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• Thou shalt not put code on a piedestal - Code is a tool, no more, no less

  - by Ralf Westphal

  “Write great code and everything else becomes easier” is what Paul Pagel believes in. That´s his version of an adage by Brian Marick he cites: “treat code as an end, not just a means.” And he concludes: “My post-Agile world is software craftsmanship.” I wonder, if that´s really the way to go. Will “simply” writing great code lead the software industry into the light? He´s alluding to the philosopher Kant who proposed, a human beings should never be treated as a means, but always as an end. But should we transfer this ethical statement into the world of software? I doubt it.   Reason #1: Human beings are categorially different from code. They are autonomous entities who need to find a way of living happily together. To Kant it seemed this goal could only be reached if nobody (ab)used a human being for his/her purposes. Because using a human being, i.e. treating it as a means, would contradict the fundamental autonomy and freedom of human beings. People should hold up a symmetric view of their relationships: Since nobody wants to be (ab)used, nobody should (ab)use anybody else. If you want to be treated decently, with respect, in accordance with your own free will - which means as an end - then do the same to other people. Code is dead, it´s a product, it´s a tool for people to reach their goals. No company spends any money on code other than to save money or earn money in the long run. Code is not a puppy. Enterprises do not commission software development to just feel good in its company. Code is not a buddy. Code is a slave, if you will. A mechanical slave, a non-tangible robot. Code is a tool, is a tool. And if we start to treat it differently, if we elevate its status unduely… I guess that will contort our relationship in a contraproductive way. Please get me right: Just because something is “just a tool”, “just a product” does not mean we should not be careful while designing, building, using it. Right to the contrary. We should be very careful when writing code – but not for the code´s sake! We should be careful because we respect our customers who are fellow human beings who should be treated as an end. If we are careless, neglectful, ignorant when producing code on their behalf, then we´re using them. Being sloppy means you´re caring more for yourself that for your customer. You´re then treating the customer as a means to fulfill some of your own needs. That´s plain unethical behavior.   Reason #2: The focus should always be on your purpose, not on any tool. But if code is treated as an end, then the focus is on the code. That might sound right, because where else should be your focus as a software developer? But, well, I´d say, your focus should be on delivering value to your customer. Because in the end your customer does not care if you write a single line of code. She just wants her problem to be solved. Solving problems is the purpose of any contractor. Code must be treated just as a means, a tool we know how to handle very well. But if we´re really trying to be craftsmen then we should be conscious about exactly that and act ethically. That means we must never be so focused on our tool as to be unable to suggest better solutions to the problems of our customers than code.   I´m all with Paul when he urges us to “Write great code”. Sure, if you need to write code, then by all means do so. Write the best code you can think of – and then try to improve it. Paul has all the best intentions when he signs Brians “treat code as an end” - but as we all know: “The road to hell is paved with best intentions” ;-) Yes, I can imagine a “hell of code focus”. In fact, I don´t need to imagine it, I´m seeing it quite often. Because code hell is whereever two developers stand together and are so immersed in talking about all sorts of coding tricks, design patterns, code smells, technologies, platforms, tools that they lose sight of the big picture. Talking about TDD or SOLID or refactoring is a sign of consciousness – relative to the “cowboy coders” view of the world. But from yet another point of view TDD, SOLID, and refactoring are just cures for ailments within a system. And I fear, if “Writing great code” is the only focus or the main focus of software development, then we as an industry lose the ability to see that. Focus draws a line around something, it defines a horizon for perceptions and thinking. So if we focus on code our horizon ends where “the land of code” ends. I don´t think that should be our professional attitude.   So what about Software Craftsmanship as the next big thing after Agility? I think Software Craftsmanship has an important message for all software developers and beyond. But to make it the successor of the Agility movement seems to miss a point. Agility never claimed to solve all software development problems, I´d say. So to blame it for having missed out on certain aspects of it is wrong. If I had to summarize Agility in one word I´d say “Value”. Agility put value for the customer back in software development. Focus on delivering value early and often – that´s Agility´s mantra. All else follows from that. And I ask you: Is that obsolete? Is delivering value not hip anymore? No, sure not. That´s our very purpose as software developers. So how can Agility become obsolete and need to be replaced? We need to do away with this “either/or”-thinking. It´s either Agility or Lean or Software Craftsmanship or whatnot. Instead we should start integrating concepts and movements. Think “both/and”. Think Agility plus Software Craftsmanship plus Lean plus whatnot. We don´t neet to tear down anything from a piedestal and replace it with a new idol. Instead we should do away with piedestals and arrange whatever is helpful is a circle. Then we can turn to concepts, movements for whatever they are best. After 10 years of Agility we should be able to identify what it was good at – and keep that. Keep Agility around and add whatever Agility was lacking or never concerned with. Add whatever is at the core of Software Craftsmanship. Add whatever is at the core of Lean etc. But don´t call out the age of Post-Agility. Because it better never will end. Because once we start to lose Agility´s core we´re losing focus of the customer.

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• Experiences with learning Chinese

  - by Greg Low

  I've had a few friends asking me about learning Chinese and what I've found works and doesn't work. I was answering a question on a mailing list today and I thought I should post this info where it might be useful to many. The question that was initially asked was whether Rosetta Stone was useful but I've provided much more info on learning the language here. I’ve used Rosetta Stone with Chinese but it’s really hard to know whether to recommend it or not. Rosetta Stone works the same way in all languages. They show you photos and then let you both see and hear the target language and get you to work out what they’re talking about. The thinking is that that’s how children learn. However, at first, I found it very frustrating. I’d be staring at photos trying to work out what they were really trying to get at. Sometimes it’s far from obvious. I could not have survived without Google Translate open at the same time. The other weird thing is that the photos are from a mixture of countries. While that’s good in a way, it also means that they are endlessly showing pictures of something that would never happen in the target language and culture. For any language, constant interaction with a speaker of the target language is needed. Rosetta Stone has a “Studio” option. That’s the best part of the program. In my case, it lets me connect around twice a week to a live online class from Beijing. Classes usually have the teacher plus two to four students. You get some Studio access with the initial packages but need to purchase it for ongoing use. I find it very inexpensive. It seems to work out to about $70 (AUD/USD) for six months. That’s a real bargain. The other downside to Rosetta Stone is that they tend to teach very formal language, but as with other languages, that’s not how the locals speak. It might have been correct at one point but no-one actually says that. As an example, Rosetta Stone teach Gonggòng qìche (pronounced roughly like “gong gong chee chure” for bus. Most of my friends from areas like Taiwan would just say Gongche. Google Translate says Zongxiàn (pronounced somewhat like “dzong sheean”) instead. Mind you, the Rosetta Stone option isn't really as bad as "omnibus"; it's more like saying "public bus". If you say the option they provide, people would understand you. I also listen to ChinesePod in the car. They also have SpanishPod. Each podcast is about five minutes of spoken conversation. It is very good for providing current language. Another resource I use is local Meetup groups. Most cities have these and for a variety of languages. It’s way less structured (just standard conversation) but good for getting interaction. The obvious challenge for Asian languages is reading/writing. The input editors for Chinese that are part of Windows are excellent. Many of my Chinese friends speak fluently but cannot read or write. I was determined to learn to do both. For writing, I’m talking about on a computer, not with a pen. (Mind you, I can barely write English with a pen nowadays). When using Rosetta Stone, you can choose to have the Chinese words displayed in pinyin (Wo xihuan xuéxí zhongguó) or in Chinese characters (???????) or both. This year, I’ve been forcing myself to just use the Chinese characters. I use a pinyin input editor in Windows though, as it’s very fast.  (The character recognition input in the iPad is also amazing). Notice from the example that I provided above that the pronunciation of the pinyin isn’t that obvious to us at first either.  Since changing to only using characters, I find I can now read many more Chinese characters fluently. It’s a major challenge though. I can read about 300 now and yet you need around 2,500 to be able to read a newspaper fairly well. Tones are a major issue for some Asian languages. Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone) and there is a major difference in meaning between two words that are spelled the same in pinyin but with different tones. For example, Ma (3rd tone?) is a horse, Ma (1st tone?) is like “mom”, and ma (neutral tone?) is a question mark and so on. Clearly you don’t want to mix these up. As in English, they also have words that do sound the same but mean different things in different contexts. What’s interesting is that even though we see two words that differ only by tone as very similar, to a native speaker, if you say the right words with the wrong tone, you might as well have said a completely different word. My wife’s dialect of Chinese has eight tones. It’s much worse. The reason I’m so keen to learn to read/write Chinese is that even though the different dialects are pronounced so differently that speakers of one dialect often cannot understand another dialect, the writing is generally the same. The only difference is that many years ago, the Chinese government created a simplified set of characters for some of the most commonly used ones. Older Chinese and most Cantonese speakers often struggle with the simplified characters. This is the simplified form of “three apples”: ????   This is the traditional form of the same words: ????  Note that two of the characters are the same but the middle two are quite different. For most languages, the best thing is to watch current movies in the target language but to watch them with the target language as subtitles, not your native language. You want to know what they actually said, not what it roughly means (which is what the English subtitle would give you). The difficulty with Asian languages like Chinese is that you have the added challenge of understanding the subtitles when they are written in the target language. I wish there were Mandarin Chinese movies with pinyin subtitles. For learning to read characters, I also recommend HanCard on the iPad. It is targeted at the HSK language proficiency levels. (I’m intending to take the first HSK exam as soon as I’m ready). Hope that info helps someone get started.  

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• Can Google Employees See My Saved Google Chrome Passwords?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Storing your passwords in your web browser seems like a great time saver, but are the passwords secure and inaccessible to others (even employees of the browser company) when squirreled away? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader MMA is curious if Google employees have (or could have) access to the passwords he stores in Google Chrome: I understand that we are really tempted to save our passwords in Google Chrome. The likely benefit is two fold, You don’t need to (memorize and) input those long and cryptic passwords. These are available wherever you are once you log in to your Google account. The last point sparked my doubt. Since the password is available anywhere, the storage must in some central location, and this should be at Google. Now, my simple question is, can a Google employee see my passwords? Searching over the Internet revealed several articles/messages. Do you save passwords in Chrome? Maybe you should reconsider: Talks about your passwords being stolen by someone who has access to your computer account. Nothing mentioned about the central storage security and vulnerability. There is even a response from Chrome browser security tech lead about the first issue. Chrome’s insane password security strategy: Mostly along the same line. You can steal password from somebody if you have access to the computer account. How to Steal Passwords Saved in Google Chrome in 5 Simple Steps: Teaches you how to actually perform the act mentioned in the previous two when you have access to somebody else’s account. There are many more (including this one at this site), mostly along the same line, points, counter-points, huge debates. I refrain from mentioning them here, simply carry a search if you want to find them. Coming back to my original query, can a Google employee see my password? Since I can view the password using a simple button, definitely they can be unhashed (decrypted) even if encrypted. This is very different from the passwords saved in Unix-like OS’s where the saved password can never be seen in plain text. They use a one-way encryption algorithm to encrypt your passwords. This encrypted password is then stored in the passwd or shadow file. When you attempt to login, the password you type in is encrypted again and compared with the entry in the file that stores your passwords. If they match, it must be the same password, and you are allowed access. Thus, a superuser can change my password, can block my account, but he can never see my password. So are his concerns well founded or will a little insight dispel his worry? The Answer SuperUser contributor Zeel helps put his mind at ease: Short answer: No* Passwords stored on your local machine can be decrypted by Chrome, as long as your OS user account is logged in. And then you can view those in plain text. At first this seems horrible, but how did you think auto-fill worked? When that password field gets filled in, Chrome must insert the real password into the HTML form element – or else the page wouldn’t work right, and you could not submit the form. And if the connection to the website is not over HTTPS, the plain text is then sent over the internet. In other words, if chrome can’t get the plain text passwords, then they are totally useless. A one way hash is no good, because we need to use them. Now the passwords are in fact encrypted, the only way to get them back to plain text is to have the decryption key. That key is your Google password, or a secondary key you can set up. When you sign into Chrome and sync the Google servers will transmit the encrypted passwords, settings, bookmarks, auto-fill, etc, to your local machine. Here Chrome will decrypt the information and be able to use it. On Google’s end all that info is stored in its encrpyted state, and they do not have the key to decrypt it. Your account password is checked against a hash to log in to Google, and even if you let chrome remember it, that encrypted version is hidden in the same bundle as the other passwords, impossible to access. So an employee could probably grab a dump of the encrypted data, but it wouldn’t do them any good, since they would have no way to use it.* So no, Google employees can not** access your passwords, since they are encrypted on their servers. * However, do not forget that any system that can be accessed by an authorized user can be accessed by an unauthorized user. Some systems are easier to break than other, but none are fail-proof. . . That being said, I think I will trust Google and the millions they spend on security systems, over any other password storage solution. And heck, I’m a wimpy nerd, it would be easier to beat the passwords out of me than break Google’s encryption. ** I am also assuming that there isn’t a person who just happens to work for Google gaining access to your local machine. In that case you are screwed, but employment at Google isn’t actually a factor any more. Moral: Hit Win + L before leaving machine. While we agree with zeel that it’s a pretty safe bet (as long as your computer is not compromised) that your passwords are in fact safe while stored in Chrome, we prefer to encrypt all our logins and passwords in a LastPass vault. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Data-driven animation states

  - by user8363

  I'm trying to handle animations in a 2D game engine hobby project, without hard-coding them. Hard coding animation states seems like a common but very strange phenomenon, to me. A little background: I'm working with an entity system where components are bags of data and subsystems act upon them. I chose to use a polling system to update animation states. With animation states I mean: "walking_left", "running_left", "walking_right", "shooting", ... My idea to handle animations was to design it as a data driven model. Data could be stored in an xml file, a rdbms, ... And could be loaded at the start of a game / level/ ... This way you can easily edit animations and transitions without having to go change the code everywhere in your game. As an example I made an xml draft of the data definitions I had in mind. One very important piece of data would simply be the description of an animation. An animation would have a unique id (a descriptive name). It would hold a reference id to an image (the sprite sheet it uses, because different animations may use different sprite sheets). The frames per second to run the animation on. The "replay" here defines if an animation should be run once or infinitely. Then I defined a list of rectangles as frames. <animation id='WIZARD_WALK_LEFT'> <image id='WIZARD_WALKING' /> <fps>50</fps> <replay>true</replay> <frames> <rectangle> <x>0</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> <rectangle> <x>45</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> </frames> </animation> Animation data would be loaded and held in an animation resource pool and referenced by game entities that are using it. It would be treated as a resource like an image, a sound, a texture, ... The second piece of data to define would be a state machine to handle animation states and transitions. This defines each state a game entity can be in, which states it can transition to and what triggers that state change. This state machine would differ from entity to entity. Because a bird might have states "walking" and "flying" while a human would only have the state "walking". However it could be shared by different entities because multiple humans will probably have the same states (especially when you define some common NPCs like monsters, etc). Additionally an orc might have the same states as a human. Just to demonstrate that this state definition might be shared but only by a select group of game entities. <state id='IDLE'> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_LEFT'> <event trigger='LEFT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_RIGHT'> <event trigger='RIGHT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> </state> These states can be handled by a polling system. Each game tick it grabs the current state of a game entity and checks all triggers. If a condition is met it changes the entity's state to the "goto" state. The last part I was struggling with was how to bind animation data and animation states to an entity. The most logical approach seemed to me to add a pointer to the state machine data an entity uses and to define for each state in that machine what animation it uses. Here is an xml example how I would define the animation behavior and graphical representation of some common entities in a game, by addressing animation state and animation data id. Note that both "wizard" and "orc" have the same animation states but a different animation. Also, a different animation could mean a different sprite sheet, or even a different sequence of animations (an animation could be longer or shorter). <entity name="wizard"> <state id="IDLE" animation="WIZARD_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="WIZARD_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> <entity name="orc"> <state id="IDLE" animation="ORC_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="ORC_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> When the entity is being created it would add a list of states with state machine data and an animation data reference. In the future I would use the entity system to build whole entities by defining components in a similar xml format. -- This is what I have come up with after some research. However I had some trouble getting my head around it, so I was hoping op some feedback. Is there something here what doesn't make sense, or is there a better way to handle these things? I grasped the idea of iterating through frames but I'm having trouble to take it a step further and this is my attempt to do that.

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• Following my passion

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} What makes you go the extra mile? What makes you move forward and be ambitious? My name is Alin Gheorghe and I am currently working as a Contracts Administrator in the Shared Service Centre in Bucharest, Romania. I have graduated from the Political Science Faculty of the National School of Political and Administrative Studies here in Bucharest and I am currently undergoing a Master Program on Security and Diplomacy at the same university. Although I have been working a full time job here at Oracle since January 2011 and also going to school after work, I am going to tell you how I spend my spare time and about my passion. I always thought that if one doesn’t have something that he would consider a passion it’s always just a matter of time until he would discover one. Looking back, I can tell you that I discovered mine when I was 14 years old and I remember watching a football game when suddenly I became fascinated by the “man in black” that all football players obeyed during the match. That year I attended and promoted a referee course within my local referee committee and about 6 months later I was delegated to my first official game at youth tournament. Almost 10 years have passed since then and I can tell you that I very much love and appreciate this activity that I have spent doing, each and every weekend, 9 months every year, acquiring more than 600 official games until now. And even if not having a real free weekend or holiday might be sound very consuming, I can say that having something I am passionate about helps me to keep myself balanced and happy while giving me an option to channel any stress or anxiety I may feel. I think it’s important to have something of your own besides work that you spend time and effort on. Whether it’s painting, writing or a sport, having a passion can only have a positive effect on your life. And as every extra thing, it’s not always easy to follow your passion, but is it worth it? Speaking from my own experience I am sure it is, and here are some tips and tricks I constantly use not to give up on my passion: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} No matter how much time you spend at work and how much credit you get for that, it will always be the passion related achievements that will comfort you more and boost your self esteem and nothing compares to that feeling you get. I always try to keep this in mind so that each time I think about giving up I get even more ambitious to move forward. Everybody can just do what they are paid to do or what they are requested to do at work but not everybody can go that extra mile when it comes to following their passion and putting in extra work for that. By exercising this constantly you get used to also applying this attitude on the work related tasks. It takes accurate planning, anticipation and forecasting in order to combine your work with your passion. Therefore having a full schedule and keeping up with it will only help develop and exercise such skills and also will prove to you that you are up to such a challenge. I always keep in mind as a final goal that if you get very good at your passion you can actually start earning from it. And I think that is the ultimate level when you can say that you make a living by doing exactly what you are passionate about. In conclusion, by taking the easy way not only do you miss out on something nice, but life’s priceless rewards are usually given by those things that you actually believe in and know how to stand up for over time.

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Advice for a distracted, unhappy, recently graduated programmer? [closed]

  - by Re-Invent

  I graduated 4 months ago. I had offers from a few good places to work at. At the same time I wanted to stick to building a small software business of my own, still have some ideas with good potential, some half done projects frozen in my github. But due to social pressures, I chose a job, the pay is great, but I am half-passionate about it. A small team of smart folks building useful product, working out contracts across the world. I've started finding it extremely boring. Boring to the extent that I skip 2-3 days a week together not doing work. Neither do I spend that time progressing any of my own projects. Yes, I feel stupid at the way I'm wasting time, but I don't understand exactly why is it happening. It's as if all the excitement has been drained. What can I do about it? Long version: School - I was in third standard. Only students, 6th grade had access to computer labs. I once peeked into the lab from the little door opening. No hard-disks, MS DOS on 5 1/2 inch floppies. I asked a senior student to play some sound in BASIC. He used PLAY to compose a tune. Boy! I was so excited, I was jumping from within. Back home, asked my brother to teach me some programming. We bought a book "MODERN All About GW-BASIC for Schools & Colleges". The book had everything, right from printing, to taking input, file i/o, game programming, machine level support, etc. I was in 6th standard, wrote my first game - a wheel of fortune, rotated the wheel by manipulating 16 color palette's definition. Got internet soon, got hooked to QuickBasic programming community. Made some more games "007 in Danger", "Car Crush 2" for submission to allbasiccode archives. I was extremely excited about all this. My interests now swayed into "hacking" (computer security). Taught myself some perl, found it annoying, learnt PHP and a bit of SQL. Also taught myself Visual Basic one of the winters and wrote a pacman clone with Direct X. By the time I was in 10th standard, I created some evil tools using visual basic, php and mysql and eventually landed myself into an unpaid side-job at a government facility, building evil tools for them. It was a dream come true for crackers of that time. And so was I, still very excited. Things changed soon, last two years of school were not so great as I was balancing preps for college, work at govt. and studies for school at same time. College - College was opposite of all I had wished it to be. I imagined it to be a place where I'd spend my 4 years building something awesome. It was rather an epitome of rote learning, attendance, rules, busy schedules, ban on personal laptops, hardly any hackers surrounding you and shit like that. We had to take permissions to even introduce some cultural/creative activities in our annual schedule. The labs won't be open on weekends because the lab employees had to have their leaves. Yes, a horrible place for someone like me. I still managed to pull out a project with a friend over 2 months. Showed it to people high in the academia hierarchy. They were immensely impressed, we proposed to allow personal computers for students. They made up half-assed reasons and didn't agree. We felt frustrated. And so on, I still managed to teach myself new languages, do new projects of my own, do an intern at the same govt. facility, start a small business for sometime, give a talk at a conference I'm passionate about, win game-dev and hacking contest at most respected colleges, solve good deal of programming contest problems, etc. At the same time I was not content with all these restrictions, great emphasis on rote learning, and sheer wastage of time due to college. I never felt I was overdoing, but now I feel I burnt myself out. During my last days at college, I did an intern at a bigco. While I spent my time building prototypes for certain LBS, the other interns around me, even a good friend, was just skipping time. I thought maybe, in a few weeks he would put in some serious efforts at work assigned to him, but all he did was to find creative ways to skip work, hide his face from manager, engage people in talks if they try to question his progress, etc. I tried a few time to get him on track, but it seems all he wanted was to "not to work hard at all and still reap the fruits". I don't know how others take such people, but I find their vicinity very very poisonous to one's own motivation and productivity. Over that, the place where I come from, HRs don't give much value to what have you done past 4 years. So towards the end of out intern, we all were offered work at the bigco, but the slacker, even after not writing more than 200 lines of code was made a much better offer. I felt enraged instantly - "Is this how the corp world treats someone who does fruitful, if not extra-ordinary work form them for past 6 months?". Yes, I did try to negotiate and debate. The bigcos seem blind due to departmentalization of responsibilities and many layers of management. I decided not to be in touch with any characters of that depressing play. Probably the busy time I had at college, ignoring friends, ignoring fun and squeezing every bit of free time for myself is also responsible. Probably this is what has drained all my willingness to work for anyone. I find my day job boring, at the same time I with to maintain it for financial reasons. I feel a bit burnt out, unsatisfied and at the same time an urge to quit working for someone else and start finishing my frozen side-projects (which may be profitable). Though I haven't got much to support myself with food, office, internet bills, etc in savings. I still have my day job, but I don't find it very interesting, even though the pay is higher than the slacker, I don't find money to be a great motivator here. I keep comparing myself to my past version. I wonder how to get rid of this and reboot myself back to the way I was in school days - excited about it, tinkering, building, learning new things daily, and NOT BORED?

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• PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

  - by Fatherjack

    So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – I had a reasonable idea on the routine and what to expect in general. Here is a list of a few things that I have learned/remembered as the week has gone by. Wear comfortable shoes. This actually needs to be broadened to Take several pairs of comfortable shoes. You will be spending many many hours, for several days one after another. Having comfortable feet that can literally support you for the duration will make the week in general a whole lot better. Not only at the conference but getting to and from you could well be walking. In the evenings you will be walking around town and standing talking in various bars and clubs. Looking back, on some days I was on my feet for over 20 hours. Make friends. This is a given for the long term benefits it brings but there is also an immediate reward in being at a conference with a friend or two. Some events are bigger and more popular than others and some have the type of session that every single attendee will want to be in. This is great for those that get in but if you are in the bathroom or queuing for coffee and you miss out it sucks. Having a friend that can get in to a room and reserve you a seat is a great advantage to make sure you get the content that you want to see and still have the coffee that you need. Don’t go to every session you want to see This might sound counter intuitive and it relies on the sessions being recorded in some way to guarantee you don’t totally miss out. Both PASS Summit and SQL Bits sessions are recorded (summit is audio, SQLBits is video) and this means that if you get into a good conversation with someone over a coffee you don’t have to break it up to go to a session. Obviously there is a trade-off here and you need to decide on the tipping point for yourself but a conversation at a place like this could make a big difference to the next contract or employer you have or it might simply be great catching up with some friends you don’t see so often. Go to at least one session you don’t want to Again, this will seem to be contrary to normal logic but there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about a part of SQL Server that isn’t part of your daily routine. Not only will you learn something new but you will also pick up on the feelings and attitudes of the people in the session. So, if you are a DBA, head off to a BI session and so on. You’ll hear BI speakers speaking to a BI audience and get to understand their point of view and reasoning for making the decisions they do. You will also appreciate the way that your decisions and instructions affect the way they have to work. This will help you a lot when you are on a project, working with multiple teams and make you all more productive. Socialise While you are at the conference venue, speak to people. Ask questions, be interested in whoever you are speaking to. You get chances to talk to new friends at breakfast, dinner and every break between sessions. The only people that might not talk to you would be speakers that are about to go and give a session, in most cases speakers like peace and quiet before going on stage. Other than that the people around you are just waiting for someone to talk to them so make the first move. There is a whole lot going on outside of the conference hours and you should make an effort to join in with some of this too. At karaoke evenings or just out for a quiet drink with a few of the people you meet at the conference. Either way, don’t be a recluse and hide in your room or be alone out in the town. Don’t talk to people Once again this sounds wrong but stay with me. I have spoken to a number of speakers since Summit 2013 finished and they have all mentioned the time it has taken them to move about the conference venue due to people stopping them for a chat or to ask a question. 45 minutes to walk from a session room to the speaker room in one case. Wow. While none of the speakers were upset about this sort of delay I think delegates should take the situation into account and possibly defer their question to an email or to a time when the person they want is clearly less in demand. Give them a chance to enjoy the conference in the same way that you are, they may actually want to go to a session or just have a rest after giving their session – talking for 75 minutes is hard work, taking an extra 45 minutes right after is unbelievable. I certainly hope that they get good feedback on their sessions and perhaps if you spoke to a speaker outside a session you can give them a mention in the ‘any other comments’ part of the feedback, just to convey your gratitude for them giving up their time and expertise for free. Say thank you I just mentioned giving the speakers a clear, visible ‘thank you’ in the feedback but there are plenty of people that help make any conference the success it is that would really appreciate hearing that their efforts are valued. People on the registration desk, volunteers giving schedule guidance and directions, people on the community zone are all volunteers giving their time to help you have the best experience possible. Send an email to PASS and convey your thoughts about the work that was done. Maybe you want to be a volunteer next time so you could enquire how you get into that position at the same time. This isn’t an exclusive list and you may agree or disagree with the points I have made, please add anything you think is good advice in the comments. I’d like to finish by saying a huge thank you to all the people involved in planning, facilitating and executing the PASS Summit 2013, it was an excellent event and I know many others think it was a totally worthwhile event to attend.

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• “It’s only test code…”

  - by Chris George

  “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems.   Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier!   Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you.   Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base.   Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.  

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• Let your Signature Experience drive IT-decision making

  - by Tania Le Voi

  Today’s CIO job description:  ‘’Align IT infrastructure and solutions with business goals and objectives ; AND while doing so reduce costs; BUT ALSO, be innovative, ensure the architectures are adaptable and agile as we need to act today on the changes that we may request tomorrow.”   Sound like an unachievable request? The fact is, reality dictates that CIO’s are put under this type of pressure to deliver more with less. In a past career phase I spent a few years as an IT Relationship Manager for a large Insurance company. This is a role that we see all too infrequently in many of our customers, and it’s a shame.  The purpose of this role was to build a bridge, a relationship between IT and the business. Key to achieving that goal was to ensure the same language was being spoken and more importantly that objectives were commonly understood - hence service and projects were delivered to time, to budget and actually solved the business problems. In reality IT and the business are already married, but the relationship is most often defined as ‘supplier’ of IT rather than a ‘trusted partner’. To deliver business value they need to understand how to work together effectively to attain this next level of partnership. The Business cannot compete if they do not get a new product to market ahead of the competition, or for example act in a timely manner to address a new industry problem such as a legislative change. An even better example is when the Application or Service fails and the Business takes a hit by bad publicity, being trending topics on social media and losing direct revenue from online channels. For this reason alone Business and IT need the alignment of their priorities and deliverables now more than ever! Take a look at Forrester’s recent study that found ‘many IT respondents considering themselves to be trusted partners of the business but their efforts are impaired by the inadequacy of tools and organizations’.  IT Meet the Business; Business Meet IT So what is going on? We talk about aligning the business with IT but the reality is it’s difficult to do. Like any relationship each side has different goals and needs and language can be a barrier; business vs. technology jargon! What if we could translate the needs of both sides into actionable information, backed by data both sides understand, presented in a meaningful way?  Well now we can with the Business-Driven Application Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12cR2! Enterprise Manager’s Business-Driven Application Management capabilities provide the information that IT needs to understand the impact of its decisions on business criteria.  No longer does IT need to be focused solely on speeds and feeds, performance and throughput – now IT can understand IT’s impact on business KPIs like inventory turns, order-to-cash cycle, pipeline-to-forecast, and similar.  Similarly, now the line of business can understand which IT services are most critical for the KPIs they care about. There are a good deal of resources on Oracle Technology Network that describe the functionality of these products, so I won’t’ rehash them here.  What I want to talk about is what you do with these products. What’s next after we meet? Where do you start? Step 1:  Identify the Signature Experience. This is THE business process (or set of processes) that is core to the business, the one that drives the economic engine, the process that a customer recognises the company brand for, reputation, the customer experience, the process that a CEO would state as his number one priority. The crème de la crème of your business! Once you have nailed this it gets easy as Enterprise Manager 12c makes it easy. Step 2:  Map the Signature Experience to underlying IT.  Taking the signature experience, map out the touch points of the components that play a part in ensuring this business transaction is successful end to end, think of it like mapping out a critical path; the applications, middleware, databases and hardware. Use the wealth of Enterprise Manager features such as Systems, Services, Business Application Targets and Business Transaction Management (BTM) to assist you. Adding Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) into the mix will make the end to end customer satisfaction story transparent. Work with the business and define meaningful key performance indicators (KPI’s) and thresholds to enable you to report and action upon. Step 3:  Observe the data over time.  You now have meaningful insight into every step enabling your signature experience and you understand the implication of that experience on your underlying IT.  Watch if for a few months, see what happens and reconvene with your business stakeholders and set clear and measurable targets which can re-define service levels.  Step 4:  Change the information about which you and the business communicate.  It’s amazing what happens when you and the business speak the same language.  You’ll be able to make more informed business and IT decisions. From here IT can identify where/how budget is spent whether on the level of support, performance, capacity, HA, DR, certification etc. IT SLA’s no longer need be focused on metrics such as %availability but structured around business process requirements. The power of this way of thinking doesn’t end here. IT staff get to see and understand how their own role contributes to the business making them accountable for the business service. Take a step further and appraise your staff on the business competencies that are linked to the service availability. For the business, the language barrier is removed by producing targeted reports on the signature experience core to the business and therefore key to the CEO. Chargeback or show back becomes easier to justify as the ‘cost of day per outage’ can be more easily calculated; the business will be able to translate the cost to the business to the cost/value of the underlying IT that supports it. Used this way, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is a key enabler to a harmonious relationship between the end customer the business and IT to deliver ultimate service and satisfaction. Just engage with the business upfront, make the signature experience visible and let Enterprise Manager 12c do the rest. In the next blog entry we will cover some of the Enterprise Manager features mentioned to enable you to implement this new way of working.  

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• PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

  - by Bill Graziano

  The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model.  (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time.  I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

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• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

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• Ruby Debug IDE error : ruby-debug-ide-0.4.9/lib/ruby-debug-ide.rb:109:in `debug_load'

  - by Paul

  I hope someone can assist me. I have RubyMine 2.0.2 installed on Windows 7 32 bit computer. Since a week ago (I presume it must have been after I have update some gems) I cant seem to debug form the IDE. I am trying to debug a rake task which I could before. Running the rake task normally works perfect, just debug doesnt. Its not just limited to the rake, I cant debug any ruby files. I've tried installing older versions of debug-ide and debug-base but to no success. I've tried it with ruby 1.8.7 and 1.8.6 on different computers but nothing. Trying to search the web gave some information, which I've tried, but also no success. Im desperate to get this working. Below are the full error and my current settings: Error: C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin\ruby.exe -e STDOUT.sync=true;STDERR.sync=true;load($0=ARGV.shift) C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin/rdebug-ide --port 57167 -- C:/InstantRails/rails_apps/paperserve/lib/tasks/poll_snmp.rake Fast Debugger (ruby-debug-ide 0.4.9) listens on :57167 C:/InstantRails/rails_apps/paperserve/lib/tasks/poll_snmp.rake:5 C:/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-debug-ide-0.4.9/lib/ruby-debug ide.rb:109:in `debug_load' C:/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-debug-ide-0.4.9/lib/ruby-debug ide.rb:109:in `debug_program' C:/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ruby-debug-ide-0.4.9/bin/rdebug-ide:87 C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin/rdebug-ide:19:in `load' C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin/rdebug-ide:19 -e:1:in `load' -e:1 Uncaught exception: undefined method `namespace' for main:Object Process finished with exit code 1 Code snippet (It fails at the start of namespace. If I remove this, it fails on the next line, etc, etc) #This script should run every 15 minutes require 'snmp' require 'yaml' namespace :cdeweb do RubyGems Environment: RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.3.7 RUBY VERSION: 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-mswin32] INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: C:/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 RUBY EXECUTABLE: C:/InstantRails/ruby/bin/ruby.exe EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: C:/InstantRails/ruby/bin RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS: ruby x86-mswin32-60 GEM PATHS: C:/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 C:/Users/Paul.LPFSYSTEMS/.gem/ruby/1.8 GEM CONFIGURATION: :update_sources = true :verbose = true :benchmark = false :backtrace = false :bulk_threshold = 1000 REMOTE SOURCES: http://rubygems.org/ * LOCAL GEMS * actionmailer (2.3.5, 2.0.2) actionpack (2.3.5, 2.0.2) activerecord (2.3.5, 2.0.2) activeresource (2.3.5, 2.0.2) activesupport (2.3.5, 2.0.2) capistrano (2.5.18, 2.1.0) cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0) cmdparse (2.0.2) columnize (0.3.1) fxri (0.3.7, 0.3.6) fxruby (1.6.12 mswin32) gem_plugin (0.2.3) highline(1.5.2, 1.4.0) hpricot (0.8.2 x86-mswin32, 0.6 mswin32) inaction_mailer (0.6) json (1.4.2 x86-mswin32) json_pure (1.4.2) linecache (0.43 mswin32) log4r (1.1.7, 1.0.5) mongrel (1.1.5 x86-mswin32-60, 1.1.2 mswin32) mysql(2.8.1 x86-mswin32, 2.7.3 mswin32) needle (1.3.0) net-scp (1.0.2) net-sftp (2.0.4, 1.1.0) net-ssh (2.0.22, 1.1.2) net-ssh-gateway (1.0.1) rack (1.0.1) rails (2.3.5, 2.0.2) rake (0.8.7, 0.8.1, 0.8.0, 0.7.3) ruby-debug-base (0.10.3 mswin32) ruby-debug-ide (0.4.9) ruby-net-ldap (0.0.4) rubygems-update (1.3.7, 1.3.6, 1.0.1) snmp (1.0.2) sources (0.0.1) sqlite3-ruby (1.2.5 x86-mswin32, 1.2.1 mswin32) win32-api (1.4.6 x86-mswin32-60, 1.0.4 mswin32) win32-clipboard (0.5.2, 0.4.3) win32-dir (0.3.6, 0.3.2) win32-eventlog (0.5.2, 0.4.6) win32-file (0.6.3, 0.5.4) win32-file-stat (1.3.4, 1.2.7) win32-process (0.6.2, 0.5.3) win32-sapi (0.1.5, 0.1.4) win32-sound (0.4.2, 0.4.1) windows-api (0.4.0, 0.2.0)

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• Grails - Simple hasMany Problem - Using CheckBoxes rather than HTML Select in create.gsp

  - by gav

  My problem is this: I want to create a grails domain instance, defining the 'Many' instances of another domain that it has. I have the actual source in a Google Code Project but the following should illustrate the problem. class Person { String name static hasMany[skills:Skill] static constraints = { id (visible:false) skills (nullable:false, blank:false) } } class Skill { String name String description static constraints = { id (visible:false) name (nullable:false, blank:false) description (nullable:false, blank:false) } } If you use this model and def scaffold for the two Controllers then you end up with a form like this that doesn't work; My own attempt to get this to work enumerates the Skills as checkboxes and looks like this; But when I save the Volunteer the skills are null! This is the code for my save method; def save = { log.info "Saving: " + params.toString() def skills = params.skills log.info "Skills: " + skills def volunteerInstance = new Volunteer(params) log.info volunteerInstance if (volunteerInstance.save(flush: true)) { flash.message = "${message(code: 'default.created.message', args: [message(code: 'volunteer.label', default: 'Volunteer'), volunteerInstance.id])}" redirect(action: "show", id: volunteerInstance.id) log.info volunteerInstance } else { render(view: "create", model: [volunteerInstance: volunteerInstance]) } } This is my log output (I have custom toString() methods); 2010-05-10 21:06:41,494 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Saving: ["skills":["1", "2"], "name":"Ian", "_skills":["", ""], "create":"Create", "action":"save", "controller":"volunteer"] 2010-05-10 21:06:41,495 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Skills: [1, 2] 2010-05-10 21:06:41,508 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Volunteer[ id: null | Name: Ian | Skills [Skill[ id: 1 | Name: Carpenter ] , Skill[ id: 2 | Name: Sound Engineer ] ]] Note that in the final log line the right Skills have been picked up and are part of the object instance. When the volunteer is saved the 'Skills' are ignored and not commited to the database despite the in memory version created clearly does have the items. Is it not possible to pass the Skills at construction time? There must be a way round this? I need a single form to allow a person to register but I want to normalise the data so that I can add more skills at a later time. If you think this should 'just work' then a link to a working example would be great. If I use the HTML Select then it works fine! Such as the following to make the Create page; <tr class="prop"> <td valign="top" class="name"> <label for="skills"><g:message code="volunteer.skills.label" default="Skills" /></label> </td> <td valign="top" class="value ${hasErrors(bean: volunteerInstance, field: 'skills', 'errors')}"> <g:select name="skills" from="${uk.co.bumbumtrain.Skill.list()}" multiple="yes" optionKey="id" size="5" value="${volunteerInstance?.skills}" /> </td> </tr> But I need it to work with checkboxes like this; <tr class="prop"> <td valign="top" class="name"> <label for="skills"><g:message code="volunteer.skills.label" default="Skills" /></label> </td> <td valign="top" class="value ${hasErrors(bean: volunteerInstance, field: 'skills', 'errors')}"> <g:each in="${skillInstanceList}" status="i" var="skillInstance"> <label for="${skillInstance?.name}"><g:message code="${skillInstance?.name}.label" default="${skillInstance?.name}" /></label> <g:checkBox name="skills" value="${skillInstance?.id.toString()}"/> </g:each> </td> </tr> The log output is exactly the same! With both style of form the Volunteer instance is created with the Skills correctly referenced in the 'Skills' variable. When saving, the latter fails with a null reference exception as shown at the top of this question. Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance! Gav

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• Emulating old-school sprite flickering (theory and concept)

  - by Jeffrey Kern

  I'm trying to develop an oldschool NES-style video game, with sprite flickering and graphical slowdown. I've been thinking of what type of logic I should use to enable such effects. I have to consider the following restrictions if I want to go old-school NES style: No more than 64 sprites on the screen at a time No more than 8 sprites per scanline, or for each line on the Y axis If there is too much action going on the screen, the system freezes the image for a frame to let the processor catch up with the action From what I've read up, if there were more than 64 sprites on the screen, the developer would only draw high-priority sprites while ignoring low-priority ones. They could also alternate, drawing each even numbered sprite on opposite frames from odd numbered ones. The scanline issue is interesting. From my testing, it is impossible to get good speed on the XBOX 360 XNA framework by drawing sprites pixel-by-pixel, like the NES did. This is why in old-school games, if there were too many sprites on a single line, some would appear if they were cut in half. For all purposes for this project, I'm making scanlines be 8 pixels tall, and grouping the sprites together per scanline by their Y positioning. So, dumbed down I need to come up with a solution that.... 64 sprites on screen at once 8 sprites per 'scanline' Can draw sprites based on priority Can alternate between sprites per frame Emulate slowdown Here is my current theory First and foremost, a fundamental idea I came up with is addressing sprite priority. Assuming values between 0-255 (0 being low), I can assign sprites priority levels, for instance: 0 to 63 being low 63 to 127 being medium 128 to 191 being high 192 to 255 being maximum Within my data files, I can assign each sprite to be a certain priority. When the parent object is created, the sprite would randomly get assigned a number between its designated range. I would then draw sprites in order from high to low, with the end goal of drawing every sprite. Now, when a sprite gets drawn in a frame, I would then randomly generate it a new priority value within its initial priority level. However, if a sprite doesn't get drawn in a frame, I could add 32 to its current priority. For example, if the system can only draw sprites down to a priority level of 135, a sprite with an initial priority of 45 could then be drawn after 3 frames of not being drawn (45+32+32+32=141) This would, in theory, allow sprites to alternate frames, allow priority levels, and limit sprites to 64 per screen. Now, the interesting question is how do I limit sprites to only 8 per scanline? I'm thinking that if I'm sorting the sprites high-priority to low-priority, iterate through the loop until I've hit 64 sprites drawn. However, I shouldn't just take the first 64 sprites in the list. Before drawing each sprite, I could check to see how many sprites were drawn in it's respective scanline via counter variables . For example: Y-values between 0 to 7 belong to Scanline 0, scanlineCount[0] = 0 Y-values between 8 to 15 belong to Scanline 1, scanlineCount[1] = 0 etc. I could reset the values per scanline for every frame drawn. While going down the sprite list, add 1 to the scanline's respective counter if a sprite gets drawn in that scanline. If it equals 8, don't draw that sprite and go to the sprite with the next lowest priority. SLOWDOWN The last thing I need to do is emulate slowdown. My initial idea was that if I'm drawing 64 sprites per frame and there's still more sprites that need to be drawn, I could pause the rendering by 16ms or so. However, in the NES games I've played, sometimes there's slowdown if there's not any sprite flickering going on whereas the game moves beautifully even if there is some sprite flickering. Perhaps give a value to each object that uses sprites on the screen (like the priority values above), and if the combined values of all objects w/ sprites surpass a threshold, introduce the sprite flickering? IN CONCLUSION... Does everything I wrote actually sound legitimate and could work, or is it a pipe dream? What improvements can you all possibly think with this game programming theory of mine?

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• Odd tcp deadlock under windows

  - by John Robertson

  We are moving large amounts of data on a LAN and it has to happen very rapidly and reliably. Currently we use windows TCP as implemented in C++. Using large (synchronous) sends moves the data much faster than a bunch of smaller (synchronous) sends but will frequently deadlock for large gaps of time (.15 seconds) causing the overall transfer rate to plummet. This deadlock happens in very particular circumstances which makes me believe it should be preventable altogether. More importantly if we don't really know the cause we don't really know it won't happen some time with smaller sends anyway. Can anyone explain this deadlock? Deadlock description (OK, zombie-locked, it isn't dead, but for .15 or so seconds it stops, then starts again) The receiving side sends an ACK. The sending side sends a packet containing the end of a message (push flag is set) The call to socket.recv takes about .15 seconds(!) to return About the time the call returns an ACK is sent by the receiving side The the next packet from the sender is finally sent (why is it waiting? the tcp window is plenty big) The odd thing about (3) is that typically that call doesn't take much time at all and receives exactly the same amount of data. On a 2Ghz machine that's 300 million instructions worth of time. I am assuming the call doesn't (heaven forbid) wait for the received data to be acked before it returns, so the ack must be waiting for the call to return, or both must be delayed by something else. The problem NEVER happens when there is a second packet of data (part of the same message) arriving between 1 and 2. That part very clearly makes it sound like it has to do with the fact that windows TCP will not send back a no-data ACK until either a second packet arrives or a 200ms timer expires. However the delay is less than 200 ms (its more like 150 ms). The third unseemly character (and to my mind the real culprit) is (5). Send is definitely being called well before that .15 seconds is up, but the data NEVER hits the wire before that ack returns. That is the most bizarre part of this deadlock to me. Its not a tcp blockage because the TCP window is plenty big since we set SO_RCVBUF to something like 500*1460 (which is still under a meg). The data is coming in very fast (basically there is a loop spinning out data via send) so the buffer should fill almost immediately. According to msdn the buffer being full and at least one pending send should cause the data to be sent (though in another place it mentions that there various "heuristics" used in deciding when a send hits the wire). Anway, why the sender doesn't actually send more data during that .15 second pause is the most bizarre part to me. The information above was captured on the receiving side via wireshark (except of course the socket.recv return times which were logged in a text file). We tried changing the send buffer to zero and turning off Nagle on the sender (yes, I know Nagle is about not sending small packets - but we tried turning Nagle off in case that was part of the unstated "heuristics" affecting whether the message would be posted to the wire. Technically microsoft's Nagle is that a small packet isn't sent if the buffer is full and there is an outstanding ACK, so it seemed like a possibility).

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• Mysql performance problem & Failed DIMM

  - by murdoch

  Hi I have a dedicated mysql database server which has been having some performance problems recently, under normal load the server will be running fine, then suddenly out of the blue the performance will fall off a cliff. The server isn't using the swap file and there is 12GB of RAM in the server, more than enough for its needs. After contacting my hosting comapnies support they have discovered that there is a failed 2GB DIMM in the server and have scheduled to replace it tomorow morning. My question is could a failed DIMM result in the performance problems I am seeing or is this just coincidence? My worry is that they will replace the ram tomorrow but the problems will persist and I will still be lost of explanations so I am just trying to think ahead. The reason I ask is that there is plenty of RAM in the server, more than required and simply missing 2GB should be a problem, so if this failed DIMM is causing these performance problems then the OS must be trying to access the failed DIMM and slowing down as a result. Does that sound like a credible explanation? This is what DELLs omreport program says about the RAM, notice one dimm is "Critical" Memory Information Health : Critical Memory Operating Mode Fail Over State : Inactive Memory Operating Mode Configuration : Optimizer Attributes of Memory Array(s) Attributes : Location Memory Array 1 : System Board or Motherboard Attributes : Use Memory Array 1 : System Memory Attributes : Installed Capacity Memory Array 1 : 12288 MB Attributes : Maximum Capacity Memory Array 1 : 196608 MB Attributes : Slots Available Memory Array 1 : 18 Attributes : Slots Used Memory Array 1 : 6 Attributes : ECC Type Memory Array 1 : Multibit ECC Total of Memory Array(s) Attributes : Total Installed Capacity Value : 12288 MB Attributes : Total Installed Capacity Available to the OS Value : 12004 MB Attributes : Total Maximum Capacity Value : 196608 MB Details of Memory Array 1 Index : 0 Status : Ok Connector Name : DIMM_A1 Type : DDR3-Registered Size : 2048 MB Index : 1 Status : Ok Connector Name : DIMM_A2 Type : DDR3-Registered Size : 2048 MB Index : 2 Status : Ok Connector Name : DIMM_A3 Type : DDR3-Registered Size : 2048 MB Index : 3 Status : Critical Connector Name : DIMM_B1 Type : DDR3-Registered Size : 2048 MB Index : 4 Status : Ok Connector Name : DIMM_B2 Type : DDR3-Registered Size : 2048 MB Index : 5 Status : Ok Connector Name : DIMM_B3 Type : DDR3-Registered Size : 2048 MB the command free -m shows this, the server seems to be using more than 10GB of ram which would suggest it is trying to use the DIMM total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 12004 10766 1238 0 384 4809 -/+ buffers/cache: 5572 6432 Swap: 2047 0 2047 iostat output while problem is occuring avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 52.82 0.00 11.01 0.00 0.00 36.17 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 47.00 0.00 576.00 0 576 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 1.00 0.00 32.00 0 32 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 46.00 0.00 544.00 0 544 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 53.12 0.00 7.81 0.00 0.00 39.06 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 49.00 0.00 592.00 0 592 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 49.00 0.00 592.00 0 592 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 56.09 0.00 7.43 0.37 0.00 36.10 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 232.00 0.00 64520.00 0 64520 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 159.00 0.00 63728.00 0 63728 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 73.00 0.00 792.00 0 792 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 52.18 0.00 9.24 0.06 0.00 38.51 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 49.00 0.00 600.00 0 600 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 49.00 0.00 600.00 0 600 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 54.82 0.00 8.64 0.00 0.00 36.55 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 100.00 0.00 2168.00 0 2168 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 100.00 0.00 2168.00 0 2168 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 54.78 0.00 6.75 0.00 0.00 38.48 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 84.00 0.00 896.00 0 896 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 84.00 0.00 896.00 0 896 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 54.34 0.00 7.31 0.00 0.00 38.35 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 81.00 0.00 840.00 0 840 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 81.00 0.00 840.00 0 840 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 55.18 0.00 5.81 0.44 0.00 38.58 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 317.00 0.00 105632.00 0 105632 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 224.00 0.00 104672.00 0 104672 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 93.00 0.00 960.00 0 960 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 55.38 0.00 7.63 0.00 0.00 36.98 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 74.00 0.00 800.00 0 800 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 74.00 0.00 800.00 0 800 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 56.43 0.00 7.80 0.00 0.00 35.77 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 72.00 0.00 784.00 0 784 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 72.00 0.00 784.00 0 784 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 54.87 0.00 6.49 0.00 0.00 38.64 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 80.20 0.00 855.45 0 864 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 80.20 0.00 855.45 0 864 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 57.22 0.00 5.69 0.00 0.00 37.09 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 33.00 0.00 432.00 0 432 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 33.00 0.00 432.00 0 432 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 56.03 0.00 7.93 0.00 0.00 36.04 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 41.00 0.00 560.00 0 560 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 2.00 0.00 88.00 0 88 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 39.00 0.00 472.00 0 472 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 55.78 0.00 5.13 0.00 0.00 39.09 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 29.00 0.00 392.00 0 392 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 29.00 0.00 392.00 0 392 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 53.68 0.00 8.30 0.06 0.00 37.95 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 78.00 0.00 4280.00 0 4280 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda4 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sda5 78.00 0.00 4280.00 0 4280

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• Xcode - "Preference Pane" project - how to access bundle?

  - by Nippysaurus

  I have created a "Preference Pane" project. In this project I would like to load an image from my bundles resources folder. This seems difficult because "[NSBundle mainBundle]" seems to return the following: 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </Applications/System Preferences.app> (loaded) Iterating through "[NSBundle allBundles]" reveals that my projects bundle appears, but does not appear to be loaded: 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Mouse.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Sound.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Spotlight.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/TimeMachine.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </Library/PreferencePanes/DivX.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Trackpad.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/UniversalAccessPref.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Dock.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/DateAndTime.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Keyboard.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/MobileMe.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/FibreChannel.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Appearance.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/DigiHubDiscs.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Ink.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Security.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/EnergySaver.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Speech.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </Users/michael/Library/PreferencePanes/MyPrefPane.prefPane> (loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </Users/michael/Code/MyPrefPane/build/Debug/MyPrefPane.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/SharingPref.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Expose.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/SoftwareUpdate.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/ParentalControls.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/PrintAndFax.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Accounts.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/DesktopScreenEffectsPref.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Bluetooth.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Localization.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/StartupDisk.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Network.prefPane> (not yet loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </Applications/System Preferences.app> (loaded) 27/12/10 9:24:18 PM System Preferences[5076] NSBundle </System/Library/PreferencePanes/Displays.prefPane> (not yet loaded) I'm not sure whats going on here. How can I access my prefpane bundle?

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• What is the coolest thing you can do in <10 lines of simple code? Help me inspire beginners!

  - by Tom Ritter

  I'm looking for the coolest thing you can do in a few lines of simple code. I'm sure you can write a Mandelbrot set in Haskell in 15 lines but it's difficult to follow. My goal is to inspire students that programming is cool. We know that programming is cool because you can create anything you imagine - it's the ultimate creative outlet. I want to inspire these beginners and get them over as many early-learning humps as I can. Now, my reasons are selfish. I'm teaching an Intro to Computing course to a group of 60 half-engineering, half business majors; all freshmen. They are the students who came from underprivileged High schools. From my past experience, the group is generally split as follows: a few rock-stars, some who try very hard and kind of get it, the few who try very hard and barely get it, and the few who don't care. I want to reach as many of these groups as effectively as I can. Here's an example of how I'd use a computer program to teach: Here's an example of what I'm looking for: a 1-line VBS script to get your computer to talk to you: CreateObject("sapi.spvoice").Speak InputBox("Enter your text","Talk it") I could use this to demonstrate order of operations. I'd show the code, let them play with it, then explain that There's a lot going on in that line, but the computer can make sense of it, because it knows the rules. Then I'd show them something like this: 4(5*5) / 10 + 9(.25 + .75) And you can see that first I need to do is (5*5). Then I can multiply for 4. And now I've created the Object. Dividing by 10 is the same as calling Speak - I can't Speak before I have an object, and I can't divide before I have 100. Then on the other side I first create an InputBox with some instructions for how to display it. When I hit enter on the input box it evaluates or "returns" whatever I entered. (Hint: 'oooooo' makes a funny sound) So when I say Speak, the right side is what to Speak. And I get that from the InputBox. So when you do several things on a line, like: x = 14 + y; You need to be aware of the order of things. First we add 14 and y. Then we put the result (what it evaluates to, or returns) into x. That's my goal, to have a bunch of these cool examples to demonstrate and teach the class while they have fun. I tried this example on my roommate and while I may not use this as the first lesson, she liked it and learned something. Some cool mathematica programs that make beautiful graphs or shapes that are easy to understand would be good ideas and I'm going to look into those. Here are some complicated actionscript examples but that's a bit too advanced and I can't teach flash. What other ideas do you have?

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• What is Causing this IIS 7 Web Service Sporadic Connectivity Error?

  - by dpalau

  On sporadic occasions we receive the following error when attempting to call an .asmx web service from a .Net client application: "The underlying connection was closed: A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server. Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host." By sporadic I mean that it might occur zero, once every few days, or a half-dozen times a day for some users. It will never occur for the first web service call of a user. And the subsequent (usually the same) call will always work immediately after the failure. The failures happen across a variety of methods in the service and usually happens between 15-20 seconds (according to the log) from the time of the request. Looking in the IIS site log for the particular call will show one or the other of the following windows error codes: 121: The semaphore timeout period has elapsed. 1236: The network connection was aborted by the local system. Some additional environment details: Running on internal network web farm consisting of two servers running IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 OS. These problems did not occur when running in an older IIS6 web farm of three servers running on Windows Server 2003 (and we use a single IIS6/2003 instance for our development and staging environments with no issues). EDIT: Also, all of these server instances are VMWare virtual machines, not sure if that is a surprise anymore or not. The web service is a .Net 2.0/3.5 compiled .asmx web service that has its own application pool (.Net 2.0, integrated pipeline). Only has Windows Authentication enabled. We have another web service on the farm that uses the same physical path as the primary service, the only difference being that Basic Authentication is enabled. This is used for a portion of our ERP system. Have tried using the same and different application pool - no effect on the error. This site isn't hit as often as the primary site and has never had an error. As mentioned, the error will only happen when called from the .Net client - not from other applications. The client application is always creating a new web service object for each request and setting the service credentials to System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials. The application is either deployed locally to a client or run in a Citrix server session. Those users running in Citrix doesn't seem to experience the issue, only locally deployed clients. The Citrix servers and the web farm are located in the same physical location and are located in the same IP range (10.67.xx.xx). Locally deployed clients experiencing the error are located elsewhere (10.105.xx.xx, 10.31.xx.xx). I've checked the OS logs to see if I can see any problems but nothing really sticks out. EDIT: Actually, I myself just ran into the error a little bit ago. I decided to check out the logs again and saw that there was a Security log entry of "Audit Failure" at the 'same' time (IIS log entry at 1:39:59, event log entry at 1:39:50). Not sure if this is a coincidence or not, I'll have to check out the logs of previous errors. I'm probably grasping for straws but the details: Log Name: Security Source: Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing Date: 7/8/2009 1:39:50 PM Event ID: 5159 Task Category: Filtering Platform Connection Level: Information Keywords: Audit Failure User: N/A Computer: is071019.<**.net Description: The Windows Filtering Platform has blocked a bind to a local port. Application Information: Process ID: 1260 Application Name: \device\harddiskvolume1\windows\system32\svchost.exe Network Information: Source Address: 0.0.0.0 Source Port: 54802 Protocol: 17 Filter Information: Filter Run-Time ID: 0 Layer Name: Resource Assignment Layer Run-Time ID: 36 I've also tried to use Failed Request Tracing in IIS7 but the service call never actually gets to where FRT can capture it (even though the failure is logged in the web service log). The network infrastructure group said they checked out the DNS and any NIC settings are correct so there is no 'flapping'. Everything pans out. I'm not sure that they checked out any domain controller servers though to see if that could be an issue. Any ideas? Or any other debugging strategies to get to the bottom of this? I'm just the developer in charge of the software and don't really have the knowledge on what to investigate from the networking side of things - although it does sound like a networking issue to me based on what is happening. Thanks in advance for any help.

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• How do I evaluate my skillset against the current market to see what needs improvement and where my

  - by baijajusav

  First of all, this question may be out of bounds for this site. If so, remove it. I say this because this site seems to be a place for more concrete questions that are not so relative in nature. And before I begin, for those of you whom just prefer a question and not this sort of dialog, here is my question: How can I assess my current skills as a programmer and decide where and what areas to improve upon? That said, here's what I'm asking/talking about, in essence. The market is always in constant flux. As programmers we're always having to learn new things, update our skills, push ourselves into that next project. There's not a very good litmus test that I know of for us to get an idea of where we stand as programmers. I came across this blog post by Jeff Atwood talking about why can't programmers code. Instinctively (and as the post goes on to state) I rushed through the program in about 4 minutes (most of that time was b/c I was hand writing it out. Still, this doesn't really answer the question of where do my skills need to be to succeed in today's world. I real blogs, listen to podcasts, try to keep up on the latest things coming out. It has only been in the past couple of months that I made a decision to pick a focus area for my learning as I can't learn everything and trying to do so is to spread myself too thin. I chose ASP.NET MVC & C#. I plan to stick with Microsoft technologies, not out of some sense of loyalty or stubbornness, but rather because they seem to stream together and have a unifying connection between them. With Windows Phone 7 coming out, it seems that now is the obvious time to pick up WPF and Silverlight as well. Still, if you asked me to code something apart from intellisense and the internet, I probably couldn't get the syntax right. I don't have libraries memorized or know precisely where the classes I use exist within the .Net framework, namely because I haven't had to pull that knowledge out of the air. In a way, I suppose Visual Studio has insulated me, which isn't a good thing, but, at the same time, I've still been able to be productive. I'm working on my own side project to try and help my learning. In doing so, I'm trying to make use of best practices and 3rd party frameworks where I can. I'm using automapper and EF 1.0. I know everyone in the .net community seems to cry foul at the sound of EF 1.0, but I can't say why because I've never used it. There's no lazy loading and that has proven rather annoying; however, aside from that, I haven't had that much of an issue. Granted this is probably because I'm not writing tests as I go (which I'm not doing because I don't know how to test EF in tests and don't really have a clue how to write tests for ASP.NET MVC 1.0). I'm also using a custom membership provider; granted, it's a barebone implementation, but I'm using it still. My thinking in all of this is, while I am neglecting a great many important technologies that are in the mainstream, I'll have a working project in the end. I can come back and add those things after I finish. Doing it all now and at once seems like too much. I know how I work and I don't think I'd ever get it done that way. I've elected to make this a community wiki as I think this question might fight better there. If a moderator disagrees with that choice or the decision to post this here, the just delete the question. I'm not trying to make undue work for anyone. I'm just a programmer trying to assess my where his skills are now and where I should be improving.

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• If 'Architect' is a dirty word - what's the alternative; when not everyone can actually design a goo

  - by Andras Zoltan

  Now - I'm a developer first and foremost; but whenever I sit down to work on a big project with lots of interlinking components and areas, I will forward-plan my interfaces, base classes etc as best I can - putting on my Architect hat. For a few weeks I've been doing this for a huge project - designing whole swathes of interfaces etc for a business-wide platform that we're developing. The basic structure is a couple of big projects that consists of service and data interfaces, with some basic implementations of all of these. On their own, these assemblies are useless though, as they are simply intended intended as a scaffold on which to build a business-specific implementation (we have a lot of businesses). Therefore, the design of the core platform is absolutely crucial, since consumers of the system are not intended to know which implementation they are actually using. In the past it's not worked so well, but after a few proof-of-concepts and R&D projects this new platform is now growing nicely and is already proving itself. Then somebody else gets involved in the project - he's a TDD man who sees code-level architecture as an irrelevance and is definitely from the camp that 'architect' is a dirty word - I should add that our working relationship is very good despite this :) He's open about the fact that he can't architect in advance and obviously TDD really helps him because it allows him to evolve his systems over time. That I get, and totally understand; but it means that his coding style, basically, doesn't seem to be able to honour the architecture that I've been putting in place. Now don't get me wrong - he's an awesome coder; but the other day he needed to extend one of his components (an implementation of a core interface) to bring in an extra implementation-specific dependency; and in doing so he extended the core interface as well as his implementation (he uses ReSharper), thus breaking the independence of the whole interface. When I pointed out his error to him, he was dismayed. Being test-first, all that mattered to him was that he'd made his tests pass, and just said 'well, I need that dependency, so can't we put it in?'. Of course we could put it in, but I was frustrated that he couldn't see that refactoring the generic interface to incorporate an implementation-specific feature was just wrong! But it is all very Charlie Brown to him (you know the sound the adults make when they're talking to the children) - as far as he's concerned we don't need to worry about it because we can always refactor. The problem is, the culture of test-write-refactor is all very well and good - but not when you're dealing with a platform that is going to be shared out among so many projects that you could never get them all in one place to make the refactorings work. In my opinion, sometimes you actually have to think about what you're doing, and not just let nature take its course. Am I simply fulfilling the role of Architect as a dirty word here? I believe that architecture is important and should be thought about before code gets written; unless it's a particularly small project. But when you're working in a team of people who don't think that way, or even can't think that way how can you actually get this across? Is it a case of simply making the architecture off-limits to changes by other people? I don't want to start having bloody committees just to be able to grow the system; but equally I don't want to be the only one responsible for it all. Do you think the architect role is a waste of time? Is it at odds with TDD and other practises? Can this mix of different practises be made to work, or should I just be a lot less precious (and in so doing allow a generic platform become useless!)? Or do I just lay down the law? Any ideas/experiences/views gratefully received.

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• How do I handle calls to AudioTrack from jni without crashing?

  - by icecream

  I was trying to write to an AudioTrack from a jni callback, and I get a signal 7 (SIGBUS), fault addr 00000000. I have looked at the Wolf3D example for odroid and they seem to use a android.os.Handler to post a Runnable that will do an update in the correct thread context. I have also tried AttachCurrentThread, but I fail in this case also. It works to play the sound when running from the constructor even if I wrap it in a thread and then post it to the handler. When I do the "same" via a callback from jni it fails. I assume I am braeaking some rules, but I haven't been able to figure out what they are. So far, I haven't found the answer here on SO. So I wonder if anyone knows how this should be done. EDIT: Answered below. The following code is to illustrate the problem. Java: package com.example.jniaudiotrack; import android.app.Activity; import android.media.AudioFormat; import android.media.AudioManager; import android.media.AudioTrack; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.util.Log; public class JniAudioTrackActivity extends Activity { AudioTrack mAudioTrack; byte[] mArr; public static final Handler mHandler = new Handler(); /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); mArr = new byte[2048]; for (int i = 0; i < 2048; i++) { mArr[i] = (byte) (Math.sin(i) * 128); } mAudioTrack = new AudioTrack(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 11025, AudioFormat.CHANNEL_CONFIGURATION_MONO, AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_8BIT, 2048, AudioTrack.MODE_STREAM); mAudioTrack.play(); new Thread(new Runnable() { public void run() { mHandler.post(new Runnable() { public void run() { mAudioTrack.write(mArr, 0, 2048); Log.i(TAG, "*** Handler from constructor ***"); } }); } }).start(); new Thread(new Runnable() { public void run() { audioFunc(); } }).start(); } public native void audioFunc(); @SuppressWarnings("unused") private void audioCB() { mHandler.post(new Runnable() { public void run() { mAudioTrack.write(mArr, 0, 2048); Log.i(TAG, "*** audioCB called ***"); } }); } private static final String TAG = "JniAudioTrackActivity"; static { System.loadLibrary("jni_audiotrack"); } } cpp: #include <jni.h> extern "C" { JNIEXPORT void Java_com_example_jniaudiotrack_JniAudioTrackActivity_audioFunc(JNIEnv* env, jobject obj); } JNIEXPORT void Java_com_example_jniaudiotrack_JniAudioTrackActivity_audioFunc(JNIEnv* env, jobject obj) { JNIEnv* jniEnv; JavaVM* vm; env->GetJavaVM(&vm); vm->AttachCurrentThread(&jniEnv, 0); jclass cls = env->GetObjectClass(obj); jmethodID audioCBID = env->GetMethodID(cls, "audioCB", "()V"); if (!audioCBID) { return; } env->CallVoidMethod(cls, audioCBID); } Trace snippet: I/DEBUG ( 1653): pid: 9811, tid: 9811 >>> com.example.jniaudiotrack <<< I/DEBUG ( 1653): signal 7 (SIGBUS), fault addr 00000000 I/DEBUG ( 1653): r0 00000800 r1 00000026 r2 00000001 r3 00000000 I/DEBUG ( 1653): r4 42385726 r5 41049e54 r6 bee25570 r7 ad00e540 I/DEBUG ( 1653): r8 000040f8 r9 41048200 10 41049e44 fp 00000000 I/DEBUG ( 1653): ip 000000f8 sp bee25530 lr ad02dbb5 pc ad012358 cpsr 20000010 I/DEBUG ( 1653): #00 pc 00012358 /system/lib/libdvm.so

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• Installing Windows on HP Proliant Servers without SmartStart

  - by Fitzroy

  I have a PXE server for deploying Windows XP and Windows 7 to workstations. The process is as follows: Boot the workstation from the NIC. Workstation sends a DHCP request. DHCP server responds with an IP address and the location of the PXE server. Workstation downloads WinPE image file from PXE server via TFTP Workstation stores WinPE image file in memory and executes it. Once booted into WinPE, I connect to a network share to gain access to either the Windows XP or Windows 7 installation files. A custom script is launched to guide you through the process of formatting and partitioning the hard drive(s) (using DISKPART and FORMAT). Another custom script asks for details such as the hostname to assign to the workstation. The answers provided are used to build an unattended answer file (SIF [Setup Information File] for WinXP and XML for Win7). The Windows setup EXE is launched, passing the unattended answer file to it as a parameter. The Windows XP and Windows 7 installation sources have been customised to include the drivers for our Dell workstations. They also run a number of scripts upon first booting up to install software packages. This process works very well for our workstations and I would now like to use it for building our servers too. The vast majority of our servers are HP Proliant DL360 G6, DL380 G5 and DL380 G6. They’re running Windows Server 2003 (various editions) or 2008 (various editions). To date, we have always built the HP Proliant servers using the SmartStart CD provided. SmartStart does three useful things for us: Setup RAID with HP Array Configuration Utility (ACU). Installs and configures SNMP Installs various HP Tools for Windows (HP Array Configuration Utility, HP Array Diagnostic Utility, HP Proliant Integrated Management Log Viewer, etc) Using SmartStart I have never had to manually download and install Windows drivers for network, sound, video, etc. I'm not sure if this is because SmartStart copies drivers from the CD during setup, or whether Windows just has the drivers natively in its driver CAB. If I abandon the SmartStart CD in favour of my PXE server I would have to do the following: As I wont have access to ACU, I'll configure the RAID (before booting to the PXE server) by pressing F8 (during the boot process) to access Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA). Installation of SNMP and the HP Tools will have to be installed once the Windows installation is complete using the Proliant Support Pack. Is this method OK? Is there anything that the SmartStart CD does that I'll be unable to do by other means? Are there any disadvantages to not using the SmartStart CD? Many thanks. UPDATE 05/01/12 I’ve been reading through the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit documentation. The scripting toolkit contains command line tools which work within WinPE and can such things as configure BIOS settings, configure an array and setup ILO. I’m personally not too bothered about configuring BIOS settings as I rarely deviate from the defaults (unless the server is to be a Hyper-V host). I’m not too fussed about being able to configure the array from within WinPE, as I’m happy to just press F8 and use Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA). Although, if it’s easy enough to do, I will explore this further, as it saves time if everything can be configured from within WinPE. One of the nice features all the tools possess is that you can pass input files to them. EG. Configure one server to your requirements, capture its configuration to a file (using the appropriate tool), you can then use the tool on other servers passing the input file with the captured configuration. Array controller drivers appear to be included with the toolkit along with example of how to incorporate them within a WinPE build. I suppose WinPE won’t be able to see logical volumes (I.E 2x physical disks in a RAID 1 configuration) without the array controller drivers? I mentioned in my post that SmartStart normally installs a bunch of Windows HP tools for you. I’ve had a look today, and if you run the SmartStart CD from within Windows all the tools can be installed. Therefore I can do this after the Windows installation is complete. The SmartStart CD appears to contain a lot Windows drivers. I can customise my Windows 2008 source to incorporate these drivers. However, I understand that incorporating an array controller driver is a little different to most drivers. I believe that you have to provide the driver during the very early stages of the Windows setup. I’m working through the Scripting Toolkit documentation to try and work this out...

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