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• iPhone SDK: Trying out 4.0

  - by dev

  I am thinking of buying a new iTouch to try out 4.0 multi-tasking. Can someone provide a link that describes how I get iPhone OS 4.0 on the device? Thanks in advance.

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• asp.net c# ToolTip with image inside of it

  - by Web Dev

  I currently have a hyperlink control as such: I am setting the logo text of it as such within my grid: HyperLink logoLink = (HyperLink)e.Item.FindControl("logoLink"); logoLink.Text = lblsub + ".gif"; What I like to do is that when a user clicks on the hyperlink, I like the gif file to show witin a tooltip. what is the easiest way of doint this? The image is in the Image folder so the path would be as such: Images/ + lblsub + ".gif"; Note that I am using ASP.NET C#. Thanks in advance

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• I have two list boxes(A,B) with some values and i can send values from A to B or B to A

  - by Dev

  I have two list boxes(A,B) with some values and i can send values from A to B or B to A and i have one save button. For the first time without updating any list box if i click on save button i am showing message like "NO changes or Done" But once i send one item from A to B and again sending that same item from B to A it means no changes or Done. here also i want to show same message "NO changes or Done" .but i am unable to fine the staus can any one pleasse give code or tips to find the default status for listboxs in javascript. Thanks

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• list boxes(A,B) with some duplicate values

  - by Dev

  I have two list boxes(A,B) with some duplicate values and i can send values from A to B or B to A using send button and i have one save button. For the first time without sending any list box if i click on save button i am showing message like "NO changes or Done" But once i send one item from A to B and again sending that same item from B to A it means no changes or Done. here also i want to show same message "NO changes or Done" .but i am unable to find the staus can any one pleasse give code or tips to find the default status for listboxs in javascript. Thanks

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• limiting a query to a specific item

  - by Dev-Ria

  I have a db with thousands of domains and data. I want to list only 100 rows of each domain. i can't use LIMIT 100 cause that only limits 100 records but I want dom1 to list 100 dom2 to list 100 dom3 to list 100 all in one query. This is what I have so far. SELECT domain COUNT(Key) AS DomCount FROM table_domain GROUP BY user,location ORDER BY domain,DomCount DESC Could I use a CASE?

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• how to get all objects of a given type in javascript

  - by FenchKiss Dev

  I want to retrieve all objects (not DOM elements) of a given type created with the "new" keyword. Is it possible ? function foo(name) { this.name = name; } var obj = new foo(); How can I retrieve a reference to all the foo objects ?

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• How to deal with 2 almost identical tables

  - by jgritty

  I have a table of baseball stats, something like this: CREATE TABLE batting_stats( ab INTEGER, pa INTEGER, r INTEGER, h INTEGER, hr INTEGER, rbi INTEGER, playerID INTEGER, FOREIGN KEY(playerID) REFERENCES player(playerID) ); But then I have a table of stats that are basically exactly the same, but for a team: CREATE TABLE team_batting_stats( ab INTEGER, pa INTEGER, r INTEGER, h INTEGER, hr INTEGER, rbi INTEGER, teamID INTEGER, FOREIGN KEY(teamID) REFERENCES team(teamID) ); My first instinct is to scrap the Foreign key and generalize the ID, but I still have a problem, I have these 2 tables, and they can't have overlapping IDs: CREATE TABLE player( playerID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, firstname TEXT, lastname TEXT, number INTEGER, teamID INTEGER, FOREIGN KEY(teamID) REFERENCES team(teamID) ); CREATE TABLE team( teamID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT, city TEXT, ); I feel like I'm overlooking something obvious that could solve this problem and reduce stats to a single table.

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• How to calculate paypal fees, 2.9% +0.30 doesn't work for some cases variable FEEAMT in checkout met

  - by dev-cu

  Hello to everyone, thanks for reading this. I am implementing paypal checkout in my website it is working but i want to make a simple fees calculator for paypal in order to help the user, i went to paypal and they said their fees amount is 2.9% +0.30 fixed, but it is not working for some cases, for example: deposit $1.34 2.9 % = $0.04 rounded + $0.30 = $0.34, so i should get $1 credited but paypal send in its response in the field FEEAMT which indicate the "PayPal fee amount charged for the transaction" 0.35, what i am doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

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• Is there a Generic USB TouchScreen Driver 12.04?

  - by lbjoum

  Is there a Generic USB TouchScreen Driver 12.04? Device 03eb:201c I've been looking for 4 days solid (not very skilled) and can't find a solution. I have a generic tablet: C97- Atom N2600 9.7" 2GB 32GB Bluetooth WiFi WebCam Ext.3G Windows 7 Tablet PC Using 12.04 and cannot find a driver. I installed android and the touchscreen works but still lots of other bugs. Oh well, stuck with Windows 7 and not happy about it. Will keep trying, but too much time wasted already. If you have a solution I would love to try it. ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0cf2:6238 ENE Technology, Inc. Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1a40:0101 Terminus Technology Inc. 4-Port HUB Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05e1:0100 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd 802.11g + Bluetooth Wireless Adapter Bus 001 Device 006: ID 090c:3731 Silicon Motion, Inc. - Taiwan (formerly Feiya Technology Corp.) Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03eb:201c Atmel Corp. at90usbkey sample firmware (HID mouse) (from Windows: HID\VID_03EB&PID_201C\6&5F38127&0&0000 USB\VID_03EB&PID_201C\5&193ADADC&1&2 ) Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0518:0001 EzKEY Corp. USB to PS2 Adaptor v1.09 Bus 001 Device 008: ID 192f:0916 Avago Technologies, Pte. ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lsusb -v Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03eb:201c Atmel Corp. at90usbkey sample firmware (HID mouse) Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 2.00 bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level) bDeviceSubClass 0 bDeviceProtocol 0 bMaxPacketSize0 32 idVendor 0x03eb Atmel Corp. idProduct 0x201c at90usbkey sample firmware (HID mouse) bcdDevice 45.a2 iManufacturer 1 CDT iProduct 2 9.75 iSerial 0 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 34 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0x00 (Missing must-be-set bit!) (Bus Powered) MaxPower 100mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 1 bInterfaceClass 3 Human Interface Device bInterfaceSubClass 0 No Subclass bInterfaceProtocol 0 None iInterface 0 HID Device Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 33 bcdHID 1.11 bCountryCode 0 Not supported bNumDescriptors 1 bDescriptorType 34 Report wDescriptorLength 177 Report Descriptors: ** UNAVAILABLE ** Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0020 1x 32 bytes bInterval 5 Device Status: 0x00fb Self Powered Remote Wakeup Enabled Debug Mode ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lshw ubuntu description: Notebook product: To be filled by O.E.M. (To be filled by O.E.M.) vendor: To be filled by O.E.M. version: To be filled by O.E.M. serial: To be filled by O.E.M. width: 32 bits capabilities: smbios-2.7 dmi-2.7 smp-1.4 smp configuration: boot=normal chassis=notebook cpus=2 family=To be filled by O.E.M. sku=To be filled by O.E.M. uuid=00020003-0004-0005-0006-000700080009 *-core description: Motherboard product: Tiger Hill vendor: INTEL Corporation physical id: 0 version: To be filled by O.E.M. serial: To be filled by O.E.M. slot: To be filled by O.E.M. *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: American Megatrends Inc. physical id: 0 version: 4.6.5 date: 08/24/2012 size: 64KiB capacity: 960KiB capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb biosbootspecification *-cpu:0 description: CPU product: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N2600 @ 1.60GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: 6.6.1 serial: 0003-0661-0000-0000-0000-0000 slot: CPU 1 size: 1600MHz capacity: 1600MHz width: 64 bits clock: 400MHz capabilities: x86-64 boot fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm arat configuration: cores=2 enabledcores=1 id=2 threads=2 *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 24KiB capacity: 24KiB capabilities: internal write-back unified *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2-Cache size: 512KiB capacity: 512KiB capabilities: internal varies unified *-logicalcpu:0 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.1 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:1 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.2 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:2 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.3 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:3 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.4 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 28 slot: System board or motherboard size: 2GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM [empty] product: [Empty] vendor: [Empty] physical id: 0 serial: [Empty] slot: DIMM0 *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 800 MHz (1.2 ns) vendor: 69 physical id: 1 serial: 00000210 slot: DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 800MHz (1.2ns) *-cpu:1 physical id: 1 bus info: cpu@1 version: 6.6.1 serial: 0003-0661-0000-0000-0000-0000 size: 1600MHz capabilities: ht configuration: id=2 *-logicalcpu:0 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.1 capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:1 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.2 capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:2 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.3 capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:3 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.4 capabilities: logical *-pci description: Host bridge product: Atom Processor D2xxx/N2xxx DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 03 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-display UNCLAIMED description: VGA compatible controller product: Atom Processor D2xxx/N2xxx Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:dfe00000-dfefffff ioport:f100(size=8) *-multimedia description: Audio device product: N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 02 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:42 memory:dff00000-dff03fff *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:2000(size=4096) memory:80000000-801fffff ioport:80200000(size=2097152) *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 ioport:f0a0(size=32) *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.1 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:f080(size=32) *-usb:2 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.2 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:18 ioport:f060(size=32) *-usb:3 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.3 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 ioport:f040(size=32) *-usb:4 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.7 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.7 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:dff05000-dff053ff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1e bus info: pci@0000:00:1e.0 version: e2 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci subtractive_decode bus_master cap_list *-isa description: ISA bridge product: NM10 Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: SATA controller product: N10/ICH7 Family SATA Controller [AHCI mode] vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 logical name: scsi0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list emulated configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:41 ioport:f0f0(size=8) ioport:f0e0(size=4) ioport:f0d0(size=8) ioport:f0c0(size=4) ioport:f020(size=16) memory:dff04000-dff043ff *-disk description: ATA Disk product: BIWIN SSD physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 1206 serial: 123403501060 size: 29GiB (32GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=8fbe402b *-volume:0 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 version: 3.1 serial: 249bde5d-8246-9a40-88c7-2d5e3bcaf692 size: 19GiB capacity: 19GiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-04-04 02:27:51 filesystem=ntfs state=clean *-volume:1 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 version: 3.1 serial: de12d40f-d5ca-8642-b306-acd9349fda1a size: 10231MiB capacity: 10GiB capabilities: primary ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-04-04 01:52:26 filesystem=ntfs state=clean *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: ioport:f000(size=32) *-scsi:0 physical id: 2 bus info: usb@1:1 logical name: scsi4 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb size: 29GiB (31GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: signature=00017463 *-volume description: Windows FAT volume vendor: mkdosfs physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sdb1 logical name: /cdrom version: FAT32 serial: 129b-4f87 size: 29GiB capacity: 29GiB capabilities: primary bootable fat initialized configuration: FATs=2 filesystem=fat mount.fstype=vfat mount.options=rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro state=mounted *-scsi:1 physical id: 3 bus info: usb@1:3.1 logical name: scsi6 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdc size: 7400MiB (7759MB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: signature=c3072e18 *-volume description: Windows FAT volume vendor: mkdosfs physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sdc1 logical name: /media/JOUM8G version: FAT32 serial: e676-9311 size: 7394MiB capacity: 7394MiB capabilities: primary bootable fat initialized configuration: FATs=2 filesystem=fat label=Android mount.fstype=vfat mount.options=rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=999,gid=999,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,errors=remount-ro state=mounted ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ xinput list ? Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ? ? Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? Plus More Enterprise LTD. USB-compliant keyboard id=10 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? USB Optical Mouse id=11 [slave pointer (2)] ? Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)] ? Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Plus More Enterprise LTD. USB-compliant keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)] ? USB 2.0 Webcam - Front id=12 [slave keyboard (3)] ? AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=13 [slave keyboard (3)] ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

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• That Escalated Quickly

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging  - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with  > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

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• Convert ddply {plyr} to Oracle R Enterprise, or use with Embedded R Execution

  - by Mark Hornick

  The plyr package contains a set of tools for partitioning a problem into smaller sub-problems that can be more easily processed. One function within {plyr} is ddply, which allows you to specify subsets of a data.frame and then apply a function to each subset. The result is gathered into a single data.frame. Such a capability is very convenient. The function ddply also has a parallel option that if TRUE, will apply the function in parallel, using the backend provided by foreach. This type of functionality is available through Oracle R Enterprise using the ore.groupApply function. In this blog post, we show a few examples from Sean Anderson's "A quick introduction to plyr" to illustrate the correpsonding functionality using ore.groupApply. To get started, we'll create a demo data set and load the plyr package. set.seed(1) d <- data.frame(year = rep(2000:2014, each = 3),         count = round(runif(45, 0, 20))) dim(d) library(plyr) This first example takes the data frame, partitions it by year, and calculates the coefficient of variation of the count, returning a data frame. # Example 1 res <- ddply(d, "year", function(x) {   mean.count <- mean(x$count)   sd.count <- sd(x$count)   cv <- sd.count/mean.count   data.frame(cv.count = cv)   }) To illustrate the equivalent functionality in Oracle R Enterprise, using embedded R execution, we use the ore.groupApply function on the same data, but pushed to the database, creating an ore.frame. The function ore.push creates a temporary table in the database, returning a proxy object, the ore.frame. D <- ore.push(d) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   mean.count <- mean(x$count)   sd.count <- sd(x$count)   cv <- sd.count/mean.count   data.frame(year=x$year[1], cv.count = cv)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, cv.count=1)) You'll notice the similarities in the first three arguments. With ore.groupApply, we augment the function to return the specific data.frame we want. We also specify the argument FUN.VALUE, which describes the resulting data.frame. From our previous blog posts, you may recall that by default, ore.groupApply returns an ore.list containing the results of each function invocation. To get a data.frame, we specify the structure of the result. The results in both cases are the same, however the ore.groupApply result is an ore.frame. In this case the data stays in the database until it's actually required. This can result in significant memory and time savings whe data is large. R> class(res) [1] "ore.frame" attr(,"package") [1] "OREbase" R> head(res)    year cv.count 1 2000 0.3984848 2 2001 0.6062178 3 2002 0.2309401 4 2003 0.5773503 5 2004 0.3069680 6 2005 0.3431743 To make the ore.groupApply execute in parallel, you can specify the argument parallel with either TRUE, to use default database parallelism, or to a specific number, which serves as a hint to the database as to how many parallel R engines should be used. The next ddply example uses the summarise function, which creates a new data.frame. In ore.groupApply, the year column is passed in with the data. Since no automatic creation of columns takes place, we explicitly set the year column in the data.frame result to the value of the first row, since all rows received by the function have the same year. # Example 2 ddply(d, "year", summarise, mean.count = mean(count)) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   mean.count <- mean(x$count)   data.frame(year=x$year[1], mean.count = mean.count)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, mean.count=1)) R> head(res)    year mean.count 1 2000 7.666667 2 2001 13.333333 3 2002 15.000000 4 2003 3.000000 5 2004 12.333333 6 2005 14.666667 Example 3 uses the transform function with ddply, which modifies the existing data.frame. With ore.groupApply, we again construct the data.frame explicilty, which is returned as an ore.frame. # Example 3 ddply(d, "year", transform, total.count = sum(count)) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   total.count <- sum(x$count)   data.frame(year=x$year[1], count=x$count, total.count = total.count)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, count=1, total.count=1)) > head(res)    year count total.count 1 2000 5 23 2 2000 7 23 3 2000 11 23 4 2001 18 40 5 2001 4 40 6 2001 18 40 In Example 4, the mutate function with ddply enables you to define new columns that build on columns just defined. Since the construction of the data.frame using ore.groupApply is explicit, you always have complete control over when and how to use columns. # Example 4 ddply(d, "year", mutate, mu = mean(count), sigma = sd(count),       cv = sigma/mu) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   mu <- mean(x$count)   sigma <- sd(x$count)   cv <- sigma/mu   data.frame(year=x$year[1], count=x$count, mu=mu, sigma=sigma, cv=cv)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, count=1, mu=1,sigma=1,cv=1)) R> head(res)    year count mu sigma cv 1 2000 5 7.666667 3.055050 0.3984848 2 2000 7 7.666667 3.055050 0.3984848 3 2000 11 7.666667 3.055050 0.3984848 4 2001 18 13.333333 8.082904 0.6062178 5 2001 4 13.333333 8.082904 0.6062178 6 2001 18 13.333333 8.082904 0.6062178 In Example 5, ddply is used to partition data on multiple columns before constructing the result. Realizing this with ore.groupApply involves creating an index column out of the concatenation of the columns used for partitioning. This example also allows us to illustrate using the ORE transparency layer to subset the data. # Example 5 baseball.dat <- subset(baseball, year > 2000) # data from the plyr package x <- ddply(baseball.dat, c("year", "team"), summarize,            homeruns = sum(hr)) We first push the data set to the database to get an ore.frame. We then add the composite column and perform the subset, using the transparency layer. Since the results from database execution are unordered, we will explicitly sort these results and view the first 6 rows. BB.DAT <- ore.push(baseball) BB.DAT$index <- with(BB.DAT, paste(year, team, sep="+")) BB.DAT2 <- subset(BB.DAT, year > 2000) X <- ore.groupApply (BB.DAT2, BB.DAT2$index, function(x) {   data.frame(year=x$year[1], team=x$team[1], homeruns=sum(x$hr))   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, team="A", homeruns=1), parallel=FALSE) res <- ore.sort(X, by=c("year","team")) R> head(res)    year team homeruns 1 2001 ANA 4 2 2001 ARI 155 3 2001 ATL 63 4 2001 BAL 58 5 2001 BOS 77 6 2001 CHA 63 Our next example is derived from the ggplot function documentation. This illustrates the use of ddply within using the ggplot2 package. We first create a data.frame with demo data and use ddply to create some statistics for each group (gp). We then use ggplot to produce the graph. We can take this same code, push the data.frame df to the database and invoke this on the database server. The graph will be returned to the client window, as depicted below. # Example 6 with ggplot2 library(ggplot2) df <- data.frame(gp = factor(rep(letters[1:3], each = 10)),                  y = rnorm(30)) # Compute sample mean and standard deviation in each group library(plyr) ds <- ddply(df, .(gp), summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y)) # Set up a skeleton ggplot object and add layers: ggplot() +   geom_point(data = df, aes(x = gp, y = y)) +   geom_point(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean),              colour = 'red', size = 3) +   geom_errorbar(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean,                                ymin = mean - sd, ymax = mean + sd),              colour = 'red', width = 0.4) DF <- ore.push(df) ore.tableApply(DF, function(df) {   library(ggplot2)   library(plyr)   ds <- ddply(df, .(gp), summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y))   ggplot() +     geom_point(data = df, aes(x = gp, y = y)) +     geom_point(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean),                colour = 'red', size = 3) +     geom_errorbar(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean,                                  ymin = mean - sd, ymax = mean + sd),                   colour = 'red', width = 0.4) }) But let's take this one step further. Suppose we wanted to produce multiple graphs, partitioned on some index column. We replicate the data three times and add some noise to the y values, just to make the graphs a little different. We also create an index column to form our three partitions. Note that we've also specified that this should be executed in parallel, allowing Oracle Database to control and manage the server-side R engines. The result of ore.groupApply is an ore.list that contains the three graphs. Each graph can be viewed by printing the list element. df2 <- rbind(df,df,df) df2$y <- df2$y + rnorm(nrow(df2)) df2$index <- c(rep(1,300), rep(2,300), rep(3,300)) DF2 <- ore.push(df2) res <- ore.groupApply(DF2, DF2$index, function(df) {   df <- df[,1:2]   library(ggplot2)   library(plyr)   ds <- ddply(df, .(gp), summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y))   ggplot() +     geom_point(data = df, aes(x = gp, y = y)) +     geom_point(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean),                colour = 'red', size = 3) +     geom_errorbar(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean,                                  ymin = mean - sd, ymax = mean + sd),                   colour = 'red', width = 0.4)   }, parallel=TRUE) res[[1]] res[[2]] res[[3]] To recap, we've illustrated how various uses of ddply from the plyr package can be realized in ore.groupApply, which affords the user explicit control over the contents of the data.frame result in a straightforward manner. We've also highlighted how ddply can be used within an ore.groupApply call.

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• My sound stopped working today, how can I fix it?

  - by Oli

  This seems to be a problem with pulseaudio. I was logged in over VNC on my phone and started playing a video this caused X to crash (as sometimes happens). I restarted and suddenly the sound doesn't work. I have a Intel HDA/Realtek ALC889 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller alsamixer is detecting this just fine. PulseAudio doesn't detect this alsa device so is using auto_null as the default sink (logs below). When I properly kill PulseAudio (tell it not to auto-start) direct ALSA communication with the sound card works just fine. speaker-test, for example, works. So the hardware and ALSA layers are fine IMO. In the logs, it seems that the card might be "busy" but I really don't know how or why it would be now (and never before). Is there an ALSA lock file somewhere that it still there because of my crash? I just ran sudo fuser /dev/snd/* and saw this: oli@bert:~$ sudo fuser /dev/snd/* /dev/snd/controlC0: 1884 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c: 1884m /dev/snd/timer: 1884 A look at the process list (ps aux | grep 1884) tells me process 1884 is arecord -c 1 -f S16_LE -r 8000 -t raw. No idea what this is or why it's running. When I try and kill arecord (as root), it just respawns and rebinds on the hardware. I'm in a very annoying situation where I don't know what is going on and don't know how to find out. I'm open to all suggestions to get this working again. Fire away. And here's what I get when I stop PA auto-loading, kill it and then start it with -vvvv. oli@bert:~$ pulseaudio -vvvvv I: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted I: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted D: core-rtclock.c: Timer slack is set to 50 us. D: core-util.c: RealtimeKit worked. I: core-util.c: Successfully gained nice level -11. I: main.c: This is PulseAudio 0.9.21-63-gd3efa-dirty D: main.c: Compilation host: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu D: main.c: Compilation CFLAGS: -g -O2 -g -Wall -O3 -Wall -W -Wextra -pipe -Wno-long-long -Winline -Wvla -Wno-overlength-strings -Wunsafe-loop-optimizations -Wundef -Wformat=2 -Wlogical-op -Wsign-compare -Wformat-security -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wformat-nonliteral -Wold-style-definition -Wpointer-arith -Winit-self -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wfloat-equal -Wmissing-prototypes -Wstrict-prototypes -Wredundant-decls -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-noreturn -Wshadow -Wendif-labels -Wcast-align -Wstrict-aliasing=2 -Wwrite-strings -Wno-unused-parameter -ffast-math -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fno-common -fdiagnostics-show-option D: main.c: Running on host: Linux x86_64 2.6.38-rc3 #1 SMP Tue Feb 1 10:53:04 GMT 2011 D: main.c: Found 8 CPUs. I: main.c: Page size is 4096 bytes D: main.c: Compiled with Valgrind support: no D: main.c: Running in valgrind mode: no D: main.c: Running in VM: no D: main.c: Optimised build: yes D: main.c: All asserts enabled. I: main.c: Machine ID is 8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b. I: main.c: Session ID is 8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-1297338553.571075-1050119523. I: main.c: Using runtime directory /home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-runtime. I: main.c: Using state directory /home/oli/.pulse. I: main.c: Using modules directory /usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules. I: main.c: Running in system mode: no I: main.c: Fresh high-resolution timers available! Enjoy ol' chap! I: cpu-x86.c: CPU flags: CMOV MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE4_1 SSE4_2 I: svolume_mmx.c: Initialising MMX optimized functions. I: remap_mmx.c: Initialising MMX optimized remappers. I: svolume_sse.c: Initialising SSE2 optimized functions. I: remap_sse.c: Initialising SSE2 optimized remappers. I: sconv_sse.c: Initialising SSE2 optimized conversions. D: memblock.c: Using shared memory pool with 1024 slots of size 64.0 KiB each, total size is 64.0 MiB, maximum usable slot size is 65472 D: database-tdb.c: Opened TDB database '/home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-device-volumes.tdb' I: module-device-restore.c: Sucessfully opened database file '/home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-device-volumes'. I: module.c: Loaded "module-device-restore" (index: #0; argument: ""). D: database-tdb.c: Opened TDB database '/home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-stream-volumes.tdb' I: module-stream-restore.c: Sucessfully opened database file '/home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-stream-volumes'. I: module.c: Loaded "module-stream-restore" (index: #1; argument: ""). D: database-tdb.c: Opened TDB database '/home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-card-database.tdb' I: module-card-restore.c: Sucessfully opened database file '/home/oli/.pulse/8310740c4729ef474fe5ecec4bbf5a6b-card-database'. I: module.c: Loaded "module-card-restore" (index: #2; argument: ""). I: module.c: Loaded "module-augment-properties" (index: #3; argument: ""). D: cli-command.c: Checking for existance of '/usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-udev-detect.so': success D: module-udev-detect.c: /dev/snd/controlC0 is accessible: yes D: module-udev-detect.c: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0 is busy: yes I: module-udev-detect.c: Found 1 cards. I: module.c: Loaded "module-udev-detect" (index: #4; argument: ""). D: cli-command.c: Checking for existance of '/usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-bluetooth-discover.so': success D: dbus-util.c: Successfully connected to D-Bus system bus ba7c9a1f90b3d49d930bca2100000015 as :1.62 D: bluetooth-util.c: dbus: interface=org.freedesktop.DBus, path=/org/freedesktop/DBus, member=NameAcquired D: bluetooth-util.c: Bluetooth daemon is apparently not available. I: module.c: Loaded "module-bluetooth-discover" (index: #5; argument: ""). D: cli-command.c: Checking for existance of '/usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-esound-protocol-unix.so': success I: module.c: Loaded "module-esound-protocol-unix" (index: #6; argument: ""). I: module.c: Loaded "module-native-protocol-unix" (index: #7; argument: ""). D: cli-command.c: Checking for existance of '/usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-gconf.so': success I: module.c: Loaded "module-gconf" (index: #8; argument: ""). I: module-default-device-restore.c: Saved default sink 'auto_null' not existant, not restoring default sink setting. I: module-default-device-restore.c: Saved default source 'auto_null.monitor' not existant, not restoring default source setting. I: module.c: Loaded "module-default-device-restore" (index: #9; argument: ""). I: module.c: Loaded "module-rescue-streams" (index: #10; argument: ""). D: module-always-sink.c: Autoloading null-sink as no other sinks detected. I: sink.c: Created sink 0 "auto_null" with sample spec s16le 6ch 44100Hz and channel map front-left,front-left-of-center,front-center,front-right,front-right-of-center,rear-center I: sink.c: device.description = "Dummy Output" I: sink.c: device.class = "abstract" I: sink.c: device.icon_name = "audio-card" D: core-subscribe.c: Dropped redundant event due to change event. I: source.c: Created source 0 "auto_null.monitor" with sample spec s16le 6ch 44100Hz and channel map front-left,front-left-of-center,front-center,front-right,front-right-of-center,rear-center I: source.c: device.description = "Monitor of Dummy Output" I: source.c: device.class = "monitor" I: source.c: device.icon_name = "audio-input-microphone" D: module-null-sink.c: Thread starting up I: module.c: Loaded "module-null-sink" (index: #11; argument: "sink_name=auto_null sink_properties='device.description="Dummy Output"'"). I: module.c: Loaded "module-always-sink" (index: #12; argument: ""). I: module.c: Loaded "module-intended-roles" (index: #13; argument: ""). D: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink auto_null becomes idle, timeout in 5 seconds. I: module.c: Loaded "module-suspend-on-idle" (index: #14; argument: ""). I: client.c: Created 0 "ConsoleKit Session /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Session1" D: module-console-kit.c: Added new session /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Session1 I: module.c: Loaded "module-console-kit" (index: #15; argument: ""). I: module.c: Loaded "module-position-event-sounds" (index: #16; argument: ""). D: dbus-util.c: Successfully connected to D-Bus session bus efbffc6788fad56cfd64d40c00000018 as :1.182 D: main.c: Got org.pulseaudio.Server! I: main.c: Daemon startup complete. I: client.c: Created 1 "Native client (UNIX socket client)" I: client.c: Created 2 "Native client (UNIX socket client)" D: protocol-native.c: Protocol version: remote 16, local 16 I: protocol-native.c: Got credentials: uid=1000 gid=1000 success=1 D: protocol-native.c: SHM possible: yes D: protocol-native.c: Negotiated SHM: yes D: protocol-native.c: Protocol version: remote 16, local 16 I: protocol-native.c: Got credentials: uid=1000 gid=1000 success=1 D: protocol-native.c: SHM possible: yes D: protocol-native.c: Negotiated SHM: yes D: module-augment-properties.c: Looking for .desktop file for gnome-volume-control-applet D: module-augment-properties.c: Looking for .desktop file for gnome-settings-daemon D: core-subscribe.c: Dropped redundant event due to change event. I: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink auto_null idle for too long, suspending ... D: sink.c: Suspend cause of sink auto_null is 0x0004, suspending Note the one section that seems to find the hardware but says it's busy (no idea if this is relevant). D: cli-command.c: Checking for existance of '/usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-udev-detect.so': success D: module-udev-detect.c: /dev/snd/controlC0 is accessible: yes D: module-udev-detect.c: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0 is busy: yes I: module-udev-detect.c: Found 1 cards.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 2 – Learn through disagreement

  - by Chris George

  I think I was in the right place! During Day 1 I kept on reading tweets about Lean Coffee that has happened earlier that morning. It intrigued me and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, and set my alarm for 6:45am. Following the award night the night before, it was _really_ hard getting up when it went off, but I did and after a very early breakfast, set off for the 10 min walk to the Dorint. With Lean Coffee due to start at 07:30, I arrived at the hotel and made my way to one of the hotel bars. I soon realised I was in the right place as although the bar was empty, there was a table with post-it’s and pens! This MUST be the place! The premise of Lean Coffee is to have several small timeboxed discussions. Everyone writes down what they would like to discuss on post-its that are then briefly explained and submitted to the pile. Once everyone is done, the group dot-votes on the topics. The topics are then sorted by the dot vote counts and the discussions begin. Each discussion had 8 mins to start with, which meant it prevented the discussions getting off topic too much. After the time elapsed, the group had a vote whether to extend the discussion by a further 4 mins or move on. Several discussion were had around training, soft skills etc. The conversations were really interesting and there were quite a few good ideas. Overall it was a very enjoyable experience, certainly worth the early start! Make Melly Happy Following Lean Coffee was real coffee, and much needed that was! The first keynote of the day was “Let’s help Melly (Changing Work into Life)”by Jurgen Appelo. Draw lines to track happiness This was a very interesting presentation, and set the day nicely. The theme to the keynote was projects are about the people, more-so than the actual tasks. So he started by showing a photo of an employee ‘Melly’ who looked happy enough. He then stated that she looked happy but actually hated her job. In fact 50% of Americans hate their jobs. He went on to say that the world over 50% of people hate Americans their jobs. Jurgen talked about many ways to reduce the feedback cycle, not only of the project, but of the people management. Ideas such as Happiness doors, happiness tracking (drawing lines on a wall indicating your happiness for that day), kudo boxes (to compliment a colleague for good work). All of these (and more) ideas stimulate conversation amongst the team, lead to early detection of issues and investigation of solutions. I’ve massively simplified Jurgen’s keynote and have certainly not done it justice, so I will post a link to the video once it’s available. Following more coffee, the next talk was “How releasing faster changes testing” by Alexander Schwartz. This is a topic very close to our hearts at the moment, so I was eager to find out any juicy morsels that could help us achieve more frequent releases, and Alex did not disappoint. He started off by confirming something that I have been a firm believer in for a number of years now; adding more people can do more harm than good when trying to release. This is for a number of reasons, but just adding new people to a team at such a critical time can be more of a drain on resources than they add. The alternative is to have the whole team have shared responsibility for faster delivery. So the whole team is responsible for quality and testing. Obviously you will have the test engineers on the project who have the specialist skills, but there is no reason that the entire team cannot do exploratory testing on the product. This links nicely with the Developer Exploratory testing presented by Sigge on Day 1, and certainly something that my team are really striving towards. Focus on cycle time, so what can be done to reduce the time between dev cycles, release cycles. What’s stops a release, what delays a release? all good solid questions that can be answered. Alex suggested that perhaps the product doesn’t need to be fully tested. Doing less testing will reduce the cycle time therefore get the release out faster. He suggested a risk-based approach to planning what testing needs to happen. Reducing testing could have an impact on revenue if it causes harm to customers, so test the ‘right stuff’! Determine a set of tests that are ‘face saving’ or ‘smoke’ tests. These tests cover the core functionality of the product and aim to prevent major embarrassment if these areas were to fail! Amongst many other very good points, Alex suggested that a good approach would be to release after every new feature is added. So do a bit of work -> release, do some more work -> release. By releasing small increments of work, the impact on the customer of bugs being introduced is reduced. Red Pill, Blue Pill The second keynote of the day was “Adaptation and improvisation – but your weakness is not your technique” by Markus Gartner and proved to be another very good presentation. It started off quoting lines from the Matrix which relate to adapting, improvising, realisation and mastery. It has alot of nerds in the room smiling! Markus went on to explain how through deliberate practice ( and a lot of it!) you can achieve mastery, but then you never stop learning. Through methods such as code retreats, testing dojos, workshops you can continually improve and learn. The code retreat idea was one that interested me. It involved pairing to write an automated test for, say, 45 mins, they deleting all the code, finding a different partner and writing the same test again! This is another keynote where the video will speak louder than anything I can write here! Markus did elaborate on something that Lisa and Janet had touched on yesterday whilst busting the myth that “Testers Must Code”. Whilst it is true that to be a tester, you don’t need to code, it is becoming more common that there is this crossover happening where more testers are coding and more programmers are testing. Markus made a special distinction between programmers and developers as testers develop tests code so this helped to make that clear. “Extending Continuous Integration and TDD with Continuous Testing” by Jason Ayers was my next talk after lunch. We already do CI and a bit of TDD on my project team so I was interested to see what this continuous testing thing was all about and whether it would actually work for us. At the start of the presentation I was of the opinion that it just would not work for us because our tests are too slow, and that would be the case for many people. Jason started off by setting the scene and saying that those doing TDD spend between 10-15% of their time waiting for tests to run. This can be reduced by testing less often, reducing the test time but this then increases the risk of introduced bugs not being spotted quickly. Therefore, in comes Continuous Testing (CT). CT systems run your unit tests whenever you save some code and runs them in the background so you can continue working. This is a really nice idea, but to do this, your tests must be fast, independent and reliable. The latter two should be the case anyway, and the first is ideal, but hard! Jason makes several suggestions to make tests fast. Firstly keep the scope of the test small, secondly spin off any expensive tests into a suite which is run, perhaps, overnight or outside of the CT system at any rate. So this started to change my mind, perhaps we could re-engineer our tests, and continuously run the quick ones to give an element of coverage. This talk was very interesting and I’ve already tried a couple of the tools mentioned on our product (Mighty Moose and NCrunch). Sadly due to the way our solution is built, it currently doesn’t work, but we will look at whether we can make this work because this has the potential to be a mini-game-changer for us. Using the wrong data Gojko’s Hierarchy of Quality The final keynote of the day was “Reinventing software quality” by Gojko Adzic. He opened the talk with the statement “We’ve got quality wrong because we are using the wrong data”! Gojko then went on to explain that we should judge a bug by whether the customer cares about it, not by whether we think it’s important. Why spend time fixing issues that the customer just wouldn’t care about and releasing months later because of this? Surely it’s better to release now and get customer feedback? This was another reference to the idea of how it’s better to build the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Get feedback early to make sure you’re making the right thing. Gojko then showed something which was very analogous to Maslow’s heirachy of needs. Successful – does it contribute to the business? Useful – does it do what the user wants Usable – does it do what it’s supposed to without breaking Performant/Secure – is it secure/is the performance acceptable Deployable Functionally ok – can it be deployed without breaking? He then explained that User Stories should focus on change. In other words they should focus on the users needs, not the users process. Describe what the change will be, how that change will happen then measure it! Networking and Beer Following the day’s closing keynote, there were drinks and nibble for the ‘Networking’ evening. This was a great opportunity to talk to people. I find approaching strangers very uncomfortable but once again, when in Rome! Pete Walen and I had a long conversation about only fixing issues that the customer cares about versus fixing issues that make you proud of your software! Without saying much, and asking the right questions, Pete made me re-evaluate my thoughts on the matter. Clever, very clever!  Oh and he ‘bought’ me a beer! My Takeaway Triple from Day 2: release small and release often to minimize issues creeping in and get faster feedback from ‘the real world’ Focus on issues that the customers care about, not what we think is important It’s okay to disagree with someone, even if they are well respected agile testing gurus, that’s how discussion and learning happens!  

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• Automatically create bug resolution task using the TFS 2010 API

  - by Bob Hardister

  My customer requires bug resolution to be approved and tracked.  To minimize the overhead for developers I implemented a TFS 2010 server-side plug-in to automatically create a child resolution task for the bug when the “CCB” field is set to approved. The CCB field is a custom field.  I also added the story points field to the bug WIT for sizing purposes. Redundant tasks will not be created unless the bug title is changed or the prior task is closed. The program writes an audit trail to a log file visible in the TFS Admin Console Log view. Here’s the code. BugAutoTask.cs /* SPECIFICATION * When the CCB field on the bug is set to approved, create a child task where the task: * name = Resolve bug [ID] - [Title of bug] * assigned to = same as assigned to field on the bug * same area path * same iteration path * activity = Bug Resolution * original estimate = bug points * * The source code is used to build a dll (Ows.TeamFoundation.BugAutoTaskCreation.PlugIns.dll), * which needs to be copied to * C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins * on ALL TFS application-tier servers. * * Author: Bob Hardister. */ using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using System.Text; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; using System.Collections; namespace BugAutoTaskCreation { public class BugAutoTask : ISubscriber { public EventNotificationStatus ProcessEvent(TeamFoundationRequestContext requestContext, NotificationType notificationType, object notificationEventArgs, out int statusCode, out string statusMessage, out ExceptionPropertyCollection properties) { statusCode = 0; properties = null; statusMessage = String.Empty; // Error message for for tracing last code executed and optional fields string lastStep = "No field values found or set "; try { if ((notificationType == NotificationType.Notification) && (notificationEventArgs.GetType() == typeof(WorkItemChangedEvent))) { WorkItemChangedEvent workItemChange = (WorkItemChangedEvent)notificationEventArgs; // see ConnectToTFS() method below to select which TFS instance/collection // to connect to TfsTeamProjectCollection tfs = ConnectToTFS(); WorkItemStore wiStore = tfs.GetService<WorkItemStore>(); lastStep = lastStep + ": connection to TFS successful "; // Get the work item that was just changed by the user. WorkItem witem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(workItemChange.CoreFields.IntegerFields[0].NewValue); lastStep = lastStep + ": retrieved changed work item, ID:" + witem.Id + " "; // Filter for Bug work items only if (witem.Type.Name == "Bug") { // DEBUG lastStep = lastStep + ": changed work item is a bug "; // Filter for CCB (i.e. Baseline Status) field set to approved only bool BaselineStatusChange = false; if (workItemChange.ChangedFields != null) { ProcessBugRevision(ref lastStep, workItemChange, wiStore, ref witem, ref BaselineStatusChange); } } } } catch (Exception e) { Trace.WriteLine(e.Message); Logger log = new Logger(); log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Error, "Application error: " + lastStep + " - " + e.Message + " - " + e.InnerException); } statusCode = 1; statusMessage = "Bug Auto Task Evaluation Completed"; properties = null; return EventNotificationStatus.ActionApproved; } // PRIVATE METHODS private static void ProcessBugRevision(ref string lastStep, WorkItemChangedEvent workItemChange, WorkItemStore wiStore, ref WorkItem witem, ref bool BaselineStatusChange) { foreach (StringField field in workItemChange.ChangedFields.StringFields) { // DEBUG lastStep = lastStep + ": last changed field is - " + field.Name + " "; if (field.Name == "Baseline Status") { lastStep = lastStep + ": retrieved bug baseline status field value, bug ID:" + witem.Id + " "; BaselineStatusChange = (field.NewValue != field.OldValue); if ((BaselineStatusChange) && (field.NewValue == "Approved")) { // Instanciate logger Logger log = new Logger(); // *** Create resolution task for this bug *** // ******************************************* // Get the team project and selected field values of the bug work item Project teamProject = witem.Project; int bugID = witem.Id; string bugTitle = witem.Fields["System.Title"].Value.ToString(); string bugAssignedTo = witem.Fields["System.AssignedTo"].Value.ToString(); string bugAreaPath = witem.Fields["System.AreaPath"].Value.ToString(); string bugIterationPath = witem.Fields["System.IterationPath"].Value.ToString(); string bugChangedBy = witem.Fields["System.ChangedBy"].OriginalValue.ToString(); string bugTeamProject = witem.Project.Name; lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory bug field values found "; // Optional fields Field bugPoints = witem.Fields["Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.StoryPoints"]; if (bugPoints.Value != null) { lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory and optional bug field values found "; } // Initialize child resolution task title string childTaskTitle = "Resolve bug " + bugID + " - " + bugTitle; // At this point I can check if a resolution task (of the same name) // for the bug already exist // If so, do not create a new resolution task bool createResolutionTask = true; WorkItem parentBug = wiStore.GetWorkItem(bugID); WorkItemLinkCollection links = parentBug.WorkItemLinks; foreach (WorkItemLink wil in links) { if (wil.LinkTypeEnd.Name == "Child") { WorkItem childTask = wiStore.GetWorkItem(wil.TargetId); if ((childTask.Title == childTaskTitle) && (childTask.State != "Closed")) { createResolutionTask = false; log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Info, "Team project " + bugTeamProject + ": " + bugChangedBy + " - set the CCB field to \"Approved\" for bug, ID: " + bugID + ". Task not created as open one of the same name already exist, ID:" + childTask.Id); } } } if (createResolutionTask) { // Define the work item type of the new work item WorkItemTypeCollection workItemTypes = wiStore.Projects[teamProject.Name].WorkItemTypes; WorkItemType wiType = workItemTypes["Task"]; // Setup the new task and assign field values witem = new WorkItem(wiType); witem.Fields["System.Title"].Value = "Resolve bug " + bugID + " - " + bugTitle; witem.Fields["System.AssignedTo"].Value = bugAssignedTo; witem.Fields["System.AreaPath"].Value = bugAreaPath; witem.Fields["System.IterationPath"].Value = bugIterationPath; witem.Fields["Microsoft.VSTS.Common.Activity"].Value = "Bug Resolution"; lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory task field values set "; // Optional fields if (bugPoints.Value != null) { witem.Fields["Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.OriginalEstimate"].Value = bugPoints.Value; lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory and optional task field values set "; } // Check for validation errors before saving the new task and linking it to the bug ArrayList validationErrors = witem.Validate(); if (validationErrors.Count == 0) { witem.Save(); // Link the new task (child) to the bug (parent) var linkType = wiStore.WorkItemLinkTypes[CoreLinkTypeReferenceNames.Hierarchy]; // Fetch the work items to be linked var parentWorkItem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(bugID); int taskID = witem.Id; var childWorkItem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(taskID); // Add a new link to the parent relating the child and save it parentWorkItem.Links.Add(new WorkItemLink(linkType.ForwardEnd, childWorkItem.Id)); parentWorkItem.Save(); log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Info, "Team project " + bugTeamProject + ": " + bugChangedBy + " - set the CCB field to \"Approved\" for bug, ID:" + bugID + ", which automatically created child resolution task, ID:" + taskID); } else { log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Error, "Error in creating bug resolution child task for bug ID:" + bugID); foreach (Field taskField in validationErrors) { log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Error, " - Validation Error in task field: " + taskField.ReferenceName); } } } } } } } private TfsTeamProjectCollection ConnectToTFS() { // Connect to TFS string tfsUri = string.Empty; // Production TFS instance production collection tfsUri = @"xxxx"; // Production TFS instance admin collection //tfsUri = @"xxxxx"; // Local TFS testing instance default collection //tfsUri = @"xxxxx"; TfsTeamProjectCollection tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new System.Uri(tfsUri)); tfs.EnsureAuthenticated(); return tfs; } // HELPERS public string Name { get { return "Bug Auto Task Creation Event Handler"; } } public SubscriberPriority Priority { get { return SubscriberPriority.Normal; } } public enum MsgLevel { Info, Warning, Error }; public Type[] SubscribedTypes() { return new Type[1] { typeof(WorkItemChangedEvent) }; } } } Logger.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace BugAutoTaskCreation { class Logger { // fields private string _ApplicationDirectory = @"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Team Foundation\Server Configuration\Logs"; private string _LogFileName = @"\CFG_ACCT_AT_OWS_BugAutoTaskCreation.log"; private string _LogFile; private string _LogTimestamp = DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss"); private string _MsgLevelText = string.Empty; // default constructor public Logger() { // check for a prior log file FileInfo logFile = new FileInfo(_ApplicationDirectory + _LogFileName); if (!logFile.Exists) { CreateNewLogFile(ref logFile); } } // properties public string ApplicationDirectory { get { return _ApplicationDirectory; } set { _ApplicationDirectory = value; } } public string LogFile { get { _LogFile = _ApplicationDirectory + _LogFileName; return _LogFile; } set { _LogFile = value; } } // PUBLIC METHODS public void WriteLineToLog(BugAutoTask.MsgLevel msgLevel, string logRecord) { try { // set msgLevel text if (msgLevel == BugAutoTask.MsgLevel.Info) { _MsgLevelText = "[Info @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } else if (msgLevel == BugAutoTask.MsgLevel.Warning) { _MsgLevelText = "[Warning @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } else if (msgLevel == BugAutoTask.MsgLevel.Error) { _MsgLevelText = "[Error @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } else { _MsgLevelText = "[Error: unsupported message level @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } // write a line to the log file StreamWriter logFile = new StreamWriter(_ApplicationDirectory + _LogFileName, true); logFile.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + logRecord); logFile.Close(); } catch (Exception) { throw; } } // PRIVATE METHODS private void CreateNewLogFile(ref FileInfo logFile) { try { string logFilePath = logFile.FullName; // write the log file header _MsgLevelText = "[Info @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; string cpu = string.Empty; if (Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem) { cpu = " (x64)"; } StreamWriter newLog = new StreamWriter(logFilePath, false); newLog.Flush(); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "===================================================================="); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Team Foundation Server Administration Log"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Version : " + "1.0.0 Author: Bob Hardister"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "DateTime : " + _LogTimestamp); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Type : " + "OWS Custom TFS API Plug-in"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Activity : " + "Bug Auto Task Creation for CCB Approved Bugs"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Area : " + "Build Explorer"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Assembly : " + "Ows.TeamFoundation.BugAutoTaskCreation.PlugIns.dll"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Location : " + @"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "User : " + Environment.UserDomainName + @"\" + Environment.UserName); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Machine : " + Environment.MachineName); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "System : " + Environment.OSVersion + cpu); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "===================================================================="); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText); newLog.Close(); } catch (Exception) { throw; } } private string MsgTimeStamp() { string msgTimestamp = string.Empty; return msgTimestamp = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss:fff"); } } }

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• SSMS Tools Pack 2.5.3 is out with bug fixes and improved licensing

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  Licensing for SSMS Tools Pack 2.5 has been quite a hit and I received some awesome feedback. The version 2.5.3 contains a few bug fixes and desired licensing improvements. Changes include more licensing options, prices in Euros because of book keeping reasons (don't you just love those :)) and generally easier purchase and licensing process for users. Licensing now offers four options: Per machine license. (€25) Perfect if you do all your work from a single machine. Plus one OS reinstall activation. Personal license (€75) Up to 4 machine activations. Plus 2 OS reinstall activations and any number of virtual machine activations. Team license (€240) Up to 10 machine activations. Plus 4 OS reinstall activations and any number of virtual machine activations. Enterprise license (€350+) For more than 10 machine activations any number of virtual machine activations. 30 days license. Time based demo license bound to a machine. You can view all the details on the Licensing page . If you want to receive email notifications when new version of SSMS Tools Pack is out you can do that on the Main page or on the Download page . Version 2.7 is expected in the first half of February and won't support SSMS 2005 and 2005 Express anymore. Enjoy it!

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• 2 drives, slow software RAID1 (md)

  - by bart613

  Hello, I've got a server from hetzner.de (EQ4) with 2* SAMSUNG HD753LJ drives (750G 32MB cache). OS is CentOS 5 (x86_64). Drives are combined together into two RAID1 partitions: /dev/md0 which is 512MB big and has only /boot partitions /dev/md1 which is over 700GB big and is one big LVM which hosts other partitions Now, I've been running some benchmarks and it seems like even though exactly the same drives, speed differs a bit on each of them. # hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 25612 MB in 1.99 seconds = 12860.70 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 352 MB in 3.01 seconds = 116.80 MB/sec # hdparm -tT /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 25524 MB in 1.99 seconds = 12815.99 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 342 MB in 3.01 seconds = 113.64 MB/sec Also, when I run eg. pgbench which is stressing IO quite heavily, I can see following from iostat output: Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 231.40 0.00 298.00 0.00 9683.20 32.49 0.17 0.58 0.34 10.24 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sda2 0.00 231.40 0.00 298.00 0.00 9683.20 32.49 0.17 0.58 0.34 10.24 sdb 0.00 231.40 0.00 301.80 0.00 9740.80 32.28 14.19 51.17 3.10 93.68 sdb1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sdb2 0.00 231.40 0.00 301.80 0.00 9740.80 32.28 14.19 51.17 3.10 93.68 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 529.60 0.00 9692.80 18.30 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.60 0.00 4.80 8.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 529.00 0.00 9688.00 18.31 24.51 49.91 1.81 95.92 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 152.40 0.00 330.60 0.00 5176.00 15.66 0.19 0.57 0.19 6.24 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sda2 0.00 152.40 0.00 330.60 0.00 5176.00 15.66 0.19 0.57 0.19 6.24 sdb 0.00 152.40 0.00 326.20 0.00 5118.40 15.69 19.96 55.36 3.01 98.16 sdb1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sdb2 0.00 152.40 0.00 326.20 0.00 5118.40 15.69 19.96 55.36 3.01 98.16 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 482.80 0.00 5166.40 10.70 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 482.80 0.00 5166.40 10.70 30.19 56.92 2.05 99.04 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 181.64 0.00 324.55 0.00 5445.11 16.78 0.15 0.45 0.21 6.87 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sda2 0.00 181.64 0.00 324.55 0.00 5445.11 16.78 0.15 0.45 0.21 6.87 sdb 0.00 181.84 0.00 328.54 0.00 5493.01 16.72 18.34 61.57 3.01 99.00 sdb1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sdb2 0.00 181.84 0.00 328.54 0.00 5493.01 16.72 18.34 61.57 3.01 99.00 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 506.39 0.00 5477.05 10.82 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 506.39 0.00 5477.05 10.82 28.77 62.15 1.96 99.00 And this is completely getting me confused. How come two exactly the same specced drives have such a difference in write speed (see util%)? I haven't really paid attention to those speeds before, so perhaps that something normal -- if someone could confirm I would be really grateful. Otherwise, if someone have seen such behavior again or knows what is causing such behavior I would really appreciate answer. I'll also add that both "smartctl -a" and "hdparm -I" output are exactly the same and are not indicating any hardware problems. The slower drive was changed already two times (to new ones). Also I asked to change the drives with places, and then sda were slower and sdb quicker (so the slow one was the same drive). SATA cables were changed two times already.

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• Process not Listed by PS or in /proc/

  - by Hammer Bro.

  I'm trying to figure out how to operate a rather large Java program, 'prog'. If I go to its /bin/ dir and configure its setenv.sh and prog.sh to use local directories and my current user account. Then I try to run it via "./prog.sh start". Here are all the relevant bits of prog.sh: USER=(my current account) _CMD="/opt/jdk/bin/java -server -Xmx768m -classpath "${CLASSPATH}" -jar "${DIR}/prog.jar"" case "${ACTION}" in start) nohup su ${USER} -c "exec ${_CMD} >>${_LOGFILE} 2>&1" >/dev/null & echo $! >${_PID} echo "Prog running. PID="`cat ${_PID}` ;; stop) PID=`cat ${_PID} 2>/dev/null` echo "Shutting down prog: ${PID} kill -QUIT ${PID} 2>/dev/null kill ${PID} 2>/dev/null kill -KILL ${PID} 2>/dev/null rm -f ${_PID} echo "STOPPED `date`" >>${_LOGFILE} ;; When I actually do ./prog.sh start, it starts. But I can't find it at all on the process list. Nor can I kill it manually, using the same command the shell script uses. But I can tell it's running, because if I do ./prog.sh stop, it stops (and some temporary files elsewhere clean themselves out). ./prog.sh start Prog running. PID=1234 ps eaux | grep 1234 ps eaux | grep -i prog.jar ps eaux >> pslist.txt (It's not there either by PID or any clear name I can find: prog, java or jar.) cd /proc/1234/ -bash: cd: /proc/1234/: No such file or directory kill -QUIT 1234 kill 1234 kill -KILL 1234 -bash: kill: (1234) - No such process ./prog.sh stop Shutting down prog: 1234 As far as I can tell, the process is running yet not in any way listed by the system. I can't find it in ps or /proc/, nor can I kill it. But the shell script can still stop it properly. So my question is, how can something like this happen? Is the process supremely hidden, actually unlisted, or am I just missing it in some fashion? I'm trying to figure out what makes this program tick, and I can barely prove that it's ticking! Edit: ps eu | grep prog.sh (after having restarted; so random PID) 50038 19381 0.0 0.0 4412 632 pts/3 S+ 16:09 0:00 grep prog.sh HOSTNAME=machine.server.com TERM=vt100 SHELL=/bin/bash HISTSIZE=1000 SSH_CLIENT=::[STUFF] 1754 22 CVSROOT=:[DIR] SSH_TTY=/dev/pts/3 ANT_HOME=/opt/apache-ant-1.7.1 USER=[USER] LS_COLORS=[COLORS] SSH_AUTH_SOCK=[DIR] KDEDIR=/usr MAIL=[DIR] PATH=[DIRS] INPUTRC=/etc/inputrc PWD=[PWD] JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk1.6.0_21 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/libexec/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass M2_HOME=/opt/apache-maven-2.2.1 SHLVL=1 HOME=[~] LOGNAME=[USER] SSH_CONNECTION=::[STUFF] LESSOPEN=|/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh %s G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 _=/bin/grep OLDPWD=[DIR] I just realized that the stop) part of prog.sh isn't actually a guarantee that the process it claims to be stopping is running -- it just tries to kill the PID and suppresses all output then deletes the temporary file and manually inserts STOPPED into the log file. So I'm no longer so certain that the process is always running when I ps for it, although the code sample above indicates that it at least runs erratically. I'll continue looking into this undocumented behemoth when I return to work tomorrow.

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• Microsoft, please help me diagnose TFS Administration permission issues!

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently had a fun time trying to debug a permission issue I ran into using TFS 2010’s TfsConfig. Update 5th March 2010 – In its style of true excellence my company has added rant to its “Suggestions for Better TFS”. <rant> I was trying to run the TfsConfig tool and I kept getting the message: “TF55038: You don't have sufficient privileges to run this tool. Contact your Team Foundation system administrator." This message made me think that it was something to do with the Install permissions as it is always recommended to use a single account to do every install of TFS. I did not install the original TFS on our network and my account was not used to do the TFS2010 install. But I did do the upgrade from 2010 beta 2 to 2010 RC with my current account. So I proceeded to do some checking: Am I in the administrators group on the server? Figure: Yes, I am in the administrators group on the server Am I in the Administration Console users list? Figure: Yes, I am in the Administration Console users list Have I reapplied the permissions in the Administration Console users list ticking all the options? Figure: Make sure you check all of the boxed if you want to have all the admin options Figure: Yes, I have made sure that all my options are correct. Am I in the Team Foundation administrators group? Figure: Yes, I am in the Team Foundation Administrators group Is my account explicitly SysAdmin on the Database server? Figure: Yes, I do have explicit SysAdmin on the database Can you guess what the problem was? The command line window was not running as the administrator! As with most other applications there should be an explicit error message that states: "You are not currently running in administrator mode; please restart the command line with elevated privileges!" This would have saved me 30 minutes, although I agree that I should change my name to Muppet and just be done with it. </rant>   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,Administration,Team Foundation Server Admin Console,TFS Admin Console

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• Oracle Linux 6 DVDs Now Available

  - by sergio.leunissen

  On Sunday 6 February 2011, Oracle Linux 6 was released on the Unbreakable Linux Network for customers with an Oracle Linux support subscription. Shortly after that, the Oracle Linux 6 RPMs were made available on our public yum server. Today we published the installation DVD images on edelivery.oracle.com/linux. Oracle Linux 6 is free to download, install and use. The full release notes are here, but similar to my recent post about Oracle Linux 5.6, I wanted to highlight a few items about this release. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel As is the case with Oracle Linux 5.6, the default installed kernel on x86_64 platform in Oracle Linux 6 is the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you watch the replay of this webcast by Chris Mason on the performance improvements made in this kernel. # uname -r 2.6.32-100.28.5.el6.x86_64 The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is delivered via the package kernel-uek: [root@localhost ~]# yum info kernel-uek ... Installed Packages Name : kernel-uek Arch : x86_64 Version : 2.6.32 Release : 100.28.5.el6 Size : 84 M Repo : installed From repo : anaconda-OracleLinuxServer-201102031546.x86_64 Summary : The Linux kernel URL : http://www.kernel.org/ License : GPLv2 Description: The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of : any Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions : of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, : device input and output, etc. ext4 file system The ext4 or fourth extended filesystem replaces ext3 as the default filesystem in Oracle Linux 6. # mount /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root on / type ext4 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,rootcontext="system_u:object_r:tmpfs_t:s0") /dev/sda1 on /boot type ext4 (rw) none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw) Red Hat compatible kernel Oracle Linux 6 also includes a Red Hat compatible kernel built directly from RHEL source. It's already installed, so booting it is a matter of editing /etc/grub.conf # rpm -qa | grep kernel-2.6.32 kernel-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 Oracle Linux 6 no longer includes a Red Hat compatible kernel with Oracle bug fixes. The only Red Hat compatible kernel included is the one built directly from RHEL source. Yum-only access to Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) Oracle Linux 6 uses yum exclusively for access to Unbreakable Linux Network. To register your system with ULN, use the following command: # uln_register No Itanium Support Oracle Linux 6 is not supported on the Itanium (ia64) platform. Next Steps Read the release notes Download Oracle Linux 6 for free Discuss on the Oracle Linux forum

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• USB packets - receive wrong data

  - by regorianer

  i have a little python script which shows me the packets of an enocean device and does some events depending on the packet type. unfortunately it doesn't work because i'm getting wrong packets. Parts of the python script (used pySerial): Blockquote ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB1',57600,bytesize = serial.EIGHTBITS,timeout = 1, parity = serial.PARITY_NONE , rtscts = 0) print 'clearing buffer' s = ser.read(10000) print 'start read' while 1: s = ser.read(1) for character in s: sys.stdout.write(" %s" % character.encode('hex')) print 'end' ser.close() output baudrate 57600: e0 e0 00 e0 00 e0 e0 e0 e0 e0 00 e0 e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 e0 e0 00 00 00 00 e0 e0 e0 00 00 e0 e0 e0 e0 e0 00 e0 00 e0 e0 e0 e0 e0 00 e0 e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 e0 e0 00 00 00 00 e0 e0 e0 00 00 e0 e0 e0 output baudrate 9600: a5 5a 0b 05 10 00 00 00 00 15 c4 56 20 6f a5 5a 0b 05 00 00 00 00 00 15 c4 56 20 5f linux terminal baudrate 57600: $stty -F /dev/ttyUSB1 57600 $stty < /dev/ttyUSB1 speed 57600 baud; line = 0; eof = ^A; min = 0; time = 0; -brkint -icrnl -imaxbel -opost -onlcr -isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echoctl -echoke $while (true) do cat -A /dev/ttyUSB1 ; done myfile $hexdump -C myfile 00000000 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 5e 40 4d 2d 60 5e 40 4d 2d 60 |M-M-^@M-^@M-| 00000010 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 5e 40 4d 2d |M-M-M-M-^@M-| 00000020 60 4d 2d 60 5e 40 5e 40 5e 40 5e 40 5e 40 5e 40 |M-^@^@^@^@^@^@| 00000030 5e 40 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 5e 40 5e 40 5e |^@M-M-M-`^@^@^| 00000040 40 5e 40 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 4d 2d 60 |@^@M-M-M-`| 0000004c linux terminal baudrate 9600: $hexdump -C myfile2 00000000 5e 40 5e 55 4d 2d 44 56 30 4d 2d 3f 5e 40 5e 40 |^@^UM-DV0M-?^@^@| 00000010 5e 55 4d 2d 44 56 20 5f |^UM-DV _| 00000018 the specification says: 0x55 sync byte 1st 0xNNNN data length bytes (2 bytes) 0x07 opt length byte 0x01 type byte CRC, data, opt data und nochmal CRC but I'm not getting this packet structure. The output of the python script differs from the one I get via the terminal. I also wrote the python part with C, but the output is the same as with python As the USB receiver a BSC-BoR USB Receiver/Sender is used The EnOcean device is a simple button

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• How to use Hybrid Graphic Switch on Sony Vaio Z?

  - by Travis R

  I got it to install nicely and it's all working, but I don't know which graphics card is being used nor how to switch between. I tried installing the official Nvidia drivers, but then I could not boot up my computer afterwards so I have not installed them again after doing a reinstall of Ubuntu. PS, if you have a grub install failure during install, the key is to tell it where to install the bootloader at the very beginning of the installation, on your partition selection screen (choose dev/mapper, not the /dev/sda it defaults to).

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• SharePoint – The Most Important Feature

  - by Bil Simser

  Watching twitter and doing a search for SharePoint and you see a lot (almost one every few minutes) of tweets about the top 10 new features in SharePoint. What answer do you get when you ask the question, “What’s the most important feature in SharePoint?”. Chances are the answer will vary. Some will say it’s the collaboration aspect, others might say it’s the new ribbon interface, multi-item editing, external content types, faceted search, large list support, document versioning, Silverlight, etc. The list goes on. However I think most people might be missing the most important feature that’s sitting right under their noses all this time. The most important feature of SharePoint? It’s called User Empowerment. Huh? What? Is that something I find in the Site Actions menu? Nope. It’s something that’s always been there in SharePoint, you just need to get the word out and support it. How many times have you had a team ask you for a team site (assuming you had SharePoint up and running). Or to create them a contact list. Or how long have you employed that guy in the corner who’s been copying and pasting content from Corporate Communications into the web from a Word document. Let’s stop the insanity. It doesn’t have to be this way. SharePoint’s strongest feature isn’t anything you can find in the Site Settings screen or Central Admin. It’s all about empowering your users and letting them take control of their content. After all, SharePoint really is a bunch of tools to allow users to collaborate on content isn’t it? So why are you stepping in as IT and helping the user every moment along the way. It’s like having to ask users to fill out a help desk ticket or call up the Windows team to create a folder on their desktop or rearrange their Start menu. This isn’t something IT should be spending their time doing nor is it something the users should be burdened with having to wait until their friendly neighborhood tech-guy (or gal) shows up to help them sort the icons on their desktop. SharePoint IS all about empowerment. Site owners can create whatever lists and libraries they need for their team, and if the template isn’t there they can always turn to my friend and yours, the Custom List. From that can spew forth approval tracking systems, new hire checklists, and server inventory. You’re only limited by your imagination and needs. Users should be able to create new sites as they need. Want a blog to let everyone know what your team is up to? Go create one, here’s how. What’s a blog you ask? Here’s what it is and why you would use one. SharePoint is the shift in the balance of power and you need, and an IT group, let go of certain responsibilities and let your users run with the tools. A power user who knows how to create sites and what features are available to them can help a team go from the forming stage to the storming stage overnight. Again, this all hinges on you as an IT organization and what you can and empower your users with as far as features go. Running with tools is great if you know how to use them, running with scissors not recommended unless you enjoy trips to the hospital. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility so don’t go out on Monday and send out a memo to the organization saying “This Bil guy says you peeps can do anything so here it is, knock yourself out” (for one, they’ll have *no* idea who this Bil guy is). This advice comes with the task of getting your users ready for empowerment. Whether it’s through some kind of internal training sessions, in-house documentation; videos; blog posts; on how to accomplish things in SharePoint, or full blown one-on-one sit downs with teams or individuals to help them through their problems. The work is up to you. Helping them along also should be part of your governance (you do have one don’t you?). Just because you have InfoPath client deployed with your Office suite, doesn’t mean users should just start publishing forms all over your SharePoint farm. There should be some governance behind that in what you’ll support and what is possible. The other caveat to all this is that SharePoint is not everything for everyone. It can’t cook you breakfast and impregnate your cat or solve world hunger. It also isn’t suited for every IT solution out there. It’s a horrible source control system (even though some people try to use it as such) and really can’t do financials worth a darn. Again, governance is key here and part of that governance and your responsibility in setting up and unleashing SharePoint into your organization is to provide users guidance on what should be in SharePoint and (more importantly) what should not be in SharePoint. There are boundaries you have to set where you don’t want your end users going as they might be treading into trouble. Again, this is up to you to set these constraints and help users understand why these pylons are there. If someone understands why they can’t do something they might have a better understanding and respect for those that put them there in the first place. Of course you’ll always have the power-users who want to go skiing down dead mans curve so this doesn’t work for everyone, but you can catch the majority of the newbs who don’t wander aimlessly off the beaten path. At the end of the day when all things are going swimmingly your end users should be empowered to solve the needs they have on a day to day basis and not having to keep bugging the IT department to help them create a view to show only approved documents. I wouldn’t go as far as business users building out full blown solutions and handing the keys to SharePoint Designer or (worse) Visual Studio to power-users might not be a path you want to go down but you also don’t have to lock up the SharePoint system in a tight box where users can’t use what’s there. So stop focusing on the shiny things in SharePoint and maybe consider making a shift to what’s really important. Making your day job easier and letting users get the most our of your technology investment.

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• How to update all the SSIS packages&rsquo; Connection Managers in a BIDS project with PowerShell

  - by Luca Zavarella

  During the development of a BI solution, we all know that 80% of the time is spent during the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) phase. If you use the BI Stack Tool provided by Microsoft SQL Server, this step is accomplished by the development of n Integration Services (SSIS) packages. In general, the number of packages made ??in the ETL phase for a non-trivial solution of BI is quite significant. An SSIS package, therefore, extracts data from a source, it "hammers" :) the data and then transfers it to a specific destination. Very often it happens that the connection to the source data is the same for all packages. Using Integration Services, this results in having the same Connection Manager (perhaps with the same name) for all packages: The source data of my BI solution comes from an Helper database (HLP), then, for each package tha import this data, I have the HLP Connection Manager (the use of a Shared Data Source is not recommended, because the Connection String is wired and therefore you have to open the SSIS project and use the proper wizard change it...). In order to change the HLP Connection String at runtime, we could use the Package Configuration, or we could run our packages with DTLoggedExec by Davide Mauri (a must-have if you are developing with SQL Server 2005/2008). But my need was to change all the HLP connections in all packages within the SSIS Visual Studio project, because I had to version them through Team Foundation Server (TFS). A good scribe with a lot of patience should have changed by hand all the connections by double-clicking the HLP Connection Manager of each package, and then changing the referenced server/database: Not being endowed with such virtues :) I took just a little of time to write a small script in PowerShell, using the fact that a SSIS package (a .dtsx file) is nothing but an xml file, and therefore can be changed quite easily. I'm not a guru of PowerShell, but I managed more or less to put together the following lines of code: $LeftDelimiterString = "Initial Catalog=" $RightDelimiterString = ";Provider=" $ToBeReplacedString = "AstarteToBeReplaced" $ReplacingString = "AstarteReplacing" $MainFolder = "C:\MySSISPackagesFolder" $files = get-childitem "$MainFolder" *.dtsx `       | Where-Object {!($_.PSIsContainer)} foreach ($file in $files) {       (Get-Content $file.FullName) `             | % {$_ -replace "($LeftDelimiterString)($ToBeReplacedString)($RightDelimiterString)", "`$1$ReplacingString`$3"} ` | Set-Content $file.FullName; } The script above just opens any SSIS package (.dtsx) in the supplied folder, then for each of them goes in search of the following text: Initial Catalog=AstarteToBeReplaced;Provider= and it replaces the text found with this: Initial Catalog=AstarteReplacing;Provider= I don’t enter into the details of each cmdlet used. I leave the reader to search for these details. Alternatively, you can use a specific object model exposed in some .NET assemblies provided by Integration Services, or you can use the Pacman utility: Enjoy! :) P.S. Using TFS as versioning system, before running the script I checked out the packages and, after the script executed succesfully, I checked in them.

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• Preview of MSDN Library Changes

  - by ScottGu

  The MSDN team has been working some potential changes to the online MSDN Library designed to help streamline the navigation experience and make it easier to find the .NET Framework information you need. To solicit feedback on the proposed changes while they are still in development, they’ve posted a preview version of some proposed changes to a new MSDN Library Preview site which you can check out.  They’ve also created a survey that leads you through the ideas and asks for your opinions on some of the changes.  We’d very much like to have as many people as possible people take the survey and give us feedback. Quick Preview of Some of the Changes Below are some examples of a few of the changes being proposed: Streamlined .NET Namespaces Navigation The current MSDN Class Library lists all .NET namespaces in a flat-namespace (sorted alphabetically): Two downsides of the above approach are: Some of the least-used namespaces are listed first (like Microsoft.Aspnet.Snapin and Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine) All sub-namespaces are listed, which makes the list a little overwhelming, and page-load times to be slow The new MSDN Library Preview Site now lists “System” namespaces first (since those are the most used), and the home-page lists just top-level namespace groups – which makes it easier to find things, and enables the page to load faster:   Class overview and members pages merged into a single topic about each class Previously you had to navigate to several different pages to find member information about types: Links to these are still available in the MSDN Library Preview Site TOC – but the members are also now listed on the overview page, which makes it easy to quickly find everything in one place: Commonly used things are nearer the top of the page One of the other usability improvements with the new MSDN Library Preview Site is that common elements like “Code Examples” and “Inheritance Hierarchy” (for classes) are now listed near the top of the help page – making them easy to quickly find: Give Us Feedback with a Survey Above are just a few of the changes made with the new MSDN preview site – there are many other changes also rolled into it.  The MSDN team is doing usability studies on the new layout and navigation right now, and would very much like feedback on it. If you have 15 minutes and want to help vote on which of these ideas makes it into the production MSDN site, please visit this survey before June 30, play with the changes a bit, and let the MSDN team know what you think. Important Note: the MSDN preview site is not a fully functional version of MSDN – it’s really only there to preview the new ideas themselves, so please don’t expect it to be integrated with the rest of MSDN, with search, etc.  Once the MSDN team gets feedback on some of the changes being proposed they will roll them into the live site for everyone to use. Hope this helps, Scott

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• So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

  - by Edith Mireles-Oracle

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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