on Windows Forms, doing GDI+ drawing, we did this stuff a lot, and it took forever! You write some code and even once you get it basically working, you see its not quite right, you go back, tweak the interval, or the math a bit, run it again, etc. You can take a look at the iPhone code here to judge for yourself. Scroll down to animatePlacardViewToCenter toward the bottom. I dont think this code is terribly complicated, but its not what Id call simple and its not at all simple to get right. And then theres a few other lines of code running around for setting up the ViewController and the Views, about 15 lines between MoveMeAppDelegate, PlacardView, and MoveMeView, plus the assorted decls in the h files. Adding those up, I conservatively get something like 100 lines of code (19+63+15+decls) on iPhone that I have to write, by hand, to make this project work. The lines of code that I wrote in the examples above is 5 lines of code on Windows Phone 7 Series. In terms of incremental concept counts beyond the HelloWorld app, heres a shot at that: iPhone: Drawing Images Drawing Text Handling touch events Creating animations Scaling animations Building a path and animating along that Windows Phone 7 Series: Laying out UI in Blend Creating & testing basic animations in Blend Handling touch events Invoking animations from code This was actually the first example I tried converting, even before I did the HelloWorld, and I was pretty surprised. Some of this is luck that this app happens to match up with the Windows Phone 7 Series platform just perfectly. In terms of time, I wrote the above application, from scratch, in about 10 minutes. I dont know how long it would take a very skilled iPhone developer to write MoveMe on that iPhone from scratch, but if I was to write it on Silverlight in the same way (e.g. all via code), I think it would likely take me at least an hour or two to get it all working right, maybe more if I ended up picking the wrong strategy or couldnt get the math right, etc. Making Some Tweaks Silverlight contains a feature called Projections to do a variety of 3D-like effects with a 2D surface. So lets play with that a bit. Go back to Blend and select the welcome Border in the object tree. In its properties, scroll down to the bottom, open Transform, and see Projection at the bottom. Set X,Y,Z to 90. Youll see the element kind of disappear, replaced by a thin blue line. Now Create a new animation called startupStoryboard. Set its key time to .5 seconds in the timeline view Set the projection values above to 0 for X, Y, and Z. Save Go back to Visual Studio, and in the constructor, add the following bold code (lines 7-9 to the constructor: 1: public MainPage() 2: { 3: InitializeComponent(); 4: 5: SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait; 6: 7: this.Loaded += (s, e) => 8: { 9: startupStoryboard.Begin(); 10: }; 11: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If the code above looks funny, its using something called a lambda in C#, which is an inline anonymous method. Its just a handy shorthand for creating a handler like the manipulation ones above. So with this youll get a nice 3D looking fly in effect when the app starts up. Here it is, in flight: Pretty cool!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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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> <title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <leg> <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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Custom filtering in Android using ArrayAdapter

- by Alxandr

I'm trying to filter my ListView which is populated with this ArrayAdapter: package me.alxandr.android.mymir.adapters; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.Collections; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.Set; import me.alxandr.android.mymir.R; import me.alxandr.android.mymir.model.Manga; import android.content.Context; import android.util.Log; import android.view.LayoutInflater; import android.view.View; import android.view.ViewGroup; import android.widget.ArrayAdapter; import android.widget.Filter; import android.widget.SectionIndexer; import android.widget.TextView; public class MangaListAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<Manga> implements SectionIndexer { public ArrayList<Manga> items; public ArrayList<Manga> filtered; private Context context; private HashMap<String, Integer> alphaIndexer; private String[] sections = new String[0]; private Filter filter; private boolean enableSections; public MangaListAdapter(Context context, int textViewResourceId, ArrayList<Manga> items, boolean enableSections) { super(context, textViewResourceId, items); this.filtered = items; this.items = filtered; this.context = context; this.filter = new MangaNameFilter(); this.enableSections = enableSections; if(enableSections) { alphaIndexer = new HashMap<String, Integer>(); for(int i = items.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Manga element = items.get(i); String firstChar = element.getName().substring(0, 1).toUpperCase(); if(firstChar.charAt(0) > 'Z' || firstChar.charAt(0) < 'A') firstChar = "@"; alphaIndexer.put(firstChar, i); } Set<String> keys = alphaIndexer.keySet(); Iterator<String> it = keys.iterator(); ArrayList<String> keyList = new ArrayList<String>(); while(it.hasNext()) keyList.add(it.next()); Collections.sort(keyList); sections = new String[keyList.size()]; keyList.toArray(sections); } } @Override public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { View v = convertView; if(v == null) { LayoutInflater vi = (LayoutInflater)context.getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); v = vi.inflate(R.layout.mangarow, null); } Manga o = items.get(position); if(o != null) { TextView tt = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.MangaRow_MangaName); TextView bt = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.MangaRow_MangaExtra); if(tt != null) tt.setText(o.getName()); if(bt != null) bt.setText(o.getLastUpdated() + " - " + o.getLatestChapter()); if(enableSections && getSectionForPosition(position) != getSectionForPosition(position + 1)) { TextView h = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.MangaRow_Header); h.setText(sections[getSectionForPosition(position)]); h.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); } else { TextView h = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.MangaRow_Header); h.setVisibility(View.GONE); } } return v; } @Override public void notifyDataSetInvalidated() { if(enableSections) { for (int i = items.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Manga element = items.get(i); String firstChar = element.getName().substring(0, 1).toUpperCase(); if(firstChar.charAt(0) > 'Z' || firstChar.charAt(0) < 'A') firstChar = "@"; alphaIndexer.put(firstChar, i); } Set<String> keys = alphaIndexer.keySet(); Iterator<String> it = keys.iterator(); ArrayList<String> keyList = new ArrayList<String>(); while (it.hasNext()) { keyList.add(it.next()); } Collections.sort(keyList); sections = new String[keyList.size()]; keyList.toArray(sections); super.notifyDataSetInvalidated(); } } public int getPositionForSection(int section) { if(!enableSections) return 0; String letter = sections[section]; return alphaIndexer.get(letter); } public int getSectionForPosition(int position) { if(!enableSections) return 0; int prevIndex = 0; for(int i = 0; i < sections.length; i++) { if(getPositionForSection(i) > position && prevIndex <= position) { prevIndex = i; break; } prevIndex = i; } return prevIndex; } public Object[] getSections() { return sections; } @Override public Filter getFilter() { if(filter == null) filter = new MangaNameFilter(); return filter; } private class MangaNameFilter extends Filter { @Override protected FilterResults performFiltering(CharSequence constraint) { // NOTE: this function is *always* called from a background thread, and // not the UI thread. constraint = constraint.toString().toLowerCase(); FilterResults result = new FilterResults(); if(constraint != null && constraint.toString().length() > 0) { ArrayList<Manga> filt = new ArrayList<Manga>(); ArrayList<Manga> lItems = new ArrayList<Manga>(); synchronized (items) { Collections.copy(lItems, items); } for(int i = 0, l = lItems.size(); i < l; i++) { Manga m = lItems.get(i); if(m.getName().toLowerCase().contains(constraint)) filt.add(m); } result.count = filt.size(); result.values = filt; } else { synchronized(items) { result.values = items; result.count = items.size(); } } return result; } @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") @Override protected void publishResults(CharSequence constraint, FilterResults results) { // NOTE: this function is *always* called from the UI thread. filtered = (ArrayList<Manga>)results.values; notifyDataSetChanged(); } } } However, when I call filter('test') on the filter nothing happens at all (or the background-thread is run, but the list isn't filtered as far as the user conserns). How can I fix this?

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How Do I make my own keyboard for an app in android

- by Ephraim

I am currently working on an app, that requires a keyboard in a different language (Specifically Hebrew), the problem is, that I don't know where to begin. I don't want the user to have to go onto an app store, and install a separate app that has more languages in it just to use my app, and, I only want the keyboard to be available in my app, ie, it shouldn't effect anything outside my specific app. the way I am doing it right now, is to create it as part of the main layout, and just make it visible whenever the user clicks on the Edit Text. the problem with this, is I can't get the size of it to readjust. I had originally tried using 2 different layouts (one in the res/layout folder, and one in the res/layout-lnd folder), but this caused different problems in my app, making it slower. so I am wondering 2 things, either of which should work. one: how would I create the layout for the keyboard to readjust. or Two: how would I make a keyboard correctly. here is the xml code that I am useing specifically partaining to the keyboard: <FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:visibility="gone" android:background="@color/puzzle_dark" android:id="@+id/hebrwKeyboardView" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="146dip" android:layout_gravity="right|center_vertical|center_horizontal|bottom" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:clipChildren="false" android:orientation="vertical" > <TableLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="145dip" android:clipChildren="false" android:layout_gravity="center_vertical|center_horizontal|bottom" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:orientation="horizontal" > <TableLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="145dip" android:clipChildren="false" android:layout_gravity="center_vertical|center_horizontal|bottom" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:orientation="vertical" > <TableRow android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:clipChildren="false" android:orientation="horizontal" android:stretchColumns="true"> <LinearLayout android:baselineAligned="true" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:clipChildren="false" android:orientation="horizontal"> <Button android:id="@+id/KoofButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Koof" android:layout_gravity="center" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/raishButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Raish" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/alephButton" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Alef" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/tetButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Tet" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/vuvButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:text="@string/Vuv" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/nunSophitButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:text="@string/NunSofit" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:gravity="fill" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/memSofitButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/MemSofit" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/payButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Pay" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:ellipsize="marquee"/> </LinearLayout> </TableRow> <TableRow android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:clipChildren="true" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:orientation="horizontal"> <RelativeLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:clipChildren="true" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center" android:gravity="bottom" android:orientation="horizontal"> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/shinButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Shin" android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/shinButton" android:id="@+id/dalidButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Dalid" android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/gimleButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/dalidButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Gimle" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/chufButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/gimleButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Chuf" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/ieyinButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/chufButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Ieyin" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/yudButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/ieyinButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Yud" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/chetButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/yudButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Chet" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/lamidButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/chetButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Lamid" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/chufSofitButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/lamidButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/ChufSofit" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/paySofitButton" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/chufSofitButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/PaySofit" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> </RelativeLayout> </TableRow> <TableRow android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:orientation="horizontal"> <LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center" android:gravity="bottom" android:orientation="horizontal"> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/zionButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Zion" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/samichButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Samich" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/betButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Bet" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/heyButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:layout_height="35dip" android:text="@string/Hey" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/nunButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Nun" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/memButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Mem" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/tzadiButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Tzadi" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/tuffButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/Tuff" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/tzadiSofitButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="@string/TzadiSofit" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> </LinearLayout> </TableRow> <TableRow android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:orientation="horizontal"> <LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center" android:gravity="bottom" android:orientation="horizontal"> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/hebrewBackButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="right" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" android:text="<--"/> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/hebrewSpaceButton" android:layout_width="150dip" android:layout_height="35dip" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical|center" android:text="" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> <Button android:soundEffectsEnabled="true" android:id="@+id/hebrewDoneButton" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="right" android:text="Done" android:fitsSystemWindows="true" /> </LinearLayout> </TableRow> </TableLayout> </TableLayout> </FrameLayout> Here is a picture of what it looks like right now in portrait: and here is what it looks like in landscape:

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half or quarter black screen in android

- by Mike McKeown

I have an android activity that when I launch sometimes (about 1 in 4 times) it only draws quarter or half the screen before showing it. When I change the orientation or press a button the screen draws properly. I'm just using TextViews, Buttons, Fonts - no drawing or anything like that. All of my code for initialising is in the onCreate(). In this method I'm loading a text file, of about 40 lines long, and also getting a shared preference. Could this cause a delay so that it can't draw the intent? Thanks in advance if anyone has seen anything similar. EDIT - I tried commenting out the loading of the word list, but it didn't fix the problem. Here is the activity <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/mainRelativeLayout" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:background="@drawable/blue_abstract_background" > <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/relativeScore" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:gravity="center_horizontal" > <TextView android:id="@+id/ScoreLabel" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:layout_centerVertical="true" android:padding="10dip" android:text="SCORE:" android:textSize="18dp" /> /> <TextView android:id="@+id/ScoreText" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_centerVertical="true" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/ScoreLabel" android:padding="5dip" android:text="0" android:textSize="18dp" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/GameTimerText" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_alignParentRight="true" android:layout_centerVertical="true" android:layout_marginLeft="5dp" android:layout_marginRight="5dp" android:minWidth="25dp" android:text="0" android:textSize="18dp" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/GameTimerLabel" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_centerVertical="true" android:layout_toLeftOf="@id/GameTimerText" android:padding="10dip" android:text="TIMER:" android:textSize="18dp" /> /> </RelativeLayout> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/relativeHighScore" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_below="@id/relativeScore" > <TextView android:id="@+id/HighScoreLabel" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:padding="10dip" android:text="HIGH SCORE:" android:textSize="16dp" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/HighScoreText" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/HighScoreLabel" android:padding="10dip" android:text="0" android:textSize="16dp" /> </RelativeLayout> <LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:layout_below="@+id/relativeHighScore" android:orientation="vertical" > <LinearLayout android:id="@+id/linearMissing" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="80dp" android:layout_gravity="center" android:orientation="vertical" > <View android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="2dp" android:background="@color/yellow_text" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/MissingWordText" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_marginTop="25dp" android:text="MSSNG WRD" android:textSize="22dp" android:typeface="normal" /> </LinearLayout> <View android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="2dp" android:background="@color/yellow_text" /> <TableLayout android:id="@+id/buttonsTableLayout" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" > <TableRow android:id="@+id/tableRow3" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:gravity="center_horizontal" android:paddingTop="5dp" > <Button android:id="@+id/aVowelButton" android:layout_width="66dp" android:layout_height="66dp" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_marginBottom="10dp" android:layout_marginRight="5dp" android:background="@drawable/blue_vowel_button" android:text="@string/a" android:textColor="@color/yellow_text" android:textSize="30dp" /> <Button android:id="@+id/eVowelButton" android:layout_width="66dp" android:layout_height="66dp" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_marginBottom="10dp" android:layout_marginRight="5dp" android:background="@drawable/blue_vowel_button" android:text="@string/e" android:textColor="@color/yellow_text" android:textSize="30dp" /> </TableRow> <TableRow android:id="@+id/tableRow4" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:gravity="center_horizontal" > <Button android:id="@+id/iVowelButton" android:layout_width="66dp" android:layout_height="66dp" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_margin="5dp" android:background="@drawable/blue_vowel_buttoni" android:text="@string/i" android:textColor="@color/yellow_text" android:textSize="30dp" /> <Button android:id="@+id/oVowelButton" android:layout_width="66dp" android:layout_height="66dp" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_margin="5dp" android:background="@drawable/blue_vowel_button" android:text="@string/o" android:textColor="@color/yellow_text" android:textSize="30dp" /> <Button android:id="@+id/uVowelButton" android:layout_width="66dp" android:layout_height="66dp" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_margin="5dp" android:background="@drawable/blue_vowel_button" android:text="@string/u" android:textColor="@color/yellow_text" android:textSize="30dp" /> </TableRow> </TableLayout> <TextView android:id="@+id/TimeToStartText" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center" android:textSize="24dp" /> <Button android:id="@+id/startButton" style="@style/yellowShadowText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal" android:layout_marginTop="10dp" android:background="@drawable/blue_button_menu" android:gravity="center" android:padding="10dip" android:text="START!" android:textSize="28dp" /> </LinearLayout> </RelativeLayout> And the OnCreate() and a few methods: public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_game); isNewWord = true; m_gameScore = 0; m_category = getCategoryFromExtras(); // loadWordList(m_category); initialiseTextViewField(); loadHighScoreAndDifficulty(); setFonts(); setButtons(); setStartButton(); enableDisableButtons(false); } private void loadHighScoreAndDifficulty() { //setting preferences SharedPreferences prefs = this.getSharedPreferences(m_category, Context.MODE_PRIVATE); int score = prefs.getInt(m_category, 0); //0 is the default value m_highScore = score; m_highScoreText.setText(String.valueOf(m_highScore)); prefs = this.getSharedPreferences(DIFFICULTY, Context.MODE_PRIVATE); m_difficulty = prefs.getString(DIFFICULTY, NRML_DIFFICULTY); } private void initialiseTextViewField() { m_startButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.startButton); m_missingWordText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.MissingWordText); m_gameScoreText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.ScoreText); m_gameScoreLabel = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.ScoreLabel); m_gameTimerText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.GameTimerText); m_gameTimerLabel = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.GameTimerLabel); m_timeToStartText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.TimeToStartText); m_highScoreLabel = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.HighScoreLabel); m_highScoreText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.HighScoreText); } private String getCategoryFromExtras() { String category = ""; Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras(); if (extras != null) { category = extras.getString("category"); } return category; } private void enableDisableButtons(boolean enable) { Button button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.aVowelButton); button.setEnabled(enable); button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.eVowelButton); button.setEnabled(enable); button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.iVowelButton); button.setEnabled(enable); button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.oVowelButton); button.setEnabled(enable); button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.uVowelButton); button.setEnabled(enable); } private void setStartButton() { m_startButton.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View view) { m_gameScore = 0; updateScore(); m_startButton.setVisibility(View.GONE); m_timeToStartText.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); startPreTimer(); } }); }

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Some problems with GridView in webpart with multiple filters.

- by NF_81

Hello, I'm currently working on a highly configurable Database Viewer webpart for WSS 3.0 which we are going to need for several customized sharepoint sites. Sorry in advance for the large wall of text, but i fear it's necessary to recap the whole issue. As background information and to describe my problem as good as possible, I'll start by telling you what the webpart shall do: Basically the webpart contains an UpdatePanel, which contains a GridView and an SqlDataSource. The select-query the Datasource uses can be set via webbrowseable properties or received from a consumer method from another webpart. Now i wanted to add a filtering feature to the webpart, so i want a dropdownlist in the headerrow for each column that should be filterable. As the select-query is completely dynamic and i don't know at design time which columns shall be filterable, i decided to add a webbrowseable property to contain an xml-formed string with filter information. So i added the following into OnRowCreated of the gridview: void gridView_RowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.Header) { for (int i = 0; i < e.Row.Cells.Count; i++) { if (e.Row.Cells[i].GetType() == typeof(DataControlFieldHeaderCell)) { string headerText = ((DataControlFieldHeaderCell)e.Row.Cells[i]).ContainingField.HeaderText; // add sorting functionality if (_allowSorting && !String.IsNullOrEmpty(headerText)) { Label l = new Label(); l.Text = headerText; l.ForeColor = Color.Blue; l.Font.Bold = true; l.ID = "Header" + i; l.Attributes["title"] = "Sort by " + headerText; l.Attributes["onmouseover"] = "this.style.cursor = 'pointer'; this.style.color = 'red'"; l.Attributes["onmouseout"] = "this.style.color = 'blue'"; l.Attributes["onclick"] = "__doPostBack('" + panel.UniqueID + "','SortBy$" + headerText + "');"; e.Row.Cells[i].Controls.Add(l); } // check if this column shall be filterable if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(filterXmlData)) { XmlNode columnNode = GetColumnNode(headerText); if (columnNode != null) { string dataValueField = columnNode.Attributes["DataValueField"] == null ? "" : columnNode.Attributes["DataValueField"].Value; string filterQuery = columnNode.Attributes["FilterQuery"] == null ? "" : columnNode.Attributes["FilterQuery"].Value; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(dataValueField) && !String.IsNullOrEmpty(filterQuery)) { SqlDataSource ds = new SqlDataSource(_conStr, filterQuery); DropDownList cbx = new DropDownList(); cbx.ID = "FilterCbx" + i; cbx.Attributes["onchange"] = "__doPostBack('" + panel.UniqueID + "','SelectionChange$" + headerText + "$' + this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);"; cbx.Width = 150; cbx.DataValueField = dataValueField; cbx.DataSource = ds; cbx.DataBound += new EventHandler(cbx_DataBound); cbx.PreRender += new EventHandler(cbx_PreRender); cbx.DataBind(); e.Row.Cells[i].Controls.Add(cbx); } } } } } } } GetColumnNode() checks in the filter property, if there is a node for the current column, which contains information about the Field the DropDownList should bind to, and the query for filling in the items. In cbx_PreRender() i check ViewState and select an item in case of a postback. In cbx_DataBound() i just add tooltips to the list items as the dropdownlist has a fixed width. Previously, I used AutoPostback and SelectedIndexChanged of the DDL to filter the grid, but to my disappointment it was not always fired. Now i check __EVENTTARGET and __EVENTARGUMENT in OnLoad and call a function when the postback event was due to a selection change in a DDL: private void FilterSelectionChanged(string columnName, string selectedValue) { columnName = "[" + columnName + "]"; if (selectedValue.IndexOf("--") < 0 ) // "-- All --" selected { if (filter.ContainsKey(columnName)) filter[columnName] = "='" + selectedValue + "'"; else filter.Add(columnName, "='" + selectedValue + "'"); } else { filter.Remove(columnName); } gridView.PageIndex = 0; } "filter" is a HashTable which is stored in ViewState for persisting the filters (got this sample somewhere on the web, don't remember where). In OnPreRender of the webpart, i call a function which reads the ViewState and apply the filterExpression to the datasource if there is one. I assume i had to place it here, because if there is another postback (e.g. for sorting) the filters are not applied any more. private void ApplyGridFilter() { string args = " "; int i = 0; foreach (object key in filter.Keys) { if (i == 0) args = key.ToString() + filter[key].ToString(); else args += " AND " + key.ToString() + filter[key].ToString(); i++; } dataSource.FilterExpression = args; ViewState.Add("FilterArgs", filter); } protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e) { EnsureChildControls(); if (WebPartManager.DisplayMode.Name == "Edit") { errMsg = "Webpart in Edit mode..."; return; } if (useWebPartConnection == true) // get select-query from consumer webpart { if (provider != null) { dataSource.SelectCommand = provider.strQuery; } } try { int currentPageIndex = gridView.PageIndex; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(m_SortExpression)) { gridView.Sort("[" + m_SortExpression + "]", m_SortDirection); } gridView.PageIndex = currentPageIndex; // for some reason, the current pageindex resets after sorting ApplyGridFilter(); gridView.DataBind(); } catch (Exception ex) { Functions.ShowJavaScriptAlert(Page, ex.Message); } base.OnPreRender(e); } So i set the filterExpression and the call DataBind(). I don't know if this is ok on this late stage.. don't have a lot of asp.net experience after all. If anyone can suggest a better solution, please give me a hint. This all works great so far, except when i have two or more filters and set them to a combination that returns zero records. Bam ... gridview gone, completely - without a possiblity of changing the filters back. So i googled and found out that i have to subclass gridview in order to always show the headerrow. I found this solution and implemented it with some modifications. The headerrow get's displayed and i can change the filters even if the returned result contains no rows. But finally to my current problem: When i have two or more filters set which return zero rows, and i change back one filter to something that should return rows, the gridview remains empty (although the pager is rendered). I have to completly refresh the page to reset the filters. When debugging, i can see in the overridden CreateChildControls of the grid, that the base method indeed returns 0, but anyway... the gridView.RowCount remains 0 after databinding. Anyone have an idea what's going wrong here?

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Asset Pipeline acting up

- by Abram

Ok, so my asset pipeline has suddenly started acting up on my development machine. JS functions that previously worked are now throwing "not a function" errors.. I know I must be doing something wrong. A minute ago the datatables jquery function was working, then it was throwing an error, then it was working, and now it's not working or throwing an error. Here is my application.js //= require jquery //= require jquery-ui //= require jquery_ujs //= require_self //= require_tree . //= require dataTables/jquery.dataTables //= require dataTables/jquery.dataTables.bootstrap //= require bootstrap //= require bootstrap-tooltip //= require bootstrap-popover //= require bootstrap-tab //= require bootstrap-modal //= require bootstrap-alert //= require bootstrap-dropdown //= require jquery.ui.addresspicker //= require raty //= require jquery.alphanumeric //= require jquery.formrestrict //= require select2 //= require chosen/chosen.jquery //= require highcharts //= require jquery.lazyload Here is some of my layout header: <%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", media: "all" %> <%= yield(:scripthead) %> <%= javascript_include_tag "application" %> <%= csrf_meta_tags %> <%= yield(:head) %> Above I am using the yield to load up online scripts from google as they're only needed on some pages, and generally slow down the site if included in the application layout. I tried removing the yield but things were still broken, even after clearing the browser cache and running rake assets:clean (just to be on the safe side). Here's what shows up between CSS and metatags (for a page with nothin in the yield scripthead): <script src="/assets/jquery.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery-ui.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery_ujs.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/application.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/aidmodels.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/audio.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-alert.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-dropdown.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-modal.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-popover.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-tab.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-tooltip.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/branches.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/charts.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/chosen/backup_chosen.jquery.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/chosen/chosen.jquery.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/consumers.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/dispensers.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/favorites.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/features.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/generic_styles.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/gmaps4rails/gmaps4rails.base.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/gmaps4rails/gmaps4rails.bing.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/gmaps4rails/gmaps4rails.googlemaps.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/gmaps4rails/gmaps4rails.mapquest.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/gmaps4rails/gmaps4rails.openlayers.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/highcharts.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery-ui-1.8.18.custom.min.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery.alphanumeric.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery.formrestrict.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery.lazyload.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/jquery.ui.addresspicker.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/likes.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/messages.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/overalls.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/pages.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/questions.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/raty.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/reviews.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/sessions.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/styles.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/tickets.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/universities.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/users.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/dataTables/jquery.dataTables.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/dataTables/jquery.dataTables.bootstrap.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-transition.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-affix.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-button.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-carousel.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-collapse.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-scrollspy.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap-typeahead.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/bootstrap.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/assets/select2.js?body=1" type="text/javascript"></script> From application.rb: config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false # Enable the asset pipeline config.assets.enabled = true config.action_controller.assets_dir = "#{File.dirname(File.dirname(__FILE__))}/public" # Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets config.assets.version = '1.0' I'm sorry, I'm not sure what else to include to help with this puzzle, but any advise would be appreciated. I was having no problems before I started trying to upload to heroku and now everything's gone haywire. EDIT: In the console at the moment I'm seeing Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'Constructor' of undefined bootstrap-popover.js:33 Uncaught ReferenceError: google is not defined jquery.ui.addresspicker.js:25 Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'popover' overall:476

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How do I get .NET to garbage collect aggressively?

- by mmr

I have an application that is used in image processing, and I find myself typically allocating arrays in the 4000x4000 ushort size, as well as the occasional float and the like. Currently, the .NET framework tends to crash in this app apparently randomly, almost always with an out of memory error. 32mb is not a huge declaration, but if .NET is fragmenting memory, then it's very possible that such large continuous allocations aren't behaving as expected. Is there a way to tell the garbage collector to be more aggressive, or to defrag memory (if that's the problem)? I realize that there's the GC.Collect and GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers calls, and I've sprinkled them pretty liberally through my code, but I'm still getting the errors. It may be because I'm calling dll routines that use native code a lot, but I'm not sure. I've gone over that C++ code, and make sure that any memory I declare I delete, but still I get these C# crashes, so I'm pretty sure it's not there. I wonder if the C++ calls could be interfering with the GC, making it leave behind memory because it once interacted with a native call-- is that possible? If so, can I turn that functionality off? EDIT: Here is some very specific code that will cause the crash. According to this SO question, I do not need to be disposing of the BitmapSource objects here. Here is the naive version, no GC.Collects in it. It generally crashes on iteration 4 to 10 of the undo procedure. This code replaces the constructor in a blank WPF project, since I'm using WPF. I do the wackiness with the bitmapsource because of the limitations I explained in my answer to @dthorpe below as well as the requirements listed in this SO question. public partial class Window1 : Window { public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); //Attempts to create an OOM crash //to do so, mimic minute croppings of an 'image' (ushort array), and then undoing the crops int theRows = 4000, currRows; int theColumns = 4000, currCols; int theMaxChange = 30; int i; List<ushort[]> theList = new List<ushort[]>();//the list of images in the undo/redo stack byte[] displayBuffer = null;//the buffer used as a bitmap source BitmapSource theSource = null; for (i = 0; i < theMaxChange; i++) { currRows = theRows - i; currCols = theColumns - i; theList.Add(new ushort[(theRows - i) * (theColumns - i)]); displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create(currCols, currRows, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, (currCols * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); System.Console.WriteLine("Got to change " + i.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } //should get here. If not, then theMaxChange is too large. //Now, go back up the undo stack. for (i = theMaxChange - 1; i >= 0; i--) { displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create((theColumns - i), (theRows - i), 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, ((theColumns - i) * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); System.Console.WriteLine("Got to undo change " + i.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } } } Now, if I'm explicit in calling the garbage collector, I have to wrap the entire code in an outer loop to cause the OOM crash. For me, this tends to happen around x = 50 or so: public partial class Window1 : Window { public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); //Attempts to create an OOM crash //to do so, mimic minute croppings of an 'image' (ushort array), and then undoing the crops for (int x = 0; x < 1000; x++){ int theRows = 4000, currRows; int theColumns = 4000, currCols; int theMaxChange = 30; int i; List<ushort[]> theList = new List<ushort[]>();//the list of images in the undo/redo stack byte[] displayBuffer = null;//the buffer used as a bitmap source BitmapSource theSource = null; for (i = 0; i < theMaxChange; i++) { currRows = theRows - i; currCols = theColumns - i; theList.Add(new ushort[(theRows - i) * (theColumns - i)]); displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create(currCols, currRows, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, (currCols * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); } //should get here. If not, then theMaxChange is too large. //Now, go back up the undo stack. for (i = theMaxChange - 1; i >= 0; i--) { displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create((theColumns - i), (theRows - i), 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, ((theColumns - i) * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();//force gc to collect, because we're in scenario 2, lots of large random changes GC.Collect(); } System.Console.WriteLine("Got to changelist " + x.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } } } If I'm mishandling memory in either scenario, if there's something I should spot with a profiler, let me know. That's a pretty simple routine there. Unfortunately, it looks like @Kevin's answer is right-- this is a bug in .NET and how .NET handles objects larger than 85k. This situation strikes me as exceedingly strange; could Powerpoint be rewritten in .NET with this kind of limitation, or any of the other Office suite applications? 85k does not seem to me to be a whole lot of space, and I'd also think that any program that uses so-called 'large' allocations frequently would become unstable within a matter of days to weeks when using .NET. EDIT: It looks like Kevin is right, this is a limitation of .NET's GC. For those who don't want to follow the entire thread, .NET has four GC heaps: gen0, gen1, gen2, and LOH (Large Object Heap). Everything that's 85k or smaller goes on one of the first three heaps, depending on creation time (moved from gen0 to gen1 to gen2, etc). Objects larger than 85k get placed on the LOH. The LOH is never compacted, so eventually, allocations of the type I'm doing will eventually cause an OOM error as objects get scattered about that memory space. We've found that moving to .NET 4.0 does help the problem somewhat, delaying the exception, but not preventing it. To be honest, this feels a bit like the 640k barrier-- 85k ought to be enough for any user application (to paraphrase this video of a discussion of the GC in .NET). For the record, Java does not exhibit this behavior with its GC.

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PHP inserting Apostrophes where it shouldn't

- by Jack W-H

Hi folks Not too sure what's going on here as this doesn't seem like standard practise to me. But basically I have a basic database thingy going on that lets users submit code snippets. They can provide up to 5 tags for their submission. Now I'm still learning so please forgive me if this is obvious! Here's the PHP script that makes it all work (note there may be some CodeIgniter specific functions in there): function submitform() { $this->load->helper(array('form', 'url')); $this->load->library('form_validation'); $this->load->database(); $this->form_validation->set_error_delimiters('<p style="color:#FF0000;">', '</p>'); $this->form_validation->set_rules('title', 'Title', 'trim|required|min_length[5]|max_length[255]|xss_clean'); $this->form_validation->set_rules('summary', 'Summary', 'trim|required|min_length[5]|max_length[255]|xss_clean'); $this->form_validation->set_rules('bbcode', 'Code', 'required|min_length[5]'); // No XSS clean (or <script> tags etc. are gone) $this->form_validation->set_rules('tags', 'Tags', 'trim|xss_clean|required|max_length[254]'); if ($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE) { // Do some stuff if it fails } else { // User's input values $title = $this->db->escape(set_value('title')); $summary = $this->db->escape(set_value('summary')); $code = $this->db->escape(set_value('bbcode')); $tags = $this->db->escape(set_value('tags')); // Stop things like <script> tags working $codesanitised = htmlspecialchars($code); // Other values to be entered $author = $this->tank_auth->get_user_id(); $bi1 = ""; $bi2 = ""; // This long messy bit basically sees which browsers the code is compatible with. if (isset($_POST['IE6'])) {$bi1 .= "IE6, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "IE6, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['IE7'])) {$bi1 .= "IE7, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "IE7, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['IE8'])) {$bi1 .= "IE8, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "IE8, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['FF2'])) {$bi1 .= "FF2, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "FF2, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['FF3'])) {$bi1 .= "FF3, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "FF3, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['SA3'])) {$bi1 .= "SA3, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "SA3, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['SA4'])) {$bi1 .= "SA4, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "SA4, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['CHR'])) {$bi1 .= "CHR, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "CHR, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['OPE'])) {$bi1 .= "OPE, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "OPE, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} if (isset($_POST['OTH'])) {$bi1 .= "OTH, "; $bi2 .= "1, ";} else {$bi1 .= "OTH, "; $bi2 .= "NULL, ";} // $b1 is $bi1 without the last two characters (, ) which would cause a query error $b1 = substr($bi1, 0, -2); $b2 = substr($bi2, 0, -2); // :::::::::::THIS IS WHERE THE IMPORTANT STUFF IS, STACKOVERFLOW READERS:::::::::: // Split up all the words in $tags into individual variables - each tag is seperated with a space $pieces = explode(" ", $tags); // Usage: // echo $pieces[0]; // piece1 etc $ti1 = ""; $ti2 = ""; // Now we'll do similar to what we did with the compatible browsers to generate a bit of a query string if ($pieces[0]!=NULL) {$ti1 .= "tag1, "; $ti2 .= "$pieces[0], ";} else {$ti1 .= "tag1, "; $ti2 .= "NULL, ";} if ($pieces[1]!=NULL) {$ti1 .= "tag2, "; $ti2 .= "$pieces[1], ";} else {$ti1 .= "tag2, "; $ti2 .= "NULL, ";} if ($pieces[2]!=NULL) {$ti1 .= "tag3, "; $ti2 .= "$pieces[2], ";} else {$ti1 .= "tag3, "; $ti2 .= "NULL, ";} if ($pieces[3]!=NULL) {$ti1 .= "tag4, "; $ti2 .= "$pieces[3], ";} else {$ti1 .= "tag4, "; $ti2 .= "NULL, ";} if ($pieces[4]!=NULL) {$ti1 .= "tag5, "; $ti2 .= "$pieces[4], ";} else {$ti1 .= "tag5, "; $ti2 .= "NULL, ";} $t1 = substr($ti1, 0, -2); $t2 = substr($ti2, 0, -2); $sql = "INSERT INTO code (id, title, author, summary, code, date, $t1, $b1) VALUES ('', $title, $author, $summary, $codesanitised, NOW(), $t2, $b2)"; $this->db->query($sql); $this->load->view('subviews/template/headerview'); $this->load->view('subviews/template/menuview'); $this->load->view('subviews/template/sidebar'); $this->load->view('thanksforsubmission'); $this->load->view('subviews/template/footerview'); } } Sorry about that boring drivel of code there. I realise I probably have a few bad practises in there - please point them out if so. This is what the outputted query looks like (it results in an error and isn't queried at all): A Database Error Occurred Error Number: 1136 Column count doesn't match value count at row 1 INSERT INTO code (id, title, author, summary, code, date, tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5, IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, SA3, SA4, CHR, OPE, OTH) VALUES ('', 'test2', 1, 'test2', 'test2 ', NOW(), 'test2, test2, test2, test2, test2', NULL, NULL, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, NULL) You'll see at the bit after NOW(), 'test2, test2, test2, test2, test2' - I never asked it to put all that in apostrophes. Did I? What I could do is put each of those lines like this: if ($pieces[0]!=NULL) {$ti1 .= "tag1, "; $ti2 .= "'$pieces[0]', ";} else {$ti1 .= "tag1, "; $ti2 .= "NULL, ";} With single quotes around $pieces[0] etc. - but then my problem is that this kinda fails when the user only enters 4 tags, or 3, or whatever. Sorry if that's the worst phrased question in history, I tried, but my brain has turned to mush. Thanks for your help! Jack

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Array sorting efficiency... Beginner need advice

- by SoleSoft

I'll start by saying I am very much a beginner programmer, this is essentially my first real project outside of using learning material. I've been making a 'Simon Says' style game (the game where you repeat the pattern generated by the computer) using C# and XNA, the actual game is complete and working fine but while creating it, I wanted to also create a 'top 10' scoreboard. The scoreboard would record player name, level (how many 'rounds' they've completed) and combo (how many buttons presses they got correct), the scoreboard would then be sorted by combo score. This led me to XML, the first time using it, and I eventually got to the point of having an XML file that recorded the top 10 scores. The XML file is managed within a scoreboard class, which is also responsible for adding new scores and sorting scores. Which gets me to the point... I'd like some feedback on the way I've gone about sorting the score list and how I could have done it better, I have no other way to gain feedback =(. I know .NET features Array.Sort() but I wasn't too sure of how to use it as it's not just a single array that needs to be sorted. When a new score needs to be entered into the scoreboard, the player name and level also have to be added. These are stored within an 'array of arrays' (10 = for 'top 10' scores) scoreboardComboData = new int[10]; // Combo scoreboardTextData = new string[2][]; scoreboardTextData[0] = new string[10]; // Name scoreboardTextData[1] = new string[10]; // Level as string The scoreboard class works as follows: - Checks to see if 'scoreboard.xml' exists, if not it creates it - Initialises above arrays and adds any player data from scoreboard.xml, from previous run - when AddScore(name, level, combo) is called the sort begins - Another method can also be called that populates the XML file with above array data The sort checks to see if the new score (combo) is less than or equal to any recorded scores within the scoreboardComboData array (if it's greater than a score, it moves onto the next element). If so, it moves all scores below the score it is less than or equal to down one element, essentially removing the last score and then places the new score within the element below the score it is less than or equal to. If the score is greater than all recorded scores, it moves all scores down one and inserts the new score within the first element. If it's the only score, it simply adds it to the first element. When a new score is added, the Name and Level data is also added to their relevant arrays, in the same way. What a tongue twister. Below is the AddScore method, I've added comments in the hope that it makes things clearer O_o. You can get the actual source file HERE. Below the method is an example of the quickest way to add a score to follow through with a debugger. public static void AddScore(string name, string level, int combo) { // If the scoreboard has not yet been filled, this adds another 'active' // array element each time a new score is added. The actual array size is // defined within PopulateScoreBoard() (set to 10 - for 'top 10' if (totalScores < scoreboardComboData.Length) totalScores++; // Does the scoreboard even need sorting? if (totalScores > 1) { for (int i = totalScores - 1; i > - 1; i--) { // Check to see if score (combo) is greater than score stored in // array if (combo > scoreboardComboData[i] && i != 0) { // If so continue to next element continue; } // Check to see if score (combo) is less or equal to element 'i' // score && that the element is not the last in the // array, if so the score does not need to be added to the scoreboard else if (combo <= scoreboardComboData[i] && i != scoreboardComboData.Length - 1) { // If the score is lower than element 'i' and greater than the last // element within the array, it needs to be added to the scoreboard. This is achieved // by moving each element under element 'i' down an element. The new score is then inserted // into the array under element 'i' for (int j = totalScores - 1; j > i; j--) { // Name and level data are moved down in their relevant arrays scoreboardTextData[0][j] = scoreboardTextData[0][j - 1]; scoreboardTextData[1][j] = scoreboardTextData[1][j - 1]; // Score (combo) data is moved down in relevant array scoreboardComboData[j] = scoreboardComboData[j - 1]; } // The new Name, level and score (combo) data is inserted into the relevant array under element 'i' scoreboardTextData[0][i + 1] = name; scoreboardTextData[1][i + 1] = level; scoreboardComboData[i + 1] = combo; break; } // If the method gets the this point, it means that the score is greater than all scores within // the array and therefore cannot be added in the above way. As it is not less than any score within // the array. else if (i == 0) { // All Names, levels and scores are moved down within their relevant arrays for (int j = totalScores - 1; j != 0; j--) { scoreboardTextData[0][j] = scoreboardTextData[0][j - 1]; scoreboardTextData[1][j] = scoreboardTextData[1][j - 1]; scoreboardComboData[j] = scoreboardComboData[j - 1]; } // The new number 1 top name, level and score, are added into the first element // within each of their relevant arrays. scoreboardTextData[0][0] = name; scoreboardTextData[1][0] = level; scoreboardComboData[0] = combo; break; } // If the methods get to this point, the combo score is not high enough // to be on the top10 score list and therefore needs to break break; } } // As totalScores < 1, the current score is the first to be added. Therefore no checks need to be made // and the Name, Level and combo data can be entered directly into the first element of their relevant // array. else { scoreboardTextData[0][0] = name; scoreboardTextData[1][0] = level; scoreboardComboData[0] = combo; } } } Example for adding score: private static void Initialize() { scoreboardDoc = new XmlDocument(); if (!File.Exists("Scoreboard.xml")) GenerateXML("Scoreboard.xml"); PopulateScoreBoard("Scoreboard.xml"); // ADD TEST SCORES HERE! AddScore("EXAMPLE", "10", 100); AddScore("EXAMPLE2", "24", 999); PopulateXML("Scoreboard.xml"); } In it's current state the source file is just used for testing, initialize is called within main and PopulateScoreBoard handles the majority of other initialising, so nothing else is needed, except to add a test score. I thank you for your time!

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Namespaces and deserialization issue

- by CaffGeek

UPDATE: You can run the code at the end of this to recreate and see the error I am having and hopefully solve it! UPDATE2: It's not the removal of the xmlns="" that's the issue... as you can remove it from the initial xml string. The problem is with the [XmlType(TypeName = "Systems")] somehow causing it to be added... UPDATE3: Turns out the problem is in here, I need to set the TypeName based on what is in the existing, XmlTypeAttribute if it already exists on the class.... xmlAttributes.XmlType = new XmlTypeAttribute { Namespace = "" }; I get the following XML as a string from a webservice <Systems xmlns=""> <System id="1"> <sys_name>ALL</sys_name> </System> <System id="2"> <sys_name>asdfasdf</sys_name> </System> <System id="3"> <sys_name>fasdfasf</sys_name> </System> <System id="4"> <sys_name>asdfasdfasdf</sys_name> </System> </Systems> I then execute this, to convert it to an object result = XElement.Parse(xmlResult.OuterXml).Deserialize<AwayRequestSystems>(); Strangely though, in the Deserialize method, while the RemoveAllNamespaces works and returns the xml without the namespace I get the error <Systems xmlns=''> was not expected. in the catch when return (T) serializer.Deserialize(reader); executes! Why is it doing this? The xmlns is GONE!!! EXECUTABLE CODE! (Just put it in a test project) using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using System.Xml; using System.Xml.Linq; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; using System.Xml.Serialization; namespace DeserializationTest { [TestClass] public class UnitTest1 { public TestContext TestContext { get; set; } [TestMethod] public void RemoveXmlnsFromSystems() { var xml = XElement.Parse(@"<Systems xmlns=""""> <System id=""1""> <sys_name>ALL</sys_name> </System> <System id=""2""> <sys_name>ePO</sys_name> </System> <System id=""3""> <sys_name>iEFT</sys_name> </System> <System id=""4""> <sys_name>Away Requests</sys_name> </System> <System id=""5""> <sys_name>RP3</sys_name> </System> </Systems>"); var systems = xml.Deserialize<AwayRequestSystems>(); Assert.IsInstanceOfType(systems, typeof(AwayRequestSystems)); var xmlnsFree = xml.RemoveAllNamespaces(); var str = xmlnsFree.ToString(); Debug.WriteLine(str); Assert.AreNotEqual("Error", xmlnsFree.Name.ToString(), "Serialization Error"); Assert.IsFalse(str.Contains("xmlns"), "Xmlns still exists"); } } [XmlType(TypeName = "Systems")] public class AwayRequestSystems : List<AwayRequestSystem> { } [XmlType(TypeName = "System")] public class AwayRequestSystem { [XmlAttribute("id")] public int ID { get; set; } [XmlElement("sys_name")] public string Name { get; set; } } public static class XmlSerializerFactory { private static Dictionary<Type, XmlSerializer> _serializers = new Dictionary<Type, XmlSerializer>(); public static void ResetCache() { _serializers = new Dictionary<Type, XmlSerializer>(); } public static XmlSerializer GetSerializerFor(Type typeOfT) { if (!_serializers.ContainsKey(typeOfT)) { var xmlAttributes = new XmlAttributes(); var xmlAttributeOverrides = new XmlAttributeOverrides(); Debug.WriteLine(string.Format("XmlSerializerFactory.GetSerializerFor(typeof({0}));", typeOfT)); xmlAttributes.XmlType = new XmlTypeAttribute { Namespace = "" }; xmlAttributes.Xmlns = false; var types = new List<Type> { typeOfT, typeOfT.BaseType }; foreach (var property in typeOfT.GetProperties()) { types.Add(property.PropertyType); } types.RemoveAll(t => t.ToString().StartsWith("System.")); foreach (var type in types) { if (xmlAttributeOverrides[type] == null) xmlAttributeOverrides.Add(type, xmlAttributes); } var newSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeOfT, xmlAttributeOverrides); //var newSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeOfT, xmlAttributeOverrides, types.ToArray(), new XmlRootAttribute(), string.Empty); //var newSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeOfT, string.Empty); _serializers.Add(typeOfT, newSerializer); } return _serializers[typeOfT]; } } public static class XElementExtensions { public static XElement RemoveAllNamespaces(this XElement source) { if (source.HasAttributes) source.Attributes().Where(a => a.Name.LocalName.Equals("xmlns")).Remove(); return source.HasElements ? new XElement(source.Name.LocalName, source.Attributes()/*.Where(a => !a.Name.LocalName.Equals("xmlns"))*/, source.Elements().Select(el => RemoveAllNamespaces(el)) ) : new XElement(source.Name.LocalName) { Value = source.Value }; } } public static class SerializationExtensions { public static XElement Serialize(this object source) { try { var serializer = XmlSerializerFactory.GetSerializerFor(source.GetType()); var xdoc = new XDocument(); using (var writer = xdoc.CreateWriter()) { serializer.Serialize(writer, source, new XmlSerializerNamespaces(new[] { new XmlQualifiedName("", "") })); } var result = (xdoc.Document != null) ? xdoc.Document.Root : new XElement("Error", "Document Missing"); return result.RemoveAllNamespaces(); } catch (Exception x) { return new XElement("Error", x.ToString()); } } public static T Deserialize<T>(this XElement source) where T : class { //try //{ var serializer = XmlSerializerFactory.GetSerializerFor(typeof(T)); var cleanxml = source.RemoveAllNamespaces(); var reader = cleanxml.CreateReader(); return (T)serializer.Deserialize(reader); //} //catch (Exception x) //{ // return null; //} } } }

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Backbone.js Adding Model to Collection Issue

- by jtmgdevelopment

I am building a test application in Backbone.js (my first app using Backbone). The app goes like this: Load Data from server "Plans" Build list of plans and show to screen There is a button to add a new plan Once new plan is added, add to collection ( do not save to server as of now ) redirect to index page and show the new collection ( includes the plan you just added) My issue is with item 5. When I save a plan, I add the model to the collection then redirect to the initial view. At this point, I fetch data from the server. When I fetch data from the server, this overwrites my collection and my added model is gone. How can I prevent this from happening? I have found a way to do this but it is definitely not the correct way at all. Below you will find my code examples for this. Thanks for the help. PlansListView View: var PlansListView = Backbone.View.extend({ tagName : 'ul', initialize : function() { _.bindAll( this, 'render', 'close' ); //reset the view if the collection is reset this.collection.bind( 'reset', this.render , this ); }, render : function() { _.each( this.collection.models, function( plan ){ $( this.el ).append( new PlansListItemView({ model: plan }).render().el ); }, this ); return this; }, close : function() { $( this.el ).unbind(); $( this.el ).remove(); } });//end NewPlanView Save Method var NewPlanView = Backbone.View.extend({ tagName : 'section', template : _.template( $( '#plan-form-template' ).html() ), events : { 'click button.save' : 'savePlan', 'click button.cancel' : 'cancel' }, intialize: function() { _.bindAll( this, 'render', 'save', 'cancel' ); }, render : function() { $( '#container' ).append( $( this.el ).html(this.template( this.model.toJSON() )) ); return this; }, savePlan : function( event ) { this.model.set({ name : 'bad plan', date : 'friday', desc : 'blah', id : Math.floor(Math.random()*11), total_stops : '2' }); this.collection.add( this.model ); app.navigate('', true ); event.preventDefault(); }, cancel : function(){} }); Router (default method): index : function() { this.container.empty(); var self = this; //This is a hack to get this to work //on default page load fetch all plans from the server //if the page has loaded ( this.plans is defined) set the updated plans collection to the view //There has to be a better way!! if( ! this.plans ) { this.plans = new Plans(); this.plans.fetch({ success: function() { self.plansListView = new PlansListView({ collection : self.plans }); $( '#container' ).append( self.plansListView.render().el ); if( self.requestedID ) self.planDetails( self.requestedID ); } }); } else { this.plansListView = new PlansListView({ collection : this.plans }); $( '#container' ).append( self.plansListView.render().el ); if( this.requestedID ) self.planDetails( this.requestedID ); } }, New Plan Route: newPlan : function() { var plan = new Plan({name: 'Cool Plan', date: 'Monday', desc: 'This is a great app'}); this.newPlan = new NewPlanView({ model : plan, collection: this.plans }); this.newPlan.render(); } FULL CODE ( function( $ ){ var Plan = Backbone.Model.extend({ defaults: { name : '', date : '', desc : '' } }); var Plans = Backbone.Collection.extend({ model : Plan, url : '/data/' }); $( document ).ready(function( e ){ var PlansListView = Backbone.View.extend({ tagName : 'ul', initialize : function() { _.bindAll( this, 'render', 'close' ); //reset the view if the collection is reset this.collection.bind( 'reset', this.render , this ); }, render : function() { _.each( this.collection.models, function( plan ){ $( this.el ).append( new PlansListItemView({ model: plan }).render().el ); }, this ); return this; }, close : function() { $( this.el ).unbind(); $( this.el ).remove(); } });//end var PlansListItemView = Backbone.View.extend({ tagName : 'li', template : _.template( $( '#list-item-template' ).html() ), events :{ 'click a' : 'listInfo' }, render : function() { $( this.el ).html( this.template( this.model.toJSON() ) ); return this; }, listInfo : function( event ) { } });//end var PlanView = Backbone.View.extend({ tagName : 'section', events : { 'click button.add-plan' : 'newPlan' }, template: _.template( $( '#plan-template' ).html() ), initialize: function() { _.bindAll( this, 'render', 'close', 'newPlan' ); }, render : function() { $( '#container' ).append( $( this.el ).html( this.template( this.model.toJSON() ) ) ); return this; }, newPlan : function( event ) { app.navigate( 'newplan', true ); }, close : function() { $( this.el ).unbind(); $( this.el ).remove(); } });//end var NewPlanView = Backbone.View.extend({ tagName : 'section', template : _.template( $( '#plan-form-template' ).html() ), events : { 'click button.save' : 'savePlan', 'click button.cancel' : 'cancel' }, intialize: function() { _.bindAll( this, 'render', 'save', 'cancel' ); }, render : function() { $( '#container' ).append( $( this.el ).html(this.template( this.model.toJSON() )) ); return this; }, savePlan : function( event ) { this.model.set({ name : 'bad plan', date : 'friday', desc : 'blah', id : Math.floor(Math.random()*11), total_stops : '2' }); this.collection.add( this.model ); app.navigate('', true ); event.preventDefault(); }, cancel : function(){} }); var AppRouter = Backbone.Router.extend({ container : $( '#container' ), routes : { '' : 'index', 'viewplan/:id' : 'planDetails', 'newplan' : 'newPlan' }, initialize: function(){ }, index : function() { this.container.empty(); var self = this; //This is a hack to get this to work //on default page load fetch all plans from the server //if the page has loaded ( this.plans is defined) set the updated plans collection to the view //There has to be a better way!! if( ! this.plans ) { this.plans = new Plans(); this.plans.fetch({ success: function() { self.plansListView = new PlansListView({ collection : self.plans }); $( '#container' ).append( self.plansListView.render().el ); if( self.requestedID ) self.planDetails( self.requestedID ); } }); } else { this.plansListView = new PlansListView({ collection : this.plans }); $( '#container' ).append( self.plansListView.render().el ); if( this.requestedID ) self.planDetails( this.requestedID ); } }, planDetails : function( id ) { if( this.plans ) { this.plansListView.close(); this.plan = this.plans.get( id ); if( this.planView ) this.planView.close(); this.planView = new PlanView({ model : this.plan }); this.planView.render(); } else{ this.requestedID = id; this.index(); } if( ! this.plans ) this.index(); }, newPlan : function() { var plan = new Plan({name: 'Cool Plan', date: 'Monday', desc: 'This is a great app'}); this.newPlan = new NewPlanView({ model : plan, collection: this.plans }); this.newPlan.render(); } }); var app = new AppRouter(); Backbone.history.start(); }); })( jQuery );

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Uploading multiple files using Spring MVC 3.0.2 after HiddenHttpMethodFilter has been enabled

- by Tiny

I'm using Spring version 3.0.2. I need to upload multiple files using the multiple="multiple" attribute of a file browser such as, <input type="file" id="myFile" name="myFile" multiple="multiple"/> (and not using multiple file browsers something like the one stated by this answer, it indeed works I tried). Although no versions of Internet Explorer supports this approach unless an appropriate jQuery plugin/widget is used, I don't care about it right now (since most other browsers support this). This works fine with commons fileupload but in addition to using RequestMethod.POST and RequestMethod.GET methods, I also want to use other request methods supported and suggested by Spring like RequestMethod.PUT and RequestMethod.DELETE in their own appropriate places. For this to be so, I have configured Spring with HiddenHttpMethodFilter which goes fine as this question indicates. but it can upload only one file at a time even though multiple files in the file browser are chosen. In the Spring controller class, a method is mapped as follows. @RequestMapping(method={RequestMethod.POST}, value={"admin_side/Temp"}) public String onSubmit(@RequestParam("myFile") List<MultipartFile> files, @ModelAttribute("tempBean") TempBean tempBean, BindingResult error, Map model, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, FileUploadException { for(MultipartFile file:files) { System.out.println(file.getOriginalFilename()); } } Even with the request parameter @RequestParam("myFile") List<MultipartFile> files which is a List of type MultipartFile (it can always have only one file at a time). I could find a strategy which is likely to work with multiple files on this blog. I have gone through it carefully. The solution below the section SOLUTION 2 – USE THE RAW REQUEST says, If however the client insists on using the same form input name such as ‘files[]‘ or ‘files’ and then populating that name with multiple files then a small hack is necessary as follows. As noted above Spring 2.5 throws an exception if it detects the same form input name of type file more than once. CommonsFileUploadSupport – the class which throws that exception is not final and the method which throws that exception is protected so using the wonders of inheritance and subclassing one can simply fix/modify the logic a little bit as follows. The change I’ve made is literally one word representing one method invocation which enables us to have multiple files incoming under the same form input name. It attempts to override the method protected MultipartParsingResult parseFileItems(List fileItems, String encoding) {} of the abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport by extending the class CommonsMultipartResolver such as, package multipartResolver; import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; import java.util.Map; import javax.servlet.ServletContext; import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItem; import org.springframework.util.StringUtils; import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartException; import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartFile; import org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartFile; import org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver; final public class MultiCommonsMultipartResolver extends CommonsMultipartResolver { public MultiCommonsMultipartResolver() { } public MultiCommonsMultipartResolver(ServletContext servletContext) { super(servletContext); } @Override @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") protected MultipartParsingResult parseFileItems(List fileItems, String encoding) { Map<String, MultipartFile> multipartFiles = new HashMap<String, MultipartFile>(); Map multipartParameters = new HashMap(); // Extract multipart files and multipart parameters. for (Iterator it = fileItems.iterator(); it.hasNext();) { FileItem fileItem = (FileItem) it.next(); if (fileItem.isFormField()) { String value = null; if (encoding != null) { try { value = fileItem.getString(encoding); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException ex) { if (logger.isWarnEnabled()) { logger.warn("Could not decode multipart item '" + fileItem.getFieldName() + "' with encoding '" + encoding + "': using platform default"); } value = fileItem.getString(); } } else { value = fileItem.getString(); } String[] curParam = (String[]) multipartParameters.get(fileItem.getFieldName()); if (curParam == null) { // simple form field multipartParameters.put(fileItem.getFieldName(), new String[] { value }); } else { // array of simple form fields String[] newParam = StringUtils.addStringToArray(curParam, value); multipartParameters.put(fileItem.getFieldName(), newParam); } } else { // multipart file field CommonsMultipartFile file = new CommonsMultipartFile(fileItem); if (multipartFiles.put(fileItem.getName(), file) != null) { throw new MultipartException("Multiple files for field name [" + file.getName() + "] found - not supported by MultipartResolver"); } if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) { logger.debug("Found multipart file [" + file.getName() + "] of size " + file.getSize() + " bytes with original filename [" + file.getOriginalFilename() + "], stored " + file.getStorageDescription()); } } } return new MultipartParsingResult(multipartFiles, multipartParameters); } } What happens is that the last line in the method parseFileItems() (the return statement) i.e. return new MultipartParsingResult(multipartFiles, multipartParameters); causes a compile-time error because the first parameter multipartFiles is a type of Map implemented by HashMap but in reality, it requires a parameter of type MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile> It is a constructor of a static class inside the abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport, public abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport { protected static class MultipartParsingResult { public MultipartParsingResult(MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile> mpFiles, Map<String, String[]> mpParams) { } } } The reason might be - this solution is about the Spring version 2.5 and I'm using the Spring version 3.0.2 which might be inappropriate for this version. I however tried to replace the Map with MultiValueMap in various ways such as the one shown in the following segment of code, MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile>mul=new LinkedMultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile>(); for(Entry<String, MultipartFile>entry:multipartFiles.entrySet()) { mul.add(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue()); } return new MultipartParsingResult(mul, multipartParameters); but no success. I'm not sure how to replace Map with MultiValueMap and even doing so could work either. After doing this, the browser shows the Http response, HTTP Status 400 - type Status report message description The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect (). Apache Tomcat/6.0.26 I have tried to shorten the question as possible as I could and I haven't included unnecessary code. How could be made it possible to upload multiple files after Spring has been configured with HiddenHttpMethodFilter? That blog indicates that It is a long standing, high priority bug. If there is no solution regarding the version 3.0.2 (3 or higher) then I have to disable Spring support forever and continue to use commons-fileupolad as suggested by the third solution on that blog omitting the PUT, DELETE and other request methods forever. Just curiously waiting for a solution and/or suggestion. Very little changes to the code in the parseFileItems() method inside the class MultiCommonsMultipartResolver might make it to upload multiple files but I couldn't succeed in my attempts (again with the Spring version 3.0.2 (3 or higher)).

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Unable to find the cause of an annoying content gap in my HTML/CSS?

- by user1472747

I'm quite new to CSS / HTML, and can't find the cause of this little bugger. I want it gone, so that the banner and the nav bar touch each other. Any help is greatly appreciated!! Here is the code for the site. I took out some of the irrelevant code. <!DOCTYPE html> <html>  <style type="text/css"> #container { margin: 0 auto; width: 900px; background: #fff; } #header { margin-top: 0px; } #header h1 { margin: 0; } #navigation { float: left; width: 900px; background: #333; } #navigation ul { margin: 0; padding: 0; } #navigation ul li { list-style-type: none; display: inline; } #navigation li a { display: block; float: left; padding: 5px 10px; color: #fff; text-decoration: none; border-right: 1px solid #fff; } #navigation li a:hover { background: #383; } #content-container { float: left; width: 900px; background: #fff url(/wp-content/uploads/layout-two-fixed-background.gif) repeat-y 100% 0; } #content { clear: left; float: left; width: 619px; height: 720px; padding: 10px 0; margin: 0 0 0 0px; display: inline; overflow: auto; } #content h2 { margin: 0; color: #003D5D; padding:10px; } #contentBody { padding:10px; font-size:22px; } #aside { float: right; width: 280px; padding: 20px 0; margin: 0 0px 0 0; display: inline; background: #cccccc; height: 700px; border-left: 1px solid #333 ; } #aside h3 { margin: 0 20px; color: #003D5D; font-family: Times New Roman; } #asideText { margin: 0 20px; font-family: Times New Roman;} #footer { clear: both; background: #ccc; text-align: right; padding: 5px; height: 1%; border-top: 1px solid #333 ; } </style>   <body> <div id="container"> <div id="header"> <img src = file:///Users/jduffy/Desktop/projectSite/banner1.jpg> </img> </div> <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li><a href="file:///Users/jduffy/Desktop/projectSite/home">Home</a></li> <li><a href="file:///Users/jduffy/Desktop/projectSite/theProject">The Project</a></li> <li><a href="file:///Users/jduffy/Desktop/projectSite/Pictures">Pictures</a></li> <li><a href="file:///Users/jduffy/Desktop/projectSite/Contact">Contact us</a></li> </ul> </div> <div id="content-container"> <div id="content"> <h2> Page heading </h2> <div id="contentBody"> <p> home pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome page home pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome page home pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome pagehome page </p> <p> test2 </p> <p> test3 </p> </div> </div> <div id="aside"> <div id="asideHeading"> <h3> Aside Heading </h3> </div> <div id="asideText"> <p> test5 </p> </div> </div> <div id="footer"> <text id="footerDate">0</text> </div> </div> </div> </body>  </html>  <script type="text/javascript"> /*date*/ var today = new Date(); document.getElementById("footerDate").innerHTML = today; </script>

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android webview returns blank page when load dynamic html page

- by user2962555

I am trying to click one button to load a page into a div block dynamically. To test it, I try to append a list item with text "abc" into the loaded page. However, I always get a blank page. load function works fine because if I try to load a static page, it works. Following is my main html page code. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <title>LoadPageTest</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,400,700"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/customizedstyle.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/themes/default/jquery.mobile-1.4.3.min.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/jqm-demos.css"> <script src="./js/jquery.js"></script> <script scr="./js/customizedjs.js"></script> <script src="./js/jquery.mobile-1.4.3.min.js"></script> <script> $( document ).on( "pagecreate", "#demo-page", function() { $( document ).on( "swipeleft swiperight", "#demo-page", function( e ) { if ( $( ".ui-page-active" ).jqmData( "panel" ) !== "open" ) { if ( e.type === "swipeleft" ) { $( "#right-panel" ).panel( "open" ); } } }); }); </script> <style type="text/css"> body { overflow:hidden; } </style> </head> <body style= "overflow:hidden" scrolling="no"> <style type="text/css"> body { overflow:hidden; } </style> <div data-role="page" id="main-page" style= "overflow:hidden" scrolling="no"> <div role="main" class="ui-content" id ="maindiv" style= "overflow: auto"> Will load diff pages here. </div> <div data-role="panel" id="left-panel" data-theme="b"> <ul data-role="listview" data-icon="false" id="menu"> <li> <a href="#" id = "btnA" data-rel="close">Go Page A <img src="./images/icona.png" class="ui-li-thumb"/> </li> <li> <a href="#" id = "btnB" data-rel="close">Go Page B <img src="./images/iconb.png" class="ui-li-thumb"/> </li> </ul> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnA").on("click", function(){ $("#maindiv").empty(); $("#maindiv").load("pageA.html"); }); $("#btnB").on("click", function(){ $("#maindiv").empty(); $("#maindiv").load("pageB.html"); }); </script> </div> </body> </html> Next is code for the page I try to load dynamically. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <title>Page should be loaded</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,400,700"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/customizedstyle.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/themes/default/jquery.mobile-1.4.3.min.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/jqm-demos.css"> <script src="./js/jquery.js"></script> <script scr="./js/customizedjs.js"></script> <script src="./js/jquery.mobile-1.4.3.min.js"></script> <script> $(document).on('pagebeforeshow', function () { $('#postlist').append('<li> abc </li>'); $('#postlist').listview('refresh'); }); </script> </head> <body > <div data-role="page" id="posthome"> <div data-role = "content"> <ul data-role='listview' id = "postlist"> </ul> </div> </div> </body> </html> I doubt if it is because my javascript in the page doesn't work, cause the swipe js code in the main page seems not work either. Is that possible? I have enabled javascript in the onCreate() function of the activity file as below. protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_message); new LongRunningGetIO().execute(); mWebView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview); mWebView.setWebViewClient(new AppClient()); mWebView.setVerticalScrollBarEnabled(false); mWebView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true); mWebView.getSettings().setDomStorageEnabled(true); mWebView.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/index.html"); } I noticed there is a warning for statement to enable javascript "Using setJavaScriptEnabled can introduce XSS vulnerabilities into you application, review carefully". Will that maybe the reason? Then, I added @SuppressLint("SetJavaScriptEnabled") on top of the activity. The warning is gone, but the js code in pages seem still not work.

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Redmine install not working and displaying directory contents - Ubuntu 10.04

- by Casey Flynn

I've gone through the steps to set up and install the redmine project tracking web app on my VPS with Apache2 but I'm running into a situation where instead of displaying the redmine app, I just see the directory contents: Does anyone know what could be the problem? I'm not sure what other files might be of use to diagnose what's going on. Thanks! # # Based upon the NCSA server configuration files originally by Rob McCool. # # This is the main Apache server configuration file. It contains the # configuration directives that give the server its instructions. # See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/ for detailed information about # the directives. # # Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without understanding # what they do. They're here only as hints or reminders. If you are unsure # consult the online docs. You have been warned. # # The configuration directives are grouped into three basic sections: # 1. Directives that control the operation of the Apache server process as a # whole (the 'global environment'). # 2. Directives that define the parameters of the 'main' or 'default' server, # which responds to requests that aren't handled by a virtual host. # These directives also provide default values for the settings # of all virtual hosts. # 3. Settings for virtual hosts, which allow Web requests to be sent to # different IP addresses or hostnames and have them handled by the # same Apache server process. # # Configuration and logfile names: If the filenames you specify for many # of the server's control files begin with "/" (or "drive:/" for Win32), the # server will use that explicit path. If the filenames do *not* begin # with "/", the value of ServerRoot is prepended -- so "/var/log/apache2/foo.log" # with ServerRoot set to "" will be interpreted by the # server as "//var/log/apache2/foo.log". # ### Section 1: Global Environment # # The directives in this section affect the overall operation of Apache, # such as the number of concurrent requests it can handle or where it # can find its configuration files. # # # ServerRoot: The top of the directory tree under which the server's # configuration, error, and log files are kept. # # NOTE! If you intend to place this on an NFS (or otherwise network) # mounted filesystem then please read the LockFile documentation (available # at <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.1/mod/mpm_common.html#lockfile>); # you will save yourself a lot of trouble. # # Do NOT add a slash at the end of the directory path. # ServerRoot "/etc/apache2" # # The accept serialization lock file MUST BE STORED ON A LOCAL DISK. # #<IfModule !mpm_winnt.c> #<IfModule !mpm_netware.c> LockFile /var/lock/apache2/accept.lock #</IfModule> #</IfModule> # # PidFile: The file in which the server should record its process # identification number when it starts. # This needs to be set in /etc/apache2/envvars # PidFile ${APACHE_PID_FILE} # # Timeout: The number of seconds before receives and sends time out. # Timeout 300 # # KeepAlive: Whether or not to allow persistent connections (more than # one request per connection). Set to "Off" to deactivate. # KeepAlive On # # MaxKeepAliveRequests: The maximum number of requests to allow # during a persistent connection. Set to 0 to allow an unlimited amount. # We recommend you leave this number high, for maximum performance. # MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 # # KeepAliveTimeout: Number of seconds to wait for the next request from the # same client on the same connection. # KeepAliveTimeout 15 ## ## Server-Pool Size Regulation (MPM specific) ## # prefork MPM # StartServers: number of server processes to start # MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare # MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare # MaxClients: maximum number of server processes allowed to start # MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 5 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 10 MaxClients 150 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> # worker MPM # StartServers: initial number of server processes to start # MaxClients: maximum number of simultaneous client connections # MinSpareThreads: minimum number of worker threads which are kept spare # MaxSpareThreads: maximum number of worker threads which are kept spare # ThreadsPerChild: constant number of worker threads in each server process # MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves <IfModule mpm_worker_module> StartServers 2 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadLimit 64 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxClients 150 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> # event MPM # StartServers: initial number of server processes to start # MaxClients: maximum number of simultaneous client connections # MinSpareThreads: minimum number of worker threads which are kept spare # MaxSpareThreads: maximum number of worker threads which are kept spare # ThreadsPerChild: constant number of worker threads in each server process # MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves <IfModule mpm_event_module> StartServers 2 MaxClients 150 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadLimit 64 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> # These need to be set in /etc/apache2/envvars User ${APACHE_RUN_USER} Group ${APACHE_RUN_GROUP} # # AccessFileName: The name of the file to look for in each directory # for additional configuration directives. See also the AllowOverride # directive. # AccessFileName .htaccess # # The following lines prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being # viewed by Web clients. # <Files ~ "^\.ht"> Order allow,deny Deny from all Satisfy all </Files> # # DefaultType is the default MIME type the server will use for a document # if it cannot otherwise determine one, such as from filename extensions. # If your server contains mostly text or HTML documents, "text/plain" is # a good value. If most of your content is binary, such as applications # or images, you may want to use "application/octet-stream" instead to # keep browsers from trying to display binary files as though they are # text. # DefaultType text/plain # # HostnameLookups: Log the names of clients or just their IP addresses # e.g., www.apache.org (on) or 204.62.129.132 (off). # The default is off because it'd be overall better for the net if people # had to knowingly turn this feature on, since enabling it means that # each client request will result in AT LEAST one lookup request to the # nameserver. # HostnameLookups Off # ErrorLog: The location of the error log file. # If you do not specify an ErrorLog directive within a <VirtualHost> # container, error messages relating to that virtual host will be # logged here. If you *do* define an error logfile for a <VirtualHost> # container, that host's errors will be logged there and not here. # ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log # # LogLevel: Control the number of messages logged to the error_log. # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. # LogLevel warn # Include module configuration: Include /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/*.load Include /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/*.conf # Include all the user configurations: Include /etc/apache2/httpd.conf # Include ports listing Include /etc/apache2/ports.conf # # The following directives define some format nicknames for use with # a CustomLog directive (see below). # If you are behind a reverse proxy, you might want to change %h into %{X-Forwarded-For}i # LogFormat "%v:%p %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vhost_combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O" common LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent # # Define an access log for VirtualHosts that don't define their own logfile CustomLog /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log vhost_combined # Include of directories ignores editors' and dpkg's backup files, # see README.Debian for details. # Include generic snippets of statements Include /etc/apache2/conf.d/ # Include the virtual host configurations: Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ # Enable fastcgi for .fcgi files # (If you're using a distro package for mod_fcgi, something like # this is probably already present) #<IfModule mod_fcgid.c> # AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi # FastCgiIpcDir /var/lib/apache2/fastcgi #</IfModule> LoadModule fcgid_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_fcgid.so LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7 PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8 ServerName demo and my vhosts file #No DNS server, default ip address v-host #domain: none #public: /home/casey/public_html/app/ <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost # ScriptAlias /redmine /home/casey/public_html/app/redmine/dispatch.fcgi DirectoryIndex index.html DocumentRoot /home/casey/public_html/app/public <Directory "/home/casey/trac/htdocs"> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> <Directory /var/www/redmine> RailsBaseURI /redmine PassengerResolveSymlinksInDocumentRoot on </Directory> # <Directory /> # Options FollowSymLinks # AllowOverride None # </Directory> # <Directory /var/www/> # Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews # AllowOverride None # Order allow,deny # allow from all # </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /home/casey/public_html/app/log/error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel debug CustomLog /home/casey/public_html/app/log/access.log combined # Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" # <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> # Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks # AllowOverride None # Order deny,allow # Deny from all # Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 # </Directory> </VirtualHost>

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Wireless access point -> Powerline -> Router -> Internet, should this work?

- by Anthony

My network at home used to be a laptop and desktop connected wirelessly to a single Wireless ADSL router, a Cisco 877W. Wireless reception around the house with this setup was quite unreliable, so I've gone about looking to improve it. I purchased some Belkin Gigabit powerline adapters and I've got these working fine. I can hook a computer up to one of the powerline adapters, and with the other one plugged into the ADSL router the computer has internet access. Additionally I can hook a Netgear DG834G Wireless ADSL router into it with the adsl not plugged in, and after turning off DHCP can RJ45 a computer up to the network. Everything works fine. However, if I setup a wireless network on the Netgear then any computer that connects wirelessly to it cannot access the internet. It gets an IP address very slowly via DHCP which is a good one, but it cannot access the internet. It can however communicate with the RJ45'd computer also connected to the Netgear. I wondered whether this could be a problem with the Netgear so I've borrowed a Cisco Aironet 1200 and got this working fine when it's attached directly to the primary ADSL router. I can connect to it wireless and get onto the internet. However, if I then plug it into the Netgear I can communicate with other devices attached to the Netgear, but can't get any further than the Netgear. All the while though the other devices RJ45'd to the Netgear are communicating with the internet just fine. I'm starting to suspect it's one of two things causing the problem: 1) For some reason the belkin powerline adapters don't like carrying wireless-originating signals. Could this be possible? 2) The primary Cisco ADSL router doesn't want to communicate with other devices on my network more than one hop away from it. I'm making an assumption here that within the Netgear box the wireless and wired sides are handled differently. Could this be true? Has anyone successfully setup something similar to what I'm trying, with a wireless device on the otherside of a pair of powerline connectors? Update 06/07/2010 - Response to irrational John 28 June Thanks for the answer John - and for clearing up some of my questions. The model number of the belkin powerline adapters are F5D4076. Security was apparently enabled by default on them, and I didn't change them from their default setting. The network diagram in your answer shows exactly what I'm trying to setup: I've followed that guide and I'm still not able to get things working properly. The thing that perplexes me is that wired network traffic works just fine - it's only the wireless traffic that doesn't. This is with the same laptop, and the same DHCP or static IPs. "1. What IP addresses did you assign to each router? What subnet masks are you using?" - subnet is 255.255.255.0, the router connected to the adsl is 192.168.153.1 and that has the DHCP server. The access point on the other side of the powerline adapters I've tried both a static IP of 192.168.153.110, same subnet, and a DHCP-assigned IP. The other devices are DHCP, although I also tried manually entering IP settings. "2. Have you correctly enabled DHCP on only one of the routers and disabled it on all the others?" Yes I have - only the internet-connected router has DHCP enabled. The IP range for the DHCP is from 192.168.153.11 - 192.168.153.200. The strange thing is that wired connections work fine on the LAN, plugged into any router, work fine - it's only the wireless connections that aren't working when they're plugged into the non-primary AP. "Since the routers you are using appear to integrate an ADSL modem I'm assuming there is no WAN port on them." There's no NAT within the LAN, and all wired connections are connected to LAN ports. It's something wrong with the wireless - wired works fine throughout the whole LAN. Update 06/07/2010 - Response to irrational John 29 June The diagram you've drawn in your answer shows pretty much exactly what I'm trying to do. I've spent another evening trying different things and made some progress but I'm still scratching my head. I've borrowed a Netgear access point and been trying with this, and the strange thing is that my PC is working now - this is a Windows 7 PC connected to the access point in the position of where the DG834G is in the diagram. Meanwhile, however, I have an old Powerbook G4 12" I use for music, and while that has a DHCP-assigned IP address, it's not getting any network throughput to either LAN or internet addresses. To make matters more strange, my phone appears to be intermittently working when it's on the wifi. The access point is a Netgear WPN802v1, DHCP, NAT both switched off, running firmware 2.0.9.0. Last night I set it up with exactly the same settings, and similar to tonight I could get a couple of devices to work, and a couple not to. By the morning, however, everything had stopped working - nothing could get a DHCP IP address. I rebooted the 877W earlier this evening and I'm wondering whether this is why a few things are working now. "Could it be possible that the issue could be with the 877W?" I didn't configure this - is it possible that the DHCP server only likes assigning devices that are immediately attached to it? Or similar, could a firewall be stopping too many addresses that are coming through one device? (ie. the Access Point) This could explain why devices are working at the start but then not by the end. In reply to your questions, "1. I looked at the Netgear DG834G support page. There are five versions of this router. Which version do you have? Netgear usually lists this on the label on the bottom of the router. What version of the firmware does it have?" It's a DG834Gv3, and the firmware is the last on the netgear site version 4.01.40. "3. Not knowing which version you have, I glanced at the reference manual for the DG834G v3. In the section for Wireless Settings under the subsection Wireless Access Point there is a check box for a Wireless Isolation setting. If you have this setting it should be off/unchecked. If it is checked then any device connected via wireless would not be able to talk to any other device on the LAN. This sounds like your problem so maybe this is the cause?" I've checked this and it's switched off. I've made a change to the IP of the access point to something outside the DHCP range - it's now 192.158.153.5, with DHCP starting at 11 and going up to 254. Thanks for the tip about this - I only have a few devices so wouldn't anticipate the DHCP server assigning up to 110, but better safe than sorry. Finally one more thing I thought I should add, is with the Powerbook G4 that's not working - it's getting a DHCP IP address and it can communicate with the WPN802 as I can visit the administration page. Anything further than this, however, it can't reach; I can't administrate the 192.168.153.1 (877W router). Strangely, however, when I open Finder on the same powerbook it's detecting my NAS which is attached directly via wire to the 877W. If I try to browse it, it says connection failed. RE: "Perhaps the problem with your Powerbook is with DNS?.." The IP settings on the powerbook are identical to that of the PC with the exception of the IP address; the PC is 192.168.153.17 and the powerbook is 192.168.153.12. Subnets are the same, 255.255.255.0 and default gateway is the same, .1, and the DNS servers are the same. I administrate the 877W by going to 192.168.153.1 in the browser. This is what isn't working from the Powerbook, despite the PC working fine when I do the same. Meanwhile, however, I can administrate the AP on 192.168.153.5 from both PC and Powerbook Update 06/07/2010 - FINAL RESOLUTION of sorts: First off, sorry for the length of this question. I need start to practice a more concise writing style, so I'm going to try to keep this bit brief. After much fiddling, and with the hugely-appreciated help of irrational John, I have come to the conclusion that it's something wrong with the powerbook. I believe that this was perhaps the reason I doubted things worked at the very beginning. I now have the original DG834Gv3 running both wirelessly and wired, and both wired devices and wireless devices get internet connectivity. The only anomaly is the powerbook which I've had to keep wired, as no matter what I do it refuses to work wirelessly. I still have suspicions that the 877W isn't quite right; I'm fairly sure that if I RJ45 the powerline adapter into a different LAN port on it then everything will break. I've just about run out of patience to test this further, and I think I need to go into the 877W's config to match the 877w's lan port's settings. I'm accepting irrational John's answer as he's been enormously helpful, way above the call of duty, and for this line he wrote: Beats the heck out of me. which in the midst of great frustration made me chuckle, and for a sentence in one of his comments to the same answer: If it is specific to the Powerbook I would put that issue aside until after you feel you have the rest of your LAN and the additional WAP all working together correctlyt It was this second sentence that made me put the powerbook aside and concentrate on the other devices that ultimately led me to getting things working.

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OpenVPN Client timing out

- by Austin

I recently installed OpenVPN on my Ubuntu VPS. Whenenver I try to connect to it, I can establish a connection just fine. However, everything I try to connect to times out. If I try to ping something, it will resolve the IP, but will time out after resolving the IP. (So DNS Server seems to be working correctly) My server.conf has this relevant information (At least I think it's relevant. I'm not sure if you need more or not) # Which local IP address should OpenVPN # listen on? (optional) ;local a.b.c.d # Which TCP/UDP port should OpenVPN listen on? # If you want to run multiple OpenVPN instances # on the same machine, use a different port # number for each one. You will need to # open up this port on your firewall. port 1194 # TCP or UDP server? ;proto tcp proto udp # "dev tun" will create a routed IP tunnel, # "dev tap" will create an ethernet tunnel. # Use "dev tap0" if you are ethernet bridging # and have precreated a tap0 virtual interface # and bridged it with your ethernet interface. # If you want to control access policies # over the VPN, you must create firewall # rules for the the TUN/TAP interface. # On non-Windows systems, you can give # an explicit unit number, such as tun0. # On Windows, use "dev-node" for this. # On most systems, the VPN will not function # unless you partially or fully disable # the firewall for the TUN/TAP interface. ;dev tap dev tun # Windows needs the TAP-Win32 adapter name # from the Network Connections panel if you # have more than one. On XP SP2 or higher, # you may need to selectively disable the # Windows firewall for the TAP adapter. # Non-Windows systems usually don't need this. ;dev-node MyTap # SSL/TLS root certificate (ca), certificate # (cert), and private key (key). Each client # and the server must have their own cert and # key file. The server and all clients will # use the same ca file. # # See the "easy-rsa" directory for a series # of scripts for generating RSA certificates # and private keys. Remember to use # a unique Common Name for the server # and each of the client certificates. # # Any X509 key management system can be used. # OpenVPN can also use a PKCS #12 formatted key file # (see "pkcs12" directive in man page). ca ca.crt cert server.crt key server.key # This file should be kept secret # Diffie hellman parameters. # Generate your own with: # openssl dhparam -out dh1024.pem 1024 # Substitute 2048 for 1024 if you are using # 2048 bit keys. dh dh1024.pem # Configure server mode and supply a VPN subnet # for OpenVPN to draw client addresses from. # The server will take 10.8.0.1 for itself, # the rest will be made available to clients. # Each client will be able to reach the server # on 10.8.0.1. Comment this line out if you are # ethernet bridging. See the man page for more info. server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 # Maintain a record of client <-> virtual IP address # associations in this file. If OpenVPN goes down or # is restarted, reconnecting clients can be assigned # the same virtual IP address from the pool that was # previously assigned. ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt # Configure server mode for ethernet bridging. # You must first use your OS's bridging capability # to bridge the TAP interface with the ethernet # NIC interface. Then you must manually set the # IP/netmask on the bridge interface, here we # assume 10.8.0.4/255.255.255.0. Finally we # must set aside an IP range in this subnet # (start=10.8.0.50 end=10.8.0.100) to allocate # to connecting clients. Leave this line commented # out unless you are ethernet bridging. ;server-bridge 10.8.0.4 255.255.255.0 10.8.0.50 10.8.0.100 # Configure server mode for ethernet bridging # using a DHCP-proxy, where clients talk # to the OpenVPN server-side DHCP server # to receive their IP address allocation # and DNS server addresses. You must first use # your OS's bridging capability to bridge the TAP # interface with the ethernet NIC interface. # Note: this mode only works on clients (such as # Windows), where the client-side TAP adapter is # bound to a DHCP client. ;server-bridge # Push routes to the client to allow it # to reach other private subnets behind # the server. Remember that these # private subnets will also need # to know to route the OpenVPN client # address pool (10.8.0.0/255.255.255.0) # back to the OpenVPN server. ;push "route 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0" ;push "route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0" # To assign specific IP addresses to specific # clients or if a connecting client has a private # subnet behind it that should also have VPN access, # use the subdirectory "ccd" for client-specific # configuration files (see man page for more info). # EXAMPLE: Suppose the client # having the certificate common name "Thelonious" # also has a small subnet behind his connecting # machine, such as 192.168.40.128/255.255.255.248. # First, uncomment out these lines: ;client-config-dir ccd ;route 192.168.40.128 255.255.255.248 # Then create a file ccd/Thelonious with this line: # iroute 192.168.40.128 255.255.255.248 # This will allow Thelonious' private subnet to # access the VPN. This example will only work # if you are routing, not bridging, i.e. you are # using "dev tun" and "server" directives. # EXAMPLE: Suppose you want to give # Thelonious a fixed VPN IP address of 10.9.0.1. # First uncomment out these lines: ;client-config-dir ccd ;route 10.9.0.0 255.255.255.252 # Then add this line to ccd/Thelonious: # ifconfig-push 10.9.0.1 10.9.0.2 # Suppose that you want to enable different # firewall access policies for different groups # of clients. There are two methods: # (1) Run multiple OpenVPN daemons, one for each # group, and firewall the TUN/TAP interface # for each group/daemon appropriately. # (2) (Advanced) Create a script to dynamically # modify the firewall in response to access # from different clients. See man # page for more info on learn-address script. ;learn-address ./script # If enabled, this directive will configure # all clients to redirect their default # network gateway through the VPN, causing # all IP traffic such as web browsing and # and DNS lookups to go through the VPN # (The OpenVPN server machine may need to NAT # or bridge the TUN/TAP interface to the internet # in order for this to work properly). push "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp" push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8" # Certain Windows-specific network settings # can be pushed to clients, such as DNS # or WINS server addresses. CAVEAT: # http://openvpn.net/faq.html#dhcpcaveats # The addresses below refer to the public # DNS servers provided by opendns.com. ;push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8" push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.4.4" # Uncomment this directive to allow different # clients to be able to "see" each other. # By default, clients will only see the server. # To force clients to only see the server, you # will also need to appropriately firewall the # server's TUN/TAP interface. ;client-to-client # Uncomment this directive if multiple clients # might connect with the same certificate/key # files or common names. This is recommended # only for testing purposes. For production use, # each client should have its own certificate/key # pair. # # IF YOU HAVE NOT GENERATED INDIVIDUAL # CERTIFICATE/KEY PAIRS FOR EACH CLIENT, # EACH HAVING ITS OWN UNIQUE "COMMON NAME", # UNCOMMENT THIS LINE OUT. ;duplicate-cn # The keepalive directive causes ping-like # messages to be sent back and forth over # the link so that each side knows when # the other side has gone down. # Ping every 10 seconds, assume that remote # peer is down if no ping received during # a 120 second time period. keepalive 10 120 # For extra security beyond that provided # by SSL/TLS, create an "HMAC firewall" # to help block DoS attacks and UDP port flooding. # # Generate with: # openvpn --genkey --secret ta.key # # The server and each client must have # a copy of this key. # The second parameter should be '0' # on the server and '1' on the clients. ;tls-auth ta.key 0 # This file is secret # Select a cryptographic cipher. # This config item must be copied to # the client config file as well. ;cipher BF-CBC # Blowfish (default) ;cipher AES-128-CBC # AES ;cipher DES-EDE3-CBC # Triple-DES # Enable compression on the VPN link. # If you enable it here, you must also # enable it in the client config file. comp-lzo # The maximum number of concurrently connected # clients we want to allow. ;max-clients 100 # It's a good idea to reduce the OpenVPN # daemon's privileges after initialization. # # You can uncomment this out on # non-Windows systems. ;user nobody ;group nogroup # The persist options will try to avoid # accessing certain resources on restart # that may no longer be accessible because # of the privilege downgrade. persist-key persist-tun # Output a short status file showing # current connections, truncated # and rewritten every minute. status openvpn-status.log # By default, log messages will go to the syslog (or # on Windows, if running as a service, they will go to # the "\Program Files\OpenVPN\log" directory). # Use log or log-append to override this default. # "log" will truncate the log file on OpenVPN startup, # while "log-append" will append to it. Use one # or the other (but not both). ;log openvpn.log ;log-append openvpn.log # Set the appropriate level of log # file verbosity. # # 0 is silent, except for fatal errors # 4 is reasonable for general usage # 5 and 6 can help to debug connection problems # 9 is extremely verbose verb 3 # Silence repeating messages. At most 20 # sequential messages of the same message # category will be output to the log. ;mute 20 I've tried on multiple computers by the way. The same result on all of them. What could be wrong? Thanks in advance, and if you need other information I'll gladly post it. Information for new comments root@vps:~# iptables -L -n -v Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 862K packets, 51M bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 3 packets, 382 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 0 0 ACCEPT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED 4641 298K ACCEPT all -- * * 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 0 0 REJECT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 reject-with icmp-port-unreachable Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 1671K packets, 2378M bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination And root@vps:~# iptables -t nat -L -n -v Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT 17937 packets, 2013K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT 8975 packets, 562K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 1579 103K SNAT all -- * * 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 to:SERVERIP Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 8972 packets, 562K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

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What is auto-mounting my media volume?

- by user285277

Something is repeatedly mounting my "media" share, doing something with it, then quietly un-mounting it with no notifications at the user level. from the little I can gleaned from the console messages below, I thought I'd managed to stop it, if not understand it last night when I followed instructions for deleting all traces of the Google Update Daemon. I've not been using any Google apps whatsoever, so I was surprised to see that in Console. What's more surprising, and perhaps a little distressing, is that the same thing occurred this evening, when the Google Daemon is long gone. I don't have that log because I can't recall precisely what time it occurred. I'll do a search and provide it if you wish, though. In the meantime, any help with this would be extremely appreciated. I've asked over at Apple Discussions but I think it might be a little deeper than those manning the boards this weekend are comfortable with. It's certainly beyond my meager skills. With apologies in advance if this is more lines thank you need. Please note that I've transformed the Google links a little because the forum here requires more reputation points before one can post more than two links. 12/27/13 10:47:31.000 PM kernel[0]: memorystatus_thread: idle exiting pid 53629 [distnoted] 12/27/13 10:48:10.433 PM com.apple.Preview.TrustedBookmarksService[53640]: Failed to resolve bookmark data at index: 0; not stale; error: The file doesn’t exist. 12/27/13 10:48:10.434 PM com.apple.Preview.TrustedBookmarksService[53640]: Failed to resolve bookmark data at index: 1; not stale; error: The file doesn’t exist. 12/27/13 10:48:10.950 PM com.apple.SecurityServer[17]: Session 103257 created 12/27/13 10:48:34.328 PM com.apple.Preview.TrustedBookmarksService[53640]: Failed to resolve bookmark data at index: 2; not stale; error: The file doesn’t exist. 12/27/13 10:48:34.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /Volumes/Media Archive-1, pid 53641 12/27/13 10:48:34.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount : succeeded on volume 0xffffff80d6355008 /Volumes/Media Archive-1 (error = 0, retval = 0) 12/27/13 10:49:32.000 PM kernel[0]: wlEvent: en0 en0 Link DOWN virtIf = 0 12/27/13 10:49:32.000 PM kernel[0]: AirPort: Link Down on en0. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving). 12/27/13 10:49:32.000 PM kernel[0]: en0::IO80211Interface::postMessage bssid changed 12/27/13 10:49:33.681 PM configd[16]: network changed: v4(en0-:10.0.1.12) DNS- Proxy- SMB 12/27/13 10:49:33.697 PM configd[16]: network changed: DNS* Proxy 12/27/13 10:49:35.475 PM KernelEventAgent[57]: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_NOTRESP (1) 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0xffffff802176b4a0 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect started /Volumes/Media Archive-1 prevTrigger 0 currTrigger 1 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: doing reconnect on /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: posting to KEA EINPROGRESS for /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: Max reconnect time: 600 secs, Connect timeout: 15 secs for /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect to the server /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on /Volumes/Media Archive-1 failed 65. 12/27/13 10:49:35.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: sleep for 1 seconds and then try again 12/27/13 10:49:35.479 PM KernelEventAgent[57]: tid 00000000 type 'afpfs', mounted on '/Volumes/Media Archive-1', from '//Me@Capsule._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Media%20Archive', not responding 12/27/13 10:49:35.487 PM KernelEventAgent[57]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s) 12/27/13 10:49:36.692 PM com.bourgeoisbits.cloak.agent[14503]: NetworkProfile: (null), (null), (null) (Connected: NO, Airport: NO, Open: NO) [trusted] 12/27/13 10:49:36.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect to the server /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:36.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on /Volumes/Media Archive-1 failed 65. 12/27/13 10:49:36.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: sleep for 2 seconds and then try again 12/27/13 10:49:38.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect to the server /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:38.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on /Volumes/Media Archive-1 failed 65. 12/27/13 10:49:38.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: sleep for 4 seconds and then try again 12/27/13 10:49:41.000 PM kernel[0]: CODE SIGNING: cs_invalid_page(0x1000): p=53662[GoogleSoftwareUp] clearing CS_VALID 12/27/13 10:49:42.102 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KeystoneDaemon logServiceState] GoogleSoftwareUpdate daemon (1.1.0.3659) vending: com.google.Keystone.Daemon.UpdateEngine: 2 connection(s) com.google.Keystone.Daemon.Administration: 0 connection(s) 12/27/13 10:49:42.113 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateEngine updateProductID:] KSUpdateEngine updating product ID: "com.google.Keystone" 12/27/13 10:49:42.116 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSCheckAction performAction] KSCheckAction checking 1 ticket(s). 12/27/13 10:49:42.121 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateCheckAction performAction] KSUpdateCheckAction starting update check for ticket(s): {( <KSTicket:0x531870 productID=com.google.Keystone version=1.1.0.3659 xc=<KSPathExistenceChecker:0x5302d0 path=/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/> serverType=Omaha url=htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2 creationDate=2012-08-12 14:47:10 > )} Using server: <KSOmahaServer:0x534340 engine=<KSDaemonUpdateEngine:0x52e530> params={ EngineVersion = "1.1.0.3659"; ActivesInfo = { "com.google.talkplugin" = { LastRollCallPingDate = 2013-10-06 07:00:00 +0000; }; "com.google.Keystone" = { LastRollCallPingDate = 2013-10-06 07:00:00 +0000; LastActivePingDate = 2013-10-06 07:00:00 +0000; LastActiveDate = 2013-12-28 03:49:42 +0000; }; "com.google.picasa" = { LastActiveDate = 2012-08-29 10:15:42 +0000; }; }; UserInitiated = 0; IsSystem = 1; OmahaOSVersion = "10.8.5_i486"; Identity = KeystoneDaemon; AllowedSubdomains = ( ".omaha.sandbox.google.com", ".tools.google.com", ".www.google.com", ".corp.google.com" ); } > 12/27/13 10:49:42.130 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateCheckAction performAction] KSUpdateCheckAction running KSServerUpdateRequest: <KSOmahaServerUpdateRequest:0x1a31a90 server=<KSOmahaServer:0x534340> url="htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2" runningFetchers=0 tickets=1 activeTickets=1 rollCallTickets=1 body= <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <o:gupdate xmlns:o="htt[Pee]://www.google.com/update2/request" protocol="2.0" version="KeystoneDaemon-1.1.0.3659" ismachine="1"> <o:os platform="mac" version="MacOSX" sp="10.8.5_i486"></o:os> <o:app appid="com.google.Keystone" version="1.1.0.3659" lang="en-us" installage="502" brand="GGLG"> <o:ping r="82" a="82"></o:ping> <o:updatecheck></o:updatecheck> </o:app> </o:gupdate> > 12/27/13 10:49:42.291 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSOutOfProcessFetcher(PrivateMethods) helperDidTerminate:] The Internet connection appears to be offline. [NSURLErrorDomain:-1009] 12/27/13 10:49:42.291 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSServerUpdateRequest(PrivateMethods) fetcher:failedWithError:] KSServerUpdateRequest fetch failed. (productIDs: com.google.Keystone) [com.google.UpdateEngine.CoreErrorDomain:702 - 'htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2'] (The Internet connection appears to be offline. [NSURLErrorDomain:-1009]) 12/27/13 10:49:42.292 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateCheckAction(PrivateMethods) finishAction] KSUpdateCheckAction found updates: {( )} 12/27/13 10:49:42.295 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSPrefetchAction performAction] KSPrefetchAction no updates to prefetch. 12/27/13 10:49:42.295 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSMultiUpdateAction performAction] KSSilentUpdateAction had no updates to apply. 12/27/13 10:49:42.296 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSMultiUpdateAction performAction] KSPromptAction had no updates to apply. 12/27/13 10:49:42.299 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateEngine(PrivateMethods) updateFinish] KSUpdateEngine update processing complete. 12/27/13 10:49:42.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect to the server /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:42.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on /Volumes/Media Archive-1 failed 65. 12/27/13 10:49:42.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: sleep for 8 seconds and then try again 12/27/13 10:49:43.152 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateEngine updateAllProducts] KSUpdateEngine updating all installed products. 12/27/13 10:49:43.153 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSCheckAction performAction] KSCheckAction checking 2 ticket(s). 12/27/13 10:49:43.158 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateCheckAction performAction] KSUpdateCheckAction starting update check for ticket(s): {( <KSTicket:0x18367a0 productID=com.google.Keystone version=1.1.0.3659 xc=<KSPathExistenceChecker:0x1837e10 path=/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/> serverType=Omaha url=htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2 creationDate=2012-08-12 14:47:10 >, <KSTicket:0x1834750 productID=com.google.talkplugin version=4.7.0.15362 xc=<KSPathExistenceChecker:0x1833890 path=/Library/Application Support/Google/GoogleTalkPlugin.app> serverType=Omaha url=htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2 creationDate=2012-08-12 14:47:10 > )} Using server: <KSOmahaServer:0x52e930 engine=<KSDaemonUpdateEngine:0x52e530> params={ EngineVersion = "1.1.0.3659"; ActivesInfo = { "com.google.talkplugin" = { LastRollCallPingDate = 2013-10-06 07:00:00 +0000; }; "com.google.Keystone" = { LastRollCallPingDate = 2013-10-06 07:00:00 +0000; LastActivePingDate = 2013-10-06 07:00:00 +0000; LastActiveDate = 2013-12-28 03:49:42 +0000; }; "com.google.picasa" = { LastActiveDate = 2012-08-29 10:15:42 +0000; }; }; UserInitiated = 0; IsSystem = 1; OmahaOSVersion = "10.8.5_i486"; Identity = KeystoneDaemon; AllowedSubdomains = ( ".omaha.sandbox.google.com", ".tools.google.com", ".www.google.com", ".corp.google.com" ); } > 12/27/13 10:49:43.159 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateCheckAction performAction] KSUpdateCheckAction running KSServerUpdateRequest: <KSOmahaServerUpdateRequest:0x53a210 server=<KSOmahaServer:0x52e930> url="htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2" runningFetchers=0 tickets=2 activeTickets=1 rollCallTickets=2 body= <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <o:gupdate xmlns:o="htt[Pee]://www.google.com/update2/request" protocol="2.0" version="KeystoneDaemon-1.1.0.3659" ismachine="1"> <o:os platform="mac" version="MacOSX" sp="10.8.5_i486"></o:os> <o:app appid="com.google.Keystone" version="1.1.0.3659" lang="en-us" installage="502" brand="GGLG"> <o:ping r="82" a="82"></o:ping> <o:updatecheck></o:updatecheck> </o:app> <o:app appid="com.google.talkplugin" version="4.7.0.15362" lang="en-us" installage="502" brand="GGLG"> <o:ping r="82"></o:ping> <o:updatecheck></o:updatecheck> </o:app> </o:gupdate> > 12/27/13 10:49:43.243 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSOutOfProcessFetcher(PrivateMethods) helperDidTerminate:] The Internet connection appears to be offline. [NSURLErrorDomain:-1009] 12/27/13 10:49:43.243 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSServerUpdateRequest(PrivateMethods) fetcher:failedWithError:] KSServerUpdateRequest fetch failed. (productIDs: com.google.Keystone, ... (2)) [com.google.UpdateEngine.CoreErrorDomain:702 - 'htt[PeeEs]://tools.google.com/service/update2'] (The Internet connection appears to be offline. [NSURLErrorDomain:-1009]) 12/27/13 10:49:43.244 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateCheckAction(PrivateMethods) finishAction] KSUpdateCheckAction found updates: {( )} 12/27/13 10:49:43.247 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSPrefetchAction performAction] KSPrefetchAction no updates to prefetch. 12/27/13 10:49:43.248 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSMultiUpdateAction performAction] KSSilentUpdateAction had no updates to apply. 12/27/13 10:49:43.248 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSMultiUpdateAction performAction] KSPromptAction had no updates to apply. 12/27/13 10:49:43.250 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KSUpdateEngine(PrivateMethods) updateFinish] KSUpdateEngine update processing complete. 12/27/13 10:49:45.570 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KeystoneDaemon logServiceState] GoogleSoftwareUpdate daemon (1.1.0.3659) vending: com.google.Keystone.Daemon.UpdateEngine: 1 connection(s) com.google.Keystone.Daemon.Administration: 0 connection(s) 12/27/13 10:49:50.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect to the server /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:50.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on /Volumes/Media Archive-1 failed 65. 12/27/13 10:49:50.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: sleep for 10 seconds and then try again 12/27/13 10:49:53.828 PM KernelEventAgent[57]: tid 00000000 unmounting 1 filesystems 12/27/13 10:49:53.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/Media Archive-1, flags 524288, pid 57 12/27/13 10:49:54.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: get the reconnect token 12/27/13 10:49:54.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: GetReconnectToken failed 32 /Volumes/Media Archive-1 12/27/13 10:49:54.000 PM kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount : afpfs_DoReconnect sent signal for unmount to proceed 12/27/13 10:50:12.104 PM GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon[53663]: -[KeystoneDaemon main] GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon inactive, shutdown. 12/27/13 10:50:29.396 PM Dock[93157]: no information back from LS about running process

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Windows 7 computer apparently connected to working wireless network but can't access router page or internet

- by Hemmer

I can consistently connect successfully to both the router and the internet using both my phone and two different computers which strongly suggests that the issue is at the desktop end. Only my Windows 7 desktop machine has stopped getting internet connectivity. It manages to connect to the router's network using the Windows 7 wireless dialog, but can't access either the router configuration page (192.168.1.1) or the internet in general once connected. The strange thing is the wireless network icon in the notification bar shows a full strength signal, sometimes with the yellow warning triangle. The output of ipconfig /all is: Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom 802.11g Network Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-12-17-94-98-90 DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.102(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : 08 June 2011 10:32:16 Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : 08 June 2011 12:32:16 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 194.168.4.100 194.168.8.100 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled I've tried renewing DCHP settings disabling IPv6 resetting TCP stack uninstalling and reinstalling WLAN card drivers I've not installed anything new or made any changes to my knowledge, this just happened out of the blue. The only possible change is my friend connected his macbook to the network, but that has gone now and shouldn't have any lasting effects? TCP/IPv4 is set to automatically find an IP address. Antivirus is MSE (up to date) and doesn't detect anything unusual. Any ideas where to go next? Any help is greatly appreciated. For reference, the results of ipconfig /all on one of the working computers is: Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom 802.11g Network Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-16-CF-67-E5-97 Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.100 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 194.168.4.100 194.168.8.100 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : 08 June 2011 10:26:38 Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : 08 June 2011 12:26:38 UPDATE: Still not working, but I've managed to find a temporary workaround by tethering my Android phone, effectively becoming a new wifi adapter. Will be moving to a new flat so will test if it is a network specific thing - maybe the card has got damaged somehow? Also will see if the card is working with Linux soon.

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26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

- by Michael Snow

Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions. That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links: Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!! Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way. CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses. --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶ ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

- by Michael Williamson

Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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