Search Results

Search found 3536 results on 142 pages for 'infant programmer'.

Page 132/142 | < Previous Page | 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139  | Next Page >

• Python error after installing libboost-all-dev on debian [migrated]

  - by Cameron Metzke

  A friend of mine wanted the liboost libraries installed on our shared computer so after installing libboost-all-dev 1.49.0.1 ( A debian wheezy machine ), I get this error when using the "pydoc modules" command on the commandline. It spits out the following error -- root@debian:/usr/include/c++/4.7# pydoc modules Please wait a moment while I gather a list of all available modules... **[debian:49065] [[INVALID],INVALID] ORTE_ERROR_LOG: A system-required executable either could not be found or was not executable by this user in file ../../../../../../orte/mca/ess/singleton/ess_singleton_module.c at line 357 [debian:49065] [[INVALID],INVALID] ORTE_ERROR_LOG: A system-required executable either could not be found or was not executable by this user in file ../../../../../../orte/mca/ess/singleton/ess_singleton_module.c at line 230 [debian:49065] [[INVALID],INVALID] ORTE_ERROR_LOG: A system-required executable either could not be found or was not executable by this user in file ../../../orte/runtime/orte_init.c at line 132 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- It looks like orte_init failed for some reason; your parallel process is likely to abort. There are many reasons that a parallel process can fail during orte_init; some of which are due to configuration or environment problems. This failure appears to be an internal failure; here's some additional information (which may only be relevant to an Open MPI developer): orte_ess_set_name failed --> Returned value A system-required executable either could not be found or was not executable by this user (-127) instead of ORTE_SUCCESS -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- It looks like MPI_INIT failed for some reason; your parallel process is likely to abort. There are many reasons that a parallel process can fail during MPI_INIT; some of which are due to configuration or environment problems. This failure appears to be an internal failure; here's some additional information (which may only be relevant to an Open MPI developer): ompi_mpi_init: orte_init failed --> Returned "A system-required executable either could not be found or was not executable by this user" (-127) instead of "Success" (0) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** The MPI_Init() function was called before MPI_INIT was invoked. *** This is disallowed by the MPI standard. *** Your MPI job will now abort. [debian:49065] Abort before MPI_INIT completed successfully; not able to guarantee that all other processes were killed!** root@debian:/usr/include/c++/4.7# I tried looking into the problem and ended up uninstalling the following to get it to work again. openmpi common all 1.4.5-1 libibverbs-dev amd64 1.1.6-1 libopenmpi-dev amd64 1.4.5-1 mpi-default-dev amd64 1.0.1 libboost-mpi-python1.49.0 although pydoc works again, I'm assuming the packages I removed are gunna hurt somethiong else down the track ? As you guessed im not a c/c++ programmer. So I guess my question is, will this hurt something later ? is their a way to install those packages without hurting python ?

  Read the article

• How can I prevent an unintentional DDOS running ColdFusion 8 with IIS 6?

  - by Eric Belair

  We had an interesting outage today on one of our client's websites. Out of nowhere, the website was inaccessible. The website runs by itself on a dedicated physical Windows 2000 server (probably overkill, I know, but that's a discussion for a different day). After restarting IIS and ColdFusion Application Service, the problem came back several times. My initial thought was that it was a DNS issue, which happens occasionally - the last time it happened was after Hurricane Sandy when we our ISP was out, and we had to make some network config changes. But, it was not a DNS issue. My second thought was that it was a DDOS attack, but, there's very little reason anyone would want to take this site down. When we called our ISP, the operator on the other end noted that traffic was spiking significantly. As it turned out, the client had unintentionally caused a DDOS on the website, after they FTPed a very large video file, and then mass emailed a link to it. Hundreds of people clicked the link and brought the site to its knees. I am primarily a Website Programmer, but I often have to contribute to server administration at times. Sadly, I'm the resident ColdFusion and IIS expert, but I don't have a lot of experience with this issue. What are some basic steps that I can take to prevent this from happening in the future, since we cannot always control what files the client posts to the website. Here are some ideas I had, but I'm unsure of the impact: Limit the number of connections in IIS. Put media files on a separate server (like an Amazon site, etc.). File requests of this type currently behind a server-script (i.e. /www.site.com/viewFile.cfm?fileId=1424545, where the fileId references a file off the webroot) that logs requests, and pushes the file to the browser using CFCONTENT. I could edit this script to reject requests when they exceed a certain amount in a given time-frame (i.e. a 5MB can be accessed globally 10 times in an hour). This may cause some users frustration, but, if hundreds of users are attempting to view the file, the site is going to crash anyways, as it did today, which is way more frustrating, since there is no "pretty" message explaining why they can't get to the file. I'm open to any suggestions, as I'm continuing my research to report to the CTO with the best options, so that we can put a solution into effect. Thank you.

  Read the article

• Remote installing an msi on citrix servers using WMI

  - by capn

  OK, I'm a C# programmer that is trying to streamline the deployment of a custom windows form app I inherited and built an installer for with WiX (this app will need to be reinstalled regularly as I'm making changes to it). I'm not really used to admin type things (or vbs, or WMI, or terminal servers, or Citrix, and even WiX and MSI are not things I usually deal with) but so far I put together some vbs and have an end goal in mind. The msi does work, and I've installed it from the mapped O: drive on my dev machine and while RDP'd to a citrix machine. End Goal: Deploy code written on my dev machine and compiled into an MSI (that I can improve upon within the confines of WiX and whatever the Windows Installer Engine allows) to the cluster of Citrix machines my users have access to. What am I missing in my script to get the MSI to execute on the remote machines? Layout: Machine A is my dev machine, and has the vbs script and the msi file (XP SP3) Machines C1 - C6 are the Citrix Servers that need the application installed them via the msi (Server 2003 R2 SP2) There is also optionally a shared network resource that all the machines can access. Script: 'Set WMI Constants Const wbemImpersonationLevelImpersonate = 3 Const wbemAuthenticationLevelPktPrivacy = 6 'Set whether this is installing to the debug Citrix Servers Const isDebug = true 'Set MSI location 'Network location yields error 1619 (This installation package could not be opened.) msiLocation = "\\255.255.255.255\odrive\Citrix Deployment\Setup.msi" 'Directory on machine A yields error 3 (file not found) 'msiLocation = "C:\Temp\Deploy\Setup.msi" 'Mapped network drive (on both machines) yield error 3 (file not found) 'msiLocation = "O:\Citrix Deployment\Setup.msi" 'Set login information strDomain = "MyDomain" Wscript.StdOut.Write "user name:" strUser = Wscript.StdIn.ReadLine Set objPassword = CreateObject("ScriptPW.Password") Wscript.StdOut.Write "password:" strPassword = objPassword.GetPassword() 'Names of Citrix Servers Dim citrixServerArray If isDebug Then citrixServerArray = array("C4") Else 'citrixServerArray = array("C1","C2","C3","C5","C6") End If 'Loop through each Citrix Server For Each citrixServer in citrixServerArray 'Login to remote computer Set objLocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator") Set objWMIService = objLocator.ConnectServer(citrixServer, _ "root\cimv2", _ strUser, _ strPassword, _ "MS_409", _ "ntlmdomain:" + strDomain) 'Set Remote Impersonation level objWMIService.Security_.ImpersonationLevel = wbemImpersonationLevelImpersonate objWMIService.Security_.AuthenticationLevel = wbemAuthenticationLevelPktPrivacy 'Reference to a process on the machine Dim objProcess : Set objProcess = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Process") 'Change user to install for terminal services errReturn = objProcess.Create _ ("cmd.exe /c change user /install", Null, Null, intProcessID) WScript.Echo errReturn 'Install MSI here 'Reference to a product on the machine Set objSoftware = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Product") 'All users set in option parameter, I'm led to believe that the third parameter is actually ignored 'http://www.webmasterkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/vbscript/2433/Installing-programs-with-VbScript errReturn = objSoftware.Install(msiLocation,"ALLUSERS=2 REBOOT=ReallySuppress",True) Wscript.Echo errReturn 'Change user back to execute errReturn = objProcess.Create _ ("cmd.exe /c change user /execute", Null, Null, intProcessID) WScript.Echo errReturn Next I also tried using this to install, it doesn't return an error code, but doesn't install the msi either, and it makes me wonder if the change user /install command is even really working. errReturn = objProcess.Create _ ("cmd.exe /c msiexec /i ""O:\Citrix Deployment\Setup.msi"" /quiet") Wscript.Echo errReturn

  Read the article

• Weird IIS with Windows Authentication + IE problem

  - by Paulius Maruška

  Hello. I have a website running on IIS and using Windows Authentication. All users that are configured to get access to the site are form a AD domain (not local users). In the properties of a Website, I have set to use the AD domain as the realm. Now, when using Firefox, Safari or Chrome - Everything is fine. When the user tries to open the site, he get's the login box. he enters simply "username" and "password" (let's pretend that it's an actual login and password :P) and he get's into the site. When using IE, however, things get nasty. When the user tries to open the site - he get's the login box. User enters the "username" and "password" again, but those get rejected! And when the second time login box pops up - it has the username filled in as "web-server-domain-name\username" which is wrong, because web-server-domain-name is not the domain where all users reside (it's "ad-domain"). I've spent days trying to figure out what's going on... Note, that if I manually enter "ad-domain\username" - I get accepted into the site without problems. So, my guess is that IE sends wrong username if domain is not specified. Anyway, IE is the only browser that triggers this behavior! Is it possible to do a server-side fix? Maybe it's possible to somehow auto-map the users to AD users? If it's not solvable server-side - is there a client-side fix for this? Thank you. PS: I'm more of a programmer than a sys-admin, so configuring servers isn't the strong side of mine... :P UPDATE: @Evan: Yes, "Digest authentication for Windows domain servers" is also enabled. @Eric: IIS version is 6.0. The authentication methods enabled are: Integrated and digest - all other methods are disabled. As for the security log. I looked at it, when doing "username" and "password" login in Chrome/Firefox and when doing "ad-domain\username" and "password" login from IE - the generated log messages are the same (I see no difference, anyway). When entering "username" and "password" I don't see any errors in the security (or any other) log, so can't tell what method it's trying to use. UPDATE 2: As suggested by Eric in the comments - I played around with Fiddler... While playing with it, I noticed, that when "username" and "password" is entered in FF and IE - the "Authorization" header value (encrypted) sent by IE is longer (almost two times) than one sent by FF. I tried to disable Windows Integrated authentication and only leave the Digest enabled - that fixed the problem (meaning, IE used the right realm just like other browsers), but that caused bazillion other problems with my site, because with Digest - user impersonation on the server doesn't work (that causes problems, when connecting to database etc). Any ideas?

  Read the article

• "Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly" when trying to install MySQL on Win7 x64.

  - by Gravitas

  Hi, I've run into a brick wall trying to install MySQL v5.5 on my machine. My PC is Windows 7 x64, Enterprise edition. MySQL installs fine, but when I run the "MySQL Instance Configuration Wizard", it pauses forever on the step "Start Service" (I can let it run for 30 minutes with no response). If I go into services, I see that the "MySQL" service hasn't started, and if I try to start it, it says "Windows could not start MySQL Service on Local Computer. Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly." I've tried the following: Turning off firewall. Uninstalling all antivirus software. Installing / reinstalling 32-bit version of MySQL. Installing / reinstalling 64-bit version of MySQL. Uninstalling, deleting the contents of "C:\program files\MySQL" and "C:\program files (x86)\MySQL", reinstalling. Checking to see that there is no rogue services named MySQL???? (from a previous install). Checking that port 3306 is not used by an alternate program. Changing the default port that MySQL uses. Checking for "my.ini" and "my.ini.cnf" in "C:\windows" (nothing there but that can cause a problem). Running both MySQL installer, and configuration wizard, in "Adminstrator mode". Turning off UAC. Installing with defaults, not changing anything. Rebooting my machine (about 6 reboots so far). Opening up port 3306 in the firewall (both TCP and UDP, inbound and outbound). Swearing at the klutz of a programmer who designed MySQL so you can't even install it (as if that would help!) My machine is working 100% in every other way. InfiniDB (a MySQL compatible database) installs 100%, as does Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft SQL Server, etc, etc. Your advice on how to work around this? p.s. Here is the screen it got stuck on for 15 minutes until I killed the process: Update 2010-12-20 Tried MySQL v5.1, it didn't work either. Its amazing - if you type "mysqld /?", or "mysqld -help", it doesn't give you any help. And, if you try to restart the service manually, it doesn't display any error messages. Could it be any more unhelpful? Update 2010-12-21 Installed MySQL 6.0 alpha, and it worked. However, I'd rather not use an alpha release, given that the "stable" release is anything but :( Update 2010-12-21 Found http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/windows-troubleshooting.html, dealing with troubleshooting under Windows. Discovered that you can generate an error log if the service doesn't start - see here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/error-log.html

  Read the article

• UAE and the mysteries of unreachable websites

  - by 0plus1

  I write here because I'm really lost, please stay with me because it's not easy to explain. A company asked me to set-up a private server, now I'm a programmer so I got a solution with technical support and cpanel which helped me to setup everything and it's working smoothless. I'm by no means a professional sysadmin, but I have a fair knowledge of server configurations, but this problem is way over my knowledge, and apparently way over the knowledge of most sysadmins, I really hope that here I'll find someone with enough experience to help me or at least give me more insight. Now this company for which I'm consulting operates in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and from there the server is almost unreachable. It started with ns not registering in the UAE, after a week that sorted itself out and now the site is indeed reachable, but it takes almost 2 minutes to load a webpage with one line of text. Emails go in timeout. The domain currently parked there has been bought appositely for tests, the main one that was supposed to go there, after a catastrophic week has been transferred to a shared hosting solution in the UK, and from there it works like a charme. Now after doing some research I discovered that I'm not alone in this, there are several reports of webmasters discovering that their website is not reachable inside the UAE, and mind this has nothing to do with the state-wide block of questionable sites, because in that case an error message appears, this seems to be related to the infrastructure of the UAE, which apparently reroutes everything through their own "fake" internet. Apparently new servers with their own IP are not recognized (yet?) by the UAE infrastructure, while shared hosting solutions seeing that they operates tons of other websites are more likely to be part of the UAE network. Now my questions are: 1) Has someone a real explanation for this? The only thing I can think of is that the server is on a new IP that is not yet recognized by the UAE, but that doesn't explain why it loads (even if after 2 minutes). I don't have any help from within the UAE as the only people that are "experts" are questionable companies that simply try to sell their own services. 2) If there is really some kind of block of new servers, is it possible to know before if a server is reachable from within the UAE, currently this is not a ns problem as even accessing the server with its IP result in a 2 minute wait. 3) Can it be that the problem lies somewhere else? There are some tests that I can perform? I'm not physically in the UAE, but I can ask the people there, or use teamviewer. Could it be some misconfiguration on the server (mind that the site works EVERYWHERE else in the world). Thank you for ANY kind of help

  Read the article

• Weird IIS with Windows Authentication + IE problem

  - by Paulius Maruška

  I have a website running on IIS and using Windows Authentication. All users that are configured to get access to the site are form a AD domain (not local users). In the properties of a Website, I have set to use the AD domain as the realm. Now, when using Firefox, Safari or Chrome - Everything is fine. When the user tries to open the site, he get's the login box. he enters simply "username" and "password" (let's pretend that it's an actual login and password :P) and he get's into the site. When using IE, however, things get nasty. When the user tries to open the site - he get's the login box. User enters the "username" and "password" again, but those get rejected! And when the second time login box pops up - it has the username filled in as "web-server-domain-name\username" which is wrong, because web-server-domain-name is not the domain where all users reside (it's "ad-domain"). I've spent days trying to figure out what's going on... Note, that if I manually enter "ad-domain\username" - I get accepted into the site without problems. So, my guess is that IE sends wrong username if domain is not specified. Anyway, IE is the only browser that triggers this behavior! Is it possible to do a server-side fix? Maybe it's possible to somehow auto-map the users to AD users? If it's not solvable server-side - is there a client-side fix for this? Thank you. PS: I'm more of a programmer than a sys-admin, so configuring servers isn't the strong side of mine... :P UPDATE: @Evan: Yes, "Digest authentication for Windows domain servers" is also enabled. @Eric: IIS version is 6.0. The authentication methods enabled are: Integrated and digest - all other methods are disabled. As for the security log. I looked at it, when doing "username" and "password" login in Chrome/Firefox and when doing "ad-domain\username" and "password" login from IE - the generated log messages are the same (I see no difference, anyway). When entering "username" and "password" I don't see any errors in the security (or any other) log, so can't tell what method it's trying to use. UPDATE 2: As suggested by Eric in the comments - I played around with Fiddler... While playing with it, I noticed, that when "username" and "password" is entered in FF and IE - the "Authorization" header value (encrypted) sent by IE is longer (almost two times) than one sent by FF. I tried to disable Windows Integrated authentication and only leave the Digest enabled - that fixed the problem (meaning, IE used the right realm just like other browsers), but that caused bazillion other problems with my site, because with Digest - user impersonation on the server doesn't work (that causes problems, when connecting to database etc). Any ideas?

  Read the article

• Random Computer Crashes

  - by Josh W.

  Ok, here's a wierd one for you all. Occasionally my PC here at work will crash in a very peculiar way. My dual monitors will suddenly go blank as if there is no longer a video signal, the USB mouse light will go dark and mouse stays unresponsive, the keyboard lights will not change status when the appropriate keys are pressed (Num/Caps/Scoll Lock). The CD Tray WILL open and close. But the computer will not respond to a ping request. For all intents & purposes it's as if the computer is off, except it wasn't intentional by me. The power light and internal fans are still on and I've now lost any unsaved work. Now here's where it gets wierd. This PC is part of a batch of PC's we got from a local vendor who does our initial system builds. Mine, and 6 other co-workers PCs all have the same issue. Originally we thought it was a bad combination of hardware, but through trial and error the only thing we haven't eliminated are the OS, Mobo & CPU. The problem was so bad for some of them that they ended up going back to their 5 year old dinosaurs in order to get some work done, for me the problem isn't as bad, maybe once every other day or so, but still enough to bite me in the ass if I've forgotten my ritualistic pressing of CTRL-S every 1-5 minutes. In this case we've tried two different video cards, two different power supplies, two different memory configurations, running on a UPS/not on UPS, updating/rolling back video drivers, three different bios revisions. The only things we haven't swapped are the mobo & cpu, mainly because a new mobo means a new Hardware Abstraction Layer, ie re-install of windows and there's alot of other software on this PC that takes forever to reload by hand. There was a base image that our systems team created with all the drivers installed and the basic setup of software our company uses, but they then must customize the setup for us programmers so it takes a while to get a new configuration up and going. I'm a programmer by day and am usually pretty good at diagnosing computer problems whether through trial and error or not. We've pretty much exhausted all the ideas we can think of here, short of a new mobo/cpu. Was hoping someone out there might have anything else we can try.. Relevant Parts: OS: XP Pro 32-bit Motherboard: Intel DG41RQ CPU: Intel Core-2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66GHz Current BIOS Version/Date Intel Corp. RQG4110H.86A.0014.2010.0306.1151, 3/6/2010 Dual LCD's, Viewsonic VG930m & Samsung SyncMaster 910v (other people have different models, but listed in case there's some very wierd problem with the signals being sent/received) PS/2 Keyboard USB Microsoft Intellimouse BIOS Versions Tried: R 0013 12/23/2009 R 0014 3/6/2010 Video cards Tried GeForce 8400 GS Radeon HD 4350 - ASUS EAH4350 Two Different Power Supplies a 380W & 550W Ram Configurations 2GB - 1 x 2GB 4GB - 2 x 2GB

  Read the article

• How to set up a file server in a restricted corporate environment

  - by Emilio M Bumachar

  I work in a big corporation, and the disk space my team gets in the corporate file server is so low, I am considering turning my work PC into a file server. I ask this community for links to tutorials, software suggestions, and advice in general about how to set it up. My machine is an Intel Core2Duo E7500 @ 3GHz, 3 GB of RAM, Running Windows XP Service Pack 3. Upgrading, formatting or installing another OS is out of the question. But I do have Administrator priviledges on the PC, and I can install programs (at least for now). A lot of security software I don't even know about is and must remain installed. But I only need communication whithin the corporate network, which is not restricted. People have usernames (logins) on the corporate network, and I need to use them to restrict access. Simply put, I have a list of logins of team members, and only people in the list should access the files. I have about 150 GB of free disk space. I'm thinking of allocating 100 GB to the team's shared files. I plan monthly backups on machines of co-workers, same configuration. But automation of backups is a nice, unnecessary feature: it's totally acceptable for me to manually copy the contents to a different machine once a month. Uptime is important, as everyone would use these files in their daily work. I have experience as a python and C programmer, but no experience whatsoever as a sysadmin, and almost nothing of my programming experience is network programming. I'm a complete beginner in this. Thanks in advance for any help. EDIT I honestly appreciate all the warnings, I really do, but what I plan to make available is mostly stuff that now is solely on DVDs just for space reasons. It's 'daily work' to read them, but 'daily work write' files will remain on the corporate server. As for the importance of uptime, I think I overstated it: a few outages are OK, it's already an improvement over getting the DVDs. As for policy, my manager is kind of on my side, I will confirm that before making my move. As for getting more space through the proper channels, well, that was Plan A, and it's still on the table... But I don't have much hope. I'm not as "core businees" as I'd like.

  Read the article

• How do I (robustly) remotely execute tasks on Windows workstations in a domain?

  - by Zac B

  I'm not even sure if "robustly" is a word. Anyway. Context: We have a few hundred Windows 7 workstations on a LAN. We use AD/GPO management pretty heavily, but there are a lot of periodic and/or manual maintenance tasks we need to do that can't be done via GPO/scheduled task. For example, say I want to execute program X (which runs silently, in the background, and doesn't bother the user) on workstation Y, or say I want to execute task A on a workstation group B either on a schedule or on demand. Kicking the users off of their computers to do this (i.e. using RDP) is a no-no, and doesn't work on groups anyway. Question: What's the best way to do this that is robust enough that, after setup, I could give it to beginner support people (read: people who are phobic of the command line, and get confused with GUI interfaces more complicated than Firefox)? I'm a competent programmer, and, if there is a robust set of tools or framework out there for this type of task, I'd consider hacking something together myself if it didn't take too long. If there's some combination of tools or techniques that others use to make remote-workstation-administration doable by beginners, I have yet to find it. For those who care about the "why": I'm midlevel IT, and was told to implement a remote management solution that allows arbitrary/scheduled remote execution, with confirmation that programs actually ran remotely, and the ability to view what they returned. "Why?" I asked, "Can't I just use PsExec and the task scheduler on a dispatcher machine?" "No," I was told, "'Joe' the second-week tech is going to be in charge of this one, and he needs something simple with a GUI." What I've tried: I've played with making a bunch of one-clickable "transfer files to remote computer and run them with PsExec" batch/VB scrips, but those tend to break down and don't easily support running on customizable groups. I've played a little bit with the Windows version of Puppet, but it doesn't support arbitrary-time remote execution (it's ability to group computers into a tree/node structure is really nice though). I've used an older version of Altiris, and, while it does a lot of what I want, it's interface is awful, it's slow, crashes a lot, and is probably too expensive for management. SwiftWater's DMS solution does some of what I want, but it's very underdeveloped, closed-source (not a deal breaker but not ideal), and I get the impression that support and reliability are lacking.

  Read the article

• Why did Intel drop the Itanium?

  - by Cole Johnson

  I was reading up on the history of the computer and I came along the IA-64 (Itanium) processors. They sounded really interesting and I was confused as to why Intel would decide to drop them. The ability to choose explicitly what 2 instructions you wanted to run in that cycle is a great idea, especially when writing your program in assembly, for example, a faster bootloader. The hundreds of registers should be convincing for any assembly programmer. You could essentially store all the functions variables in the registers if it doesn't call any other ones. The ability to do instructions like this: (qp) xor r1 = r2, r3 ; r1 = r2 XOR r3 (qp) xor r1 = (imm8), r3 ; r1 = (imm8) XOR r3 versus having to do: ; eax = r1 ; ebx = r2 ; ecx = r3 mov eax, ebx ; first put r2 into r1 xor eax, ecx ; then set r1 equivalent to r2 XOR r3 or ; SAME mov eax, (imm32) ; first put (imm32) into r1 xor eax, ecx ; then set r1 equivalent to (imm32) XOR r3 I heard it was because of no backwards x86 comparability, but couldn't thy be fixed by just adding the Pentium circuitry to it and just add a processor flag that would switch it to Itanium mode (like switching to Protected or Long mode) All the great things about it would have surly put them a giant leap ahead of AMD. Any ideas? Sadly this means you will need a very advanced compiler to do this. Or even one per specific model of the CPU. (E.g. a newer version of the Itanium with an extra feature would require different compiler). When I was working on a WinForms (target only had .NET 2.0) project in Visual Studio 2010, I had a compile target of IA-64. That means that there is a .NET runtime that was able to be compiled for IA-64 and a .NET runtime means Windows. Plus, Hamilton's answer mentions Windows NT. Having a full blown OS like Windows NT means that there is a compiler capable of generating IA-64 machine code.

  Read the article

• UNIX Question to b answered??? [closed]

  - by Nits

  Create a tree structure named ‘training’ in which there are 3 subdirectories – ‘level 1’,’ level2’ and ‘cep’. Each one is again further divided into 3. The ‘level 1’ is divided into ‘sdp’, ‘re’ and ‘se’. From the subdirectory ‘se’ how can one reach the home directory in one step and also how to navigate to the subdirectory ‘sdp’ in one step? Give the commands, which do the above actions? How will you copy a directory structure dir1 to dir2 ? (with all the subdirectories) How can you find out if you have the permission to send a message? Find the space occupied ( in Bytes) by the /home directory including all its subdirectories. What is the command for printing the current time in 24-hour format? What is the command for printing the year, month, and date with a horizontal tab between the fields? Create the following files: chapa, chapb, chapc, chapd, chape, chapA, chapB, chapC, chapD, chapE, chap01, chap02, chap03, chap04, chap05, chap11, chap12, chap13, chap14, and chap15. With reference to question 7, What is the command for listing all files ending in small letters? With reference to question 7, What is the command for listing all files ending in capitals? With reference to question 7, What is the command for listing all files whose last but one character is 0? With reference to question 7, What is the command for listing all files which end in small letters but not ‘a’ and ‘c’? In an organisation one wants to know how many programmers are there. The employee data is stored in a file called ‘personnel’ with one record per employee. Every record has field for designation. How can grep be used for this purpose? In the organisation mentioned in question 12 how can sed be used to print only the records of all employees who are programmers. In the organisation mentioned in question 12 how can sed be used to change the designation ‘programmer’ to ‘software professional’ every where in the ‘personnel’ file Find out about the sleep command and start five jobs in the background, each one sleeping for 10 minutes. How do you get the status of all the processes running on the system? i.e. using what option?

  Read the article

• RDP exits immediately after connecting to Windows Server 2008 R2

  - by carpat

  Background: I recently got a Windows cloud VPS server. I don't have much experience with server admin (I'm a programmer), and what little I do have is with linux servers. Ever since getting the server I've been having issues with RDP. I can connect about two or three times, after which point I can't connect until one of the tech guys "fixes" it (see below). When I connect, I can stay connected for hours with no problem. When the problem connecting starts, the first time I try to log in, the remote desktop window pops up, starts connecting, and then exits with "Your Remote Desktop session has ended". After that, for about 10-20 minutes if I try to connect again, the connections times out with Remote Desktop can't connect to the computer for one of these reasons: 1) Remote access on the server is not enabled 2) The remote computer is turned off 3) The remote computer is not available on the network then goes back to connecting once and immediately disconnecting. All of the updates are installed. The firewall has been correctly configured to let RDP traffic through. The remote setting is "Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop". I tried creating a second user, and when I can't connect, I can't connect to that user either. I've tried both soft and hard reboots, neither of which help. I've tried connecting from two different computers (both running Windows 7) from two different networks (work and home), and the behavior is the same. Everything else on the server continues to run fine (IIS-served http pages, Tomcat-served java pages, svn, ping). The "fix" that the tech guys supply is simply logging into the console on their end, after which point I can connnect 2 or 3 times again. The event viewer on the server has "authentication failure" (or something similar) events generated when I attempt to log in and can't. I can't get to the actual event at the moment as I'm currently in the can't connect stage, and waiting for the techs to log in. But when I searched for the event earlier this morning I couldn't find anything useful. Can anyone help?

  Read the article

• windows 7 virtual wireless adapter keeps going to sleep

  - by conners

  Just a quick question that I can't see mentioned anywhere online. I have a Windows 7 box configured like these guys recommend http://www.itgeekdiary.com/windows-7-as-an-wi-fi-access-point/ simply so that I can have my Windows 7 box as a wifi access point or a wifi emitter. It's also called a Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter. But it powers off and shuts down automatically and stops working. Basically everything works as intended and then - well -it will stopped working when I am not at the Windows 7 PC for a long time. The problem seems to be that every time my PC goes to "power save / sleep" and in the morning the Windows 7 machine "wakes" but blooming heck the wifi has stopped and you have to power cycle the PC (which is very uncool). When I power Cycle I have to do the following as administrator C:\Windows\System32\netsh.exe wlan start hostednetwork I then tried a gazllion things involving services and power management and eventually discovered that if I run the following commands as administrator it will be ok (for a bit) but every 3rd ot 4th time I try this "trick" it simply fails. the trick that seems to work 3 out of 4 times (i.e. "most" of the time) C:\Windows\System32\netsh.exe wlan stop hostednetwork C:\Windows\System32\netsh.exe wlan start hostednetwork But why does this only work "some" of the time? What else I did by myself: on every manage adapter properties (that relates to the wifi) I right clicked [configure] [power management] /disabled/ "allow the computer to power off to save power" <- this made no difference Also (and this is a bit annoying) there is no system tray app/GUI for the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter output signal ... none... so (lame as it sounds) the ONLY way I can check if it's on is to physically go to another device and SCAN.. lame so my question can probably be solved by any of the following: a) can I stop Windows 7 sleeping this wifi when the machine sleeps b) can I force Windows to force wake this process on wake? if so how? c) what is the service / process REALLY called and how do I restart it if it crashes d) how can I flush the wifi properly rather power cycle the host machine e) anyone have a link to an program or app that can sit in the system tray that shows windows 7 wifi hotspot emission status (on/off/etc etc) Since I am a programmer I can easily write a vbs script / windows exe to fix this (and I will share this solution) and the gui problem if I can work out the actual service that is running that netsh stops/starts

  Read the article

• Migrating Split Access Database from one domain to another (not working, details in Q)

  - by Expo_Rob

  Some background: I'm a programmer, not a network administrator, who has been asked to migrate some accounting software (Integrated Office Accounting version 3.2) from an existing domain (OLD_NETWORK) to a new domain (NEW_NETWORK). No-body at the office knows how it works under the hood. It is a split Access 2000 database with the back-end shared and on a file server (which is also the DC) using mapped drives. The DC is NT Server 4 SP 6. The new server is server 2003. The two networks are running independently (ie: two computers on each desk). I have been able to get new computers set up on NEW_NETWORK and working with the IOA software just perfectly but for one problem: The company here uses other entirely separate databases which access the tables IOA maintains (specifically the 'customers' table) via links. To switch between these systems, you press F11 then File-Open the appropriate database and away you go (this is necessary to maintain the permissions that the IOA system uses to protect the customers table). The entire database is Access 2000, the links go to other Access databases, SQL-Server is not involved in any way, nor is a migration to SQL server likely. If I can't migrate anything over, everything will stay as it is, and the NEW_NETWORK computers will not be used. The problem: When I try and update these seperate databases (I shall call one "BANK_ACCOUNT", but the name does not matter), it says "this recordset cannot be updated". It also will sometimes not pull information out of the 'customers' table (ie: date_entered) when looking at a report of everyone who opened a bank account on a certain day (ie: today). I have tried: Giving 'everyone' full control via. shared directory permissions Giving 'everyone' full control on a file system level Checking the permissions within Access (everyone has full read/write on all tables) Copying the entire server contents from one file server to another (ie: xcopy everything) Copying the entire local client files from one computer to another, putting them in the exact same position in the file system, with the same permissons (or full control to 'everyone'). Running as an Administrator Taking one of the NEW_NETWORK computers, having it join OLD_NETWORK and run the software (direct copy from a working system with identical drive mappings), this did not work Weeping openly My Question: Is there anything else I can try? (sorry for this being so long)

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Community Tech Days – A SQL Legends in Ahmedabad – December 11, 2010

  - by pinaldave

  Ahmedabad is going to be fortunate city again on December 11. We are going to have SQL Server Legends present at the prestigious event of Community Tech Days in Ahmedabad. The venue details are as following: H K Hall, H K College Campus, Near Handloom House, Opp. Natraj Cinema, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad – 380009 Click here to Registration for the event. Agenda of the event is as following. 10:15am – 10:30am     Welcome – Pinal Dave 10:30am – 11:15am     SQL Tips and Tricks for .NET Developers by Jacob Sebastian 11:15am – 11:30am     Tea Break 11:30am – 12:15pm     Best Database Practice for SharePoint Server by Pinal Dave 12:15pm – 01:00pm     Self Service Business Intelligence by Rushabh Mehta 01:00pm – 02:00pm     Lunch 02:00pm – 02:45pm     Managing your future, Managing your time by Vinod Kumar 02:45pm – 03:30pm     Windows Azure News and Introducing Storage Services by Mahesh Devjibhai Dhola 03:30pm – 03:45pm     Tea Break 03:45pm – 04:30pm     Improve Silverlight application with Threads and MEF by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi 04:30pm – 04:45pm     Thank you – Mahesh Devjibhai Dhola Ahmedabad considers itself extremely fortunate when there are SQL Legends presenting on various subjects in front of community. Here is brief introduction about them in my own words. (Their names are in order of the agenda). 1) Jacob Sebastian (SQL Server MVP) – This person needs no introduction. Every developer and programmer in Ahmedabad and India knows him. He is the one man who is founder of various community-related ideas like SQL Challenges, SQL Quiz and BeyondRelational. He works with me on all the community-related activities; we are extremely good friends. 2) Rushabh Mehta (SQL Server MVP) – If you use SQL Server – you know this man. He is the President of SQL Server of Professional Association (PASS) and one of the leading Business Intelligence (BI) Experts renowned in the world. He has blessed Ahmedabad once before and now doing once again this year. 3) Vinod Kumar (Microsoft Evangelist – SQL Server & BI) – Ahmedabad remembers him very well. During his last visit to Ahmedabad, a fight had almost broke outside the hall amidst the rush to listen him. There were more people standing and listening to him than those who were seated. This is one man Ahmedabad will never forget. 4) and Myself. I will not rate myself in the league of abovementioned experts, but I must say that I am fortunate to have friends like those above. We also have two strong .NET presenters – Mahesh and Prabhjot. During this event, there will be plenty of giveaways, lots of fun, demos and pure technical talk, specifically no marketing and promotion – just pure technical talk. The most interesting part is that all the SQL Legends – Jacob, Rushabh and Vinod are for sure presenting on SQL Server but with a twist. Jacob – He is going to talk about .NET and SQL – Optimization Techniques Rushabh – He is going to talk about SQL and BI – Self Service BI Vinod – He is going to talk about professional development of developers – Managing Time Pinal – Best Practices for SharePoint Database Administrators – SharePoint DBA – I have presented this session earlier. I promise this event is going to be one of the best events held ever. You can read about the earlier event over here. ?Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in VB.NET can be tricky…

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Sometime you’re searching for something forever and when you find it, you realize it was right under your nose.  Maybe you were distracted by other things around… or maybe that thing right under your nose was so well hidden that it deserves a blog post…   That happened to me a few days ago while using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in my VB.NET application…  I thought it was a cool feature and I decided to use it…  So there I am adding new settings with “USER” scope and StringCollection as the data type, testing my application and everything works perfectly fine...  That was before I decided to modify the “Value” of one of my settings…  After changing the value of one of my settings, I start my application again and, to my surprise, my new values aren’t showing!  Hmmm… That’s odd…  My setting was a pretty long list of strings so I was rather angry at myself for not saving my work after I was done…  So I open up the Settings.setting in the designer and click the ellipsis symbol to enter my string collection again, but to my great pleasure (and disbelief) my strings are there!!!  Alright, you rock VB.NET!  You’ve just save me a bunch of typing time and I’m thinking it’s just a simple Visual Studio glitch…  I hit “Save” then “Save All” (just in case) and finally I rebuild everything and fire up my app once again.  Huh?  Where are my darn strings????????  Ok there’s a bug there…  I open up the app.config and my new strings are there!!!  Alright, let’s recap…  My new strings are in the app.config, they show correctly in the Settings.settings designer UI but they aren’t showing at runtime…  Hmmmm?  Let’s try something else…  Let’s start the application but outside Visual Studio this time… I fire up the exe and BAM!  My strings where there!  I “alt-tab” and hit “F5” and BOOM, no strings!  So it’s a bug in the Visual Studio environment… or could it be a FEATURE?  I must admit that I’m a little confused over what’s a bug and what’s a feature in Visual Studio… lol!   Finally I found out there’s a “cache” for your Visual Studio located here:  C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\<your app name and a very weird temp ID>\<your app version>\user.config When using the “Settings.settings” with a setting of scope “user”, this file is out of sync with your app.config until you manually decide to update it… The button is right there… under your nose… at the top left corner of your screen in the settings designer…  See the big “Synchronize” button there?  Yep…  Now that’s user friendly isn’t it?  Oh, and wait until you see what it does when you click it…  It prompts you and basically says:  “Would you like your settings to start working inside Visual Studio now that you found out that I exist?” and of course the right answer is yes… or rather “OK”…  Unfortunately, you have to do this every time you edit a value… On the other hand, adding and removing settings seem to work flawlessly without having to click this magical button… go figure!  Oh and I almost forgot… this great “feature” is only available for VB.NET…  A project in C# using Settings.settings will work perfectly EVEN when editing values… Here’s a screenshot that shows this important button: Button Using other data types appears to work perfectly well…   Maybe it’s simply related to the StringCollection data type?  If you are a VB.NET programmer, you should pay attention to this when you plan on using the settings functionalities and your scope is “user” and your data type is StringCollection… Happy coding all!

  Read the article

• Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It – book review

  - by DigiMortal

      How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything. Why Software Sucks… is book for software users but I consider it as a-must reading also for developers and specially for their managers whose politics often kills all usability topics as soon as they may appear. For managers usability is soft topic that can be manipulated the way it is best in current state of project. Although developers are not UI designers and usability experts they are still very often forced to deal with these topics and this is how usability problems start (of course, also designers are able to produce designs that are stupid and too hard to use for users, but this blog here is about development). I found this book to be very interesting and funny reading. It is not humor book but it explains you all so you remember later very well what you just read. It took me about three evenings to go through this book and I am still enjoying what I found and how author explains our weird young working field to end users. I suggest this book to all developers – while you are demanding your management to hire or outsource usability expert you are at least causing less pain to end users. So, go and buy this book, just like I did. And… they thanks to mr. Platt :) There is one book more I suggest you to read if you are interested in usability - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Editorial review from Amazon Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t. Table of contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Chapter 1: Who’re You Calling a Dummy? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Control versus Ease of Use I Don’t Care How Your Program Works A Bad Feature and a Good One Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy Testing on Live Animals Where We Are and What You Can Do Chapter 2: Tangled in the Web Where We Came From How It Works Why It Still Sucks Today Client-Centered Design versus Server-Centered Design Where’s My Eye Opener? It’s Obvious—Not! Splash, Flash, and Animation Testing on Live Animals What You Can Do about It Chapter 3: Keep Me Safe The Way It Was Why It Sucks Today What Programmers Need to Know, but Don’t A Human Operation Budgeting for Hassles Users Are Lazy Social Engineering Last Word on Security What You Can Do Chapter 4: Who the Heck Are You? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Incompatible Requirements OK, So Now What? Chapter 5: Who’re You Looking At? Yes, They Know You Why It Sucks More Than Ever Today Users Don’t Know Where the Risks Are What They Know First Milk You with Cookies? Privacy Policy Nonsense Covering Your Tracks The Google Conundrum Solution Chapter 6: Ten Thousand Geeks, Crazed on Jolt Cola See Them in Their Native Habitat All These Geeks Who Speaks, and When, and about What Selling It The Next Generation of Geeks—Passing It On Chapter 7: Who Are These Crazy Bastards Anyway? Homo Logicus Testosterone Poisoning Control and Contentment Making Models Geeks and Jocks Jargon Brains and Constraints Seven Habits of Geeks Chapter 8: Microsoft: Can’t Live With ’Em and Can’t Live Without ’Em They Run the World Me and Them Where We Came From Why It Sucks Today Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t We Love to Hate Them Plus ça Change Growing-Up Pains What You Can Do about It The Last Word Chapter 9: Doing Something About It 1. Buy 2. Tell 3. Ridicule 4. Trust 5. Organize Epilogue About the Author

  Read the article

• Clean up after Visual Studio

  - by psheriff

  As programmer’s we know that if we create a temporary file during the running of our application we need to make sure it is removed when the application or process is complete. We do this, but why can’t Microsoft do it? Visual Studio leaves tons of temporary files all over your hard drive. This is why, over time, your computer loses hard disk space. This blog post will show you some of the most common places where these files are left and which ones you can safely delete..NET Left OversVisual Studio is a great development environment for creating applications quickly. However, it will leave a lot of miscellaneous files all over your hard drive. There are a few locations on your hard drive that you should be checking to see if there are left-over folders or files that you can delete. I have attempted to gather as much data as I can about the various versions of .NET and operating systems. Of course, your mileage may vary on the folders and files I list here. In fact, this problem is so prevalent that PDSA has created a Computer Cleaner specifically for the Visual Studio developer.  Instructions for downloading our PDSA Developer Utilities (of which Computer Cleaner is one) are at the end of this blog entry.Each version of Visual Studio will create “temporary” files in different folders. The problem is that the files created are not always “temporary”. Most of the time these files do not get cleaned up like they should. Let’s look at some of the folders that you should periodically review and delete files within these folders.Temporary ASP.NET FilesAs you create and run ASP.NET applications from Visual Studio temporary files are placed into the <sysdrive>:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework[64]\<vernum>\Temporary ASP.NET Files folder. The folders and files under this folder can be removed with no harm to your development computer. Do not remove the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder itself, just the folders underneath this folder. If you use IIS for ASP.NET development, you may need to run the iisreset.exe utility from the command prompt prior to deleting any files/folder under this folder. IIS will sometimes keep files in use in this folder and iisreset will release the locks so the files/folders can be deleted.Website CacheThis folder is similar to the ASP.NET Temporary Files folder in that it contains files from ASP.NET applications run from Visual Studio. This folder is located in each users local settings folder. The location will be a little different on each operating system. For example on Windows Vista/Windows 7, the folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. If you are running Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. Check these locations periodically and delete all files and folders under this directory.Visual Studio BackupThis backup folder is used by Visual Studio to store temporary files while you develop in Visual Studio. This folder never gets cleaned out, so you should periodically delete all files and folders under this directory. On Windows XP, this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\My Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\Backup Files. On Windows Vista/Windows 7 this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\.Assembly CacheNo, this is not the global assembly cache (GAC). It appears that this cache is only created when doing WPF or Silverlight development with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010. This folder is located in <sysdrive>:\ Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\assembly\dl3 on Windows Vista/Windows 7. On Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly. If you have not done any WPF or Silverlight development, you may not find this particular folder on your machine.Project AssembliesThis is yet another folder where Visual Studio stores temporary files. You will find a folder for each project you have opened and worked on. This folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies on Windows XP. On Microsoft Vista/Windows 7 you will find this folder at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies.Remember not all of these folders will appear on your particular machine. Which ones do show up will depend on what version of Visual Studio you are using, whether or not you are doing desktop or web development, and the operating system you are using.SummaryTaking the time to periodically clean up after Visual Studio will aid in keeping your computer running quickly and increase the space on your hard drive. Another place to make sure you are cleaning up is your TEMP folder. Check your OS settings for the location of your particular TEMP folder and be sure to delete any files in here that are not in use. I routinely clean up the files and folders described in this blog post and I find that I actually eliminate errors in Visual Studio and I increase my hard disk space.NEW! PDSA has just published a “pre-release” of our PDSA Developer Utilities at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities that contains a Computer Cleaner utility which will clean up the above-mentioned folders, as well as a lot of other miscellaneous folders that get Visual Studio build-up. You can download a free trial at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities. If you wish to purchase our utilities through the month of November, 2011 you can use the RSVP code: DUNOV11 to get them for only $39. This is $40 off the regular price.NOTE: You can download this article and many samples like the one shown in this blog entry at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips and Tricks”, then “Developer Machine Clean Up” from the drop down list.Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

  Read the article

• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

  Read the article

• Open Source but not Free Software (or vice versa)

  - by TRiG

  The definition of "Free Software" from the Free Software Foundation: “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so. The definition of "Open Source Software" from the Open Source Initiative: Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: Free Redistribution The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed. Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. Integrity of The Author's Source Code The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. Distribution of License The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution. License Must Not Restrict Other Software The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software. License Must Be Technology-Neutral No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface. These definitions, although they derive from very different ideologies, are broadly compatible, and most Free Software is also Open Source Software and vice versa. I believe, however, that it is possible for this not to be the case: It is possible for software to be Open Source without being Free, or to be Free without being Open Source. Questions Is my belief correct? Is it possible for software to fall into one camp and not the other? Does any such software actually exist? Please give examples. Clarification I've already accepted an answer now, but I seem to have confused a lot of people, so perhaps a clarification is in order. I was not asking about the difference between copyleft (or "viral", though I don't like that term) and non-copyleft ("permissive") licenses. Nor was I asking about your personal idiosyncratic definitions of "Free" and "Open". I was asking about "Free Software as defined by the FSF" and "Open Source Software as defined by the OSI". Are the two always the same? Is it possible to be one without being the other? And the answer, it seems, is that it's impossible to be Free without being Open, but possible to be Open without being Free. Thank you everyone who actually answered the question.

  Read the article

• Independence Day for Software Components &ndash; Loosening Coupling by Reducing Connascence

  - by Brian Schroer

  Today is Independence Day in the USA, which got me thinking about loosely-coupled “independent” software components. I was reminded of a video I bookmarked quite a while ago of Jim Weirich’s “Grand Unified Theory of Software Design” talk at MountainWest RubyConf 2009. I finally watched that video this morning. I highly recommend it. In the video, Jim talks about software connascence. The dictionary definition of connascence (con-NAY-sense) is: 1. The common birth of two or more at the same time 2. That which is born or produced with another. 3. The act of growing together. The brief Wikipedia page about Connascent Software Components says that: Two software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. Connascence is a way to characterize and reason about certain types of complexity in software systems. The term was introduced to the software world in Meilir Page-Jones’ 1996 book “What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design”. The middle third of that book is the author’s proposed graphical notation for describing OO designs. UML became the standard about a year later, so a revised version of the book was published in 1999 as “Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML”. Weirich says that the third part of the book, in which Page-Jones introduces the concept of connascence “is worth the price of the entire book”. (The price of the entire book, by the way, is not much – I just bought a used copy on Amazon for $1.36, so that was a pretty low-risk investment. I’m looking forward to getting the book and learning about connascence from the original source.) Meanwhile, here’s my summary of Weirich’s summary of Page-Jones writings about connascence: The stronger the form of connascence, the more difficult and costly it is to change the elements in the relationship. Some of the connascence types, ordered from weak to strong are: Connascence of Name Connascence of name is when multiple components must agree on the name of an entity. If you change the name of a method or property, then you need to change all references to that method or property. Duh. Connascence of name is unavoidable, assuming your objects are actually used. My main takeaway about connascence of name is that it emphasizes the importance of giving things good names so you don’t need to go changing them later. Connascence of Type Connascence of type is when multiple components must agree on the type of an entity. I assume this is more of a problem for languages without compilers (especially when used in apps without tests). I know it’s an issue with evil JavaScript type coercion. Connascence of Meaning Connascence of meaning is when multiple components must agree on the meaning of particular values, e.g that “1” means normal customer and “2” means preferred customer. The solution to this is to use constants or enums instead of “magic” strings or numbers, which reduces the coupling by changing the connascence form from “meaning” to “name”. Connascence of Position Connascence of positions is when multiple components must agree on the order of values. This refers to methods with multiple parameters, e.g.: eMailer.Send("[email protected]", "[email protected]", "Your order is complete", "Order completion notification"); The more parameters there are, the stronger the connascence of position is between the component and its callers. In the example above, it’s not immediately clear when reading the code which email addresses are sender and receiver, and which of the final two strings are subject vs. body. Connascence of position could be improved to connascence of type by replacing the parameter list with a struct or class. This “introduce parameter object” refactoring might be overkill for a method with 2 parameters, but would definitely be an improvement for a method with 10 parameters. This points out two “rules” of connascence:  The Rule of Degree: The acceptability of connascence is related to the degree of its occurrence. The Rule of Locality: Stronger forms of connascence are more acceptable if the elements involved are closely related. For example, positional arguments in private methods are less problematic than in public methods. Connascence of Algorithm Connascence of algorithm is when multiple components must agree on a particular algorithm. Be DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself. If you have “cloned” code in multiple locations, refactor it into a common function.   Those are the “static” forms of connascence. There are also “dynamic” forms, including… Connascence of Execution Connascence of execution is when the order of execution of multiple components is important. Consumers of your class shouldn’t have to know that they have to call an .Initialize method before it’s safe to call a .DoSomething method. Connascence of Timing Connascence of timing is when the timing of the execution of multiple components is important. I’ll have to read up on this one when I get the book, but assume it’s largely about threading. Connascence of Identity Connascence of identity is when multiple components must reference the entity. The example Weirich gives is when you have two instances of the “Bob” Employee class and you call the .RaiseSalary method on one and then the .Pay method on the other does the payment use the updated salary?   Again, this is my summary of a summary, so please be forgiving if I misunderstood anything. Once I get/read the book, I’ll make corrections if necessary and share any other useful information I might learn.   See Also: Gregory Brown: Ruby Best Practices Issue #24: Connascence as a Software Design Metric (That link is failing at the time I write this, so I had to go to the Google cache of the page.)

  Read the article

• An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

  - by Brian Schroer

  Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

  Read the article

• Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

  Read the article

• Getting to grips with the stack in nasm

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I spent a good part of my day getting to grips with the stack and nasm. After looking at my notes on nasm I think this is one area for the course I am doing they could focus more on… So here are some snippets I have put together that have helped me understand a little bit about the stack… Simplest example of the stack You will probably see examples like the following in circulation… these demonstrate the simplest use of the stack… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main main: push 42h push 43h push 44h mov ah,2h ;set to display characters pop dx    ;get the first value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 2nd value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 3rd value int 21h   ;and display it int 20h The output from above code would be… DCB Decoupling code using “call” and “ret” This is great, but it oversimplifies what I want to use the stack for… I do not know if this goes against the grain of assembly programmers or not, but I want to write loosely coupled assembly code – and I want to use the stack as a mechanism for passing values into my decoupled code. In nasm we have the call and return instructions, which provides a mechanism for decoupling code, for example the following could be done… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h mov dx,41h int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: call displayChar int 20h   This would output the following to the console A So, it would seem that call and ret allow us to jump to segments of our code and then return back to the calling position – a form of segmenting the code into what we would called in higher order languages “functions” or “methods”. The only issue is, in higher order languages there is a way to pass parameters into the functions and return results. Because of the primitive nature of the call and ret instructions, this does not seem to be obvious. We could of course use the registers to pass values into the subroutine and set values coming out, but the problem with this is we… Have a limited number of registers Are threading our code with tight coupling (it would be hard to migrate methods outside of their intended use in a particular program to another one) With that in mind, I turn to the stack to provide a loosely coupled way of calling subroutines… First attempt with the Stack Initially I thought this would be simple… we could use code that looks as follows to achieve what I want… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h pop dx int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h   However running this application does not give the desired result, I want an ‘A’ to be returned, and I am getting something totally different (you will to). Reading up on the call and ret instructions a discovery is made… they are pushing and popping things onto and off the stack as well… When the call instruction is executed, the current value of IP (the address of the instruction to follow) is pushed onto the stack, when ret is called, the last value on the stack is popped off into the IP register. In effect what the above code is doing is as follows with the stack… push 41h push current value of ip pop current value of ip to dx pop 41h to ip This is not what I want, I need to access the 41h that I pushed onto the stack, but the call value (which is necessary) is putting something in my way. So, what to do? Remember we have other registers we can use as well as a thing called indirect addressing… So, after some reading around, I came up with the following approach using indirect addressing… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h In essence, what I have done here is used a trick with the stack pointer… it goes as follows… Push 41 onto the stack Make the call to the function, which will push the IP register onto the stack and then jump to the displayChar label Move the value in the stack point to the bp register (sp currently points at IP register) Move the at the location of bp minus 2 bytes to dx (this is now the value 41h) display it, execute the ret instruction, which pops the ip value off the stack and goes back to the calling point This approach is still very raw, some further reading around shows that I should be pushing the value of bp onto the stack before replacing it with sp, but it is the starting thread to getting loosely coupled subroutines. Let’s see if you get what the following output would be? org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+4] int 21h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h push 42h call displayChar int 20h The output is… AB Where to from here? If by any luck some assembly programmer comes along and see this code and notices that I have made some fundamental flaw in my logic… I would like to know, so please leave a comment… appreciate any feedback!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139  | Next Page >