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• My First 5K, the recap.

  - by Chris Williams

  It was a nice day to be outside (and trust me, those aren't words you'll hear from me often.) I got to the site around 7:45, hit the pre-reg table and got my number along with a goody bag full of coupons for racing gear, a water bottle and a tshirt. Oh and a map. Stashed all that stuff in the jeep, emptied my pockets of everything but my iPhone and my jeep key, and proceeded to walk around for a bit as people started showing up and signing in. It was fairly breezy, and there was definitely a storm coming... but it was anyone's guess on when it would actually arrive. It was interesting to see everyone who was participating. If I had to guess, I would say the event was 60-70% women, with a pretty broad distribution of age... as young as 13 to well over 60 (in both genders.) I don't know exactly how many folks were there, but it was well over 300. Eventually it was time to kick things off, and everyone made their way to the start line. All of the 5k and 10k runners were mixed together, starting at the same time. All the walkers and the people with strollers or dogs were in the back. It was pretty chaotic at first, once things started, but it thinned out fairly quickly. The 10k people and the hardcore runners sped ahead of everyone else and the walkers gradually lagged behind. The 5K course was pretty nice, winding around a lake down in Eden Prairie. The 10K course overlapped most of ours, but branched off a couple times too. I didn't run the whole time, but I started the race running and I ended it running, and did a mix of walking and running along the way. I met my goals, which were a) don't ever stop and b) don't be last. The weather managed to hold out for the entire race. It never got too hot, there was a nice breeze and it was mostly overcast. Pretty much perfect in my book. About 20-30 minutes after I left, the rain came down pretty hard. I had a good time, and will most likely do more of them. We'll see.

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• Many sources of movement in an entity system

  - by Sticky

  I'm fairly new to the idea of entity systems, having read a bunch of stuff (most usefully, this great blog and this answer). Though I'm having a little trouble understanding how something as simple as being able to manipualate the position of an object by an undefined number of sources. That is, I have my entity, which has a position component. I then have some event in the game which tells this entity to move a given distance, in a given time. These events can happen at any time, and will have different values for position and time. The result is that they'd be compounded together. In a traditional OO solution, I'd have some sort of MoveBy class, that contains the distance/time, and an array of those inside my game object class. Each frame, I'd iterate through all the MoveBy, and apply it to the position. If a MoveBy has reached its finish time, remove it from the array. With the entity system, I'm a little confused as how I should replicate this sort of behavior. If there were just one of these at a time, instead of being able to compound them together, it'd be fairly straightforward (I believe) and look something like this: PositionComponent containing x, y MoveByComponent containing x, y, time Entity which has both a PositionComponent and a MoveByComponent MoveBySystem that looks for an entity with both these components, and adds the value of MoveByComponent to the PositionComponent. When the time is reached, it removes the component from that entity. I'm a bit confused as to how I'd do the same thing with many move by's. My initial thoughts are that I would have: PositionComponent, MoveByComponent the same as above MoveByCollectionComponent which contains an array of MoveByComponents MoveByCollectionSystem that looks for an entity with a PositionComponent and a MoveByCollectionComponent, iterating through the MoveByComponents inside it, applying/removing as necessary. I guess this is a more general problem, of having many of the same component, and wanting a corresponding system to act on each one. My entities contain their components inside a hash of component type - component, so strictly have only 1 component of a particular type per entity. Is this the right way to be looking at this? Should an entity only ever have one component of a given type at all times?

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• Maximizing the Value of Software

  - by David Dorf

  A few years ago we decided to increase our investments in documenting retail processes and architectures.  There were several goals but the main two were to help retailers maximize the value they derive from our software and help system integrators implement our software faster.  The sale is only part of our success metric -- its actually more important that the customer realize the benefits of the software.  That's when we actually celebrate. This week many of our customers are gathered in Chicago to discuss their successes during our annual Crosstalk conference.  That provides the perfect forum to announce the release of the Oracle Retail Reference Library.  The RRL is available for free to Oracle Retail customers and partners.  It contains 1000s of hours of work and represents years of experience in the retail industry.  The Retail Reference Library is composed of three offerings: Retail Reference Model We've been sharing the RRM for several years now, with lots of accolades.  The RRM is a set of business process diagrams at varying levels of granularity. This release marks the debut of Visio documents, which should make it easier for retailers to adopt and edit the diagrams.  The processes represent an approximation of the Oracle Retail software, but at higher levels they are pretty generic and therefore usable with other software as well.  Using these processes, the business and IT are better able to communicate the expectations of the software.  They can be used to guide customization when necessary, and help identify areas for optimization in the organization. Retail Reference Architecture When embarking on a software implementation project, it can be daunting to start from a blank sheet of paper.  So we offer the RRA, a comprehensive set of documents that describe the retail enterprise in terms of logical architecture, physical deployments, and systems integration.  These documents and diagrams describe how all the systems typically found in a retailer enterprise work together.  They serve as a way to jump-start implementations using best practices we've captured over the years. Retail Semantic Glossary Have you ever seen two people argue over something because they're using misaligned terminology?  Its a huge waste and happens all the time.  The Retail Semantic Glossary is a simple application that allows retailers to define terms and metrics in a centralized database.  This initial version comes with limited content with the goal of adding more over subsequent releases.  This is the single source for defining key performance indicators, metrics, algorithms, and terms so that the retail organization speaks in a consistent language. These three offerings are downloaded from MyOracleSupport separately and linked together using the start page above.  Everything is navigated using a Web browser.  See the Oracle Retail Documentation blog for more details.

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• Why do old programming languages continue to be revised?

  - by SunAvatar

  This question is not, "Why do people still use old programming languages?" I understand that quite well. In fact the two programming languages I know best are C and Scheme, both of which date back to the 70s. Recently I was reading about the changes in C99 and C11 versus C89 (which seems to still be the most-used version of C in practice and the version I learned from K&R). Looking around, it seems like every programming language in heavy use gets a new specification at least once per decade or so. Even Fortran is still getting new revisions, despite the fact that most people using it are still using FORTRAN 77. Contrast this with the approach of, say, the typesetting system TeX. In 1989, with the release of TeX 3.0, Donald Knuth declared that TeX was feature-complete and future releases would contain only bug fixes. Even beyond this, he has stated that upon his death, "all remaining bugs will become features" and absolutely no further updates will be made. Others are free to fork TeX and have done so, but the resulting systems are renamed to indicate that they are different from the official TeX. This is not because Knuth thinks TeX is perfect, but because he understands the value of a stable, predictable system that will do the same thing in fifty years that it does now. Why do most programming language designers not follow the same principle? Of course, when a language is relatively new, it makes sense that it will go through a period of rapid change before settling down. And no one can really object to minor changes that don't do much more than codify existing pseudo-standards or correct unintended readings. But when a language still seems to need improvement after ten or twenty years, why not just fork it or start over, rather than try to change what is already in use? If some people really want to do object-oriented programming in Fortran, why not create "Objective Fortran" for that purpose, and leave Fortran itself alone? I suppose one could say that, regardless of future revisions, C89 is already a standard and nothing stops people from continuing to use it. This is sort of true, but connotations do have consequences. GCC will, in pedantic mode, warn about syntax that is either deprecated or has a subtly different meaning in C99, which means C89 programmers can't just totally ignore the new standard. So there must be some benefit in C99 that is sufficient to impose this overhead on everyone who uses the language. This is a real question, not an invitation to argue. Obviously I do have an opinion on this, but at the moment I'm just trying to understand why this isn't just how things are done already. I suppose the question is: What are the (real or perceived) advantages of updating a language standard, as opposed to creating a new language based on the old?

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• How should I structure my turn based engine to allow flexibility for players/AI and observation?

  - by Reefpirate

  I've just started making a Turn Based Strategy engine in GameMaker's GML language... And I was cruising along nicely until it came time to handle the turn cycle, and determining who is controlling what player, and also how to handle the camera and what is displayed on screen. Here's an outline of the main switch happening in my main game loop at the moment: switch (GameState) { case BEGIN_TURN: // Start of turn operations/routines break; case MID_TURN: switch (PControlledBy[Turn]) { case HUMAN: switch (MidTurnState) { case MT_SELECT: // No units selected, 'idle' UI state break; case MT_MOVE: // Unit selected and attempting to move break; case MT_ATTACK: break; } break; case COMPUTER: // AI ROUTINES GO HERE break; case OBSERVER: // OBSERVER ROUTINES GO HERE break; } break; case END_TURN: // End of turn routines/operations, and move Turn to next player break; } Now, I can see a couple of problems with this set-up already... But I don't have any idea how to go about making it 'right'. Turn is a global variable that stores which player's turn it is, and the BEGIN_TURN and END_TURN states make perfect sense to me... But the MID_TURN state is baffling me because of the things I want to happen here: If there are players controlled by humans, I want the AI to do it's thing on its turn here, but I want to be able to have the camera follow the AI as it makes moves in the human player's vision. If there are no human controlled player's, I'd like to be able to watch two or more AI's battle it out on the map with god-like 'observer' vision. So basically I'm wondering if there are any resources for how to structure a Turn Based Strategy engine? I've found lots of writing about pathfinding and AI, and those are all great... But when it comes to handling the turn structure and the game states I am having trouble finding any resources at all. How should the states be divided to allow flexibility between the players and the controllers (HUMAN, COMPUTER, OBSERVER)? Also, maybe if I'm on the right track I just need some reassurance before I lay down another few hundred lines of code...

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• How do I know if I am using Scrum methodologies?

  - by Jake

  When I first started at my current job, my purpose was to rewrite a massive excel-VBA workbook-application to C# Winforms because it was thought that the new C# app will fix all existing problems and have all the new features for a perfect world. If it were a direct port, in theory it would be easy as i just need to go through all the formulas, conditional formatting, validations, VBA etc. to understand it. However, that was not the case. Many of the new features are tightly dependant on business logic which I am unfamiliar with. As a solo programmer, the first year was spent solely on deciphering the excel workbook and writing the C# app. In theory, I had the business people to "help" me specify requirements, how GUI looks and work, and testing of the app etc; but in practice it is like a contant tsunami of feature creep. At the beginning of the second year I managed to convince the management that this is not going anywhere. I made them start from scratch with the excel-VBA. I have this "issue log" saved on the network, each time they found something they didn't like about the excel-VBA app, they will write it in there. I check the log daily and consolidate issues (in my mind) mainly into 2 groups: (1) requires massive change. (2) can be fixed in current version. For massive change issues, I make a copy of the latest excel-VBA and give it a new version number, then work on it whenever I can. For current version fixes, I make the changes in a few days to a week, and then immediately release it. I also ensure I update the same change in any in-progress massive change future versions. This has gone on for about 4 months and I feel it works great. I made many releases and solved many real issues, also understood the business logic more and more. However, my boss (non-IT trained) thinks what I am doing are just adhoc changes and that i am not looking at the "bigger picture". I am struggling to convince my boss that this works. So I hope to formalise my approach and maybe borrow a buzzword to confuse him. Incidentally, I read about Agile and SCRUM, about backlog and sprints. But it's all very vague to me still. QUESTION (finally): I want to tell him that this is SCRUM! But I want to hold my breath first and ask whether my current approach is considered SCRUM or SCRUM-like? How can I make it more SCRUM-like? Note that I have only myself, there's no project leader or teams.

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• You probably have enough

  - by BuckWoody

  This a decidedly non-technical post, and even a little preachy. I post it here because you, the technical professional, are the perfect audience for it. I have enough stuff. I never think so, of course, but I do. I don’t consider myself rich, but if you have a comfortable place to sleep,  enough food to eat and you can plan for your future, you are rich. And when we are rich enough to have “enough” stuff, that usually means we have too much stuff. Stuff costs money that could be put to better use, stuff needs painting, cleaning, fueling, feeding, storage and caring for. Stuff is a burden. So I decided a few years back that I had enough stuff. We gave away a lot of things, and we don’t buy any new (meaning we didn’t have one before)  things – only replacement things. We’d rather “do something” than “have something”. But even so, when birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas rolled around, we got more stuff. So I asked all of my friends and relatives to do something for me.   I ask folks that want to give me a gift (for whatever reason) to donate the price they would have paid for the gift to a charity they care about. This does a few things: They have to find a charity to care about The fact that I made it through a calendar year now actually means something Someone else gets the help they need Everybody feels better No, I’m not saying these things so you’ll think I’m a wonderful person - the reason I’m posting this here is that as a technical professional you probably have enough stuff like I do. So I ask you to try this out. Try it for one birthday, or one Holiday, or even for a year. I can promise this: it will change your life, the life of the person who gives the gift, and the person’s life who receives it. If you do try it, I’d love to have a comment here on your thoughts.

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• How do you take into account usability and user requirements for your application?

  - by voroninp

  Our team supports BackOffice application: a mix of WinForm and WPF windows. (about 80 including dialogs). Really a kind of a Swiss Army Knife. It is used by developers, tech writers, security developers, testers. The requirements for new features come quite often and sometimes we play Wizard of Oz to decide which GUI our users like the most. And it usually happens (I admit it can be just my subjective interpretation of the reality) that one tiny detail giving the flavor of good usability to our app requires a lot of time. This time is being spent on 'fighting' with GUI framework making it act like we need. And it very difficult to make estimations for this type of tasks (at least for me and most members of our team). Scrum poker is not a help either. Management often considers this usability perfectionism to be a waste of time. On the other hand an accumulated affect of features where each has some little usability flaw frustrates users. But the same users want frequent releases and instant bug fixes. Hence, no way to get the positive feedback: there is always somebody who is snuffy. I constantly feel myself as competing with ourselves: more features - more bugs/tasks/architecture. We are trying to outrun the cart we are pushing. New technologies arrive and some of them can potentially help to improve the design or decrease task implementation time but these technologies require learning, prototyping and so on. Well, that was a story. And now is the question: How do you balance between time pressure, product quality, users and management satisfaction? When and how do you decide to leave the problem with not a perfect but to some extent acceptable solution, how often do you make these decisions? How do you do with your own satisfaction? What are your priorities? P.S. Please keep in mind, we are a BackOffice team, we have neither dedicated technical writer nor GUI designer. The tester have joined us recently. We've much work to do and much freedom concerning 'how'. I like it because it fosters creativity but I don't want to become too nerdy perfectionist.

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• Understanding exceptional cases

  - by Justin

  I've been studying the use of exceptions in various php projects (such as Doctrine and Zend Framework). Exceptions seem to be thrown when unordinary input/state occurs. A perfect example is Doctrine throwing an exception when you try to use a invalid query string. I think the creators of the doctrine api understood that first, you can't query data by using an invalid DQL statement, and a developer should immediately be warned that an error has occurred, rather then letting execution continue with the possibility of an error code going un-checked. I also bet that this simplifies reading the code. I can't think of a situation where you would want to use an invalid DQL statement, except unit testing. Since this is true, it's better to avoid plaguing a bunch of code with null/error checks and use exceptions. I've read in books that exceptions shouldn't be thrown when validating dating user input. I've seen examples where of where the guideline is broken. One example is the Zend framework. If supplying an invalid controller or action name, an exception is thrown. Unlike doctrine, the user has more direct control over this sort of input. I know you can configure an error controller and set up a 404 message or what have you, but I'm curious why they have used an exception in this scenario? I guess you can argue the Zend Framework does not know how to continue processing the quest. One last example Is I wrote a function to return some html based on a given resource type. This resource type is hard-coded and sent when a user interacts with a web site (such as clicking a button to display the form to input data). I don't expect users to be mucking around with the request type. Under normal operating conditions, the resource type should be valid. To clean up some logic, I was going to throw an exception if a particular form wasn't found. This is mainly to find the correct form associated with a resource type so proper validation can occur. Does this sound like a valid use case for an exception? Right now it's pretty trivial, but I do plan to implement a restful consumer and re-using a function to map resources to their validation services would be very useful. I can then catch the exception and based on the consumer, return an error message suitable for the request type...

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• JavaOne 2013: (Key) Notes of a conference – State of the Java platform and all the roadmaps by Amis

  - by JuergenKress

  Last week’s JavaOne conference provided insights in the roadmap of the Java platform as well as in the current state of things in the Java community. The close relationship between Oracle and IBM concerning Java, the (continuing) lack of such a relationship with Google, the support from Microsoft for Java applications on its Azure cloud and the vibrant developer community – with over 200 different Java User Groups in many countries of the world. There were no major surprises or stunning announcements. Java EE 7 (release in June) was celebrated, the progress of Java 8 SE explained as well as the progress on Java Embedded and ME. The availability of NetBeans 7.4 RC1 and JDK 8 Early Adopters release as well as the open sourcing of project Avatar probably were the only real news stories. The convergence of JavaFX and Java SE is almost complete; the upcoming alignment of Java SE Embedded and Java ME is the next big consolidation step that will lead to a unified platform where developers can use the same skills, development tools and APIs on EE, SE, SE Embedded and ME development. This means that anything that runs on ME will run on SE (Embedded) and EE – not necessarily the reverse because not all SE APIs are part of the compact profile or the ME environment. However, the trimming down of the SE libraries and the increased capabilities of devices mean that a pretty rich JVM runs on many devices – such as JavaFX 8 on the Raspberry PI. The major theme of the conference was Internet of Things. A world of things that are smart and connected, devices like sensors, cameras and equipment from cars, fridges and television sets to printers, security gates and kiosks that all run Java and are all capable of sending data over local network connections or directly over the internet. The number of devices that has these capabilities is rapidly growing. This means that the number of places where Java programs can help program the behavior of devices is growing too. It also means that the volume of data generated is expanding and that we have to find ways to harvest that data, possibly do a local pre-processing (filter, aggregate) and channel the data to back end systems. Terms typically used are edge devices (small, simple, publishing data), gateways (receiving data from many devices, collecting and consolidating, pre-processing, sending onwards to back end – typically using real time event processing) and enterprise services – receiving the data-turned-information from the gateways to further consolidate, distribute and act upon. A cheap device like the Raspberry PI is a perfect way to get started as a Java developer with what embedded (device) programming means and how interaction with physical input and output takes place. Roadmaps The over all progress on Java is visualized in this overview: Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Amis,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,JavaOne,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Are these non-standard applications of rendering practical in games?

  - by maul

  I've recently got into 3D and I came up with a few different "tricky" rendering techniques. Unfortunately I don't have the time to work on this myself, but I'd like to know if these are known methods and if they can be used in practice. Hybrid rendering Now I know that ray-tracing is still not fast enough for real-time rendering, at least on home computers. I also know that hybrid rendering (a combination of rasterization and ray-tracing) is a well known theory. However I had the following idea: one could separate a scene into "important" and "not important" objects. First you render the "not important" objects using traditional rasterization. In this pass you also render the "important" objects using a special shader that simply marks these parts on the image using a special color, or some stencil/depth buffer trickery. Then in the second pass you read back the results of the first pass and start ray tracing, but only from the pixels that were marked by the "important" object's shader. This would allow you to only ray-trace exactly what you need to. Could this be fast enough for real-time effects? Rendered physics I'm specifically talking about bullet physics - intersection of a very small object (point/bullet) that travels across a straight line with other, relatively slow-moving, fairly constant objects. More specifically: hit detection. My idea is that you could render the scene from the point of view of the gun (or the bullet). Every object in the scene would draw a different color. You only need to render a 1x1 pixel window - the center of the screen (again, from the gun's point of view). Then you simply check that central pixel and the color tells you what you hit. This is pixel-perfect hit detection based on the graphical representation of objects, which is not common in games. Afaik traditional OpenGL "picking" is a similar method. This could be extended in a few ways: For larger (non-bullet) objects you render a larger portion of the screen. If you put a special-colored plane in the middle of the scene (exactly where the bullet will be after the current frame) you get a method that works as the traditional slow-moving iterative physics test as well. You could simulate objects that the bullet can pass through (with decreased velocity) using alpha blending or some similar trick. So are these techniques in use anywhere, and/or are they practical at all?

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• Drawing flaming letters in 3D with OpenGL ES 2.0

  - by Chiquis

  I am a bit confused about how to achieve this. What I want is to "draw with flames". I have achieved this with textures successfully, but now my concern is about doing this with particles to achieve the flaming effect. Am I supposed to create a path along which I should add many particle emitters that will be emitting flame particles? I understand the concept for 2D, but for 3D are the particles always supposed to be facing the user? Something else I'm worried about is the performance hit that will occur by having that many particle emitters, because there can be many letters and drawings at the same time, and each of these elements will have many particle emitters. More detailed explanation: I have a path of points, which is my model. Imagine a dotted letter "S" for example. I want make the "S" be on fire. The "S" is just an example it can be a circle, triangle, a line, pretty much any path described by my set of points. For achieving this fire effect I thought about using particles. So I am using a program called "Particle Designer" to create a fire style particle emitter. This emitter looks perfect on 2D on the iphone screen dimensions. So then I thought that I could probably draw an S or any other figure if i place many particle emitters next to each other following the path described. To move from the 2D version to the 3D version I thought about, scaling the emitter (with a scale matrix multiplication in its model matrix) and then moving it to a point in my 3D world. I did this and it works. So now I have 1 particle emitter in the 3D world. My question is, is this how you would achieve a flaming letter? Is this too inefficient if i expect to have many flaming paths on my world? Am i supposed to rotate the particle's quad so that its always looking at the user? (the last one is because i noticed that if u look at it from the side the particles start to flatten out)

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• git workflow for separating commits

  - by gman

  Best practices with git (or any VCS for that matter) is supposed to be to have each commit do the smallest change possible. But, that doesn't match how I work at all. For example I recently I needed to add some code that checked if the version of a plugin to my system matched the versions the system supports. If not print a warning that the plugin probably requires a newer version of the system. While writing that code I decided I wanted the warnings to be colorized. I already had code that colorized error message so I edited that code. That code was in the startup module of one entry to the system. The plugin checking code was in another path that didn't use that entry point so I moved the colorization code into a separate module so both entry points could use it. On top of that, in order to test my plugin checking code works I need to go edit UI/UX code to make sure it tells the user "You need to upgrade". When all is said and done I've edited 10 files, changed dependencies, the 2 entry points are now both dependant on the colorization code, etc etc. Being lazy I'd probably just git add . && git commit -a the whole thing. Spending 10-15 minutes trying to manipulate all those changes into 3 to 6 smaller commits seems frustrating which brings up the question Are there workflows that work for you or that make this process easier? I don't think I can some how magically always modify stuff in the perfect order since I don't know that order until after I start modifying and seeing what comes up. I know I can git add --interactive etc but it seems, at least for me, kind of hard to know what I'm grabbing exactly the correct changes so that each commit is actually going to work. Also, since the changes are sitting in the current directory it doesn't seem like it would be easy to run tests on each commit to make sure it's going to work short of stashing all the changes. And then, if it were to stash and then run the tests, if I missed a few lines or accidentally added a few too many lines I have no idea how I'd easily recover from that. (as in either grab the missing lines from the stash and then put the rest back or take the few extra lines I shouldn't have grabbed and shove them into the stash for the next commit. Thoughts? Suggestions? PS: I hope this is an appropriate question. The help says development methodologies and processes

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• Redesigning an Information System - Part 1

  - by dbradley

  Through the next few weeks or months I'd like to run a small series of articles sharing my experiences from the largest of the project I've worked on and explore some of the real-world problems I've come across and how we went about solving them. I'm afraid I can't give too many specifics on the project right now as it's not yet complete so you'll have to forgive me for being a little abstract in places! To start with I'm going to run through a little of the background of the problem and the motivations to re-design from scratch. Then I'll work through the approaches taken to understanding the requirements, designing, implementing, testing and migrating to the new system. Motivations for Re-designing a Large Information System The system is one that's been in place for a number of years and was originally designed to do a significantly different one to what it's now being used for. This is mainly due to the product maturing as well as client requirements changing. As with most information systems this one can be defined in four main areas of functionality: Input – adding information to the system Storage – persisting information in an efficient, searchable structure Output – delivering the information to the client Control – management of the process There can be a variety of reasons to re-design an existing system; a few of our own turned out to be factors such as: Overall system reliability System response time Failure isolation and recovery Maintainability of code and information General extensibility to solve future problem Separation of business and product concerns New or improved features The factor that started the thought process was the desire to improve the way in which information was entered into the system. However, this alone was not the entire reason for deciding to redesign. Business Drivers Typically all software engineers would always prefer to do a project from scratch themselves. It generally means you don't have to deal with problems created by predecessors and you can create your own absolutely perfect solution. However, the reality of working within a business is that the bottom line comes down to return on investment. For a medium sized business such as mine there must be actual value able to be delivered within a reasonable timeframe for any work to be started. As a result, any long term project will generally take a lot of effort and consideration to be approved by those in charge and therefore it might be better to break down the project into more manageable chunks which allow more frequent deliverables and also value within a shorter timeframe. As the only thing of concern was the methods for inputting information, this is where we started with requirements gathering and design. However knowing that there might be more to the problem and not limiting your design decisions before the requirements is key to finding the best solutions.

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• PMDB Block Size Choice

  - by Brian Diehl

  Choosing a block size for the P6 PMDB database is not a difficult task. In fact, taking the default of 8k is going to be just fine. Block size is one of those things that is always hotly debated. Everyone has their personal preference and can sight plenty of good reasons for their choice. To add to the confusion, Oracle supports multiple block sizes withing the same instance. So how to decide and what is the justification? Like most OLTP systems, Oracle Primavera P6 has a wide variety of data. A typical table's average row size may be less than 50 bytes or upwards of 500 bytes. There are also several tables with BLOB types but the LOB data tends not to be very large. It is likely that no single block size would be perfect for every table. So how to choose? My preference is for the 8k (8192 bytes) block size. It is a good compromise that is not too small for the wider rows, yet not to big for the thin rows. It is also important to remember that database blocks are the smallest unit of change and caching. I prefer to have more, individual "working units" in my database. For an instance with 4gb of buffer cache, an 8k block will provide 524,288 blocks of cache. The following SQL*Plus script returns the average, median, min, and max rows per block. column "AVG(CNT)" format 999.99 set verify off select avg(cnt), median(cnt), min(cnt), max(cnt), count(*) from ( select dbms_rowid.ROWID_RELATIVE_FNO(rowid) , dbms_rowid.ROWID_BLOCK_NUMBER(rowid) , count(*) cnt from &tab group by dbms_rowid.ROWID_RELATIVE_FNO(rowid) , dbms_rowid.ROWID_BLOCK_NUMBER(rowid) ) Running this for the TASK table, I get this result on a database with an 8k block size. Each activity, on average, has about 19 rows per block. Enter value for tab: task AVG(CNT) MEDIAN(CNT) MIN(CNT) MAX(CNT) COUNT(*) -------- ----------- ---------- ---------- ---------- 18.72 19 3 28 415917 I recommend an 8k block size for the P6 transactional database. All of our internal performance and scalability test are done with this block size. This does not mean that other block sizes will not work. Instead, like many other parameters, this is the safest choice.

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• Recommended learning path?

  - by stairmast0r

  First, my current standing: I know C++ at an.. advanced beginner level? I've gone through a book, I know the syntax well enough, I know a fair amount of standard library functions, and I've programmed some simple console stuff with it. I'd probably be able to program more with it if I knew how to structure a program, but I just can't seem to wrap my head around the whole concept of structuring something remotely complex. I've messed around with Java for a day or two, and the syntax was extremely easy to get the hang of, except that I didn't really know any functions. I'm plenty willing to learn, and to work hard to do so, but I don't really know where to go from here. Now, at the risk of sounding cliche, what I'd like to become is someone like the great three of id; Carmack, Romero, and Abrash. To be considered a genius. I believe anything can be learned, and nothing mentally limits anyone except lack of desire to learn. But I don't know how to learn this. They learned by doing, and making do with what resources they had. On the other hand, I have access to almost any books I want, access to the internet, and access to a more than capable computer and software. Should I learn more languages? Assembly? LISP? BASIC? Haskell? Should I dive straight into advanced topics like OpenGL? Or should I wait until I feel I've come closer to mastering the simpler things, like console programs, first? Should I follow tutorials? Should I follow books? Should I just dive into writing something and follow a reference manual as I go? What order should I do all this in? How should I do it? I want to completely master this; to be considered a genius. The most perfect career I can imagine is to start the next id. I have the drive to do it, I just don't know where to begin...

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• Varnish 3.0.2 and ISPConfig 3.0.4

  - by Warren Bullock III

  I followed the tutorial The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 11.10 [ISPConfig 3] here. I'm running an Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) server with 1024 RAM on Rackspace. I've gone through and updated to ISPConfig 3.0.4. Everything has been working great up to now when I decided to try and install Varnish. Initially I did an install of Varnish by issuing: apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get install varnish Apparently the version that was installed was Varnish 2.x so I went back and added the repositories for packages provided by varnish-cache.org curl http://repo.varnish-cache.org/debian/GPG-key.txt | apt-key add - echo "deb http://repo.varnish-cache.org/ubuntu/ lucid varnish-3.0" >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get install varnish This updated my version of Varnish to 3.0.2 I then proceeded to make the following changes: vim /etc/default/varnish change DAEMON_OPTS to port 80: vim /etc/apache2/ports.conf NameVirtualHost *:8000 Listen 8000 vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default <VirtualHost *:8000> vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/ispconfig.vhost Listen 8080 NameVirtualHost *:8080 <VirtualHost _default_:8080> I then proceeded to set my other vhosts to use 8000 (the apache2 port) so with all this set I reset both Apache2 and Varnish to test. I used Firebug in Firefox 11.0 The output from what I see doesn't seem to indicate that Varnish is working completely correct: First of all I see: X-Varnish 1644834493 but I've heard that unless you have two timestamps side by side than it's probably not working correctly so for example I was thinking I might see something like: X-Varnish 1644834493 1644837493 Also if I noticed this in the output which seems to be inconstant: X-Drupal-Cache MISS There are times when it will say HIT as well.... So the question here that I have is I think Varnish is partially working, however, why don't I see two timestamps on X-Varnish like I'm thinking I should and does the output of the screenshot I have look correct? If Varnish isn't working can someone tell me what I might being doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

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• How do I configure freeSSHd on Windows Server 2008 so I can log in using ssh?

  - by Daryl Spitzer

  I've installed freeSSHd on a Windows Server 2008 box (following the instructions in How to install an SSH Server in Windows Server 2008), including: created a user named "dspitzer" with NTLM authorization opened an exception for port 22 in the Windows Firewall But when I try to connect (from a Mac OS X 10.5.8 command-line), I get permission denied after entering the password: $ ssh 12.34.56.78 [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Received disconnect from 12.34.56.78: 2: Too many attempts. I've also tried: $ ssh [email protected] [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Received disconnect from 12.34.56.78: 2: Too many attempts. I've also tried changing the authorization to "Password stored as SHA1 hash" and entering a simple password, but I get the same problem. And I've tried a different user name ("Administrator") with no luck. I've confirmed that I am connecting to the server I'm configuring—if I stop freeSSHd and try to connect I get: $ ssh 12.34.56.78 ssh: connect to host 12.34.56.78 port 22: Operation timed out I get the exact same results from a Linux command-line. Any advice or troubleshooting tips? Update: I tried disabling the firewall (in response to geeklin's comment) and it made no difference. Update #2: I no longer have this machine (I've changed employers), so I have no way of verifying the answers. I guess all I can do is make this question "community wiki".

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• How do I configure freeSSHd on Windows Server 2008 so I can log in using ssh?

  - by Daryl Spitzer

  I've installed freeSSHd on a Windows Server 2008 box (following the instructions in How to install an SSH Server in Windows Server 2008), including: created a user named "dspitzer" with NTLM authorization opened an exception for port 22 in the Windows Firewall But when I try to connect (from a Mac OS X 10.5.8 command-line), I get permission denied after entering the password: $ ssh 12.34.56.78 [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Received disconnect from 12.34.56.78: 2: Too many attempts. I've also tried: $ ssh [email protected] [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Permission denied, please try again. [email protected]'s password: Received disconnect from 12.34.56.78: 2: Too many attempts. I've also tried changing the authorization to "Password stored as SHA1 hash" and entering a simple password, but I get the same problem. And I've tried a different user name ("Administrator") with no luck. I've confirmed that I am connecting to the server I'm configuring—if I stop freeSSHd and try to connect I get: $ ssh 12.34.56.78 ssh: connect to host 12.34.56.78 port 22: Operation timed out I get the exact same results from a Linux command-line. Any advice or troubleshooting tips? Update: I tried disabling the firewall (in response to geeklin's comment) and it made no difference. Update #2: I no longer have this machine (I've changed employers), so I have no way of verifying the answers. I guess all I can do is make this question "community wiki".

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• Convert Custom Firefox Setup to Firefox Portable?

  - by dfree

  I have a pretty awesome firefox set up and spent a lot of time getting it perfect. Is there any way that anyone knows about to convert the entire configuration to portable? Programs like MozBackup are great for backing up the complete set up, but you can't restore a Firefox profile to Firefox portable (maybe there is a workaround to fake it out? or possibly another method?) In case anyone is interested here is the gist of the best add-ons I've found: Autopager (scroll down google and other multi page results without clicking next) Coral IE Tab (IE in firefox - in case a website 'insists' that you use IE) Cyber search (search google straight from the address bar - VERY HELPFUL) Download StatusBar (display progress of downloads in the bottom of ff - no annoying popups FireFTP (erases need for an external FTP client - opens in a tab) Gmail manager (if you use multiple gmail accounts) Session Manager (saving multiple sessions of tabs - ff session recover) Surf Canyon (pull relevant stuff out of the depths of search results - even from craigslist Tab Mix Plus (ESSENTIAL - tab behavior customization - have multiple rows of tabs I also have it set up so you can type 'g test' in the address bar and ff will pull up the google results for 'test'. Similarly have it set up for guitar tabs (tab), facebook (f), wikipedia (w), google maps from my house (gmhome), torrents (tor), ticketmaster (t), rotten tomatoes (rt), craiglist (c) plus about 20 other sites.

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• Windows 7 XP Mode disable time sync

  - by Oskar Duveborn

  So I've tried the trick from Virtual PC 2007, adding the following section to the vmc configuration file: <components> <host_time_sync> <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled> </host_time_sync> </components> Later someone suggested VPC doesn't want the components level so added this instead: <host_time_sync> <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled> <frequency type="integer">15</frequency> <threshold type="integer">10</threshold> </host_time_sync> When I start up XP Mode (Microsoft Virtual PC) it completely ignores any of these two configuration changes and if I change the clock it's instantly reset to the host time again. I've also obviously disabled the Windows Time service but as it's not joined to a domain or set up with a source it shouldn't be involved anyway. I need to test an application over a few midnight passes and thought the XP Mode machine would be perfect, so I didn't have to mess with my workstation clock... is there any way to get the VPC guest to not sync time with the host? This is easy in Hyper-V ;p

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• PDF Converter wanted: Convert 8.5*11 PDF images into 600*800px PDF images for the Nook

  - by Astro

  I have PDF files that are maritime charts, For example this one from the Delaware Bay http://ocsdata.ncd.noaa.gov/BookletChart/12304_BookletChart_HomeEd.pdf There is a lot of detailed information in the image. When I show them on a monitor the details are shown. When I put them on the Nook they are sized to fit the Nook screen (about 3*5) and all the details are lost. Since the Nook pdf reader does not have a zoom feature, the charts are unreadable. I'd like to convert them to fit on the Nook screen(600*800px). This means the images would need to be sliced into multiple images. (ie a single image (page) would get split into 5 rows and 4 columns) In a perfect world they would get converted with a slight overlap, left to right, top to bottom. I could then page through the smaller slices to find the section I need. I had used PaperCrop in the past to convert two col PDF's (highly recommended) but it can't do anything with the images. ImageMagick does a lot with combining images, but I didn't see any split options to split the image into tiles. Windows program preferred. Thanks!

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• Howto make a diff of a bios or backup/ restore all bios settings

  - by sfonck

  Hi, I'm using an Dell M90 Precision Laptop which has a NVidia Quadro FX 2500M graphics card and is running Windows XP. Laptop has been running fine - but a few weeks ago screen went 'white' - restarted computer- bios and startup screens show weird green dots and stripes, normal startup only shows a black screen... only VGA mode works to display something. I've been trying to remove and reinstall the correct drivers downloaded from Dell's website - no solution. I gave up and reinstalled XP - everything was working perfect again. 2 weeks later - again the white screen - tried everything again (flashin new bios also - nothing works) Reinstalled XP - everyhting was working again, so I made a DriveSnapShot of the partition. Today - again the 'white screen'. Ok, no problem ...I was thinking all I needed to do was to restore the DriveSnapShot backup... Few minutes later the backup is restored ... but guess what: video driver does not work correctly... As the DriveSnapShot restored the complete partition, as it was at the time everything was working perfectly, this would mean my driver problems are due to 'settings' in the bios or on the graphics-card itself + these 'settings' can get overridden by doing a new XP-install.... I'm out of options, can somebody help me to find a solution for this problem: Is there some way to backup and restore a bios after seeing some problems? Is there some way to know what is causing this problem like a bios diff utility? Thanks!

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• Avoiding DNS timeouts when a dns server fails

  - by user65124

  Hi there. We have a small datacenter with about a hundred hosts pointing to 3 internal dns servers (bind 9). Our problem comes when one of the internal dns servers becomes unavailable. At that point all the clients that point to that server start performing very slowly. The problem seems to be that the stock linux resolver doesn't really have the concept of "failing over" to a different dns server. You can adjust the timeout and number of retries it uses, (and set rotate so it will work through the list), but no matter what settings one uses our services perform much more slowly if a primary dns server becomes unavailable. At the moment this is one of the largest sources of service disruptions for us. My ideal answer would be something like "RTFM: tweak /etc/resolv.conf like this...", but if that's an option I haven't seen it. I was wondering how other folks handled this issue? I can see 3 possible types of solutions: Use linux-ha/Pacemaker and failover ips (so the dns IP VIPs are "always" available). Alas, we don't have a good fencing infrastructure, and without fencing pacemaker doesn't work very well (in my experience Pacemaker lowers availability without fencing). Run a local dns server on each node, and have resolv.conf point to localhost. This would work, but it would give us a lot more services to monitor and manage. Run a local cache on each node. Folks seem to consider nscd "broken", but dnrd seems to have the right feature set: it marks dns servers as up or down, and won't use 'down' dns servers. Any-casting seems to work only at the ip routing level, and depends on route updates for server failure. Multi-casting seemed like it would be a perfect answer, but bind does not support broadcasting or multi-casting, and the docs I could find seem to suggest that multicast dns is more aimed at service discovery and auto-configuration rather than regular dns resolving. Am I missing an obvious solution?

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• Is there any way to tweak / rotate mouse orientation? Any applications? Registry edits?

  - by calbar

  I've got a very frustrating issue with my new Logitech Marathon Mouse M705. It is absolutely perfect for what I need, with the exception that it tracks on an angle for some reason. What I mean is when you slide the cursor to the left, it trends upward - when you slide to the right, it trends down. Moving the cursor along a flat horizontal line is no longer a natural motion - you need to fight what I suspect is a mechanical error of some kind. Unfortunately, I've already exchanged this mouse once and tested both on different Windows 7 and Mac OS machines - the problem continues to occur. So is there a software solution for me? I'm incredibly surprised there is no simple way to adjust the orientation... How can every mouse manufacturer possibly adjust their hardware to track to everyone's tastes? What about those who need to flip orientation a full 90 or 180 degrees? I only need to adjust mine a few degrees, but I'm sure that need has arisen as well. Anyway, I'm running the latest SetPoint drivers (6.00) on Windows 7 and there are no orientation options available. I've checked out uberOptions (http://uberoptions.net/) and the M705 isn't supported yet (with the last version update over 6 months ago). MAF Mouse (http://www.maf-soft.de/mafmouse/) instructions are a very strange series of mouse clicks to activate? This app also seems a little overkill and costs $$ (which I'm willing to pay as a last resort). Is there no universal registry value for mouse orientation? How about for SetPoint drivers specifically? I've done a simple search in regedit without any luck. An XML file somewhere? Anything?? Thanks a million for any help - it's driving me nuts!

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