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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; Ants Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  I just downloaded ANTS Profiler 7.4 to check how fast it is and how deep I can analyze the startup of Visual Studio 2012. The Pro version which is useful does cost 445€ which is ok. To measure a complex system I decided to simply profile VS2012 (Update 1) on my older Intel 6600 2,4GHz with 3 GB RAM and a 32 bit Windows 7. Ants Profiler is really easy to use. So lets try it out. The Ants Profiler does want to start the profiled application by its own which seems to be rather common. I did choose Method Level timing of all managed methods. In the configuration menu I did want to get all call stacks to get full details. Once this is configured you are ready to go.   After that you can select the Method Grid to view Wall Clock Time in ms. I hate percentages which are on by default because I do want to look where absolute time is spent and not something else.   From the Method Grid I can drill down to see where time is spent in a nice and I can look at the decompiled methods where the time is spent. This does really look nice. But did you see the size of the scroll bar in the method grid? Although I wanted all call stacks I do get only about 4 pages of methods to drill down. From the scroll bar count I would guess that the profiler does show me about 150 methods for the complete VS startup. This is nonsense. I will never find a bottleneck in VS when I am presented only a fraction of the methods that were actually executed. I have also tried in the configuration window to also profile the extremely trivial functions but there was no noticeable difference. It seems that the Ants Profiler does filter away way too many details to be useful for bigger systems. If you want to optimize a CPU bound operation inside NUnit then Ants Profiler is with its line level timings a very nice tool to work with. But for bigger stuff it is certainly not usable. I also do not like that I must start the profiled application from the profiler UI. This makes it hard to profile processes which are started by some other process. Next: JetBrains dotTrace

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• 12.04 Unity 3D 80% CPU load with Compiz

  - by user39288

  EDIT : I have been able to to determine that the problem is not compiz, but is actually Xorg. I don't know why, but by quickly maximizing terminal and taking a screenshot with top running before the problem went away I am able to see xorg takes up 72% of cpu, with bamfdaemon taking up 18%, and compiz taking up 14%. Seems the nvidia drivers are to blame, will play more with settings and perhaps do a clean nvidia-current install to try to fix the problem. Having a very annoying problem with high CPU usage. Running 12.04 with latest drivers and nvidia-current installed. Have not had any issues for days, now I have a strange problem. Unity 3d runs great most of the time, 1-2% CPU usage with only transmission running in background. Windows open and close smoothly. However,no matter what programs are open, if I minimize all open programs to the unity bar on the left, my CPU jumps to about 80% and slows down all maximize and minimize effects. Mouse movement stays smooth the whole time, but unity becomes unresponsive for up to 30 seconds at times. Hitting alt + tab to bring up even a single window fixes the problem. The window I bring back up doesn't even have to be maximized to solve the problem. Hitting the super button to bring up the dash makes CPU drop back to idle until I close it, then high CPU usage resumes. Believe the problem is compiz, but even just having only terminal running "top", I have to minimize it to the tray for the problem to show, so I can't see the problem process. I can only tell about the high CPU usage using indicator-sysmonitor. Even tried quitting the indicator, but I can still tell very poor performance with all applications when minimized. Reset compiz back to defaults, tried going to the post-release update nvidia drivers, played with vsync settings in both the nvidia settings and compiz. Even forced refresh rate, but cannot solve the problem. The problem does NOT occur in Unity 2D. Specs are core 2 duo 2.0ghz, 4GB ddr2 ram, 2x 320's HDD in RAID 0, and Nvidia GTX 260M graphics card.

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• How do I maintain a really poorly written code base?

  - by onlineapplab.com

  Recently I got hired to work on existing web application because of NDA I'm not at liberty to disclose any details but this application is working online in sort of a beta testing stage before official launch. We have a few hundred users right now but this number is supposed to significantly increase after official launch. The application is written in PHP (but it is irrelevant to my question) and is running on a dual xeon processor standalone server with severe performance problems. I have seen a lot of bad PHP code but this really sets new standards, especially knowing how much time and money was invested in developing it. it is as badly coded as possible there is PHP, HTML, SQL mixed together and code is repeated whenever it is necessary (especially SQL queries). there are not any functions used, not mentioning any OOP there are four versions of the app (desktop, iPhone, Android + other mobile) each version has pretty much the same functionality but was created by copying the whole code base, so now there are some differences between each version and it is really hard to maintain the database is really badly designed, which is causing severe performance problems also for fixing some errors in PHP code there is a lot of database triggers used which are updating data on SELECT and on INSERT so any testing is a nightmare Basically, any sin of a bad programming you can imagine is there for example it is not only possible to use SQL injections in literally every place but you can log into app if you use a login which doesn't exist and an empty password. The team which created this app is not working on it any more and there is an outsourced team which suggested that there are some problems but was never willing to deal with the elephant in the room partially because they've got a very comfortable contract and partially due to lack of skills (just my opinion). My job was supposed to be fixing some performance problems and extending existing functionality but first thing I was asked to do was a review of the existing code base. I've made my review and it was quite a shock for the management but my conclusions were after some time finally confirmed by other programmers. Management made it clear that it is not possible to start rewriting this app from scratch (which in my opinion should be done). We have to maintain its operable state and at the same time fix performance errors and extend the functionality. My question is, as I don't want just to patch the existing code, how to transform this into properly written app while keeping the existing code working at the same time? My plan is: Unify four existing versions into common code base (fixing only most obvious errors). Redesign db and use triggers to populate it with data (so data will be maintained in two formats at the same time) All new functionality will be written as separate project. Step by step transfer existing functionality into the new project After some time everything will be in the new project Some explanation about #2, right now it is practically impossible to make any updates in existing db any change requires reviewing whole code and making changes in many places. Is such plan feasible at all? Another solution is to walk away and leave the headache to someone else.

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• Criteria for selecting timeout value?

  - by stijn

  Situation: a piece of software reads frames of data from a file in a seperate thread and puts it on a queue, emptied by another thread. That second thread periodically checks on the queue and fails rather gracefully, by showing an error message stating the read timed out, if no data is available within a certain amount of time. Initially this timeout was set to 200mSec. There was no real reasoning behind that constant though, but it worked fine. We measured on a couple of machines and for large data frames, larger than what would be used by customers, a read took like 20mSec whith no other load on the machine. However one customer now gets timeout errors now and then (on the second try all is fine, probably the file is in cache or the virus scanner leaves it alone). The programmers are like 'well, yeah, but that customer's machine is full of cruft, virus scanners, tons of unneeded background processes etc'. Of course the customer is like 'hey this should just work, shouldn't it'? While the programers have a point, since the software is heavy enough to validate the need for a dedicated machine, that does not make the customer happy. Increasing the timeout to 2 seconds, for example, solves the problem. But I'd like to make a proper decision now instead of just randomly pick some magic constant that is probably ok in 99% of cases. What criteria should be used for that? We could just pick a large number, but that feels wrong. (and then we end up with a program that has the horrible bahaviour of hanging when trying to read from a disconnected drive for instance, whereas we'd rather make it show an error right away). Or we could make the timeout value a user setting, but then we need to ducument it clearly and even then not all customers are tech savy enough to really understand what it does. Or we could try and wait until another customer reports timeouts and increase the value again. And again. Until we find something ok for 99.99% of the cases.. Any good practice for this type of situation?

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• How to apply effects that occur (or change) over time to characters in a game?

  - by Joshua Harris

  So assume that I have a system that applies Effects to Characters like so: public class Character { private Collection<Effect> _effects; public void AddEffect (Effect e) { e.ApplyTo(this); _effects.Add(e); } public void RemoveEffect (Effect e) { e.RemoveFrom(this); _effects.Remove(e); } } public interface Effect { public void ApplyTo (Character character); public void RemoveFrom (Character character); } Example Effect: Armor Buff for 5 seconds. void someFunction() { // Do Stuff ... Timer armorTimer = new Timer(5 seconds); ArmorBuff armorbuff = new ArmorBuff(); character.AddEffect(armorBuff); armorTimer.Start(); // Do more stuff ... } // Some where else in code public void ArmorTimer_Complete() { character.RemoveEffect(armorBuff); } public class ArmorBuff implements Effect { public void applyTo(Character character) { character.changeArmor(20); } public void removeFrom(Character character) { character.changeArmor(-20); } } Ok, so this example would buff the Characters armor for 5 seconds. Easy to get working. But what about effects that change over the duration of the effect being applied. Two examples come to mind: Damage Over Time: 200 damage every second for 3 seconds. I could mimic this by applying an Effect that lasts for 1 second and has a counter set to 3, then when it is removed it could deal 200 damage, clone itself, decrement the counter of the clone, and apply the clone to the character. If it repeats this until the counter is 0, then you got a damage over time ability. I'm not a huge fan of this approach, but it does describe the behavior exactly. Degenerating Speed Boost: Gain a speed boost that degrades over 3 seconds until you return to your normal speed. This is a bit harder. I can basically do the same thing as above except having timers set to some portion of a second, such that they occur fast enough to give the appearance of degenerating smoothly over time (even though they are really just stepping down incrementally). I feel like you could get away with only 12 steps over a second (maybe less, I would have to test it and see), but this doesn't seem very elegant to me. The only other way to implement this effect would be to change the system so that the Character checks the _effects collection for effects that alter any of the properties any time that they are being used. I could handle this in functions like getCurrentSpeed() and getCurrentArmor(), but you can imagine how much of a hassle it would be to have that kind of overhead every time you want to do a calculation with movement speed (which would be every time you move your character). Is there a better way to deal with these kinds of effects or events?

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• Travelling at Magenic

  - by Chris G. Williams

  I occasionally get asked if we travel "a lot" at Magenic. Sometimes the question comes from job candidates. Other times it's clients, recruiters or friends. To give a simple yes or no answer would be a disservice to the person asking the question. So here is my standard answer:It depends.(That was the short version.  Here's the long version...)We do have some guys that are more "national" in focus, and they can travel a fair amount. They also receive a little extra in compensation for doing so. It's a balancing act, and not necessarily a one-size-fits-all situation. Not everyone is well suited to constant travel. Some folks enjoy it and some folks hate it.With our local guys, our general policy is to TRY and keep them close to home whenever possible, but sometimes the needs of the client will dictate otherwise. (As Spock would say... the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.)In most cases though, we really do try to avoid sending our guys on extended travel gigs (i.e. every week for 6 months) when a simple kickoff trip and occasional visit will do. This depends on the nature of the gig, of course. Some types of work lend themselves to this model better than others. Additionally, this can and does vary by office. If one office is having trouble staffing a gig (not enough available bodies) and another office has a few too many folks on the bench, well... you can connect the dots. But again, we try to keep that to a minimum.Lastly, we all have our own thresholds for what we consider "a lot" of travel. There are two parts to this threshold:Half of it is whatever you're accustomed to already. The other half is being honest with yourself about how much you [like/hate] dealing with airports, car rentals, taxis, hotels, disruptions to your workout schedule, time away from friends/family, etc.Knowing a bit about yourself will definitely help you decide how much travel is too much for you.

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• From Co-op to fulltime help with salary negotation [closed]

  - by Peter

  Hey I'm a coop student that worked at a particular medium size printing company for 8 months. I had a good time it was lax, sometimes insufficiently challenging but none the less I learned a whole lot. I stuck with them for another 5 months (including this month) at the same rate I was paid then, doing testing work, tool development, taking care of emergencies when the lead developers were away, and other smaller projects and now bigger projects and problem handling (bad printer output etc.). I know their website inside out (ecommerce), and I know their printing software inside out and have made many changes to them both without a hitch. I have also done a lot of refactoring of the existing code base which as far as Im concerned, I believe am the only one to do those sorts of restructuring even though there is constant talk about it. I guess the unit testing paid off and lets me see the value in modularity if even a tad more. Never the less I have faith in my skill and the restructuring I did turned out better than I had imagined . Now the problem is that I finish school next month and so I asked for a full time spot the month after. They have been expanding and have hired a new guy a few months after my coop spot, and just now they hired a new guy to deal with the CRM application. The lead developer who wrote all of the software had left 5 months ago so it was up to all of us to learn what he had done over 4 years (including db, networking). So now I'm afraid that if I assert myself for a salary similar to the other guys, which I believe I am certainly on par with, that I would be seen as ingrateful. It's hard to flip a switch and say, hey double my pay, although when I'm working with their bread and butter (printers) and writing new features, refactoring the whole application for extensibility. I love it regardless of pay. I also feel maybe I'm replaceeble, although nobody knows the website better than myself and the lead web dev (not by a long shot), and nobody knows the printer software/drivers better than myself. I just thought they would have brought up a raise earlier on, and now it feels like they don't value my work. I'm also tired of worrying about it. I think my question is, well what do I do next?

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• What is the best way to implement collision detection using Bullet physics engine and a track generated from a curve?

  - by tigrou

  I am developing a small racing game were the track is generated from a curve. As said above, the track is generated, but not infinite. The track of one level could fit with no problem in memory and will contain a reasonably small amount of triangles. For collisions, I would like to use Bullet physics engine and know what is the best way to handle collisions with the track efficiently. NOTE : The track will be stored as a static rigid body (mass = 0). The player will be represented by a sphere shape for collisions. Here is some possibilities i have in mind : Create one rigid body, then, put all triangles of the track (except non collidable stuff) into it. Result : 1 body with many triangles (eg : 30000 triangles) Split the track into several sections (eg: 10 sections). Then, for each section, create a rigid body and put corresponding triangles in it. Result : small amount of bodies with relatively small amount of triangles (eg : 1500 triangles per section). Split the track into many sub-sections (eg : 1200 sections). Here one subsection = very small step when generating the curve. Again for each sub-section, create a body and put triangles in it. Result : many bodies with very small amount of triangles (eg : 20 triangles). Advantage : it could be possible to "extra data" to each of the subsection, that could be used when handling collisions. Same as 2, but only put sections N and N+1 in physics engine (where N = current section where the player is). When player reach section N+1, unload section N and load section N+2 and so on... Issue : harder to implement, problems if the player suddenly "jump" from one section to another (eg : player fly away from section N, and fall on section N + 4 that was underneath : no collision handled, player will fall into void ) Same as 4, but with many sub-sections. Issues : since subsections are very small there will be constantly new bodies added and removed to physics engine at runtime. Possibilities for player to accidently skip some sections and fall into the void are higher than 4.

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• Getting a virus is *very* annoying

  - by bconlon

  I spent most of yesterday removing an annoying virus from my PC. I feel slightly foolish for getting one in the first place, but after so many years I guess I was always going to eventually succumb. I was also a little surprised at the failure of various tools at removing it. The virus would redirect the browser to websites including ‘licosearch’, ‘hugosearch’ and ‘facebook’, and the disk would be thrashing away infecting dlls in some way. I had the full up to date version of McAfee installed. This identified that there was an issue in some dlls on the system and was able to ‘fix’ them. But they kept getting re-infected. So I installed Microsoft Security Essentials and this too was able to identify and ‘fix’ the infected dlls. The system scans take forever and I really expected better results. I also tried Malwarebytes, Hitman Pro, AVG and Sophos to no avail. Eventually I thought I’d investigate myself. It turned out that on reboot, the virus would start 3 instances of Firefox.exe which I’m guessing would do bad things including infecting as many dlls on the system as possible. I removed Firefox and the virus cleverly then launched 3 instances of Chrome! So I uninstalled Chrome and yes, it then started to launch 3 instances of iexplore.exe. If I’m honest, by this stage I was just seeing if it would be able to use any of the browsers! As it was starting these on reboot, I looked in my User Startup folder and there was a <randomly named>.exe and several log files. I deleted these and rebooted. When I looked they had been recreated. So I then looked in the registry Run and RunOnce entries: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Sure enough there were entries to run a file in C:\Program Files\<random name folder>\<random name file>.exe. I deleted this and rebooted and it was fixed. I also looked in the event log and found a warning that Winlogon had failed to start the file C:\Program Files\<random name folder>\<random name file>.exe So I also checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and this entry had also been changed. Finally I ran a full system scan to clean up any infected dlls. I hope it’s gone for good!  #

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• Investment scheme for a PC game the project

  - by Alex Kamen

  Good day everyone, I am working on a PC game project that has 3 phases planned, micro, macro and mmo versions [if confused, see a brief description at the bottom]. I have found a potential investor for the micro version of the game, but naturally, he requested a detailed plan of how the game will pay back. And the problem is that micro version itself is not supposed to be monetized much, other than some ads and limited in-game currency utilization. The idea is that with this combat demo already at hand, it should be possible to get a really large enough investment (millions of dollars) and use it to pay back the initial small one (thousands of dollars) and take the project into macro phase, which will really make profit. This way, everybody is going to win, provided that I can deliver the end-product. Yet while I am confident of that both the conception of the macro and the real game-play of the micro versions are going to be appealing, I don’t know how to obtain any guarantee of that I will be able to get funded once I have the prototype ready. And without that, I won’t receive the funds for the prototype in the first place! To summarize, my question is: how to figure out my future possibilities of getting funded once I have combat demo out, basically “whom to write to and what”. Ideally, I would like some sort of a preliminary agreement with a game publisher, something that would basically state “If the developer provides the product in time and in quality corresponding to the specifications given, the publisher guarantees to allocate funds for distribution and further development, thereby acquiring the right to X part of all future profits”. Does this sound sane? It’s just that I don’t want to sell all of my rights out straight away by taking a big outside investment while the project is in such early stage. I would appreciate if you would share your thoughts on this kind of scheme, and be sure to ask questions as I am sure I must have forgotten to mention a ton of important things, like the fact that initial funds are going to be spent on outsourcing (living in Siberia is really just great). [here’s a brief outline of what each version will feature] [micro] 1) turn based tactical combat rules 2) character development 3) arena/tournament system [macro] 4) ai-ruled dynamic interactive worlds 5) global map adventuring 6) strategic rpg + god simulator gameplay [mmo] 7) Persistent worlds system 8) Social structures system (“guilds/clans”) 9) god-simulation on the mmo scale P.S. Obviously, these features are incremental, so that mmo version has all 9.

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• Anticipating JavaOne 2012 – Number 17!

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  As I write this, JavaOne 2012 (September 30-October 4 in San Francisco, CA) is just over a week away -- the seventeenth JavaOne! I’ll resist the impulse to travel in memory back to the early days of JavaOne. But I will say that JavaOne is a little like your birthday or New Year’s in that it invites reflection, evaluation, and comparison. It’s a time when we take the temperature of Java and assess the world of information technology generally. At JavaOne, insight and information flow amongst Java developers like no other time of the year.This year, the status of Java seems more secure in the eyes of most Java developers who agree that Oracle is doing an acceptable job of stewarding the platform, and while the story is still in progress, few doubt that Oracle is engaging strongly with the Java community and wants to see Java thrive. From my perspective, the biggest news about Java is the growth of some 250 alternative languages for the JVM – from Groovy to Jython to JRuby to Scala to Clojure and on and on – offering both new opportunities and challenges. The JVM has proven itself to be unusually flexible, resulting in an embarrassment of riches in which, more and more, developers are challenged to find ways to optimally mix together several different languages on projects.    To the matter at hand -- I can say with confidence that Oracle is working hard to make each JavaOne better than the last – more interesting, more stimulating, more networking, and more fun! A great deal of thought and attention is being devoted to the task. To free up time for the 475 technical sessions/Birds of feather/Hands-on-Labs slots, the Java Strategy, Partner, and Technical keynotes will be held on Sunday September 30, beginning at 4:00 p.m.   Let’s not forget Java Embedded@JavaOne which is being held Wednesday, Oct. 3rd and Thursday, Oct. 4th at the Hotel Nikko. It will provide business decision makers, technical leaders, and ecosystem partners important information about Java Embedded technologies and new business opportunities.   This year's JavaOne theme is “Make the Future Java”. So come to JavaOne and make your future better by:--Choosing from 475 sessions given by the experts to improve your working knowledge and coding expertise --Networking with fellow developers in both casual and formal settings--Enjoying world-class entertainment--Delighting in one of the world’s great cities (my home town) Hope to see you there! Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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• How to end a relationship with a client without pissing them off?

  - by thesam18888

  Here's my situation: I'm a freelancing student and I was working on a software project for a client over the summer holidays of 2010. At the time I completed the application, tested it on my machine, delivered it to the client and went back to University. However the client is not completely satisfied with the product and apparently has found a couple of bugs with it. Ever since I went back to Uni, they have been chasing me up and asking me to spend some time to fix the bugs. I have explained that this is simply not possible as I am extremely busy with my Uni work and cannot afford to spare my time for anything else. The client is getting increasingly pissed off and have been chasing me by calling during lectures at evenings and even asking me if I could go over to their place over the weekend to talk about this. This is in turn pissing me off as well because they're essentially asking me to give up my education so that I could help them out by fixing bugs. I go to Uni 5 days a week, 9-6 and feel it is unreasonable for them to call me during evenings and to ask me to work over weekends etc. I would like to end my relationship with this client but would like to do it amicably without pissing them off. How can I do this? I really wish they would just find someone else but I was charging them piss-poor rates so I think they don't want to go to anyone else because they would have to pay more. EDIT The application does not seem to work perfectly on their machine. I had tested it extensively on my machine and it seemed to work fine. I am not sure what exactly is causing it to not work. I was paid a very low amount and it was on an hourly basis. e.g. I would send an invoice saying I worked on this for x amount of hours and they would pay me for it. Apart from the work itself, I have not charged them for all the time spent sending e-mails back and forth, phone calls, visits to their place etc. I would really like to end all my dealings with this client right away.

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• I didn't mean to become a database developer, but now I am. Should I stop or try to get better?

  - by pretlow majette

  20 years ago I couldn't afford even a cheap POS program when I opened my first surf shop in the Virgin Islands. I bought a copy of Paradox (remember that?) in 1990 and spent months in a back room scratching out a POS application. Over many iterations, including a switch to Access (2000)/SQL Server (2003), I built a POS and backoffice solution that runs four stores with multiple cash registers, a warehouse and office. Until recently, all my stores were connected to the same LAN (in a small shopping center) and performance wasn't an issue. Now that we've opened a location in the States that's changed. Connecting to my local server via the internet has slowed that locations application to a crawl. This is partly due to the slow and crappy dsl service we have in the Virgin Islands, and partly due to my less-than-professional code and sql. With other far-away stores in the works, I need a better solution. I like my application. My staff knows it well, and I'm not inclined to take on the expense of a proper commercial solution. So where does that leave me? I should probably host my sql online to sidestep the slow dsl here. I think I can handle cleaning up my SQL querries to speed that up a bit. What about Access? My version seems so old, but I don't like the newer versions with the 'ribbon'. There are so many options... Should I be learning Visual Studio with an eye on moving completely to the web? Will my VBA skills help me at all there? I don't have the luxury of a year at the keyboard to figure it out anymore. What about dotnetnuke, sharepoint, or lightswitch? They all seem like possibilities, but even understanding their capabilities is daunting. I'm pretty deep into it, but maybe I should bail and hire a consultant or programmer. That sounds expensive tho, and there's no guarantee there either... Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Or, if anybody is interested in buying a small chain of surf shops...

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• Powerful Lessons in Data from the Presidential Election

  - by Christina McKeon

  Now that we’ve had a few days to recover from the U.S. presidential election, it’s a good time to take a step back from politics and look for the customer experience lessons that we can take away. The most powerful lesson is that when you know more about your base, you will have an advantage over your competition. That advantage will translate into you winning and your competition losing. Michael Scherer of TIME was given access to Obama’s data analysts two days before the election. His account is documented in Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win. What we learned from Scherer’s inside view is how well Obama’s team did in getting the right data, analyzing it, and acting on it. This data team recognized how critical it was to break down data silos within the campaign. As Scherer noted, they created “a single system that merged information from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers, consumer databases, and social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.” The Obama analysis was so meticulous that they knew which celebrity and which type of celebrity event would help them maximize campaign contributions. With a single system, their data models became more precise. They determined which messages were more successful with specific demographic groups and that who made the calls mattered. Data analysis also led to many other changes in Obama’s campaign including a new ad buying strategy, using social media and applications to tap into supporters’ friends, and using new social news sites. While we did not have that same inside view into Romney’s campaign, much of the post-mortem coverage indicates that Romney’s team did not have the right analysis. As Peter Hamby of CNN wrote in Analysis: Why Romney Lost, “Romney officials had modeled an electorate that looked something like a mix of 2004 and 2008….” That historical data did not account for the changing demographics in the U.S. Does your organization approach data like the Obama or Romney team? Do you really know your base? How well can you predict what is going to happen in your business? If you haven’t already put together a strategy and plan to know more, this week’s civics lesson is a powerful reason to do it sooner rather than later. Your competitors are probably thinking the same thing that you are!

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• Determining cause of random latency/loading issues

  - by Sherwin Flight

  I'm not sure exactly what details to post in regards to my issue, because I'm not sure what is relevant. Prior to the end of September my websites all loaded quickly, in almost all cases. Loading time wasn't usually more than a few seconds. However, since the end of September I noticed a big increase in page loading times. In some cases pages were taking 30 seconds or more to load. I do have a remote monitoring service monitoring some of the sites as well, and the image below shows the response times over the past month. The response times shown at the beginning of this graph were what the usual response times were prior to this issue occurring. You can see that there has been a significant increase in response times from the beginning to the end of this graph. The thing is, the problem is not happening 100% of the time. If I click through the site, or even just keep refreshing the page, about 25% of the time the pages load quickly, the remaining 75% of the time they load slowly. Sometimes the pages take so long to load that they time out, and don't load at all. I have contacted my hosting provider, and they said things at their end was fine. I don't believe the problem is my home internet provider, because all other websites load without a problem. The server is located in Texas, USA. This also raises another interesting point. My remote monitor checks my site from two locations, California, USA, and London, England. As you can see in the chart below the response time is actually shorter when checked from London, which doesn't seem to make sense, since the server is physically closer to the California monitoring location. I would have expected the London monitoring location to have higher response times since they are physically farther away. I should also point out that in some traceroute test I've done it seem like the first connection to the server seems to take the longest, then after that the rest of the page loads quickly. Below is a little chart showing the times for the first connection to the server. So, what could be causing this problem, and what steps can I take to resolve it or at least narrow down the problem? Sending the request to the server was very quick, and receiving the reply back seems pretty quick, but the WAIT time is really long. So it connects, sends the request, but then waits close to 30 seconds before it starts receiving data back. I am also aware that there are things I can do to speed up page loading times, like reducing the number of css/js files used on a page, compressing images, etc. This is not really what the source of the problem is though, because nothing has really changed on the site since before the problem started, and other sites on the same server are loading slowly as well. Any help or advice is much appreciated.

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• In Technology, Ignorance is NOT Bliss

  - by Tanu Sood

  Author: Debra Lilley, ACE Director, UK Proof I’m not technical -  I’ve just finished a Latin America tour with OTN and a funny thing happened that I want to share with you; because it is quite a good analogy for how many of us use technology today and you know how I love analogies. In Costa Rica we had a really long journey up through the mountains to where our conference was to be. The road was windy and narrow and once it got dark there was no scenery to see, boredom set in. At one stage I looked at my watch to see the time, but in the dark I couldn’t make it out, so I thought I would be clever and use the torch in my smartphone! Even though as soon as I switched on the phone it showed the time, I ignored it and used the torch to read my watch. That’s us when we pay maintenance on software, ask for enhancements, and either chose not to upgrade or as I have seen so many times, upgrade but don’t use the new features. I know there are always other factors not least the upgrade costs themselves but in the later releases of all the Oracle family of applications Oracle have done a lot to make the interoperability of them with Oracle Fusion Middleware more successful and in many cases for the first time. My heritage is Oracle E Business Suite (EBS) and the availability of Oracle Weblogic for EBS is fantastic for an Oracle powered organisation that can move away from supporting multiple flavours of application server. The same release made available  - the no downtime patching that Oracle Database 11g introduced with Edition Based Redefinition. I am not saying you must use these features but you must be aware of what each release of your application brings and make a business based decision as to whether it is for you or not. I like to have a simple spreadsheet of features with no-value, nice-to-have, must-have ratings, but make the spreadsheet cumulative so that when you do upgrade you have all the features listed you previously didn’t take up. That way you can avoid the ‘using your phone to read your watch’ scenario. About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Lilley has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Lead and Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts  

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• You probably have enough

  - by BuckWoody

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

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• Evolution laggy due to IMAP -profile or due to some odd Sync -issue?

  - by Izzy

  I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine -- but it is very slow to react in certain situations. Helper questions Could it be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down? There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? Are there e.g. any configuration files? I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up? Different scenarios when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out. Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current, where I cannot do anything in the application until the window closes. switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few things: I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried to access the address book. No noticeable difference. I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one might have expected this in this case according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here) Maybe I should also mention that I'm using the KDE4 desktop (so no Unity or Gnome, though both is installed on the computer). And I did not have this issue before I updated to 12.04.

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• Create simple jQuery plugin

  - by ybbest

  In the last post, I have shown you how to add the function to jQuery. In this post, I will show you how to create plugin to achieve this. 1. You need to wrap your code in the following construct, this is because you should not use $ directly as $ is global variable, it could have clash with some other library which also use $.Basically, you can pass in jQuery object into the function, so that $ is made available inside the function. (JavaScript use function to create scope, so you can make sure $ is referred to jQuery inside the function ) (function($){ //Your code goes here. }; })(jQuery); 2. Put your code into the construct above. (function ($) { $.getParameterByName = function (name) { name = name.replace(/[\[]/, "\\\[").replace(/[\]]/, "\\\]"); var regexS = "[\\?&]" + name + "=([^&#]*)"; var regex = new RegExp(regexS); var results = regex.exec(window.location.search); if (results == null) return ""; else return decodeURIComponent(results[1].replace(/\+/g, " ")); }; })(jQuery); 3. Now you can reference the code into you project and you can call the method in you JavaScript References: Provides scope for variables Variables are scoped at the function level in javascript. This is different to what you might be used to in a language like C# or Java where the variables are scoped to the block. What this means is if you declare a variable inside a loop or an if statement, it will be available to the entire function. If you ever find yourself needing to explicitly scope a variable inside a function you can use an anonymous function to do this. You can actually create an anonymous function and then execute it straight away and all the variables inside will be scoped to the anonymous function: (function() { var myProperty = "hello world"; alert(myProperty); })(); alert(typeof(myProperty)); // undefined How does an anonymous function in JavaScript work? Building Your First jQuery Plugin A Plugin Development Pattern

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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Java @Contented annotation to help reduce false sharing

  - by Dave

  See this posting by Aleksey Shipilev for details -- @Contended is something we've wanted for a long time. The JVM provides automatic layout and placement of fields. Usually it'll (a) sort fields by descending size to improve footprint, and (b) pack reference fields so the garbage collector can process a contiguous run of reference fields when tracing. @Contended gives the program a way to provide more explicit guidance with respect to concurrency and false sharing. Using this facility we can sequester hot frequently written shared fields away from other mostly read-only or cold fields. The simple rule is that read-sharing is cheap, and write-sharing is very expensive. We can also pack fields together that tend to be written together by the same thread at about the same time. More generally, we're trying to influence relative field placement to minimize coherency misses. Fields that are accessed closely together in time should be placed proximally in space to promote cache locality. That is, temporal locality should condition spatial locality. Fields accessed together in time should be nearby in space. That having been said, we have to be careful to avoid false sharing and excessive invalidation from coherence traffic. As such, we try to cluster or otherwise sequester fields that tend to written at approximately the same time by the same thread onto the same cache line. Note that there's a tension at play: if we try too hard to minimize single-threaded capacity misses then we can end up with excessive coherency misses running in a parallel environment. Theres no single optimal layout for both single-thread and multithreaded environments. And the ideal layout problem itself is NP-hard. Ideally, a JVM would employ hardware monitoring facilities to detect sharing behavior and change the layout on the fly. That's a bit difficult as we don't yet have the right plumbing to provide efficient and expedient information to the JVM. Hint: we need to disintermediate the OS and hypervisor. Another challenge is that raw field offsets are used in the unsafe facility, so we'd need to address that issue, possibly with an extra level of indirection. Finally, I'd like to be able to pack final fields together as well, as those are known to be read-only.

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• What You Said: Staying Productive While Working from home

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your telecommuting/work-from-home productivity tips. Now we’re back with a tips and tricks roundup; read on to see how your fellow readers stay focused at home. By far and away the most common technique deployed as carefully isolating work from home life. Carol writes: I love working from home and have done so for 6 years now. I have a routine just as if I was going to an office, except my commute is 12 steps. I get ready for work, grab my purse and smart phone and go to up the steps to my office. I maintain a separate phone line and voice mail for work that I cannot answer from anywhere but my work desk. I use call forwarding when I travel so only my office phone number is published. I have VOIP phone service so I can forward calls from the internet if I forget, or need to change where the phone is forwarded. I do have a wired and wireless head set so I can go get a cold drink if on one of those long boring conference calls. I plan my ‘get off from work’ time and try to stick to it, as with any job some days I am late getting off, but it all works out. I make sure my office is for work only, any other computer play time is in a different part of the house on different computer. My office has laptop, dock, couple of monitors, multipurpose printer, fax, scanner, file cabinets – just like the office at a company. I just also happen to have a couple of golden retrievers that come to work with me and usually lay quietly until 5, and yes they know it is 5pm sometimes before I do. For me, one of the biggest concerns when working from home is not being unproductive, but the danger of never stopping work. You could keep going and going because let’s face it – the company will let you do it, so I set myself up to prevent that and maintain a separateness. HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder?

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• Legal concerns with orchestrating a music submission contest

  - by Amplify91

  My team and I are getting pretty far along in the development of our latest game and have been thinking about audio. We decided to host an audio submission contest where we will offer a little cash and some equity stake in the game as prizes. We are also giving away copies of the game to participants. We hope not only to find audio for our game, but to meet some cool sound artists and promote the game a bit through the process. First of all, is this even a good idea? What are some potential dangers in doing this? Will it even be well received among artists? Secondly, I wrote up some Terms and Conditions in my best legal-speak to try to protect us and clarify how the contest will be run. Are these sufficient to make sure everyone involved is treated fairly and is legally protected? They are as follows: All submissions (The Submission) must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-3.0) By applying a CC-BY-3.0 license, you (The Submitter) expressly give Detour Games (and all members wherein) permission to copy, distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and make commercial use of The Submission. The Submitter must own all rights to The Submission and be within their rights to license it as specified and submit it. The Submitter claims responsibility for the legality of The Submission. If The Submission is found to infringe on the rights of a person or entity other than those of The Submitter, Detour Games will not be held liable as all responsibility and liability for the legality of The Submission is that of The Submitter's. No more than two free copies of The Game per submitter. All flat cash prizes will only be disbursed pending the success of our first $5,000 Kickstarter campaign. These prizes will be disbursed 30 days after Detour Games receives the Kickstarter funds. All equity prizes (percentage of profits) are defined as the given percent of total profits after costs for a period of one year (12 months) after the release of RAW. These prizes will be disbursed semi-annually. All prize money will be disbursed through either an electronic fund transfer through a service such as PayPal or by a mailed money order. It is The Submitter's responsibility to cooperate with Detour Games in the disbursement of the funds. Detour Games reserves the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time without notice. By participating in the contest, The Submitter agrees to and accepts all terms and conditions listed. What else could I do (legally) to protect everyone involved?

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• Can you work for the big (Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc.) without getting too much involved?

  - by Developer Art

  Having seen people talking about interviewing and working for the big companies, I keep wondering how much are you expected to actually get involved in there. 1) That's because I keep seeing folks from Google and Microsoft and others writing in forums, blogging, tweeting, speaking at conferences and seemingly doing this on the 24/7/365 basis from their office, apartment, hotel and even plane. Are you really expected to commit that much if you come to work for them? Do they want you to think about your work while you're eating, sleeping, taking a shower, making love and so on? Can you in fact "switch off" at five and go home forgetting everything? Perhaps you have a hobby, family life, kids, friends, personal projects anyone? Is it so that if you work for the big then you're expected not to have any life outside of the company? You can't develop own projects, have own clients and just have another life? 2) One other thing is the work contracts the big use. I've heard for instance that when you join Microsoft you need to provide a list of projects you're currently working on and after that anything new you'll come up with during your employment automatically belongs to the company. Are all of the big doing this? Can you deny signing a contract until such clause is removed or with the big it is "take it or leave it" because the legal department won't accept any change? Can you make them write the contract in that manner that they step away from anything you've developed in your private time? Of all the big I have only been at SAP during my internship. Lately while browsing through the old papers I've found my old contact which stipulated they owned everything I developed or invented during my employment, which I would never have signed these days. On a side note I don't think I would return to SAP since I remember most people there were clueless and provided the impression they were simply sitting out their years waiting for the retirement. But anyway, what do the other big put in their contracts? How far do you get involved when you go working for the big? Or perhaps fully committed with your body and soul? P.S. I'm not planning to join any of them I'm just curious.

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• Tricky situation with EF and Include while projecting (Select / SelectMany)

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/vincentgrondin/archive/2014/06/07/tricky-situation-with-ef-and-include-while-projecting-select.aspxHello, the other day I stumbled on a problem I had a while back with EF and Include method calls and decided this was it and I was going to blog about it…  This would sort of to pin it inside my head and maybe help others too !  So I was using DBContext and wanted to query a DBSet and include some of it’s associations and in the end, do a projection to get a list of Ids…   At first it seems easy…  Query your DBSet, call Include right afterward, then code the rest of your statement with the appropriate where clause and then, do the projection…   Well it wasn’t that easy as my query required I code my where on some entities a few degree further in the association chain and most of these links where “Many”…  I had to do my projection right away with the SelectMany method.  So I did my stuff and tested the query….  no association where loaded…  My Include statement was simply ignored !  Then I remembered this behavior and how to get it to work…  You need to move the Include AFTER your first projection (Select or SelectMany).  So my sequence became:   Query the DBSet, do the projection with SelectMany, Include the associations, code the where clause and do the final projection…. but it wouldn’t compile…   It kept saying that it could not find an “Include” method on an IQueryable… which is perfectly true!  I knew this should work so I went to the definition of the DBset and saw it inherited DBQuery and sure enough the include method was there…  So I had to cast my statement from start until the end of the first projection in a DBQuery then do the Includes and then the rest of my query….   Bottom line is, whenever your Include statement seem to be ignored, then maybe you will need to move them further down in your query and cast your statement in whatever class gives you access to the Include…   Happy coding all !

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