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• Managing a difficult manager

  - by griegs

  I have a situation here at work. We are redeveloping our basic architecture across the entire company. Currently we have the following hierarchy; SQL Database <= Stored Procs not allowed. nHibernate Classes to convert nHibernate into our own objects Web Service <= for all external and [internal] calls. Class to take objects from Web Service and back into our own objects and then… Normal nTier application architecture such as Data Transformation Layer, Business layer etc. Within the database, when we are writing a hierarchy of objects to the database, say for example; Order Person Details Address Product Other We need to serialise the object and save it, in its entirety, to an image field in a table. No attempt has been made to store the objects in their own tables so that we can do useful stuff like report on it. This is an architecture that was implemented [way] before I started and as you can probably appreciate, is a complete nightmare not to mention slow as a wet weekend. We’re not even allowed to have stored procs within SQL server because in my boss’s last job they had a hundred or so and he had a problem identifying them all so therefore all stored procs are the devil. Now the same person that developed the above architecture has developed the new one. It came as no surprise that he’s essentially used the same framework only now it’s using DotNet 3.5 with interfaces and generics. We still have to go through web services, still need to serialise (everything), still not allowed to use stored procs etc. In fact, we’re only barely able to bang two rocks together here. He says to us that the framework is open for discussion but when you discuss it, unless you approve of his design, you are told flatly “No”. He simply won’t listen to any other suggestions. Even when you show him demo applications of his proposed architecture v’s yours and he can see the speed difference, he still won’t take that on board. So I guess my question is, and I know others have experienced the same things out there, how do I get through to someone like this? How do you convince someone to ditch Web Services for internal calls and applications? How do you demonstrate, and make it stick, that stored procs are a better way to go than ad-hoc sql statements? This is killing me. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past and I certainly don’t want to write code that I know is going to be slow and cumbersome. Help!

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• What am I missing about WCF?

  - by Bigtoe

  I've been developing in MS technologies for longer than I care to remember at this stage. When .NET arrived on the scene I thought they hit the nail on the head and with each iteration and version I thought their technologies were getting stronger and stronger and looked forward to each release. However, having had to work with WCF for the last year I must say I found the technology very difficult to work with and understand. Initially it's quite appealing but when you start getting into the guts of it, configuration is a nightmare, having to override behaviours for message sizes, number of objects contained in a messages, the complexity of the security model, disposing of proxies when faulted and finally moving back to defining interfaces in code rather than in XML. It just does not work out of the box and I think it should. We found all of the above issues while either testing ourselves or else when our products were out on site. I do understand the rationale behind it all, but surely they could have come up with simpler implementation mechanism. I suppose what I'm asking is, Am I looking at WCF the wrong way? What strengths does it have over the alternatives? Under what circumstances should I choose to use WCF? OK Folks, Sorry about the delay in responding, work does have a nasty habbit of get in the way somethimes :) Some clarifications My main paint point with WCF I suppose falls down into the following areas While it does work out of the box, your left with some major surprises under the hood. As pointed out above basic things are restricted until they are overridden Size of string than can be passed can't be over 8K Number of objects that can be passed in a single message is restricted Proxies not automatically recovering from failures The amount of configuration while it's there is a good thing, but understanding it all and what to use what and under which circumstances can be difficult to understand. Especially when deploying software on site with different security requirements etc. When talking about configuration, we've had to hide lots of ours in a back-end database because security and network people on-site were trying to change things in configuration files without understanding it. Keeping the configuration of the interfaces in code rather than moving to explicitly defined interfaces in XML, which can be published and consumed by almost anything. I know we can export the XML from the assembley, but it's full of rubbish and certain code generators choke on it. I know the world moves on, I've moved on a number of times over the last (ahem 22 years I've been developing) and am actively using WCF, so don't get me wrong, I do understand what it's for and where it's heading. I just think there should be simplier configuration/deployment options available, easier set-up and better management for configuration (SQL config provider maybe, rahter than just the web.config/app.config files). OK, back to the daily grid. Thanks for all your replies so far. Kind Regards Noel

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• Suggestions for designing large-scale Java webapp from the group up

  - by Chris Thompson

  Hi all, I'm about to start developing a large-scale system and I'm struggling with which direction to proceed. I've done plenty of Java web apps before and I have plenty of experience with servlet containers and GWT and some experience with Spring. The problem is most of my webapps have been thrown together just to be a proof of concept and what I'm struggling with is what set of frameworks to use. I need to have both a browser based application as well as a web service designed to support access from mobile devices (Android and iPhone for now). Ideally, I'd like to design this system in such a way that I don't end up rewriting all of my servlets for each client (browser and phone) although I don't mind having some small checks in there to properly format the data. In addition, although I'm the only developer now, that won't necessarily be the case down the road and I'd like to design something that scales well both with regards to traffic and number of developers (isn't just a nightmare to maintain). So where I am now is planning on using GWT to design the browser-based interface but I'm struggling with how to reuse that code with to present the interface (most likely xml) for the mobile devices. Using GWT RPC would, I think, make it relatively easy to do all of the AJAX in the browser, but might make generating xml for the mobile phones difficult. In addition, I like the idea of using something like Hibernate for persistence and Spring Security to secure the whole thing. Again, I'm not sure how well those will cooperate with GWT (I think Hibernate should be fine...) There's obviously a lot more to this than I've presented here, but I've tried to give you the 5-minute overview. I'm a bit stumped and was wondering if anybody in the community had any experience starting from this place. Does what I'm trying to do make sense? Is it realistic? I have no doubt I can make all of these frameworks speak the same language, I'm just wondering if it's worth my time to fight with them. Also, am I missing a framework that would be really beneficial? Thanks in advance and sorry for the relatively broad question... Chris

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• architecture python question

  - by tom smith

  hi. creating a distributed crawling python app. it consists of a master server, and associated client apps that will run on client servers. the purpose of the client app is to run across a targeted site, to extract specific data. the clients need to go "deep" within the site, behind multiple levels of forms, so each client is specifically geared towards a given site. each client app looks something like main: parse initial url call function level1 (data1) function level1 (data) parse the url, for data1 use the required xpath to get the dom elements call the next function call level2 (data) function level2 (data2) parse the url, for data2 use the required xpath to get the dom elements call the next function call level3 function level3 (dat3) parse the url, for data3 use the required xpath to get the dom elements call the next function call level4 function level4 (data) parse the url, for data4 use the required xpath to get the dom elements at the final function.. --all the data output, and eventually returned to the server --at this point the data has elements from each function... my question: given that the number of calls that is made to the child function by the current function varies, i'm trying to figure out the best approach. each function essentialy fetches a page of content, and then parses the page using a number of different XPath expressions, combined with different regex expressions depending on the site/page. if i run a client on a single box, as a sequential process, it'll take awhile, but the load on the box is rather small. i've thought of attempting to implement the child functions as threads from the current function, but that could be a nightmare, as well as quickly bring the "box" to its knees! i've thought of breaking the app up in a manner that would allow the master to essentially pass packets to the client boxes, in a way to allow each client/function to be run directly from the master. this process requires a bit of rewrite, but it has a number of advantages. a bunch of redundancy, and speed. it would detect if a section of the process was crashing and restart from that point. but not sure if it would be any faster... i'm writing the parsing scripts in python.. so... any thoughts/comments would be appreciated... i can get into a great deal more detail, but didn't want to bore anyone!! thanks! tom

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• Suggestions for designing large-scale Java webapp from the ground up

  - by Chris Thompson

  Hi all, I'm about to start developing a large-scale system and I'm struggling with which direction to proceed. I've done plenty of Java web apps before and I have plenty of experience with servlet containers and GWT and some experience with Spring. The problem is most of my webapps have been thrown together just to be a proof of concept and what I'm struggling with is what set of frameworks to use. I need to have both a browser based application as well as a web service designed to support access from mobile devices (Android and iPhone for now). Ideally, I'd like to design this system in such a way that I don't end up rewriting all of my servlets for each client (browser and phone) although I don't mind having some small checks in there to properly format the data. In addition, although I'm the only developer now, that won't necessarily be the case down the road and I'd like to design something that scales well both with regards to traffic and number of developers (isn't just a nightmare to maintain). So where I am now is planning on using GWT to design the browser-based interface but I'm struggling with how to reuse that code with to present the interface (most likely xml) for the mobile devices. Using GWT RPC would, I think, make it relatively easy to do all of the AJAX in the browser, but might make generating xml for the mobile phones difficult. In addition, I like the idea of using something like Hibernate for persistence and Spring Security to secure the whole thing. Again, I'm not sure how well those will cooperate with GWT (I think Hibernate should be fine...) There's obviously a lot more to this than I've presented here, but I've tried to give you the 5-minute overview. I'm a bit stumped and was wondering if anybody in the community had any experience starting from this place. Does what I'm trying to do make sense? Is it realistic? I have no doubt I can make all of these frameworks speak the same language, I'm just wondering if it's worth my time to fight with them. Also, am I missing a framework that would be really beneficial? Thanks in advance and sorry for the relatively broad question... Chris

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• Is Java assert broken?

  - by BlairHippo

  While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn't already know! A more efficient way for me to check the validity of input parameters! Yay learning! But then I took a closer look, and my enthusiasm was not so much "tempered" as "snuffed-out completely" by one simple fact: you can turn assertions off.* This sounds like a nightmare. If I'm asserting that I don't want the code to keep going if the input listOfStuff is null, why on earth would I want that assertion ignored? It sounds like if I'm debugging a piece of production code and suspect that listOfStuff may have been erroneously passed a null but don't see any logfile evidence of that assertion being triggered, I can't trust that listOfStuff actually got sent a valid value; I also have to account for the possibility that assertions may have been turned off entirely. And this assumes that I'm the one debugging the code. Somebody unfamiliar with assertions might see that and assume (quite reasonably) that if the assertion message doesn't appear in the log, listOfStuff couldn't be the problem. If your first encounter with assert was in the wild, would it even occur to you that it could be turned-off entirely? It's not like there's a command-line option that lets you disable try/catch blocks, after all. All of which brings me to my question (and this is a question, not an excuse for a rant! I promise!): What am I missing? Is there some nuance that renders Java's implementation of assert far more useful than I'm giving it credit for? Is the ability to enable/disable it from the command line actually incredibly valuable in some contexts? Am I misconceptualizing it somehow when I envision using it in production code in lieu of statements like if (listOfStuff == null) barf();? I just feel like there's something important here that I'm not getting. *Okay, technically speaking, they're actually off by default; you have to go out of your way to turn them on. But still, you can knock them out entirely.

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• Middleware with generic communication media layer

  - by Tom

  Greetings all, I'm trying to implement middleware (driver) for an embedded device with generic communication media layer. Not sure what is the best way to do it so I'm seeking an advice from more experienced stackoverflow users:). Basically we've got devices around the country communicating with our servers (or a pda/laptop in used in field). Usual form of communication is over TCP/IP, but could be also using usb, RF dongle, IR, etc. The plan is to have object corresponding with each of these devices, handling the proprietary protocol on one side and requests/responses from other internal systems on the other. The thing is how create something generic in between the media and the handling objects. I had a play around with the TCP dispatcher using boost.asio but trying to create something generic seems like a nightmare :). Anybody tried to do something like that? What is the best way how to do it? Example: Device connects to our Linux server. New middleware instance is created (on the server) which announces itself to one of the running services (details are not important). The service is responsible for making sure that device's time is synchronized. So it asks the middleware what is the device's time, driver translates it to device language (protocol) and sends the message, device responses and driver again translates it for the service. This might seem as a bit overkill for such a simple request but imagine there are more complex requests which the driver must translate, also there are several versions of the device which use different protocol, etc. but would use the same time sync service. The goal is to abstract the devices through the drivers to be able to use the same service to communicate with them. Another example: we find out that the remote communications with the device are down. So we send somebody out with PDA, he connects to the device using USB cable. Starts up the application which has the same functionality as the timesync service. Again middleware instance is created (on the PDA) to translate communication between application and the device this time only using USB/serial media not TCP/IP as in previous example. I hope it makes more sense now :) Cheers, Tom

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• Simplest way to flatten document to a view in RavenDB

  - by degorolls

  Given the following classes: public class Lookup { public string Code { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } public class DocA { public string Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public Lookup Currency { get; set; } } public class ViewA // Simply a flattened version of the doc { public string Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string CurrencyName { get; set; } // View just gets the name of the currency } I can create an index that allows client to query the view as follows: public class A_View : AbstractIndexCreationTask<DocA, ViewA> { public A_View() { Map = docs => from doc in docs select new ViewA { Id = doc.Id, Name = doc.Name, CurrencyName = doc.Currency.Name }; Reduce = results => from result in results group on new ViewA { Id = result.Id, Name = result.Name, CurrencyName = result.CurrencyName } into g select new ViewA { Id = g.Key.Id, Name = g.Key.Name, CurrencyName = g.Key.CurrencyName }; } } This certainly works and produces the desired result of a view with the data transformed to the structure required at the client application. However, it is unworkably verbose, will be a maintenance nightmare and is probably fairly inefficient with all the redundant object construction. Is there a simpler way of creating an index with the required structure (ViewA) given a collection of documents (DocA)? FURTHER INFORMATION The issue appears to be that in order to have the index hold the data in the transformed structure (ViewA), we have to do a Reduce. It appears that a Reduce must have both a GROUP ON and a SELECT in order to work as expected so the following are not valid: INVALID REDUCE CLAUSE 1: Reduce = results => from result in results group on new ViewA { Id = result.Id, Name = result.Name, CurrencyName = result.CurrencyName } into g select g.Key; This produces: System.InvalidOperationException: Variable initializer select must have a lambda expression with an object create expression Clearly we need to have the 'select new'. INVALID REDUCE CLAUSE 2: Reduce = results => from result in results select new ViewA { Id = result.Id, Name = result.Name, CurrencyName = result.CurrencyName }; This prduces: System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type 'ICSharpCode.NRefactory.Ast.IdentifierExpression' to type 'ICSharpCode.NRefactory.Ast.InvocationExpression'. Clearly, we also need to have the 'group on new'. Thanks for any assistance you can provide. (Note: removing the type (ViewA) from the constructor calls has no effect on the above)

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• how to design this relation in a DB schema

  - by raticulin

  I have a table Car in my db, one of the columns is purchaseDate. I want to be able to tag every car with a number of Policies (limited to 10 policies). Each policy has a time to life (ttl, a duration of time, like '5 years', '10 months' etc), that is, for how long since the car's purchaseDate the policy can be applied. I need to perform the following actions: when inserting a Car, it will be set with a number of Policies (at least one is set) sometimes a Car will be updated to add/remove a Policy searches must be done taking into account date/policies, for example: 'select all cars that are not covered by any policy as of today' My current design is (pol0..pol9 are the policies): CREATE TABLE Car ( id int NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1), purchaseDate datetime NOT NULL, //more stuff... pol0 smallint default NULL, pol1 smallint default NULL, pol2 smallint default NULL, pol3 smallint default NULL, pol4 smallint default NULL, pol5 smallint default NULL, pol6 smallint default NULL, pol7 smallint default NULL, pol8 smallint default NULL, pol9 smallint default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) ) CREATE TABLE Policy ( id smallint NOT NULL, name varchar(50) collate Latin1_General_BIN NOT NULL, ttl varchar(100) collate Latin1_General_BIN NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) ) The problem I am facing is that the sql to perform the query above is a nightmare to write. As I don't know in which column each policy can be, so I have to check all columns for every policy etc etc. So I am wondering wether it is worth changing this. My questions are: The smallint as Policy id was chosen instead of an 'int IDENTITY' in order to save some space as there are going to be millions of Car records. It just adds complexity when creating a Policy as we must handle the id etc. Was it worth doing this? I am thinking that maybe there is a much better design? Obviously we could move the policy/car relation to its own table CarPolicy, benefits would be: no limit on 10 policies per car adding/removing etc much easier when only the default policy is applied (when no others are applied one called Default policy is applied), we could signal that by not having any entry in CarPolicy, now this is just done inserting the Default policy id in one of the columns. The cons are that we would need to change the DB, ORM classes etc. What would you recommend? Maybe there is another smart way to implement this that we are not aware without using the CarPolicy table?

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• HTML-like GUI Framework in Java

  - by wintermute

  I was recently brought onto a project where we are developing a lot GUI elements for BlackBerry devices. The standard RIM APIs are pretty basic, almost never do what is required and are difficult or impossible to extend, so we end up re-implementing chunks of it. Currently the code we have isn't super organized and factored so there are lots of little tricks that get implemented over and over again. I had a thought about how to aid development efforts on this platform and wanted to see if the community could tell me if I'm still sane or if I've gone totally nuts. By far, the biggest organizational problem I've run into is making sure that each screen is laid out properly with proper padding and such. The current approach is to manually keep track of padding like so: protected void sublayout(int width, int height) { final int padding = 5; int y = padding; int x = padding; layoutChild(_someChild, width - padding * 2, height / 3 - padding * 2); setPositionChild(_someChild, x, y); y += _someChild.getHeight() + padding; // Calculate where to start drawing next. /* ... snipped ... */ } As you can see, positioning elements on a screen is a nightmare due to the tedium. I have investigated other GUI frameworks but, for a variety of reasons, it is difficult to find one that suites our purposes. One potential solution that came to me is to create a GUI framework who's API resembles HTML/CSS. This would allow for things like padding, margins, borders and colours to be handled through a sort of CSS API while the content would be organized using the HTML part of the API. It might look something like this: public class OptionsScreen extends Document { public OptionsScreen() { // You would set the style (like CSS style) through the constructor. Div content = new Div(new Style(new Padding(5), Color.BLACK)); // Then build up a tree of elements which can each have their own style's. // Each element knows how to draw itself, but it doesn't have to worry about // manually handling things like padding. // content.addChild(new P("This is a paragraph", new Style(new Padding(), Color.RED))); Ul list = new Ul(); list.addChild(new Li("item 1")); list.addChild(new Li("item 2")); content.addChild(list); addChild(content); } } I can imagine this making it easier to customize the UI of our app (which is very important) with different fonts, colours and layouts. Does this idea belong on The Daily WTF or do you think there is some promise?

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• ajaxSubmit and Other Code. Can someone help me determine what this code is doing?

  - by Matt Dawdy

  I've inherited some code that I need to debug. It isn't working at present. My task is to get it to work. No other requirements have been given to me. No, this isn't homework, this is a maintenance nightmare job. ASP.Net (framework 3.5), C#, jQury 1.4.2. This project makes heavy use of jQuery and AJAX. There is a drop down on a page that, when an item is chosen, is supposed to add that item (it's a user) to an object in the database. To accomplish this, the previous programmer first, on page load, dynamically loads the entire page through AJAX. To do this, he's got 5 div's, and each one is loaded from a jquery call to a different full page in the website. Somehow, the HTML and BODY and all the other stuff is stripped out and the contents of the div are loaded with the content of the aspx page. Which seems incredibly wrong to me since it relies on the browser to magically strip out html, head, body, form tags and merge with the existing html head body form tags. Also, as the "content" page is returned as a string, the previous programmer has this code running on it before it is appended to the div: function CleanupResponseText(responseText, uniqueName) { responseText = responseText.replace("theForm.submit();", "SubmitSubForm(theForm, $(theForm).parent());"); responseText = responseText.replace(new RegExp("theForm", "g"), uniqueName); responseText = responseText.replace(new RegExp("doPostBack", "g"), "doPostBack" + uniqueName); return responseText; } When the dropdown itself fires it's onchange event, here is the code that gets fired: function SubmitSubForm(form, container) { //ShowLoading(container); $(form).ajaxSubmit( { url: $(form).attr("action"), success: function(responseText) { $(container).html(CleanupResponseText(responseText, form.id)); $("form", container).css("margin-top", "0").css("padding-top", "0"); //HideLoading(container); } } ); } This blows up in IE, with the message that "Microsoft JScript runtime error: Object doesn't support this property or method" -- which, I think, has to be that $(form).ajaxSubmit method doesn't exist. What is this code really trying to do? I am so turned around right now that I think my only option is to scrap everything and start over. But I'd rather not do that unless necessary. Is this code good? Is it working against .Net, and is that why we are having issues?

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• How do you select form elements in JQuery based upon an html table?

  - by Swoop

  I am working on some ASP.NET web forms which involves some dynamic generation, and I need to add some onClick helpers on the client side. I have a basic outline of something working, except for one huge problem. There are multiple HTML tables, each generated by a different ASP.NET web control. Each table can contain overlapping field names, which is causing a problem with my JQuery click event handlers. The click event handler is linking to unintended form fields in addition to the intended form field. I have provided a simplified sample version of the code below. This code is trying to set the value of textbox box1 when a particular radiobutton is selected in the table with id=thing1. Obviously, the jquery code will be triggered for the form fields in both tables. The tables are dynamically added to the webpage based upon different conditions. It is possible that no tables will be loaded, only 1 table, or both tables might load. In the future, other tables could be added. Each table comes from a different .net web control. Other than renaming the form fields to make sure they are unique across all user controls, is there a way to have JQuery act only on the intended form fields? In other words, could the table ID be incorporated into the JQuery code in a manner that does not become a nightmare to maintain later? <script> $(document).ready(function() { $("[id$=radio1_0]").click(function() { $("[id$=box1]").attr("value", ""); }); $("[id$=radio1_1]").click(function() { $("[id$=box1]").attr("value", "N/A"); }); </script> <table id="thing1"> <tr><td> <radiobuttonlist id="radio1"/> <listitem>yes</listitem> <listitem>no</listitem> </td></tr> <tr><td> <textbox id="box1"/> </td></tr> </table> <table id="thing2"> <tr><td> <radiobuttonlist id="radio1"/> <listitem>yes</listitem> <listitem>no</listitem> </td></tr> <tr><td> <textbox id="box1"/> </tr></td> </table>

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• MySQL Split Time Ranges into Smaller Chunks

  - by Neren

  Hello all, I've recently been tasked with finishing a PHP/MySQL web app when the developer quit last week. I'm no MySQL expert, so I apologize if this is an intensely simple question. I've searched SO for the better part of two days trying to find a relatively easy solution to my problem, which is as follows. Problem in a Nutshell: I have a MySQL table full of start and end datetime (GMT -5) & UNIX Timestamp values covering durations of irregular length and need to break/split/divide them into more-regular time chunks (5 minutes). I'm not after a count of row entries per time chunk/bucket/period, if that makes any sense. Data Example: started, ended, started_UNIX, ended_UNIX 2010-10-25 15:12:33, 2010-10-25 15:47:09, 1288033953, 1288036029 What I'm hoping to get: 2010-10-25 15:12:33, 2010-10-25 15:15:00, 1288033953, 1288037700 2010-10-25 15:15:00, 2010-10-25 15:20:00, 1288037700, 1288038000 2010-10-25 15:20:00, 2010-10-25 15:25:00, 1288038000, 1288038300 2010-10-25 15:25:00, 2010-10-25 15:30:00, 1288038300, 1288038600 2010-10-25 15:30:00, 2010-10-25 15:35:00, 1288038600, 1288038900 2010-10-25 15:35:00, 2010-10-25 15:40:00, 1288038900, 1288039200 2010-10-25 15:40:00, 2010-10-25 15:45:00, 1288039200, 1288039500 2010-10-25 15:45:00, 2010-10-25 15:47:09, 1288039500, 1288039629 If you're interested, here's the quick & dirty on the app and why I need the data: App overview: The application receives very simple POST requests generated by a basic sensor device when its input pins go to ground, which submits an INSERT query to the database where MySQL records a timestamp (as started). When the input pins return from a grounded state, the device submits a different POST request, which causes the PHP app to submit an UPDATE query, where a modification time timestamp is inserted (as ended). My employer recently changed the periodic reporting unit of measure from Seconds "On" Per Day to Seconds "On" Per 5 Minute Interval. I had formulated what I thought would be a workable solution, but when I looked at it on paper, it looked like Rube Goldberg's nightmare constructed in MySQL, so that was out. Any suggestions as to how to break these spans into 5 minute blocks? Keeping it all in MySQL would be my preference, though I'll take any suggestions. Thank you for any suggestions you may have. Again, I apologize if this is a no-brainer. If I ask any additional questions of the SO collective consciousness in the future, I'll try to word them a bit better. Any help will be happily welcomed. Thanks, Neren

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• Multi domain rails app. How to intelligently use MVC?

  - by denial

  Background: We have app a, b, and plan to add more apps into this same application. The apps are similar enough they could share many views, assets, and actions. Currently a,b live in a single rails app(2.3.10). c will be similar enough that it could also be in this rails app. The problem: As we continue to add more apps to this one app, there's going to be too much case logic that the app will soon become a nightmare to maintain. There will also be potential namespace issues. However, the apps are very similar in function and layout, it also makes sense to keep them in one app so that it's one app to maintain(since roughly 50% of site look/functionality will be shared). What we are trying to do is keep this as clean as possible so it's easy for multiple teams to work on and easy to maintain. Some things we've thought about/are trying: Engines. Make each app an engine. This would let us base routes on the domain. It also allows us to pull out controllers, models and views for the specific app. This solution does not seem ideal as we won't be reusing the apps any time soon. And explicitly stating the host in the routes doesn't seem right. Skinning/themes. The auth logic would be different between the apps. Each user model would be different. So it's not just a skinning problem. In app/view add folder sitea for sitea views, siteb for siteb views and so on. Do the same for controllers and models. This is still pretty messy and since it didn't follow naming conventions, it did not work with rails so nicely and made much of the code messier. Making another rails app. We just didn't want to maintain the same controller or view in 2 apps if they are identical. What we want to do is make the app intelligently use a controller based on the host. So there would be a sessions controller for each app, and perhaps some parent session controller for shared logic(not needed now). In each of these session controllers, it handles authentication for that specific app. So if the domain is a.mysite.com, it would use session controller for app a and know to use app a's views,models,controllers. And if the domain is b.mysite, it would use the session controller for b. And there would be a user model for a and user model for b, which also would be determined by the domain. Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with this situation? And ideally using rails 2.3.x as updating to rails 3 isn't an option right now.

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• What alternatives do I have for source control and does GIT does that?

  - by RubberDuck

  I work as a freelancer programmer for some clients and also create apps for myself. When I work for myself, obviously I work alone. I generally don't work in a linear way. My big problems today are: I have a lot of apps that use the same classes I have developed; In the past, I put all these common classes on a directory outside all projects and included them on my apps using absolute paths, but this method sucks because by accident (if you forget) you may change a path or the disk and all projects are broken. Then I decided to copy those classes to my projects every time. Because the majority of these classes do not change frequently, I am relatively ok, but when they change, I am in hell; When I change one of these classes I have to propagate the changes to all other apps using copies of them. I have also tried to create frameworks but thanks to Apple, I cannot create frameworks for iOS and have to create libraries and bundles and create a nightmare of paths from one to the other and to the project to make that sh!t works. So, I am done with frameworks/libraries on Xcode until Xcode is a decent IDE. So, I see I need something better to manage my source code. What I need is this (I never used GIT on Xcode. I have read Apple docs but I still have these points): does git locally on Xcode allows me to deal with assets or just code? Can I have the equivalent of a "framework" (code + assets) managed by git locally? Can an entire xcodeproj be managed as a unity? I mean, Suppose I have a xcodeproj created and want GIT to manage it. How do I enable git on a project that was created without it and start designating files for management. (I have enabled git on Xcode's preferences, but all source control menu is grayed out). Is git the best option? Do I have another? Remember that my main condition is that the files should stay on the local computer. Please save me (I am a bit dramatic today). Thanks.

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• Achieving C# "readonly" behavior in C++

  - by Tommy Fisk

  Hi guys, this is my first question on stack overflow, so be gentle. Let me first explain the exact behavior I would like to see. If you are familiar with C# then you know that declaring a variable as "readonly" allows a programmer to assign some value to that variable exactly once. Further attempts to modify the variable will result in an error. What I am after: I want to make sure that any and all single-ton classes I define can be predictably instantiated exactly once in my program (more details at the bottom). My approach to realizing my goal is to use extern to declare a global reference to the single-ton (which I will later instantiate at a time I choose. What I have sort of looks like this, namespace Global { extern Singleton& mainInstance; // not defined yet, but it will be later! } int main() { // now that the program has started, go ahead and create the singleton object Singleton& Global::mainInstance = Singleton::GetInstance(); // invalid use of qualified name Global::mainInstance = Singleton::GetInstance(); // doesn't work either :( } class Singleton { /* Some details ommited */ public: Singleton& GetInstance() { static Singleton instance; // exists once for the whole program return instance; } } However this does not really work, and I don't know where to go from here. Some details about what I'm up against: I'm concerned about threading as I am working on code that will deal with game logic while communicating with several third-party processes and other processes I will create. Eventually I would have to implement some kind of synchronization so multiple threads could access the information in the Singleton class without worry. Because I don't know what kinds of optimizations I might like to do, or exactly what threading entails (never done a real project using it), I was thinking that being able to predictably control when Singletons were instantiated would be a Good Thing. Imagine if Process A creates Process B, where B contains several Singletons distributed against multiple files and/or libraries. It could be a real nightmare if I can not reliably ensure the order these singleton objects are instantiated (because they could depend on each other, and calling methods on a NULL object is generally a Bad Thing). If I were in C# I would just use the readonly keyword, but is there any way I can implement this (compiler supported) behavior in C++? Is this even a good idea? Thanks for any feedback.

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• How do I reset/update my BIOS for Optiplex GX280?

  - by Sam Langlhey

  So far this has been a nightmare for me, which has been frustrating me constantly. I am using Dell Optiplex GX280 with Windows XP home edition, which is running a BIOS version A04. Recently, i've rebooted the pc to find out that its not booting. It will get to the Windows boot up screen with the progress bar but only to restart to the same process again, over and over. Frustrated that I am, i've inserted the Windows recovery CD to at least either repair of reinstall the operating system to find out that was not possible. I hit F8 to have the boot options, each of the boot option that I've selected gave me an error saying: "Selected boot device is not available." Right after that, I went to the BIOS setting and did a diagnostic test, which recognized all the Boot devices onboard. Now, I cannot even repair of reinstall Windows XP, because the system is not booting from none of the boot devices. The surprise is when I removed the hard-drive from the computer and loaded it on into another computer successfully; that's right, there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. After that I was totally puzzled. I found a few pointers online saying that the BIOS start-up block might be corrupted itself and I might need to flash/update the BIOS. I found the detailed instruction on how to create a Boot up disk by downloading the BIOS firmware from the manufacture's website. I did exactly as instructed below: Download the latest version or your choose version of BIOS file for your computer or motherboard from the manufacturer’s support site. Rename the downloaded file to AMIBOOT.ROM. Copy the file to a floppy disk. Insert the floppy disk to the floppy drive. Turn on the system. After I did that and powered on the PC to boot from the floppy drive, it gave me this error message: "Non-System Disk or Disk Error. Replace and Strike any key when ready." I did all that, and I kept on pressing [Ctrl]+[Home] to force it, but it did not did any satisfying result. Desperate as I am, my next attempt is to try the instruction below. Since I want to be ready, in the event it does not work, do you have any solution that you can provide? Please keep in mind that I cannot boot from any of the devices at this moment. My only hope now is to come on with a solution that will work through the Floppy drive, since that's the only drive that affected. Thank you very much for your advice and support in advance. To create a Windows startup disk, insert a floppy disk into the drive of a similarly configured, working Windows XP system, launch My Computer, right-click the floppy disk icon, and select the Format command from the context menu. When you see the Format dialog box, leave all the default settings as they are and click the Start button. Once the format operation is complete, close the Format dialog box to return to My Computer, double-click the drive C icon to access the root directory, and copy the following three files to the floppy disk: Boot.ini NTLDR Ntdetect.com

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• What seems to be plaguing my hard drives?

  - by Craig

  In a little bit of a tech nightmare here. I know oodles about software, not so much more than the above average user about hardware. I recently had to toss an old desktop of mine. It was gradually getting slower and slower, and after shutting the desktop down for long periods of time, it would choke up upon startup. Sometimes it'd give a disk read error, sometimes say no OS was found, etc. Restarting it about 5-15 times would eventually boot properly. Weird. I also noticed that startup programs were going missing, Dropbox was reindexing my entire folder, and Backblaze was backing up less than the number of files that it should. This lead me to believe it was probably a hard drive issue. I began to wonder why I'd have hard drive issues, and came to closure when I assumed it was because of recent power surges and outages. I'm sure that does a number on the drive. I bought a new desktop recently. It's not a beast or anything, but it's enough for what I do. It's an eMachines (I know, I know) Ultra-Slim (http://www.amazon.com/eMachines-Ultra-Slim-ER1401-57-Desktop-PC/dp/B00475OG9U). This is ideal for me because it's small and portable. It comes with an AC adapter and battery, like a laptop. Just to be safe, I bought an uninterruptable power supply on top of that. It's basically protected completely from any outages that might scramble the drive. I set this up a few days ago and for the past few days I've been perfecting settings, downloading the usual applications, etc. Two days ago, I noticed Dropbox was reindexing my entire Dropbox folder. I installed both Dropbox and Backblaze on this system, but it is very much more lightweight than the other. Only about 15 third-party applications installed. I thought that maybe Dropbox and Backblaze were stressing my system, so I turned off Backblaze. Still, Dropbox runs and comes across this infinite reindex issue. I noticed that upon a reboot recently, two applications did not start on startup either. Also, much like my old desktop, every 3rd or 4th reboot, I'll be forced into a chkdsk. This makes me incredibly nervous. What could possibly be going wrong with my old, years-old desktop that is immediately causing the same issues to my new one? I've considered all of the basics. I'm in a very air conditioned room. I take run routine virus scans. I'd like to think I take care of my systems very well. What is this issue that is haunting me? There's always the possibility that this new desktop has a junk hard drive, but it just seems way too coincidental.

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• Share and Deliver BI Publisher Reports in Multiple Languages

  - by kanichiro.nishida

  When you share your reports with someone who speak and read in different languages you want your reports to be shown in their language, right ? Well, translating reports with BI Publisher is not only easy but also reduces the maintenance cost a lot. Many of us in the BI Publisher product development team used to work in Globalization and Multi Lingual support, which enables Oracle products and applications to be used in many different languages and countries and territories.  And we have a lot of experience in this area. In fact, being a strategic reporting platform for Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and many other Oracle application products, our customers from all over the world are generating thousands of thousands of reports, including out-of-the-box pre-developed reports from Oracle and customer created or customized reports, in their own local language everyday as they operate and manage their business. Today, I’m going to talk about this very topic, how to translate my reports with BI Publisher 11G. Translation Grows, not the Numbers of the Reports Most of the reporting tools, regardless if it’s traditional or new, always take this translation on the back burner. They require their users to copy an original report and translate the whole thing. So when you want to support additional10 languages you will need to have 10 copies of the original. Imagine when you have 50 reports then you will end up having 500 reports (50 x 10) ! Now you need to maintain these 500 reports, whenever you need to make a change in a report you need to apply the same change to the other 10 reports. And as you imagine this is not only a nightmare for IT managements but not acceptable especially for the applications like Oracle EBS that supports over 30 languages. So first thing we did was, very simple, we separated the translation out of the report and marry it to the report only at the report generation. This means, regardless of how many languages you need to support you need to have only one report and translation files for the 10 languages, which would contain the translated letters and words. So let’s say you have 50 reports and need to support 10 languages for those reports you still have only 50 reports and each report now has 10 language translation files. Yes, translation is the one should grow as you add more languages to support, not the report itself! And second, we provide the translation files in XLIFF format, which is an international standard XML based format to exchange and maintain translation strings. So once you generate the XLIFF files for your reports with BI Publisher then you can work with any translation vendors in the world to make a mass translation or you can translate the XML files by yourself by manually updating the translatable strings presented in this text file. Lastly, we made it easier to manage the translation process starting from generating the XLIFF files to uploading the translated XLIFF files back to the BI Publisher server. You can generate, download, upload the XLIFF files from the BI Publisher’s Web interface with your browser and you can see the translated reports right away without needing to shutdown or restart your server. While the translated reports are displayed based on your language preference setting you can also specify a different language when you schedule or deliver the reports so that they can be generated in your customer’s preferred language. What Can I Translate? When it comes to translation there are three things. First, report content translation. When you receive a report you like to see the content like report title, section title, comments, annotation, table column header, and anything that are static and embedded in the report. in your preferred language. We call this Reports Content translation. Second, when you open a report online you might want to see not only the report content being translated but also the report UI, such as report name, parameter name, layout name, and anything that would help you to navigate around the reports, to be translated in your language. We call this Reports UI translation. And this separation of the Reports Content and Reports UI translation makes it very useful especially when you want to navigate through the reports in your preferred language UI but want to generate the reports in your customer’s preferred language. Imagine you are English native speaker and need to generate and send a report to your customers in China. You like to see the report name, parameter name in English so that you can comfortably navigate to the report and generate the report output, but like to see the report generated in Chinese so that the your customers in China can understand the report when they receive it. And lastly, you might want to see even the data presented in the report to be translated. For example, you might want to see product names in an Order Status report to be translated based on the report viewer’s language preference. We call this Reporting Data translation. Since this Reporting Data translation is maintained at the data source level such as Database tables along with the main data, you need to prepare the translation at the data source level first. Then, you want to make sure that your query is switched accordingly based on the language preference setting so that the translated data will be retrieved. How to Translate BI Publisher Reports? Now when it comes to ‘how to translate BI Publisher reports?’ the main focus here is about the translation for the Report Content and Report UI. And I just created this video to show you how to create and manage the translation with BI Publisher 11G. Please take a look at the clip below.   In today’s business world, customers and suppliers are from all over the world regardless of the size of the company or organization. Supporting multiple languages for your reports is no longer something ‘nice to have’, it’s mandatory. BI Publisher is designed to support multi lingual reports from the beginning without any extra hidden cost of license or configuration like other reporting tools such as Crystal Reports. You can support additional languages translation at any time with the very simple steps shown in the video above. Happy translation! Please share your translation experience with us! 

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• CLR Version issues with CorBindRuntimeEx

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’m working on an older FoxPro application that’s using .NET Interop and this app loads its own copy of the .NET runtime through some of our own tools (wwDotNetBridge). This all works fine and it’s fairly straightforward to load and host the runtime and then make calls against it. I’m writing this up for myself mostly because I’ve been bitten by these issues repeatedly and spend 15 minutes each However, things get tricky when calling specific versions of the .NET runtime since .NET 4.0 has shipped. Basically we need to be able to support both .NET 2.0 and 4.0 and we’re currently doing it with the same assembly – a .NET 2.0 assembly that is the AppDomain entry point. This works as .NET 4.0 can easily host .NET 2.0 assemblies and the functionality in the 2.0 assembly provides all the features we need to call .NET 4.0 assemblies via Reflection. In wwDotnetBridge we provide a load flag that allows specification of the runtime version to use. Something like this: do wwDotNetBridge LOCAL loBridge as wwDotNetBridge loBridge = CreateObject("wwDotNetBridge","v4.0.30319") and this works just fine in most cases.  If I specify V4 internally that gets fixed up to a whole version number like “v4.0.30319” which is then actually used to host the .NET runtime. Specifically the ClrVersion setting is handled in this Win32 DLL code that handles loading the runtime for me: /// Starts up the CLR and creates a Default AppDomain DWORD WINAPI ClrLoad(char *ErrorMessage, DWORD *dwErrorSize) { if (spDefAppDomain) return 1; //Retrieve a pointer to the ICorRuntimeHost interface HRESULT hr = CorBindToRuntimeEx( ClrVersion, //Retrieve latest version by default L"wks", //Request a WorkStation build of the CLR STARTUP_LOADER_OPTIMIZATION_MULTI_DOMAIN | STARTUP_CONCURRENT_GC, CLSID_CorRuntimeHost, IID_ICorRuntimeHost, (void**)&spRuntimeHost ); if (FAILED(hr)) { *dwErrorSize = SetError(hr,ErrorMessage); return hr; } //Start the CLR hr = spRuntimeHost->Start(); if (FAILED(hr)) return hr; CComPtr<IUnknown> pUnk; WCHAR domainId[50]; swprintf(domainId,L"%s_%i",L"wwDotNetBridge",GetTickCount()); hr = spRuntimeHost->CreateDomain(domainId,NULL,&pUnk); hr = pUnk->QueryInterface(&spDefAppDomain.p); if (FAILED(hr)) return hr; return 1; } CorBindToRuntimeEx allows for a specific .NET version string to be supplied which is what I’m doing via an API call from the FoxPro code. The behavior of CorBindToRuntimeEx is a bit finicky however. The documentation states that NULL should load the latest version of the .NET runtime available on the machine – but it actually doesn’t. As far as I can see – regardless of runtime overrides even in the .config file – NULL will always load .NET 2.0 even if 4.0 is installed. <supportedRuntime> .config File Settings Things get even more unpredictable once you start adding runtime overrides into the application’s .config file. In my scenario working inside of Visual FoxPro this would be VFP9.exe.config in the FoxPro installation folder (not the current folder). If I have a specific runtime override in the .config file like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727" /> </startup> </configuration> Not surprisingly with this I can load a .NET 2.0  runtime, but I will not be able to load Version 4.0 of the .NET runtime even if I explicitly specify it in my call to ClrLoad. Worse I don’t get an error – it will just go ahead and hand me a V2 version of the runtime and assume that’s what I wanted. Yuck! However, if I set the supported runtime to V4 in the .config file: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0.30319" /> </startup> </configuration> Then I can load both V4 and V2 of the runtime. Specifying NULL however will STILL only give me V2 of the runtime. Again this seems pretty inconsistent. If you’re hosting runtimes make sure you check which version of the runtime is actually loading first to ensure you get the one you’re looking for. If the wrong version loads – say 2.0 and you want 4.0 - and you then proceed to load 4.0 assemblies they will all fail to load due to version mismatches. This is how all of this started – I had a bunch of assemblies that weren’t loading and it took a while to figure out that the host was running the wrong version of the CLR and therefore caused the assemblies loading to fail. Arrggh! <supportedRuntime> and Debugger Version <supportedRuntime> also affects the use of the .NET debugger when attached to the target application. Whichever runtime is specified in the key is the version of the debugger that fires up. This can have some interesting side effects. If you load a .NET 2.0 assembly but <supportedRuntime> points at V4.0 (or vice versa) the debugger will never fire because it can only debug in the appropriate runtime version. This has bitten me on several occasions where code runs just fine but the debugger will just breeze by breakpoints without notice. The default version for the debugger is the latest version installed on the system if <supportedRuntime> is not set. Summary Besides all the hassels, I’m thankful I can build a .NET 2.0 assembly and have it host .NET 4.0 and call .NET 4.0 code. This way we’re able to ship a single assembly that provides functionality that supports both .NET 2 and 4 without having to have separate DLLs for both which would be a deployment and update nightmare. The MSDN documentation does point at newer hosting API’s specifically for .NET 4.0 which are way more complicated and even less documented but that doesn’t help here because the runtime needs to be able to host both .NET 4.0 and 2.0. Not pleased about that – the new APIs look way more complex and of course they’re not available with older versions of the runtime installed which in our case makes them useless to me in this scenario where I have to support .NET 2.0 hosting (to provide greater ‘built-in’ platform support). Once you know the behavior above, it’s manageable. However, it’s quite easy to get tripped up here because there are multiple combinations that can really screw up behaviors.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET  FoxPro  

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• Premature-Optimization and Performance Anxiety

  - by James Michael Hare

  While writing my post analyzing the new .NET 4 ConcurrentDictionary class (here), I fell into one of the classic blunders that I myself always love to warn about.  After analyzing the differences of time between a Dictionary with locking versus the new ConcurrentDictionary class, I noted that the ConcurrentDictionary was faster with read-heavy multi-threaded operations.  Then, I made the classic blunder of thinking that because the original Dictionary with locking was faster for those write-heavy uses, it was the best choice for those types of tasks.  In short, I fell into the premature-optimization anti-pattern. Basically, the premature-optimization anti-pattern is when a developer is coding very early for a perceived (whether rightly-or-wrongly) performance gain and sacrificing good design and maintainability in the process.  At best, the performance gains are usually negligible and at worst, can either negatively impact performance, or can degrade maintainability so much that time to market suffers or the code becomes very fragile due to the complexity. Keep in mind the distinction above.  I'm not talking about valid performance decisions.  There are decisions one should make when designing and writing an application that are valid performance decisions.  Examples of this are knowing the best data structures for a given situation (Dictionary versus List, for example) and choosing performance algorithms (linear search vs. binary search).  But these in my mind are macro optimizations.  The error is not in deciding to use a better data structure or algorithm, the anti-pattern as stated above is when you attempt to over-optimize early on in such a way that it sacrifices maintainability. In my case, I was actually considering trading the safety and maintainability gains of the ConcurrentDictionary (no locking required) for a slight performance gain by using the Dictionary with locking.  This would have been a mistake as I would be trading maintainability (ConcurrentDictionary requires no locking which helps readability) and safety (ConcurrentDictionary is safe for iteration even while being modified and you don't risk the developer locking incorrectly) -- and I fell for it even when I knew to watch out for it.  I think in my case, and it may be true for others as well, a large part of it was due to the time I was trained as a developer.  I began college in in the 90s when C and C++ was king and hardware speed and memory were still relatively priceless commodities and not to be squandered.  In those days, using a long instead of a short could waste precious resources, and as such, we were taught to try to minimize space and favor performance.  This is why in many cases such early code-bases were very hard to maintain.  I don't know how many times I heard back then to avoid too many function calls because of the overhead -- and in fact just last year I heard a new hire in the company where I work declare that she didn't want to refactor a long method because of function call overhead.  Now back then, that may have been a valid concern, but with today's modern hardware even if you're calling a trivial method in an extremely tight loop (which chances are the JIT compiler would optimize anyway) the results of removing method calls to speed up performance are negligible for the great majority of applications.  Now, obviously, there are those coding applications where speed is absolutely king (for example drivers, computer games, operating systems) where such sacrifices may be made.  But I would strongly advice against such optimization because of it's cost.  Many folks that are performing an optimization think it's always a win-win.  That they're simply adding speed to the application, what could possibly be wrong with that?  What they don't realize is the cost of their choice.  For every piece of straight-forward code that you obfuscate with performance enhancements, you risk the introduction of bugs in the long term technical debt of the application.  It will become so fragile over time that maintenance will become a nightmare.  I've seen such applications in places I have worked.  There are times I've seen applications where the designer was so obsessed with performance that they even designed their own memory management system for their application to try to squeeze out every ounce of performance.  Unfortunately, the application stability often suffers as a result and it is very difficult for anyone other than the original designer to maintain. I've even seen this recently where I heard a C++ developer bemoaning that in VS2010 the iterators are about twice as slow as they used to be because Microsoft added range checking (probably as part of the 0x standard implementation).  To me this was almost a joke.  Twice as slow sounds bad, but it almost never as bad as you think -- especially if you're gaining safety.  The only time twice is really that much slower is when once was too slow to begin with.  Think about it.  2 minutes is slow as a response time because 1 minute is slow.  But if an iterator takes 1 microsecond to move one position and a new, safer iterator takes 2 microseconds, this is trivial!  The only way you'd ever really notice this would be in iterating a collection just for the sake of iterating (i.e. no other operations).  To my mind, the added safety makes the extra time worth it. Always favor safety and maintainability when you can.  I know it can be a hard habit to break, especially if you started out your career early or in a language such as C where they are very performance conscious.  But in reality, these type of micro-optimizations only end up hurting you in the long run. Remember the two laws of optimization.  I'm not sure where I first heard these, but they are so true: For beginners: Do not optimize. For experts: Do not optimize yet. This is so true.  If you're a beginner, resist the urge to optimize at all costs.  And if you are an expert, delay that decision.  As long as you have chosen the right data structures and algorithms for your task, your performance will probably be more than sufficient.  Chances are it will be network, database, or disk hits that will be your slow-down, not your code.  As they say, 98% of your code's bottleneck is in 2% of your code so premature-optimization may add maintenance and safety debt that won't have any measurable impact.  Instead, code for maintainability and safety, and then, and only then, when you find a true bottleneck, then you should go back and optimize further.

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• SQL University: What and why of database refactoring

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Tools of the trade This is a second part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at what database refactoring is and why do it. Why refactor a database To know why refactor we first have to know what refactoring actually is. Code refactoring is a process where we change module internals in a way that does not change that module’s input/output behavior. For successful refactoring there is one crucial thing we absolutely must have: Tests. Automated unit tests are the only guarantee we have that we haven’t broken the input/output behavior before refactoring. If you haven’t go back ad read my post on the matter. Then start writing them. Next thing you need is a code module. Those are views, UDFs and stored procedures. By having direct table access we can kiss fast and sweet refactoring good bye. One more point to have a database abstraction layer. And no, ORM’s don’t fall into that category. But also know that refactoring is NOT adding new functionality to your code. Many have fallen into this trap. Don’t be one of them and resist the lure of the dark side. And it’s a strong lure. We developers in general love to add new stuff to our code, but hate fixing our own mistakes or changing existing code for no apparent reason. To be a good refactorer one needs discipline and focus. Now we know that refactoring is all about changing inner workings of existing code. This can be due to performance optimizations, changing internal code workflows or some other reason. This is a typical black box scenario to the outside world. If we upgrade the car engine it still has to drive on the road (preferably faster) and not fly (no matter how cool that would be). Also be aware that white box tests will break when we refactor. What to refactor in a database Refactoring databases doesn’t happen that often but when it does it can include a lot of stuff. Let us look at a few common cases. Adding or removing database schema objects Adding, removing or changing table columns in any way, adding constraints, keys, etc… All of these can be counted as internal changes not visible to the data consumer. But each of these carries a potential input/output behavior change. Dropping a column can result in views not working anymore or stored procedure logic crashing. Adding a unique constraint shows duplicated data that shouldn’t exist. Foreign keys break a truncate table command executed from an application that runs once a month. All these scenarios are very real and can happen. With the proper database abstraction layer fully covered with black box tests we can make sure something like that does not happen (hopefully at all). Changing physical structures Physical structures include heaps, indexes and partitions. We can pretty much add or remove those without changing the data returned by the database. But the performance can be affected. So here we use our performance tests. We do have them, right? Just by adding a single index we can achieve orders of magnitude performance improvement. Won’t that make users happy? But what if that index causes our write operations to crawl to a stop. again we have to test this. There are a lot of things to think about and have tests for. Without tests we can’t do successful refactoring! Fixing bad code We all have some bad code in our systems. We usually refer to that code as code smell as they violate good coding practices. Examples of such code smells are SQL injection, use of SELECT *, scalar UDFs or cursors, etc… Each of those is huge code smell and can result in major code changes. Take SELECT * from example. If we remove a column from a table the client using that SELECT * statement won’t have a clue about that until it runs. Then it will gracefully crash and burn. Not to mention the widely unknown SELECT * view refresh problem that Tomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar on Twitter) and Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT on Twitter) talk about in detail. Go read about it, it’s informative. Refactoring this includes replacing the * with column names and most likely change to application using the database. Breaking apart huge stored procedures Have you ever seen seen a stored procedure that was 2000 lines long? I have. It’s not pretty. It hurts the eyes and sucks the will to live the next 10 minutes. They are a maintenance nightmare and turn into things no one dares to touch. I’m willing to bet that 100% of time they don’t have a single test on them. Large stored procedures (and functions) are a clear sign that they contain business logic. General opinion on good database coding practices says that business logic has no business in the database. That’s the applications part. Refactoring such behemoths requires writing lots of edge case tests for the stored procedure input/output behavior and then start to refactor it. First we split the logic inside into smaller parts like new stored procedures and UDFs. Those then get called from the master stored procedure. Once we’ve successfully modularized the database code it’s best to transfer that logic into the applications consuming it. This only leaves the stored procedure with common data manipulation logic. Of course this isn’t always possible so having a plethora of performance and behavior unit tests is absolutely necessary to confirm we’ve actually improved the codebase in some way.   Refactoring is not a popular chore amongst developers or managers. The former don’t like fixing old code, the latter can’t see the financial benefit. Remember how we talked about being lousy at estimating future costs in the previous post? But there comes a time when it must be done. Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas how to get started. In the last post of the series we’ll take a look at the tools to use and an example of testing and refactoring.

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• Finally, upgrade from Nokia X3 to Samsung Galaxy S III

  This time, something slightly different but nonetheless not less interesting, hopefully. Living on a remote island like Mauritius, ill-praised 'Cyber Island' in the Indian Ocean, has its advantages in life style and relaxed environment to life in but in terms of technological aspects it can be quite a nightmare. Well, I guess this might be different story to report about... one day. Cyber Island Mauritius Despite it's shiny advertisement as Cyber Island and business in ICT hub to Africa, Mauritius is not on the latest track of available models in computer hardware or, in the context of this article, cellulars or smart-phone, or communication technology in general. Okay, I have to admit that this statement is only partly true. Money can buy, even here in Mauritius. Luckily, there are ways and ways to deal with this outcry of modern, read: technological, civilisation issues. Online shopping you might think? Yes, for sure, until you discover in your checkout procedure that a small island in the Indian Ocean isn't a preferred destination for delivery and the precious time you spent on putting your items into your cart and feeding your personal level of anticipation gets ruined on the last stint. Ordering from abroad saves you money Anyway, I got in touch with my personal courier and luckily there were some extra-kilos left in the luggage. First obstacle sorted, we have a Transporter! Okay, on the next occasion off to Amazon online and using their Prime service for fast delivery. Actually, the order was placed on Saturday evening and everything got delivered on Tuesday morning - nice job in less than 72 hours. Okay, among the items of that shopping rush I ordered a shiny Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB in oceanic blue - did I mention, that you hardly get a blue model in Mauritius? - for my BWE. Interesting side-notes: First, Amazon Germany dropped the prices for roughly 30% on the S3, and we got the 16GB model for less than 500 Euro (or approx. Rs. 19.500,-) compared to the usual Rs. 27.000,- on the local market. It even varies whether the local price is inclusive or exclusive VAT (15%). Second, since a while she was bothering me to get an iPhone and an iPad for her, fair enough I thought, decent hardware, posh design and reliable services. Until we watched the 'magical' introduction of Samsung's new models at the IFA exhibition, she read the bashing comments on Google+ on the iPhone 5 and I gave her a brief summary on the law suit between Apple and Samsung in the USA. So, yes, Samsung USA is right, the next big thing is already here - literally. My BWE loves the look and touch of the Galaxy S3. And for me it was more cost-effective in terms of purchases done at the App Store, ups, Play Store. Transfer of contacts, text messages and media files Okay, now that the hardware is in place, how to transfer all those contacts, text messages, media files, etc. between those two devices? In the past, I used to use the Nokia Communication Suite between various models but now for Android? Well, as usual Google and Bing are reliable friends and among the first hits I came across an article about How to Transfer Contacts from Nokia to Android. Couldn't be easier, right? Well, sort of... my main Windows systems are already running on Windows 8, and this actually caused problems with the mobile/smart-phone device drivers. The article provides the download for an older version 1.10 which upgrades to 2.11 (as time of writing this entry) but both couldn't get the Galaxy S3 and the Nokia connected. Shame on me... the product page clearly doesn't mention Windows 8 (for now) and Windows 8 isn't available for the general audience at all... After I took a spare machine running on Windows Vista everything went smooth. Software installed, upgrade done, device drivers for Android automatically downloaded and installed, and the same painless routine for the Nokia part. I think, I rebooted the system twice during the whole setup procedure but hey, it was more or less a distraction while coding some stuff in ASP.NET MVC and Telerik Kendo UI. The transfer of contacts and text messages was done via Wondershare MobileGo for Android, and all media files by moving the additional microSD card from one device to the other. But even without an external SD card, it would have been very easy to copy the files via Windows Explorer directly. Little catch and excellent service Fine, we are almost done and the only step left is to shift the SIM card... Ouch, gotcha! The X3 uses a standard size SIM card while the S III only accepts microSIM form factor. What an irony, bigger smartphone needs smaller SIM card. Luckily, the next showroom of Emtel is just 5 mins away up the road, and the service staff over there know their job. Finally, after roughly 10 mins of paper work, activation and small chit-chat, the S3 came to life on the mobile network. Owning a smart-phone now and knowing that my BWE would like to interact more on social networks away from home, especially to upload pictures and provide local 'check-ins', I activated a data package for her in advance, too. Even that it is Saturday, everything was already done and ready to be used. Nice bonus: The Emtel clerk directly offered me to set up the configuration for the Emtel data services, yes sure, go ahead, this saves me to search for that in the settings. Okay, spoiler-alert here, setting a static APN to access the Emtel network and the internet wouldn't be a challenge. But hey, she already had the phone in her hands and I could keep my eyes on the children. Well done, Emtel! Resume Thanks to the useful software package by Wondershare is was a hands-free experience to transfer all the data from a Nokia mobile on Symbian S60 to a Samsung Galaxy S III on Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). In the future, this wont be a serious issue at all anymore thanks to synchronisation services and cloud storage. And for now, I'm only waiting for the official upgrades for Jelly Bean.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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• SQL Sentry First Impressions

  - by AjarnMark

  After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate. A couple of weeks ago, seemingly from out of nowhere, complaints from the business users started coming in that one of the core internal applications was running dramatically slower than normal, and fingers were being pointed at the SQL Server.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a production DBA whose entire job is to monitor and maintain our SQL Servers.  The responsibility falls to me to do the best I can, investing only a small portion of my time, because there are so many other responsibilities to take care of, and our industry is still deep in recession.  I inherited these SQL Servers and have made significant improvements in process and procedure, but I had not yet made the time to take real baseline measurements or keep a really close eye on the performance.  Like many DBAs, I wrote several of my own tools and used the “built-in tools” like Profiler, PerfMon, and sp_who2 (did I mention most of our instances are SQL Server 2000?).  These have all served me well for in-the-moment troubleshooting and maintenance, but they really fell down on the job when I was called upon to “prove” that SQL Server performance was acceptable and more importantly had not degraded recently (i.e. historical comparisons).  I really didn’t have anything from a historical comparison perspective, but I was able to show that current performance was acceptable, and deflect attention back onto other components (which in fact turned out to be the real culprit). That experience dramatically illustrated the need for better monitoring tools.  Coincidentally, I had been talking recently to my boss about the mini nightmare of monitoring several critical and interdependent overnight jobs that operate on separate instances of SQL Server.  Among other tools, I had been using Idera’s SQL Job Manager which is a free tool and did a nice job of showing me job schedules and histories in a nice calendar view.  This worked fairly well, and for the money (did I mention it was free?) it couldn’t be beat.  But it is based on the stored job history in MSDB, and there were other performance problems that we ran into when we started changing the settings for how much job history to retain, in order to be able to look back a month or more in the calendar view.  Another coincidence (if you believe in such things) was that when we had some of those performance challenges, I posted a couple of questions to the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter and Greg Gonzalez (@SQLSensei) suggested I check out SQL Sentry’s Event Manager.  At the time, I just thought he worked there, but later found out that he founded the company.  When I took a quick look at the features & benefits, the one that really jumped out at me is Chaining and Queueing which sounded like it would really help with our “interdependent jobs on different servers” issue. I know that is a lot of background story and coincidences, but hopefully you have stuck with me so far, and now we have arrived at the point where last week I downloaded and installed the 30-day trial of the SQL Sentry Power Suite, which is Event Manager plus Performance Advisor.  And I must say that I really like what I see so far.  Here are a few highlights: Great Support.  I had two issues getting the trial setup and monitoring a handful of our servers.  One of which was entirely my fault (missed a security setting in SQL 2008) and the other was mostly my fault (late change to some config settings that were apparently cached and did not get refreshed properly).  In both cases, the support staff at SQL Sentry were very responsive and rather quickly figured out what the cause and fix was for each of them.  This left me with a great impression of the company.  Kudos to them! Chaining and Queueing.  While I have not yet activated this feature, I am very excited about the possibilities.  We have jobs on three different instances of SQL Server that have to be run in a certain order, and each has to finish before the next can successfully begin, and I believe this feature will ensure just that.  It has been a real pain in the backside when one of those jobs runs just a little too long and does not finish before the job on another instance starts, thus triggering a chain reaction of either outright job failures, or worse, successful completion of completely invalid processing. Calendar View.  I really, really like the Event Manager calendar view where I can see all jobs and events across all instances and identify potential resource contention as well as windows of opportunity for maintenance activity.  Very well done, and based on Event Manager’s own database of accumulated historical information rather than querying the source instances every time. Performance Advisor Dashboard History View.  This view let’s me quickly select a date and time range and it displays graphs of key SQL Server and Windows metrics.  This is exactly the thing I needed to answer the “has performance changed recently” question at the beginning of this post. Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name.  This was a big and VERY pleasant surprise.  If you have ever looked at the list of SQL Server jobs that SQL Server Reporting Services creates when you make a Subscription, you will notice that they all have some sort of GUID as the name of the job.  This is really ugly, and really annoying because when you are just looking at the SQL Agent and Job Activity Monitor, if you see that Job X failed, you really do not have any indication in the name or the properties of the Job itself, as to what Report that was for.  But with SQL Sentry Event Manager you do.  The Jobs list in the Navigator pane in SQL Sentry, amazingly, displays the name of the Report that the Subscription Job is for.  And when you open it to see more details, it shows you the full Reporting Services path to that Report, so you can immediately track it down in the Report Manager in case you want to identify/notify the owner or edit the Subscription information.  I did not expect this at all, but I sure do like it.  HOORAY! That is just my first impressions from using the tools for a few days.  And I haven’t even gotten into how it showed me where I was completely mistaken about one aspect of my SQL Server disk configurations.  I’ll share that lesson in another blog entry.  But I have to say it again, the combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan.

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