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• onDateSet does not get called from DatePickerDialog on tablet

  - by cit

  I am using a DatePickerDialog to prompt the user for a date. It works fine in the simulator and on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus, but onDateSet does not get called on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. I noticed, that the dialog is bigger and shows a calendar besides the normal spin view. Can that be the problem? Here is some code: import java.util.Calendar; import java.util.Date; import android.app.DatePickerDialog; import android.app.Dialog; import android.content.DialogInterface; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.support.v4.app.DialogFragment; import android.widget.DatePicker; import com.cbit.gtbetapp.R; import com.cbit.gtbetapp.gui.racedata.MeetingDataActivity; import com.cbit.gtbetapp.gui.racedata.MeetingListFragment; import com.cbit.gtbetapp.logic.Utility; public class DatePickerFragment extends DialogFragment implements DatePickerDialog.OnDateSetListener { protected Date date = null; @Override public Dialog onCreateDialog(Bundle savedInstanceState) { // Use the current date as the default date in the picker final Calendar c = Utility.getToday(); int year = c.get(Calendar.YEAR); int month = c.get(Calendar.MONTH); int day = c.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH); date = c.getTime(); // Create a new instance of DatePickerDialog and return it DatePickerDialog dialog = new DatePickerDialog(getActivity(), this, year, month, day) { @Override public void onDateChanged(DatePicker view, int year, int month, int day) { super.onDateChanged(view, year, month, day); setTitle(getString(R.string.date_picker_title)); } }; dialog.setTitle(getString(R.string.date_picker_title)); dialog.setButton(DatePickerDialog.BUTTON_POSITIVE, getString(android.R.string.ok), new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() { @Override public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) { dialog.cancel(); Intent intent = new Intent(getActivity(), MeetingDataActivity.class); intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP); intent.putExtra(MeetingListFragment.EXTRA_DATE, date.getTime()); startActivity(intent); } }); dialog.setButton(DatePickerDialog.BUTTON_NEGATIVE, getString(R.string.button_cancel), new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() { @Override public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) { dialog.cancel(); } }); return dialog; } public void onDateSet(DatePicker view, int year, int month, int day) { Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(); c.clear(); c.set(Calendar.YEAR, year); c.set(Calendar.MONTH, month); c.set(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, day); date = c.getTime(); } } What could cause this? A bug in the tablet? Am I missing something? Can anyone think of a workaround? Thanks a lot!

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• What Apache/PHP configurations do you know and how good are they?

  - by FractalizeR

  Hello. I wanted to ask you about PHP/Apache configuration methods you know, their pros and cons. I will start myself: ---------------- PHP as Apache module---------------- Pros: good speed since you don't need to start exe every time especially in mpm-worker mode. You can also use various PHP accelerators in this mode like APC or eAccelerator. Cons: if you are running apache in mpm-worker mode, you may face stability issues because every glitch in any php script will lead to unstability to the whole thread pool of that apache process. Also in this mode all scripts are executed on behalf of apache user. This is bad for security. mpm-worker configuration requires PHP compiled in thread-safe mode. At least CentOS and RedHat default repositories doesn't have thread-safe PHP version so on these OSes you need to compile at least PHP yourself (there is a way to activate worker mpm on Apache). The use of thread-safe PHP binaries is considered experimental and unstable. Plus, many PHP extensions does not support thread-safe mode or were not well-tested in thread-safe mode. ---------------- PHP as CGI ---------------- This seems to be the slowest default configuration which seems to be a "con" itself ;) ---------------- PHP as CGI via mod_suphp ---------------- Pros: suphp allows you to execute php scipts on behalf of the script file owner. This way you can securely separate different sites on the same machine. Also, suphp allows to use different php.ini files per virtual host. Cons: PHP in CGI mode means less performance. In this mode you can't use php accelerators like APC because each time new process is spawned to handle script rendering the cache of previous process useless. BTW, do you know the way to apply some accelerator in this config? I heard something about using shm for php bytecode cache. Also, you cannot configure PHP via .htaccess files in this mode. You will need to install PECL htscanner for this if you need to set various per-script options via .htaccess (php_value / php_flag directives) ---------------- PHP as CGI via suexec ---------------- This configuration looks the same as with suphp, but I heard, that it's slower and less safe. Almost same pros and cons apply. ---------------- PHP as FastCGI ---------------- Pros: FastCGI standard allows single php process to handle several scripts before php process is killed. This way you gain performance since no need to spin up new php process for each script. You can also use PHP accelerators in this configuration (see cons section for comment). Also, FCGI almost like suphp also allows php processes to be executed on behalf of some user. mod_fcgid seems to have the most complete fcgi support and flexibility for apache. Cons: The use of php accelerator in fastcgi mode will lead to high memory consumption because each PHP process will have his own bytecode cache (unless there is some accelerator that can use shared memory for bytecode cache. Is there such?). FastCGI is also a little bit complex to configure. You need to create various configuration files and make some configuration modifications. It seems, that fastcgi is the most stable, secure, fast and flexible PHP configuration, however, a bit difficult to be configured. But, may be, I missed something? Comments are welcome!

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• Performing mechanical movements using computer

  - by Vi

  How to make a computer (in particular, my laptop) to perform some mechanical movements without buying anything $5, soldering things inside computer or creating big sophisticated circuits? Traditionally CD-ROM tray is used to make computer do some movement IRL by, for example, SSH command, but in laptop tray is one-shot (unless manually reloaded) and also not very comfortable [mis]usage. Some assistance circuits can be in use too, but not complex. For example, there is a little motor that can work on USB power. Devices in my computer: DVD-ROM tray: one-time push. USB power: continuous power to the motor or LEDS or relay that turns on something powerful. Audio card. 3 outputs (modprobe alsa model=test can set Mic and Line-in as additional output). One controllable DC output (microphone) that can power up LED and some electronic (may be even mechanic?) relay. Also with sophisticated additional circuiting can control a lot of devices with a good precision. Both input and output support. Probably the most useful object in computer for radio ham. Modem. Don't know about this much, it doesn't work because of hsfmodem crashes kernel if memory is = 1GB. May be it's "pick up" and "hang up" can turn on and off power taken from USB port? Video card. VGA port? S-Video port? Will them be useful? Backlight. Tunable, but probably unuseful. CardBus (or some) slot. Nothing interesting for the task probably (is it?). AC adapter and battery. Probably nothing programmable here. /* My AC adapter already have additional jacks to connect extra devics */ Keyboard. No use. Touchpad. Good sensor (synclient -m 1), but no output. Various LEDs inside laptop. Probably too weak and requires soldering. Fans inside laptop. Poor control over them, requires soldering and dangerous to tinker. HDD (internal and external) that can be spin down and up (hdparm -Y, cat /dev/ubb). But connecting anything serially with it's power line makes HDD underpowered... And too complex. Is something are missed? Any ideas how to use described components? Any other ideas? May be there are easily available /* in developing countries */ cheap devices like "enhanced multimeters" that are controllable from computer and can provide configurable output and measure current and other things? Things to aid pushing many physical buttons with computer. Isn't this a simple idea and implementation and a lot of use in good hands?

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• Hardware recommendations / parts list for a modern, quiet ZFS NAS box - 2011-Feb edition [closed]

  - by dandv

  I want to build some really reliable storage for my data, and it seems that ZFS is the only filesystem at the moment that does live checksumming. That rules out DroboPro, so I'm looking to building a quiet ZFS NAS that would start with 4 2TB or larger hard drives. I'd like this system to be very reliable and relatively future-proof for 2-3 years, so I'm willing to invest some $$$ and buy higher end components. I did see questions here and on other forums about low-cost servers, but I'm not looking for those. I'd be super happy to go for an off-the-shelf solution, but I haven't found one that's quiet. I started doing the research (summarized on my wiki), but I realized that it just gets too complicated for what I know as a software dude, and I'm entering the analysis paralysis area. At this point, I'm basically looking for a parts list for a configuration that will work (and is modern), and I know there are folks around here who are way more competent than me. I've built computers and am comfortable assembling one and messing with *nix; I can follow guides; I just want to end the decision process for the hardware and software configuration. What I've researched so far (not that these are very modern components): Case: I think I've settled on the Antec Twelve Hundred case because it cools well, is quiet, and simply has 12 bays that allow elastic mounting. The SilverStone Raven is its counter-candidate, but I find its construction quite odd. For the PSU, I'm torn between Antec CP-850 and Nexus RX-8500, but I did this research more than a year ago. The Nexus has a very uniform power profile, and I'd rather not have the Antec spin up and down based on load. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often my file server will draw more than 400W under use. For the hard drives, I've read that WD Black drives are actually WD RE3 with a software setting changed. I'd also like to buy different drive types, not just 4 WDs. Recommendations? Right now I have a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K300. For the motherboard, CPU and RAM I have no idea, other than the RAM must be ECC. I already asked a question here about ECC RAM, but I was misguided and was looking for a motherboard that would support USB 3.0 as well. I've learned to go with eSATA, or worry about USB later. Then there's the (liquid) cooling, Wi-Fi card, and FreeBSD vs. OpenSolaris Express. Lastly, I'm wondering if I can make this PC into a media server by adding a Blu-ray drive and a good sound card. But support for Blu-Ray is spotty on Linux, and I don't know if Windows 7 on VirtualBox would get sufficient hardware access to output HDMI or SPDIFF signals. (Running OpenSolaris virtualized is not an option because of the reliability risk.) Then there are HDCP concerns. Suggestions on that would be appreciated as well, but I don't want us to get sidetracked. A specific shopping list on the core components would be great, so I can start ordering, and in the meantime educate myself with regards to the other issues. Finally, I think this could become a great FAQ for those technically inclined to build their own ZFS server, but confused by the dizzying array of options out there, and I promise to compile the results and share my experience building and benchmarking the server.

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• What networking hardware do I need in this situation (Fairpoint [ISP] "E-DIA" connection)?

  - by Tegeril

  Right away you'd probably want to say, "Well just ask Fairpoint." I've done that, a number of times in as many different ways I can phrase it and just keep hitting a brick wall where they will not commit to giving any useful information and instead recommend contracting an outside firm and spending a pile of money. Anyway... I'm trying to help a family member out with an office connection that is being setup. I've managed to scrape tiny details here and there from our discussions with the ISP (Fairpoint in Maine) about what is going to be done and what is going to be needed. This is the connection that is being setup: http://www.fairpoint.com/enterprise/vantagepoint/e-dia/index.jsp Information I have been given: Via this connection I can get IPs across different C blocks if that were necessary (it is not) Fairpoint is bringing hardware with them that they claim simply does the conversion from whatever line is coming in the building to ethernet, they have referred to this as the "Fairpoint Netvanta" which I know suggests a line of products that I have looked up, but some (most? all?) of those seems to handle all the routing that I saw. Fairpoint says that I need to bring my own router to sit behind their device. They have literally declined to even suggest products that have worked for other clients in the past and fall back on "any business router works, not a home router." That alone makes my head spin. Detail and clarity hit a brick wall from there. At one moment I got them to cough up that the router I provide needs to be able to do VPN tunneling but they typically fall back to "not a home router" and I was even given "just a business router, Cisco or something, it'll be $500-$1000". Now I know that VPN tunneling routers exist well below that price point and since this connection is going to one machine, possibly two only via ethernet, my desire to purchase networking hardware that over-delivers what I need is not very high. They are literally setting all this up, have provided no configuration details for after they finish, and expect me to just plunk a $500+ router behind it and cross my fingers or contract out to a third party company. If there were other options available for the location, I would have dropped them in a second, but there aren't. The device that is connected requires a static IP and I'm honestly a bit hazy on the necessity of an additional router behind their device and generally a bit over my head. I presume that the router needs to be able to serve external static IPs to its clients, but I really don't know what is going to show up when they come to do the install. This was originally going to be run via an ADSL bridge modem with a range of static IPs (which is easy and is currently setup properly) but the location is too far from the telco to get speeds that we really want for upload and this is also a connection that needs high availability. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated (I see a number of options in the Cisco Small Business line and other competitors that aren't going to break the bank…), especially if you've worked with Fairpoint before! Thanks for reading my wall of text.

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• Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Introduction

  - by zowens

  I’ve read a few different blogs that talk about multi-tenancy and how to resolve some of the issues surrounding multi-tenancy. What I’ve come to realize is that these implementations overcomplicate the issues and give only a muddy implementation! I’ve seen some really illogical code out there. I have recently been building a multi-tenancy framework for internal use at eagleenvision.net. Through this process, I’ve realized a few different techniques to make building multi-tenant applications actually quite easy. I will be posting a few different entries over the issue and my personal implementation. In this first post, I will discuss what multi-tenancy means and how my implementation will be structured.   So what’s the problem? Here’s the deal. Multi-tenancy is basically a technique of code-reuse of web application code. A multi-tenant application is an application that runs a single instance for multiple clients. Here the “client” is different URL bindings on IIS using ASP.NET MVC. The problem with different instances of the, essentially, same application is that you have to spin up different instances of ASP.NET. As the number of running instances of ASP.NET grows, so does the memory footprint of IIS. Stack Exchange shifted its architecture to multi-tenancy March. As the blog post explains, multi-tenancy saves cost in terms of memory utilization and physical disc storage. If you use the same code base for many applications, multi-tenancy just makes sense. You’ll reduce the amount of work it takes to synchronize the site implementations and you’ll thank your lucky stars later for choosing to use one application for multiple sites. Multi-tenancy allows the freedom of extensibility while relying on some pre-built code.   You’d think this would be simple. I have actually seen a real lack of reference material on the subject in terms of ASP.NET MVC. This is somewhat surprising given the number of users of ASP.NET MVC. However, I will certainly fill the void ;). Implementing a multi-tenant application takes a little thinking. It’s not straight-forward because the possibilities of implementation are endless. I have yet to see a great implementation of a multi-tenant MVC application. The only one that comes close to what I have in mind is Rob Ashton’s implementation (all the entries are listed on this page). There’s some really nasty code in there… something I’d really like to avoid. He has also written a library (MvcEx) that attempts to aid multi-tenant development. This code is even worse, in my honest opinion. Once I start seeing Reflection.Emit, I have to assume the worst :) In all seriousness, if his implementation makes sense to you, use it! It’s a fine implementation that should be given a look. At least look at the code. I will reference MvcEx going forward as a comparison to my implementation. I will explain why my approach differs from MvcEx and how it is better or worse (hopefully better).   Core Goals of my Multi-Tenant Implementation The first, and foremost, goal is to use Inversion of Control containers to my advantage. As you will see throughout this series, I pass around containers quite frequently and rely on their use heavily. I will be using StructureMap in my implementation. However, you could probably use your favorite IoC tool instead. <RANT> However, please don’t be stupid and abstract your IoC tool. Each IoC is powerful and by abstracting the capabilities, you’re doing yourself a real disservice. Who in the world swaps out IoC tools…? No one!</RANT> (It had to be said.) I will outline some of the goodness of StructureMap as we go along. This is really an invaluable tool in my tool belt and simple to use in my multi-tenant implementation. The second core goal is to represent a tenant as easily as possible. Just as a dependency container will be a first-class citizen, so will a tenant. This allows us to easily extend and use tenants. This will also allow different ways of “plugging in” tenants into your application. In my implementation, there will be a single dependency container for a single tenant. This will enable isolation of the dependencies of the tenant. The third goal is to use composition as a means to delegate “core” functions out to the tenant. More on this later.   Features In MvcExt, “Modules” are a code element of the infrastructure. I have simplified this concept and have named this “Features”. A feature is a simple element of an application. Controllers can be specified to have a feature and actions can have “sub features”. Each tenant can select features it needs and the other features will be hidden to the tenant’s users. My implementation doesn’t require something to be a feature. A controller can be common to all tenants. For example, (as you will see) I have a “Content” controller that will return the CSS, Javascript and Images for a tenant. This is common logic to all tenants and shouldn’t be hidden or considered a “feature”; Content is a core component.   Up next My next post will be all about the code. I will reveal some of the foundation to the way I do multi-tenancy. I will have posts dedicated to Foundation, Controllers, Views, Caching, Content and how to setup the tenants. Each post will be in-depth about the issues and implementation details, while adhering to my core goals outlined in this post. As always, comment with questions of DM me on twitter or send me an email.

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• Displaying an image on a LED matrix with a Netduino

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  In the previous post, we’ve been flipping bits manually on three ports of the Netduino to simulate the data, clock and latch pins that a shift register expected. We did all that in order to control one line of a LED matrix and create a simple Knight Rider effect. It was rightly pointed out in the comments that the Netduino has built-in knowledge of the sort of serial protocol that this shift register understands through a feature called SPI. That will of course make our code a whole lot simpler, but it will also make it a whole lot faster: writing to the Netduino ports is actually not that fast, whereas SPI is very, very fast. Unfortunately, the Netduino documentation for SPI is severely lacking. Instead, we’ve been reliably using the documentation for the Fez, another .NET microcontroller. To send data through SPI, we’ll just need  to move a few wires around and update the code. SPI uses pin D11 for writing, pin D12 for reading (which we won’t do) and pin D13 for the clock. The latch pin is a parameter that can be set by the user. This is very close to the wiring we had before (data on D11, clock on D12 and latch on D13). We just have to move the latch from D13 to D10, and the clock from D12 to D13. The code that controls the shift register has slimmed down considerably with that change. Here is the new version, which I invite you to compare with what we had before: public class ShiftRegister74HC595 { protected SPI Spi; public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin) : this(latchPin, SPI.SPI_module.SPI1) { } public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin, SPI.SPI_module spiModule) { var spiConfig = new SPI.Configuration( SPI_mod: spiModule, ChipSelect_Port: latchPin, ChipSelect_ActiveState: false, ChipSelect_SetupTime: 0, ChipSelect_HoldTime: 0, Clock_IdleState: false, Clock_Edge: true, Clock_RateKHz: 1000 ); Spi = new SPI(spiConfig); } public void Write(byte buffer) { Spi.Write(new[] {buffer}); } } All we have to do here is configure SPI. The write method couldn’t be any simpler. Everything is now handled in hardware by the Netduino. We set the frequency to 1MHz, which is largely sufficient for what we’ll be doing, but it could potentially go much higher. The shift register addresses the columns of the matrix. The rows are directly wired to ports D0 to D7 of the Netduino. The code writes to only one of those eight lines at a time, which will make it fast enough. The way an image is displayed is that we light the lines one after the other so fast that persistence of vision will give the illusion of a stable image: foreach (var bitmap in matrix.MatrixBitmap) { matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, true); matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, false); row++; } Now there is a twist here: we need to run this code as fast as possible in order to display the image with as little flicker as possible, but we’ll eventually have other things to do. In other words, we need the code driving the display to run in the background, except when we want to change what’s being displayed. Fortunately, the .NET Micro Framework supports multithreading. In our implementation, we’ve added an Initialize method that spins a new thread that is tied to the specific instance of the matrix it’s being called on. public LedMatrix Initialize() { DisplayThread = new Thread(() => DoDisplay(this)); DisplayThread.Start(); return this; } I quite like this way to spin a thread. As you may know, there is another, built-in way to contextualize a thread by passing an object into the Start method. For the method to work, the thread must have been constructed with a ParameterizedThreadStart delegate, which takes one parameter of type object. I like to use object as little as possible, so instead I’m constructing a closure with a Lambda, currying it with the current instance. This way, everything remains strongly-typed and there’s no casting to do. Note that this method would extend perfectly to several parameters. Of note as well is the return value of Initialize, a common technique to add some fluency to the API and enabling the matrix to be instantiated and initialized in a single line: using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) The “using” in the previous line is because we have implemented IDisposable so that the matrix kills the thread and clears the display when the user code is done with it: public void Dispose() { Clear(); DisplayThread.Abort(); } Thanks to the multi-threaded version of the matrix driver class, we can treat the display as a simple bitmap with a very synchronous programming model: matrix.Set(someimage); while (button.Read()) { Thread.Sleep(10); } Here, the call into Set returns immediately and from the moment the bitmap is set, the background display thread will constantly continue refreshing no matter what happens in the main thread. That enables us to wait or read a button’s port on the main thread knowing that the current image will continue displaying unperturbed and without requiring manual refreshing. We’ve effectively hidden the implementation of the display behind a convenient, synchronous-looking API. Pretty neat, eh? Before I wrap up this post, I want to talk about one small caveat of using SPI rather than driving the shift register directly: when we got to the point where we could actually display images, we noticed that they were a mirror image of what we were sending in. Oh noes! Well, the reason for it is that SPI is sending the bits in a big-endian fashion, in other words backwards. Now sure you could fix that in software by writing some bit-level code to reverse the bits we’re sending in, but there is a far more efficient solution than that. We are doing hardware here, so we can simply reverse the order in which the outputs of the shift register are connected to the columns of the matrix. That’s switching 8 wires around once, as compared to doing bit operations every time we send a line to display. All right, so bringing it all together, here is the code we need to write to display two images in succession, separated by a press on the board’s button: var button = new InputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_SW1, false, Port.ResistorMode.Disabled); using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) { // Oh, prototype is so sad! var sad = new byte[] { 0x66, 0x24, 0x00, 0x18, 0x00, 0x3C, 0x42, 0x81 }; DisplayAndWait(sad, matrix, button); // Let's make it smile! var smile = new byte[] { 0x42, 0x18, 0x18, 0x81, 0x7E, 0x3C, 0x18, 0x00 }; DisplayAndWait(smile, matrix, button); } And here is a video of the prototype running: The prototype in action I’ve added an artificial delay between the display of each row of the matrix to clearly show what’s otherwise happening very fast. This way, you can clearly see each of the two images being displayed line by line. Next time, we’ll do no hardware changes, focusing instead on building a nice programming model for the matrix, with sprites, text and hardware scrolling. Fun stuff. By the way, can any of my reader guess where we’re going with all that? The code for this prototype can be downloaded here: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/NetduinoLedMatrixDriver.zip

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• Thursday Community Keynote: "By the Community, For the Community"

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Sharat Chander, JavaOne Community Chairperson, began Thursday's Community Keynote. As part of the morning’s theme of "By the Community, For the Community," Chander noted that 60% of the material at the 2012 JavaOne conference was presented by Java Community members. "So next year, when the call for papers starts, put-in your submissions," he urged.From there, Gary Frost, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD, expanded upon Sunday's Strategy Keynote exploration of Project Sumatra, an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to heterogeneous computing platforms (which combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon). Sumatra entails enhancing the JVM to make maximum use of these advanced platforms. Within this development space, AMD created the Aparapi API, which converts Java bytecode into OpenCL for execution on such GPU devices. The Aparapi API was open sourced in September 2011.Whether it was zooming-in on a Mandelbrot set, "the game of life," or a swarm of 10,000 Dukes in a space-bound gravitational dance, Frost's demos, using an Aparapi/OpenCL implementation, produced stunningly faster display results. He indicated that the Java 9 timeframe is where they see Project Sumatra coming to ultimate fruition, employing the Lamdas of Java 8.Returning to the theme of the keynote, Donald Smith, Director, Java Product Management, Oracle, explored a mind map graphic demonstrating the importance of Community in terms of fostering innovation. "It's the sharing and mixing of culture, the diversity, and the rapid prototyping," he said. Within this topic, Smith, brought up a panel of representatives from Cloudera, Eclipse, Eucalyptus, Perrone Robotics, and Twitter--ideal manifestations of community and innovation in the world of Java.Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, explored his company's open source cloud software platform, written in Java, and used by gaming companies, technology companies, media companies, and more. Chris Aniszczyk, Operations Engineering,Twitter, noted the importance of the JVM in terms of their multiple-language development environment. Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera, described his company's Apache Hadoop-based software, support, and training. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation, noted that they have about 270 tools projects at Eclipse, with 267 of them written in Java. Milinkovich added that Eclipse will even be going into space in 2013, as part of the control software on various experiments aboard the International Space Station. Lastly, Paul Perrone, CEO, Perrone Robotics, detailed his company's robotics and automation software platform built 100% on Java, including Java SE and Java ME--"on rat, to cat, to elephant-sized systems." Milinkovic noted that communities are by nature so good at innovation because of their very openness--"The more open you make your innovation process, the more ideas are challenged, and the more developers are focused on justifying their choices all the way through the process."From there, Georges Saab, VP Development Java SE OpenJDK, continued the topic of innovation and helping the Java Community to "Make the Future Java." Martijn Verburg, representing the London Java Community (winner of a Duke's Choice Award 2012 for their activity in OpenJDK and JCP), soon joined Saab onstage. Verburg detailed the LJC's "Adopt a JSR" program--"to get day-to-day developers more involved in the innovation that's happening around them."  From its London launching pad, the innovative program has spread to Brazil, Morocco, Latvia, India, and more.Other active participants in the program joined Verburg onstage--Ben Evans, London Java Community; James Gough, Stackthread; Bruno Souza, SOUJava; Richard Warburton, jClarity; and Cecelia Borg, Oracle--OpenJDK Onboarding. Together, the group explored the goals and tasks inherent in the Adopt a JSR program--from organizing hack days (testing prototype implementations), to managing mailing lists and forums, to triaging issues, to evangelism—all with the goal of fostering greater community/developer involvement, but equally importantly, building better open standards. “Come join us, and make your ecosystem better!" urged Verburg.Paul Perrone returned to profile the latest in his company's robotics work around Java--including the AARDBOTS family of smaller robotic vehicles, running the Perrone MAX platform on top of the Java JVM. Perrone took his "Rumbles" four-wheeled robot out for a spin onstage--a roaming, ARM-based security-bot vehicle, complete with IR, ultrasonic, and "cliff" sensors (the latter, for the raised stage at JavaOne). As an ultimate window into the future of robotics, Perrone displayed a "head-set" controller--a sensor directed at the forehead to monitor brainwaves, for the someday-implementation of brain-to-robot control.Then, just when it seemed this might be the end of the day's futuristic offerings, a mystery voice from offstage pronounced "I've got some toys"--proving to be guest-visitor James Gosling, there to explore his cutting-edge work with Liquid Robotics. While most think of robots as something with wheels or arms or lasers, Gosling explained, the Liquid Robotics vehicle is an entirely new and innovative ocean-going 'bot. Looking like a floating surfboard, with an attached set of underwater wings, the autonomous devices roam the oceans using only the energy of ocean waves to propel them, and a single actuated rudder to steer. "We have to accomplish all guidance just by wiggling the rudder," Gosling said. The devices offer applications from self-installing weather buoy, to pollution monitoring station, to marine mammal monitoring device, to climate change data gathering, to even ocean life genomic sampling. The early versions of the vehicle used C code on very tiny industrial micro controllers, where they had to "count the bytes one at a time."  But the latest generation vehicles, which just hit the water a week or so ago, employ an ARM processor running Linux and the ARM version of JDK 7. Gosling explained that vehicle communication from remote locations is achieved via the Iridium satellite network. But because of the costs of this communication path, the data must be sent in very small bursts--using SBD short burst data. "It costs $1/kb, so that rules everything in the software design,” said Gosling. “If you were trying to stream a Netflix video over this, it would cost a million dollars a movie. …We don't have a 'big data' problem," he quipped. There are currently about 150 Liquid Robotics vehicles out traversing the oceans. Gosling demonstrated real time satellite tracking of several vehicles currently at sea, noting that Java is actually particularly good at AI applications--due to the language having garbage collection, which facilitates complex data structures. To close-out his time onstage, Gosling of course participated in the ceremonial Java tee-shirt toss out to the audience…In parting, Chander passed the JavaOne Community Chairperson baton to Stephen Chin, Java Technology Evangelist, Oracle. Onstage in full motorcycle gear, Chin noted that he'll soon be touring Europe by motorcycle, meeting Java Community Members and streaming live via UStream--the ultimate manifestation of community and technology!  He also reminded attendees of the upcoming JavaOne Latin America 2012, São Paulo, Brazil (December 4-6, 2012), and stated that the CFP (call for papers) at the conference has been extended for one more week. "Remember, December is summer in Brazil!" Chin said.

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• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

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• 10 tape technology features that make you go hmm.

  - by Karoly Vegh

  A week ago an Oracle/StorageTek Tape Specialist, Christian Vanden Balck, visited Vienna, and agreed to visit customers to do techtalks and update them about the technology boom going around tape. I had the privilege to attend some of his sessions and noted the information and features that took the customers by surprise and made them think. Allow me to share the top 10: I. StorageTek as a brand: StorageTek is one of he strongest names in the Tape field. The brand itself was valued so much by customers that even after Sun Microsystems acquiring StorageTek and the Oracle acquiring Sun the brand lives on with all the Oracle tapelibraries are officially branded StorageTek.See http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/overview/index.html II. Disk information density limitations: Disk technology struggles with information density. You haven't seen the disk sizes exploding lately, have you? That's partly because there are physical limits on a disk platter. The size is given, the number of platters is limited, they just can't grow, and are running out of physical area to write to. Now, in a T10000C tape cartridge we have over 1000m long tape. There you go, you have got your physical space and don't need to stuff all that data crammed together. You can write in a reliable pattern, and have space to grow too. III. Oracle has a market share of 62% worldwide in recording head manufacturing. That's right. If you are running LTO drives, with a good chance you rely on StorageTek production. That's two out of three LTO recording heads produced worldwide.  IV. You can store 1 Exabyte data in a single tape library. Yes, an Exabyte. That is 1000 Petabytes. Or, a million Terabytes. A thousand million GigaBytes. You can store that in a stacked StorageTek SL8500 tapelibrary. In one SL8500 you can put 10.000 T10000C cartridges, that store 10TB data (compressed). You can stack 10 of these SL8500s together. Boom. 1000.000 TB.(n.b.: stacking means interconnecting the libraries. Yes, cartridges are moved between the stacked libraries automatically.)  V. EMC: 'Tape doesn't suck after all. We moved on.': Do you remember the infamous 'Tape sucks, move on' Datadomain slogan? Of course they had to put it that way, having only had disk products. But here's a fun fact: on the EMCWorld 2012 there was a major presence of a Tape-tech company - EMC, in a sudden burst of sanity is embracing tape again. VI. The miraculous T10000C: Oracle StorageTek has developed an enterprise-grade tapedrive and cartridge, the T10000C. With awesome numbers: The Cartridge: Native 5TB capacity, 10TB with compression Over a kilometer long tape within the cartridge. And it's locked when unmounted, no rattling of your data.  Replaced the metalparticles datalayer with BaFe (bariumferrite) - metalparticles lose around 7% of magnetism within 30 days. BaFe does not. Yes we employ solid-state physicists doing R&D on demagnetisation in our labs. Can be partitioned, storage tiering within the cartridge!  The Drive: 2GB Cache Encryption implemented in HW - no performance hit 252 MB/s native sustained data rate, beats disk technology by far. Not to mention peak throughput.  Leading the tape while never touching the data side of it, protecting your data physically too Data integritiy checking (CRC recalculation) on tape within the drive without having to read it back to the server reordering data from tape-order, delivering it back in application-order  writing 32 tracks at once, reading them back for CRC check at once VII. You only use 20% of your data on a regular basis. The rest 80% is just lying around for years. On continuously spinning disks. Doubly consuming energy (power+cooling), blocking diskstorage capacity. There is a solution called SAM (Storage Archive Manager) that provides you a filesystem unifying disk and tape, moving data on-demand and for clients transparently between the different storage tiers. You can share these filesystems with NFS or CIFS for clients, and enjoy the low TCO of tape. Tapes don't spin. They sit quietly in their slots, storing 10TB data, using no energy, producing no heat, automounted when a client accesses their data.See: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/storage-software/storage-archive-manager/overview/index.html VIII. HW supported for three decades: Did you know that the original PowderHorn library was released in '87 and has been only discontinued in 2010? That is over two decades of supported operation. Tape libraries are - just like the data carrying on tapecartridges - built for longevity. Oh, and the T10000C cartridge has 30-year archival life for long-term retention.  IX. Tape is easy to manage: Have you heard of Tape Storage Analytics? It is a central graphical tool to summarize, monitor, analyze dataflow, health and performance of drives and libraries, see: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/tape-analytics/overview/index.html X. The next generation: The T10000B drives were able to reuse the T10000A cartridges and write on them even more data. On the same cartridges. We call this investment protection, and this is very important for Oracle for the future too. We usually support two generations of cartridges together. The current drive is a T10000C. (...I know I promised to enlist 10, but I got still two more I really want to mention. Allow me to work around the problem: ) X++. The TallBots, the robots moving around the cartridges in the StorageTek library from tapeslots to the drives are cableless. Cables, belts, chains running to moving parts in a library cause maintenance downtimes. So StorageTek eliminated them. The TallBots get power, commands, even firmwareupgrades through the rails they are running on. Also, the TallBots don't just hook'n'pull the tapes out of their slots, they actually grip'n'lift them out. No friction, no scratches, no zillion little plastic particles floating around in the library, in the drives, on your data. (X++)++: Tape beats SSDs and Disks. In terms of throughput (252 MB/s), in terms of TCO: disks cause around 290x more power and cooling, in terms of capacity: 10TB on a single media and soon more.  So... do you need to store large amounts of data? Are you legally bound to archive it for dozens of years? Would you benefit from automatic storage tiering? Have you got large mediachunks to be streamed at times? Have you got power and cooling issues in the growing datacenters? Do you find EMC's 180° turn of tape attitude interesting, but appreciate it at the same time? With all that, you aren't alone. The most data on this planet is stored on tape. Tape is coming. Big time.

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• I Know What I Did This Summer: Put Down Trex Decking

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re wondering why I would bore everyone with my pictures and frequent status updates/tweets from the past week – it’s so I could document the process of refurbishing my deck, or what some would call a porch. When we go to take a vacation, buy a car, do anything – we also read personal blogs to get the real story. So, if you’re curious about what it takes to tackle this sort of project, read on. Skills/Equipment/Manpower We Possessed I took the old decking out by myself. I’m about 230 lbs, more than 6′ tall, and I’m pretty healthy. This took about 8 hours over two afternoons. Three of us put the deck back together. My wife has two engineering degrees. Her father also has two engineering degrees. Lots of brainpower available here. Also, her dad ran the public works department for a country for more than 20 years – so lots and lots of practical experience on hand. We had a compound mitre saw, a skilsaw, 2-3 crowbars, a framing hammer, 3 cordless drills, a corded drill, lots of sawhorses, a power sander, an angle grinder, a 10×10 Coleman canopy tent, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, outdoor speakers and lots of iTunes playlists, plenty of water and cold beer. Why We Did This Our deck was relatively young – it was built in 2005. However, the pressure treated boards must not have been adequately maintained before we bought the house. I had powerwashed the deck every other year and had it stained a few times. The boards just rotted. We’re going to be in the house for a long time, and we wanted something that would look nice and require little maintenance. More bad deck boards The deck boards were in bad shape Things We Learned The two most important things: The hidden fasteners have to be put in JUST right. Wedge them into the grooved board, then bend down the bit that is screwed down. We didn’t do this on the first board and couldn’t get the second board to fit nearly close enough. Watching the official TREX YouTube video helped immensely, and we should have watched that first. When pre-drilling holes for the boards that need screwed down – DO NOT pre-drill through the underlying framing wood. ONLY pre-drill through the TREX itself. The screw won’t seat in the board properly. Instead of sitting down flush with the board, it will stop at the top of the board and just spin. I had to call the the place that sold me the screws to find this out. So about a third of our screws look like crap. If it doesn’t look or feel right – stop everything and pick up your computer or your phone. It’s not right, and it will be much easier to stop and find out why. We didn’t do this, and now I’m going to see every screw that’s not flush with the boards and get upset. Oh well. The Process How much time did it take? Well I spent about 8 hours taking the deck apart. And then the 3 of use spent 8 hours the first day, 10 hours the second day, 8 hours the third, and another 6 hours on the fourth day. That’s like 104 man-hours. We supposedly saved four or five thousand dollars in labor, but don’t do the math here or you might get a bit upset. The main thing is that we got what we wanted, and there won’t be any surprises later. Now for some pictures… This 6”+ pry bar made the destruction of the old deck much easier Most of the joists, once exposed, were OK. This joist wasn’t sitting on ANYTHING before. We think a lazy gas person cut the board to sneak a gas line in. Awesome… These monster lag bolts had to be accounted for when putting in the additional framing The border pattern Sheri wanted to put in required a lot more framing. These were the first boards to go down – we screwed them in as there was no way to attach clips I sat, kicked in the boards, and then drilled these clips in – but my wife was able to go MUCH faster by using her hands to lock the boards in and drill on her knees. I liked locking the board in with my feet when they needed to be ‘encouraged’ to go straight. The first board took FOREVER to go in, but then when we got rolling, we were able to put in a 20′ board in less than 10 minutes. This was end of construction day #2 – we got much further than we thought we would. Ah, the dreaded last 10% – what to do here? Remember those ‘floating’ stringers? Yeah, we fixed that up a bit, too. My wife used a website (and her brain) to calculate exactly how to cut the stringers to give us the rise/run we needed with the proper clearance and all that jazz. The stairs with stringers and toe kicks – this was worth the effort It started raining on us as I screwed down the steps – this we managed to get our shade tent up on the deck to protect us from the rain too The stairs, finished Finished, mostly Good corner shot The top of the stairs Stairs, looking down Celebratory beer In Summary There are a few things we’re not happy with. I think we can fix them up – but later. I have a few things left to finish, rewire the lighting, get the gas grille put back in, and rehang some screen doors. I was expecting this to be a lot worse than it was. If I didn’t have the help, I would have never done it myself. But I’m glad that I did have that help and did do that project. It’s not often you get to spend that kind of qualify time with family and building cool stuff.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• Right-Time Retail Part 1

  - by David Dorf

  This is the first in a three-part series. 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Revolution Technology enables some amazing feats in retail. I can order flowers for my wife while flying 30,000 feet in the air. I can order my groceries in the subway and have them delivered later that day. I can even see how clothes look on me without setting foot in a store. Who knew that a TV, diamond necklace, or even a car would someday be as easy to purchase as a candy bar? Can technology make a mattress an impulse item? Wake-up and your back is hurting, so you rollover and grab your iPad, then a new mattress is delivered the next day. Behind the scenes the many processes are being choreographed to make the sale happen. This includes moving data between systems with the least amount for friction, which in some cases is near real-time. But real-time isn’t appropriate for all the integrations. Think about what a completely real-time retailer would look like. A consumer grabs toothpaste off the shelf, and all systems are immediately notified so that the backroom clerk comes running out and pushes the consumer aside so he can replace the toothpaste on the shelf. Such a system is not only cost prohibitive, but it’s also very inefficient and ineffectual. Retailers must balance the realities of people, processes, and systems to find the right speed of execution. That’ what “right-time retail” means. Retailers used to sell during the day and count the money and restock at night, but global expansion and the Web have complicated that simplistic viewpoint. Our 24hr society demands not only access but also speed, which constantly pushes the boundaries of our IT systems. In the last twenty years, there have been three major technology advancements that have moved us closer to real-time systems. Networking is the first technology that drove the real-time trend. As systems became connected, it became easier to move data between them. In retail we no longer had to mail the daily business report back to corporate each day as the dial-up modem could transfer the data. That was soon replaced with trickle-polling, when sale transactions were occasionally sent from stores to corporate throughout the day, often through VSAT. Then we got terrestrial networks like DSL and Ethernet that allowed the constant stream of data between stores and corporate. When corporate could see the sales transactions coming from stores, it could better plan for replenishment and promotions. That drove the need for speed into the supply chain and merchandising, but for many years those systems were stymied by the huge volumes of data. Nordstrom has 150 million SKU/Store combinations when planning (RPAS); The Gap generates 110 million price changes during end-of-season (RPM); Argos does 1.78 billion calculations executed each day for replenishment planning (AIP). These areas are now being alleviated by the second technology, storage. The typical laptop disk drive runs at 5,400rpm with PCs stepping up to 7,200rpm and servers hitting 15,000rpm. But the platters can only spin so fast, so to squeeze more performance we’ve had to rely on things like disk striping. Then solid state drives (SSDs) were introduced and prices continue to drop. (Augmenting your harddrive with a SSD is the single best PC upgrade these days.) RAM continues to be expensive, but compressing data in memory has allowed more efficient use. So a few years back, Oracle decided to build a box that incorporated all these advancements to move us closer to real-time. This family of products, often categorized as engineered systems, combines the hardware and software so that they work together to provide better performance. How much better? If Exadata powered a 747, you’d go from New York to Paris in 42 minutes, and it would carry 5,000 passengers. If Exadata powered baseball, games would last only 18 minutes and Boston’s Fenway would hold 370,000 fans. The Exa-family enables processing more data in less time. So with faster networks and storage, that brings us to the third and final ingredient. If we continue to process data in traditional ways, we won’t be able to take advantage of the faster networks and storage. Enter what Harvard calls “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” – the data scientist. New technologies like the Hadoop-powered Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery change the way in which we organize data. These technologies allow us to extract actionable information from raw data at incredible speeds, often ad-hoc. So the foundation to support the real-time enterprise exists, but how does a retailer begin to take advantage? The most visible way is through real-time marketing, but I’ll save that for part 3 and instead begin with improved integrations for the assets you already have in part 2.

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• The fastest way to resize images from ASP.NET. And it’s (more) supported-ish.

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  I’ve shown before how to resize images using GDI, which is fairly common but is explicitly unsupported because we know of very real problems that this can cause. Still, many sites still use that method because those problems are fairly rare, and because most people assume it’s the only way to get the job done. Plus, it works in medium trust. More recently, I’ve shown how you can use WPF APIs to do the same thing and get JPEG thumbnails, only 2.5 times faster than GDI (even now that GDI really ultimately uses WIC to read and write images). The boost in performance is great, but it comes at a cost, that you may or may not care about: it won’t work in medium trust. It’s also just as unsupported as the GDI option. What I want to show today is how to use the Windows Imaging Components from ASP.NET APIs directly, without going through WPF. The approach has the great advantage that it’s been tested and proven to scale very well. The WIC team tells me you should be able to call support and get answers if you hit problems. Caveats exist though. First, this is using interop, so until a signed wrapper sits in the GAC, it will require full trust. Second, the APIs have a very strong smell of native code and are definitely not .NET-friendly. And finally, the most serious problem is that older versions of Windows don’t offer MTA support for image decoding. MTA support is only available on Windows 7, Vista and Windows Server 2008. But on 2003 and XP, you’ll only get STA support. that means that the thread safety that we so badly need for server applications is not guaranteed on those operating systems. To make it work, you’d have to spin specialized threads yourself and manage the lifetime of your objects, which is outside the scope of this article. We’ll assume that we’re fine with al this and that we’re running on 7 or 2008 under full trust. Be warned that the code that follows is not simple or very readable. This is definitely not the easiest way to resize an image in .NET. Wrapping native APIs such as WIC in a managed wrapper is never easy, but fortunately we won’t have to: the WIC team already did it for us and released the results under MS-PL. The InteropServices folder, which contains the wrappers we need, is in the WicCop project but I’ve also included it in the sample that you can download from the link at the end of the article. In order to produce a thumbnail, we first have to obtain a decoding frame object that WIC can use. Like with WPF, that object will contain the command to decode a frame from the source image but won’t do the actual decoding until necessary. Getting the frame is done by reading the image bytes through a special WIC stream that you can obtain from a factory object that we’re going to reuse for lots of other tasks: var photo = File.ReadAllBytes(photoPath); var factory = (IWICComponentFactory)new WICImagingFactory(); var inputStream = factory.CreateStream(); inputStream.InitializeFromMemory(photo, (uint)photo.Length); var decoder = factory.CreateDecoderFromStream( inputStream, null, WICDecodeOptions.WICDecodeMetadataCacheOnLoad); var frame = decoder.GetFrame(0); We can read the dimensions of the frame using the following (somewhat ugly) code: uint width, height; frame.GetSize(out width, out height); This enables us to compute the dimensions of the thumbnail, as I’ve shown in previous articles. We now need to prepare the output stream for the thumbnail. WIC requires a special kind of stream, IStream (not implemented by System.IO.Stream) and doesn’t directlyunderstand .NET streams. It does provide a number of implementations but not exactly what we need here. We need to output to memory because we’ll want to persist the same bytes to the response stream and to a local file for caching. The memory-bound version of IStream requires a fixed-length buffer but we won’t know the length of the buffer before we resize. To solve that problem, I’ve built a derived class from MemoryStream that also implements IStream. The implementation is not very complicated, it just delegates the IStream methods to the base class, but it involves some native pointer manipulation. Once we have a stream, we need to build the encoder for the output format, which could be anything that WIC supports. For web thumbnails, our only reasonable options are PNG and JPEG. I explored PNG because it’s a lossless format, and because WIC does support PNG compression. That compression is not very efficient though and JPEG offers good quality with much smaller file sizes. On the web, it matters. I found the best PNG compression option (adaptive) to give files that are about twice as big as 100%-quality JPEG (an absurd setting), 4.5 times bigger than 95%-quality JPEG and 7 times larger than 85%-quality JPEG, which is more than acceptable quality. As a consequence, we’ll use JPEG. The JPEG encoder can be prepared as follows: var encoder = factory.CreateEncoder( Consts.GUID_ContainerFormatJpeg, null); encoder.Initialize(outputStream, WICBitmapEncoderCacheOption.WICBitmapEncoderNoCache); The next operation is to create the output frame: IWICBitmapFrameEncode outputFrame; var arg = new IPropertyBag2[1]; encoder.CreateNewFrame(out outputFrame, arg); Notice that we are passing in a property bag. This is where we’re going to specify our only parameter for encoding, the JPEG quality setting: var propBag = arg[0]; var propertyBagOption = new PROPBAG2[1]; propertyBagOption[0].pstrName = "ImageQuality"; propBag.Write(1, propertyBagOption, new object[] { 0.85F }); outputFrame.Initialize(propBag); We can then set the resolution for the thumbnail to be 96, something we weren’t able to do with WPF and had to hack around: outputFrame.SetResolution(96, 96); Next, we set the size of the output frame and create a scaler from the input frame and the computed dimensions of the target thumbnail: outputFrame.SetSize(thumbWidth, thumbHeight); var scaler = factory.CreateBitmapScaler(); scaler.Initialize(frame, thumbWidth, thumbHeight, WICBitmapInterpolationMode.WICBitmapInterpolationModeFant); The scaler is using the Fant method, which I think is the best looking one even if it seems a little softer than cubic (zoomed here to better show the defects): Cubic Fant Linear Nearest neighbor We can write the source image to the output frame through the scaler: outputFrame.WriteSource(scaler, new WICRect { X = 0, Y = 0, Width = (int)thumbWidth, Height = (int)thumbHeight }); And finally we commit the pipeline that we built and get the byte array for the thumbnail out of our memory stream: outputFrame.Commit(); encoder.Commit(); var outputArray = outputStream.ToArray(); outputStream.Close(); That byte array can then be sent to the output stream and to the cache file. Once we’ve gone through this exercise, it’s only natural to wonder whether it was worth the trouble. I ran this method, as well as GDI and WPF resizing over thirty twelve megapixel images for JPEG qualities between 70% and 100% and measured the file size and time to resize. Here are the results: Size of resized images   Time to resize thirty 12 megapixel images Not much to see on the size graph: sizes from WPF and WIC are equivalent, which is hardly surprising as WPF calls into WIC. There is just an anomaly for 75% for WPF that I noted in my previous article and that disappears when using WIC directly. But overall, using WPF or WIC over GDI represents a slight win in file size. The time to resize is more interesting. WPF and WIC get similar times although WIC seems to always be a little faster. Not surprising considering WPF is using WIC. The margin of error on this results is probably fairly close to the time difference. As we already knew, the time to resize does not depend on the quality level, only the size does. This means that the only decision you have to make here is size versus visual quality. This third approach to server-side image resizing on ASP.NET seems to converge on the fastest possible one. We have marginally better performance than WPF, but with some additional peace of mind that this approach is sanctioned for server-side usage by the Windows Imaging team. It still doesn’t work in medium trust. That is a problem and shows the way for future server-friendly managed wrappers around WIC. The sample code for this article can be downloaded from: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/WicResize.zip The benchmark code can be found here (you’ll need to add your own images to the Images directory and then add those to the project, with content and copy if newer in the properties of the files in the solution explorer): http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/WicWpfGdiImageResizeBenchmark.zip WIC tools can be downloaded from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wictools To conclude, here are some of the resized thumbnails at 85% fant:

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• guvcview recording video and audio out of synchronisation in Ubuntu 10.10

  - by SIJAR

  I finally got Guvcview, a great software for Logitech webcam and it does all the stuff that one wants out of it. But I'm not satisfy with the video recording, video and audio out of synchronisation also video seems to be in slow motion. Please help so that I can tweak in and get a good video recording with the webcam. Below is the log of Guvcview ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guvcview 1.4.1 video_device: /dev/video0 vid_sleep: 0 cap_meth: 1 resolution: 640 x 480 windowsize: 1024 x 715 vert pane: 578 spin behavior: 0 mode: mjpg fps: 1/25 Display Fps: 0 bpp: 0 hwaccel: 1 avi_format: 4 sound: 1 sound Device: 4 sound samp rate: 0 sound Channels: 0 Sound delay: 0 nanosec Sound Format: 85 Pan Step: 2 degrees Tilt Step: 2 degrees Video Filter Flags: 0 image inc: 0 profile(default):/home/sijar/default.gpfl starting portaudio... bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111) bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111) bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111) bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111) Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory Cannot connect to server socket jack server is not running or cannot be started language catalog= dir:/usr/share/locale type:UTF-8 lang:en_US.utf8 cat:guvcview.mo mjpg: setting format to 1196444237 capture method = 1 video device: /dev/video0 libv4lconvert: warning more framesizes then I can handle! libv4lconvert: warning more framesizes then I can handle! /dev/video0 - device 1 libv4lconvert: warning more framesizes then I can handle! libv4lconvert: warning more framesizes then I can handle! Init. UVC Camera (046d:0825) (location: usb-0000:00:1d.7-5) { pixelformat = 'YUYV', description = 'YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV)' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 176 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 432, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 544, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 640, height = 360 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, ... repeats a couple of times ... vid:046d pid:0825 driver:uvcvideo Adding control for Pan (relative) UVCIOC_CTRL_ADD - Error: Operation not permitted checking format: 1196444237 VIDIOC_G_COMP:: Invalid argument compression control not supported fps is set to 1/25 drawing controls control[0]: 0x980900 Brightness, 0:255:1, default 128 control[0]: 0x980901 Contrast, 0:255:1, default 32 control[0]: 0x980902 Saturation, 0:255:1, default 32 control[0]: 0x98090c White Balance Temperature, Auto, 0:1:1, default 1 control[0]: 0x980913 Gain, 0:255:1, default 0 control[0]: 0x980918 Power Line Frequency, 0:2:1, default 2 control[0]: 0x98091a White Balance Temperature, 0:10000:10, default 4000 control[0]: 0x98091b Sharpness, 0:255:1, default 24 control[0]: 0x98091c Backlight Compensation, 0:1:1, default 1 control[0]: 0x9a0901 Exposure, Auto, 0:3:1, default 3 control[0]: 0x9a0902 Exposure (Absolute), 1:10000:1, default 166 control[0]: 0x9a0903 Exposure, Auto Priority, 0:1:1, default 0 resolutions of format(2) = 19 frame rates of 1º resolution=6 Def. Res: 0 numb. fps:6 --------------------------------------- device #0 Name = Intel 82801DB-ICH4: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 (hw:0,0) Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 2, Max outputs = 2 Def. low input latency = 0.012 Def. low output latency = 0.012 Def. high input latency = 0.046 Def. high output latency = 0.046 Def. sample rate = 44100.00 --------------------------------------- device #1 Name = Intel 82801DB-ICH4: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 - MIC ADC (hw:0,1) Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 2, Max outputs = 0 Def. low input latency = 0.011 Def. low output latency = -1.000 Def. high input latency = 0.043 Def. high output latency = -1.000 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #2 Name = Intel 82801DB-ICH4: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 - MIC2 ADC (hw:0,2) Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 2, Max outputs = 0 Def. low input latency = 0.011 Def. low output latency = -1.000 Def. high input latency = 0.043 Def. high output latency = -1.000 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #3 Name = Intel 82801DB-ICH4: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 - ADC2 (hw:0,3) Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 2, Max outputs = 0 Def. low input latency = 0.011 Def. low output latency = -1.000 Def. high input latency = 0.043 Def. high output latency = -1.000 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #4 Name = Intel 82801DB-ICH4: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 - IEC958 (hw:0,4) Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 0, Max outputs = 2 Def. low input latency = -1.000 Def. low output latency = 0.011 Def. high input latency = -1.000 Def. high output latency = 0.043 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #5 Name = USB Device 0x46d:0x825: USB Audio (hw:1,0) Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 1, Max outputs = 0 Def. low input latency = 0.011 Def. low output latency = -1.000 Def. high input latency = 0.043 Def. high output latency = -1.000 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #6 Name = front Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 0, Max outputs = 2 Def. low input latency = -1.000 Def. low output latency = 0.012 Def. high input latency = -1.000 Def. high output latency = 0.046 Def. sample rate = 44100.00 --------------------------------------- device #7 Name = iec958 Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 0, Max outputs = 2 Def. low input latency = -1.000 Def. low output latency = 0.011 Def. high input latency = -1.000 Def. high output latency = 0.043 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #8 Name = spdif Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 0, Max outputs = 2 Def. low input latency = -1.000 Def. low output latency = 0.011 Def. high input latency = -1.000 Def. high output latency = 0.043 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #9 Name = pulse Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 32, Max outputs = 32 Def. low input latency = 0.012 Def. low output latency = 0.012 Def. high input latency = 0.046 Def. high output latency = 0.046 Def. sample rate = 44100.00 --------------------------------------- device #10 Name = dmix Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 0, Max outputs = 2 Def. low input latency = -1.000 Def. low output latency = 0.043 Def. high input latency = -1.000 Def. high output latency = 0.043 Def. sample rate = 48000.00 --------------------------------------- device #11 [ Default Input, Default Output ] Name = default Host API = ALSA Max inputs = 32, Max outputs = 32 Def. low input latency = 0.012 Def. low output latency = 0.012 Def. high input latency = 0.046 Def. high output latency = 0.046 Def. sample rate = 44100.00 ---------------------------------------------- SampleRate:0 Channels:0 Video driver: x11 A window manager is available VIDIOC_S_EXT_CTRLS for multiple controls failed (error -1) using VIDIOC_S_CTRL for user class controls control(0x0098091a) "White Balance Temperature" failed to set (error -1) VIDIOC_S_EXT_CTRLS for multiple controls failed (error -1) using VIDIOC_S_EXT_CTRLS on single controls for class: 0x009a0000 control(0x009a0902) "Exposure (Absolute)" failed to set (error -1) VIDIOC_S_EXT_CTRLS for multiple controls failed (error -1) using VIDIOC_S_CTRL for user class controls control(0x0098091a) "White Balance Temperature" failed to set (error -1) VIDIOC_S_EXT_CTRLS for multiple controls failed (error -1) using VIDIOC_S_EXT_CTRLS on single controls for class: 0x009a0000 control(0x009a0902) "Exposure (Absolute)" failed to set (error -1) Cap Video toggled: 1 (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25371756K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K using audio codec: 0x0055 Audio frame size is 1152 samples for selected codec IO thread started...OK [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2 Cache64 [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]profile Baseline, level 3.0 [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]non-strictly-monotonic PTS shift sound by -9 ms shift sound by -9 ms shift sound by -9 ms AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data ... repeats a couple of times ... AUDIO: droping audio data (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25371748K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data ... repeats a couple of times ... Cap Video toggled: 0 Shuting Down IO Thread AUDIO: droping audio data stop= 4426644744000 start=4416533023000 VIDEO: 146 frames in 10111.000000 ms = 14.439719 fps Stoping audio stream Closing audio stream... close avi Last message repeated 145 times [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]frame I:2 Avg QP:14.10 size: 24492 [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]frame P:103 Avg QP:16.06 size: 20715 [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]mb I I16..4: 48.4% 0.0% 51.6% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]mb P I16..4: 57.5% 0.0% 0.0% P16..4: 40.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% skip: 2.3% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]final ratefactor: 62.05 [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]coded y,uvDC,uvAC intra: 79.7% 92.2% 68.4% inter: 62.4% 87.5% 48.0% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]i16 v,h,dc,p: 23% 17% 41% 19% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]i4 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 30% 24% 26% 2% 5% 3% 3% 3% 4% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]i8c dc,h,v,p: 53% 20% 23% 4% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]ref P L0: 63.0% 37.0% [libx264 @ 0x8cbd8b0]kb/s:-0.00 total frames encoded: 0 total audio frames encoded: 0 IO thread finished...OK IO Thread finished enabling controls Cap Video toggled: 1 (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25379744K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K using audio codec: 0x0055 Audio frame size is 1152 samples for selected codec IO thread started...OK [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2 Cache64 [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]profile Baseline, level 3.0 [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]non-strictly-monotonic PTS shift sound by -236 ms shift sound by -236 ms shift sound by -236 ms (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25377044K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25373408K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data ... repeats a couple of times ... (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25370696K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data AUDIO: droping audio data ... repeats a couple of times ... (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25367680K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25364052K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25360312K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25356628K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25352908K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25349316K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25345552K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25341828K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25338092K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K (/home/sijar/Videos/Webcam) 25334412K bytes free on a total of 39908968K (used: 36 %) treshold=51200K Cap Video toggled: 0 Shuting Down IO Thread stop= 4708817235000 start=4578624714000 VIDEO: 1604 frames in 130192.000000 ms = 12.320265 fps Stoping audio stream Closing audio stream... close avi Last message repeated 1603 times [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]frame I:16 Avg QP:14.78 size: 42627 [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]frame P:1547 Avg QP:16.44 size: 28599 [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]mb I I16..4: 21.6% 0.0% 78.4% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]mb P I16..4: 28.1% 0.0% 0.0% P16..4: 70.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% skip: 1.4% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]final ratefactor: 88.17 [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]coded y,uvDC,uvAC intra: 74.4% 95.8% 83.2% inter: 75.2% 94.6% 69.2% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]i16 v,h,dc,p: 27% 17% 40% 16% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]i4 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 25% 25% 21% 3% 6% 4% 5% 4% 7% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]i8c dc,h,v,p: 61% 18% 18% 4% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]ref P L0: 64.0% 36.0% [libx264 @ 0x8cfba20]kb/s:-0.00 total frames encoded: 0 total audio frames encoded: 0 IO thread finished...OK IO Thread finished enabling controls Shuting Down Thread Thread terminated... cleaning Thread allocations: 100% SDL Quit Video Thread finished write /home/sijar/.guvcviewrc OK free audio mutex closed v4l2 strutures free controls free controls - vidState cleaned allocations - 100% Closing portaudio ...OK Closing GTK... OK

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• Active directory authentication for Ubuntu Linux login and cifs mounting home directories...

  - by Jamie

  I've configured my Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS Beta 2 residing on a windows network to authenticate logins using active directory, then mount a windows share to serve as there home directory. Here is what I did starting from the initial installation of Ubuntu. Download and install Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS Beta 2 Get updates # sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade Install an SSH server (sshd) # sudo apt-get install openssh-server Some would argue that you should "lock sshd down" by disabling root logins. I figure if your smart enough to hack an ssh session for a root password, you're probably not going to be thwarted by the addition of PermitRootLogin no in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. If your paranoid or not simply not convinced then edit the file or give the following a spin: # (grep PermitRootLogin /etc/ssh/sshd_conifg && sudo sed -ri 's/PermitRootLogin ).+/\1no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_conifg) || echo "PermitRootLogin not found. Add it manually." Install required packages # sudo apt-get install winbind samba smbfs smbclient ntp krb5-user Do some basic networking housecleaning in preparation for the specific package configurations to come. Determine your windows domain name, DNS server name, and IP address for the active directory server (for samba). For conveniance I set environment variables for the windows domain and DNS server. For me it was (my AD IP address was 192.168.20.11): # WINDOMAIN=mydomain.local && WINDNS=srv1.$WINDOMAIN If you want to figure out what your domain and DNS server is (I was contractor and didn't know the network) check out this helpful reference. The authentication and file sharing processes for the Windows and Linux boxes need to have their clocks agree. Do this with an NTP service, and on the server version of Ubuntu the NTP service comes installed and preconfigured. The network I was joining had the DNS server serving up the NTP service too. # sudo sed -ri "s/^(server[ \t]).+/\1$WINDNS/" /etc/ntp.conf Restart the NTP daemon # sudo /etc/init.d/ntp restart We need to christen the Linux box on the new network, this is done by editing the host file (replace the DNS of with the FQDN of the windows DNS): # sudo sed -ri "s/^(127\.0\.0\.1[ \t]).*/\1$(hostname).$WINDOMAIN localhost $(hostname)/" /etc/hosts Kerberos configuration. The instructions that follow here aren't to be taken literally: the values for MYDOMAIN.LOCAL and srv1.mydomain.local need to be replaced with what's appropriate for your network when you edit the files. Edit the (previously installed above) /etc/krb5.conf file. Find the [libdefaults] section and change (or add) the key value pair (and it is in UPPERCASE WHERE IT NEEDS TO BE): [libdefaults] default_realm = MYDOMAIN.LOCAL Add the following to the [realms] section of the file: MYDOMAIN.LOCAL = { kdc = srv1.mydomain.local admin_server = srv1.mydomain.local default_domain = MYDOMAIN.LOCAL } Add the following to the [domain_realm] section of the file: .mydomain.local = MYDOMAIN.LOCAL mydomain.local = MYDOMAIN.LOCAL Conmfigure samba. When it's all said done, I don't know where SAMBA fits in ... I used cifs to mount the windows shares ... regardless, my system works and this is how I did it. Replace /etc/samba/smb.conf (remember I was working from a clean distro of Ubuntu, so I wasn't worried about breaking anything): [global] security = ads realm = MYDOMAIN.LOCAL password server = 192.168.20.11 workgroup = MYDOMAIN idmap uid = 10000-20000 idmap gid = 10000-20000 winbind enum users = yes winbind enum groups = yes template homedir = /home/%D/%U template shell = /bin/bash client use spnego = yes client ntlmv2 auth = yes encrypt passwords = yes winbind use default domain = yes restrict anonymous = 2 Start and stop various services. # sudo /etc/init.d/winbind stop # sudo service smbd restart # sudo /etc/init.d/winbind start Setup the authentication. Edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf. Here are the contents of mine: passwd: compat winbind group: compat winbind shadow: compat winbind hosts: files dns networks: files protocols: db files services: db files ethers: db files rpc: db files Start and stop various services. # sudo /etc/init.d/winbind stop # sudo service smbd restart # sudo /etc/init.d/winbind start At this point I could login, home directories didn't exist, but I could login. Later I'll come back and add how I got the cifs automounting to work. Numerous resources were considered so I could figure this out. Here is a short list (a number of these links point to mine own questions on the topic): Samba Kerberos Active Directory WinBind Mounting Linux user home directories on CIFS server Authenticating OpenBSD against Active Directory How to use Active Directory to authenticate linux users Mounting windows shares with Active Directory permissions Using Active Directory authentication with Samba on Ubuntu 9.10 server 64bit How practical is to authenticate a Linux server against AD? Auto-mounting a windows share on Linux AD login

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• Solaris: What comes next?

  - by alanc

  As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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• Getting Started with TypeScript – Classes, Static Types and Interfaces

  - by dwahlin

  I had the opportunity to speak on different JavaScript topics at DevConnections in Las Vegas this fall and heard a lot of interesting comments about JavaScript as I talked with people. The most frequent comment I heard from people was, “I guess it’s time to start learning JavaScript”. Yep – if you don’t already know JavaScript then it’s time to learn it. As HTML5 becomes more and more popular the amount of JavaScript code written will definitely increase. After all, many of the HTML5 features available in browsers have little to do with “tags” and more to do with JavaScript (web workers, web sockets, canvas, local storage, etc.). As the amount of JavaScript code being used in applications increases, it’s more important than ever to structure the code in a way that’s maintainable and easy to debug. While JavaScript patterns can certainly be used (check out my previous posts on the subject or my course on Pluralsight.com), several alternatives have come onto the scene such as CoffeeScript, Dart and TypeScript. In this post I’ll describe some of the features TypeScript offers and the benefits that they can potentially offer enterprise-scale JavaScript applications. It’s important to note that while TypeScript has several great features, it’s definitely not for everyone or every project especially given how new it is. The goal of this post isn’t to convince you to use TypeScript instead of standard JavaScript….I’m a big fan of JavaScript. Instead, I’ll present several TypeScript features and let you make the decision as to whether TypeScript is a good fit for your applications. TypeScript Overview Here’s the official definition of TypeScript from the http://typescriptlang.org site: “TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. Any browser. Any host. Any OS. Open Source.” TypeScript was created by Anders Hejlsberg (the creator of the C# language) and his team at Microsoft. To sum it up, TypeScript is a new language that can be compiled to JavaScript much like alternatives such as CoffeeScript or Dart. It isn’t a stand-alone language that’s completely separate from JavaScript’s roots though. It’s a superset of JavaScript which means that standard JavaScript code can be placed in a TypeScript file (a file with a .ts extension) and used directly. That’s a very important point/feature of the language since it means you can use existing code and frameworks with TypeScript without having to do major code conversions to make it all work. Once a TypeScript file is saved it can be compiled to JavaScript using TypeScript’s tsc.exe compiler tool or by using a variety of editors/tools. TypeScript offers several key features. First, it provides built-in type support meaning that you define variables and function parameters as being “string”, “number”, “bool”, and more to avoid incorrect types being assigned to variables or passed to functions. Second, TypeScript provides a way to write modular code by directly supporting class and module definitions and it even provides support for custom interfaces that can be used to drive consistency. Finally, TypeScript integrates with several different tools such as Visual Studio, Sublime Text, Emacs, and Vi to provide syntax highlighting, code help, build support, and more depending on the editor. Find out more about editor support at http://www.typescriptlang.org/#Download. TypeScript can also be used with existing JavaScript frameworks such as Node.js, jQuery, and others and even catch type issues and provide enhanced code help. Special “declaration” files that have a d.ts extension are available for Node.js, jQuery, and other libraries out-of-the-box. Visit http://typescript.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/fe3bc0bfce1f#samples%2fjquery%2fjquery.d.ts for an example of a jQuery TypeScript declaration file that can be used with tools such as Visual Studio 2012 to provide additional code help and ensure that a string isn’t passed to a parameter that expects a number. Although declaration files certainly aren’t required, TypeScript’s support for declaration files makes it easier to catch issues upfront while working with existing libraries such as jQuery. In the future I expect TypeScript declaration files will be released for different HTML5 APIs such as canvas, local storage, and others as well as some of the more popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks. Getting Started with TypeScript To get started learning TypeScript visit the TypeScript Playground available at http://www.typescriptlang.org. Using the playground editor you can experiment with TypeScript code, get code help as you type, and see the JavaScript that TypeScript generates once it’s compiled. Here’s an example of the TypeScript playground in action:   One of the first things that may stand out to you about the code shown above is that classes can be defined in TypeScript. This makes it easy to group related variables and functions into a container which helps tremendously with re-use and maintainability especially in enterprise-scale JavaScript applications. While you can certainly simulate classes using JavaScript patterns (note that ECMAScript 6 will support classes directly), TypeScript makes it quite easy especially if you come from an object-oriented programming background. An example of the Greeter class shown in the TypeScript Playground is shown next: class Greeter { greeting: string; constructor (message: string) { this.greeting = message; } greet() { return "Hello, " + this.greeting; } } Looking through the code you’ll notice that static types can be defined on variables and parameters such as greeting: string, that constructors can be defined, and that functions can be defined such as greet(). The ability to define static types is a key feature of TypeScript (and where its name comes from) that can help identify bugs upfront before even running the code. Many types are supported including primitive types like string, number, bool, undefined, and null as well as object literals and more complex types such as HTMLInputElement (for an <input> tag). Custom types can be defined as well. The JavaScript output by compiling the TypeScript Greeter class (using an editor like Visual Studio, Sublime Text, or the tsc.exe compiler) is shown next: var Greeter = (function () { function Greeter(message) { this.greeting = message; } Greeter.prototype.greet = function () { return "Hello, " + this.greeting; }; return Greeter; })(); Notice that the code is using JavaScript prototyping and closures to simulate a Greeter class in JavaScript. The body of the code is wrapped with a self-invoking function to take the variables and functions out of the global JavaScript scope. This is important feature that helps avoid naming collisions between variables and functions. In cases where you’d like to wrap a class in a naming container (similar to a namespace in C# or a package in Java) you can use TypeScript’s module keyword. The following code shows an example of wrapping an AcmeCorp module around the Greeter class. In order to create a new instance of Greeter the module name must now be used. This can help avoid naming collisions that may occur with the Greeter class.   module AcmeCorp { export class Greeter { greeting: string; constructor (message: string) { this.greeting = message; } greet() { return "Hello, " + this.greeting; } } } var greeter = new AcmeCorp.Greeter("world"); In addition to being able to define custom classes and modules in TypeScript, you can also take advantage of inheritance by using TypeScript’s extends keyword. The following code shows an example of using inheritance to define two report objects:   class Report { name: string; constructor (name: string) { this.name = name; } print() { alert("Report: " + this.name); } } class FinanceReport extends Report { constructor (name: string) { super(name); } print() { alert("Finance Report: " + this.name); } getLineItems() { alert("5 line items"); } } var report = new FinanceReport("Month's Sales"); report.print(); report.getLineItems();   In this example a base Report class is defined that has a variable (name), a constructor that accepts a name parameter of type string, and a function named print(). The FinanceReport class inherits from Report by using TypeScript’s extends keyword. As a result, it automatically has access to the print() function in the base class. In this example the FinanceReport overrides the base class’s print() method and adds its own. The FinanceReport class also forwards the name value it receives in the constructor to the base class using the super() call. TypeScript also supports the creation of custom interfaces when you need to provide consistency across a set of objects. The following code shows an example of an interface named Thing (from the TypeScript samples) and a class named Plane that implements the interface to drive consistency across the app. Notice that the Plane class includes intersect and normal as a result of implementing the interface.   interface Thing { intersect: (ray: Ray) => Intersection; normal: (pos: Vector) => Vector; surface: Surface; } class Plane implements Thing { normal: (pos: Vector) =>Vector; intersect: (ray: Ray) =>Intersection; constructor (norm: Vector, offset: number, public surface: Surface) { this.normal = function (pos: Vector) { return norm; } this.intersect = function (ray: Ray): Intersection { var denom = Vector.dot(norm, ray.dir); if (denom > 0) { return null; } else { var dist = (Vector.dot(norm, ray.start) + offset) / (-denom); return { thing: this, ray: ray, dist: dist }; } } } }   At first glance it doesn’t appear that the surface member is implemented in Plane but it’s actually included automatically due to the public surface: Surface parameter in the constructor. Adding public varName: Type to a constructor automatically adds a typed variable into the class without having to explicitly write the code as with normal and intersect. TypeScript has additional language features but defining static types and creating classes, modules, and interfaces are some of the key features it offers. So is TypeScript right for you and your applications? That’s a not a question that I or anyone else can answer for you. You’ll need to give it a spin to see what you think. In future posts I’ll discuss additional details about TypeScript and how it can be used with enterprise-scale JavaScript applications. In the meantime, I’m in the process of working with John Papa on a new Typescript course for Pluralsight that we hope to have out in December of 2012.

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

  - by Chris George

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

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• alot questings since i wanted to make a new SSB game or mario game(that use 3d models) [closed]

  - by user20465

  i have just started to study programming and i know already ppl will say why make a so big project like as a SSB game for a noob game development? cuz i always wanted a SSB engine like as Mugen is a fighter game engine but is not like as SSB´s gameplay + is not using 3d models too so i will call it SSBmugen(until i find a better title for it i got afew ideas for titles) also i wanted to make this game so it can use SSBbrawl files(models+animations mainly) the moveset+Stage coding files i wanted to redo cuz so anything can be possible like make a teleporter or a pipe teleporter(like as Super mario bros game) on a stag e or make some stuff there is impossible in SSBbrawl for moveset coding but is not in SSBmugen like make so a char. summon a Clone and the clone will do a attack and then is gone or some attacks/moves also i will make a moveset/stage Coding editor so it will be really easy to make moveset/stages coding for yours 3d models/animations moveset+stage Coding i mean: hitboxes/hurtboxes/moving Stuff/moving bones like cape or hair bones that is moving by wind effects or falling or other stuff like that/other stuff that needed to be coded i have planed to make a editor(for moveset/char. coding) or add the editor in brawlbox for my game so other ppl can easy make moveset/stages Coding to they´s models/animations so it will be easy so even kids can make a custom movesets/stages why using SSBbrawl files?: cuz ppl have made alot of models or textures/custom movesets/custom stages like goku/other anime/not brawl stuff for super smash bros brawl hacking(a.k.a modding) so ppl dont have to redo anything if they wanted to have the custom models or textures/custom movesets/custom stages from SSBbrawl to SSBmugen +there is the program named brawlbox that can open brawl files like model/animations and can edit models or animations and import models from 3ds max to be the right model format for SSBbrawl and i also wanted it so easy to add(a.k.a installer) Recolours or alt. models(like as oneslot doctor mario model over mario´s boneset) or textures/Movesets/new char. slots/new stages so easy so you only needing to download themplace them in right foldername them the right nameStart the gameRecolours or alt. models or textures/Movesets/new char. slots/new stages works an loading right so you wont needing to edit any files for add something so kids/not so smart ppl can easy use the mods other ppl is making/uploading for this game here is the file format i wanted to know if they can be readed/opened if making a game that use these files: .mld0(brawl model file) .chr0(model animation for moving/scale/rota the bones) .srt0(animations for texture like moving eyes or blinking) .vis0(Animations for get polygons to hide/show with visibilitybones on the model there is also some polygons there ) .brres(a file format where stuff like model files or textures or animations is inside) .pac(a file format where the .brres is inside to keep model+textures+model for the shadow in 1 file) .wav (for SoundFX effects or voices to char. or stages) i am sure that one is possible the .wav files is inside a other file format for brawl but that file can´t you add more .wav files inside only replace so i wanted the .wav files outside so its easy to add/replace/remove SoundFX effects or voices to char. or stages .brstm(brawl music file so the music is looped perfect so it loop in middel of the music and not start over again then the music is done) afew more file formats (mainly for the Graphics effects like fire/aura/hit effects if not needing to redo them)so only coding in the editor i will make is needed to be done for port a SSBB hack(a.k.a mod)(moveset/stage coding) to this game wanted the game to be able to load these files and load them right like if loading wait1.chr0(idle animation) it will also load at same time wait1.srt0/wait1.vis0 and all kinda of animations is inside the same .brres file i am needing since it to be able to load the file format i wanted cuz: -the animations can´t be converted to any other animation file format and i dont think ppl want to redo these animations(inc. me for Goku to SSBbrawl) -models can be converted but then they lose all the shader/materials stuff like a shine effect or lighting on the model -.brstm can be converted to .wav but then there will be no loop so i prefer it can load this file format too for the music to stage/menu -brawlbox is really easy to use for make animation for the char. and import models from 3ds max so even around "not too stupid" 10 year kids can make SSBB mods(not try to be rude but to say how easy it is) also i wanted the folder setup for characters/stages/moveset/other stuff to be like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2oolm5z5ri234tz/SSBmugen%20Folder%20setup.txt just uploaded a txt file since it is a wall of text and this post is already a wall of test so it easy to place stuff (if not i do a program for to that so it auto place the stuff on right place) not 100% sure what to use of game engine to make this possible but i got a dll file from that brawlbox program that can open/read/edit these file formats if that helps i also got open source of brawlbox i have kinda learned programming(since its kinda the same thing but still not 100% same) from Super smash bros modding/hacking like coding a moveset for the new animations/models + have readed alittle about it but i am soon starting for real to study it for ppl who is alittle confuse for what i am asking for here is the list: -what game engine should i use to make a SSB clone? but at same time to make all this stuff i just said possible so ppl can make they own mods and share them and use the already made mods from SSBbrawl? and easy to use aswell so noob programmors can use it? -where to learning programming on internet to be even more ready to make a game like this? and dont wanted to start in the small like making small boring 2d games that no one care about anyway ps. i am also planing a other project like as SSBmugen but it will be Super mario bros open (again tittle unsure but open means open source) i will make a Mario game engine that also use 3d models and can have 2d or 3d gameplay with any mario powerups/gameplay(from any mario platform games) there is ever made multiplayer like as in New super mario bros wii maybe multiplay over lan or online but for now over 1 PC also alittle planed for that to my SSBmugen a Level/world map editor for it too(easy to use so even kids can use it and make levels for it) so it just place the objects/enemies and options for them enemies since they are not 100% same AI in all mario game like to choose a goomba have AI from SM64 the Editor will be able to change the gameplay on a level while have a other gameplay on a other level like this: 1 level have Super mario bros 3 gameplay (then it will be a 3d model remake) a other level have super mario galaxy gameplay but in a Super mario 3d land level yet a other level have super mario 64 gameplay but with powerups from a other mario game like powerups from mario 3d land or can ride on Yoshi so you can easy remake your fav. level from a old mario game in this mario engine/editor or just make a custom one with yours fav. mario gameplay/powerups so it will be like turn off/on: walljump/triple jump/other kinda or jumps/2x punch and 1 kick+Air kick/SMG spin attack/Fludd/other stuff like that so you can make the gameplay from the first mario game to the newest or make custom gameplay on a level also the star(from 64/sunshine/galaxy) will be replaced with the flag from new super mario bros/mario 3d land since the game is not so much about getting stars its more about making/download the levels you wanted and share them to other ppl and play these level so after have killed like the boss from SM64 bomb omb field(if one have made that) you will get the flag instead of star since i wanted it to be simple to make levels in the editor to make the bosses/new enemies/new powerups/custom char. idk what to do to make that simple yet also thinking the mario game will use brawl files since it almost already got all needed animations/models for this since i dont wanted to redo animations/models and if needing more animations i can just make them easy in brawlbox since thats the program i am most used to make animations but that will be after my SSBmugen project if not this game will be easyer then SSBmugen to make since i am planing then 1 of them is done i use the that game as base to make the other (since both is kinda platfrom games and possible using same file format for both) also wanted to ask what is best to start with out of these 2 games? also will maybe make a DLC site(or ingame) for both of these games if they get done so it wont end up like as Mugen where you needing to look all over the internet to find the stuff you wanted but for my game all the mods for my game is on same place not sure about online mode for SSBmugen or super mario bros open but i can always add that then i get better at programming both games also need to have options on controls/if using joystick also that i have planed these game for a long time and got even more ideas for them but first i wanted to get them to work so i can add the other stuff later(like DLC or online mode or some other stuff later) right now i know 0,0001% to programming(in my option) maybe i know more then that since i have been study it alittle but i learning while making stuff like this that was also my plan for make these game learn while making them and get better to programming so again i say it i kinda dont want to hear dont do these projects cuz i already know it will be hard so dont wanted so much to heard stuff like: you can´t do it since you just started learning programming or this project will fail since somewhere i needing to get started with programming and this is where i want to start to make my dream games(possible other´s dream games too) and i dont think this project will fail if i work hard on it (as i possible will) and ppl will maybe help i think this was all my questing/ideas for now (sorry for it sounds more like ideas then questings) but i needing to say my ideas so you ppl can see what i needing to use for make this possible

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• How to Force an Exception from a Task to be Observed in a Continuation Task?

  - by Richard

  I have a task to perform an HttpWebRequest using Task<WebResponse>.Factory.FromAsync(req.BeginGetRespone, req.EndGetResponse) which can obviously fail with a WebException. To the caller I want to return a Task<HttpResult> where HttpResult is a helper type to encapsulate the response (or not). In this case a 4xx or 5xx response is not an exception. Therefore I've attached two continuations to the request task. One with TaskContinuationOptions OnlyOnRanToCompletion and the other with OnlyOnOnFaulted. And then wrapped the whole thing in a Task<HttpResult> to pick up the one result whichever continuation completes. Each of the three child tasks (request plus two continuations) is created with the AttachedToParent option. But when the caller waits on the returned outer task, an AggregateException is thrown is the request failed. I want to, in the on faulted continuation, observe the WebException so the client code can just look at the result. Adding a Wait in the on fault continuation throws, but a try-catch around this doesn't help. Nor does looking at the Exception property (as section "Observing Exceptions By Using the Task.Exception Property" hints here). I could install a UnobservedTaskException event handler to filter, but as the event offers no direct link to the faulted task this will likely interact outside this part of the application and is a case of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Given an instance of a faulted Task<T> is there any means of flagging it as "fault handled"? Simplified code: public static Task<HttpResult> Start(Uri url) { var webReq = BuildHttpWebRequest(url); var result = new HttpResult(); var taskOuter = Task<HttpResult>.Factory.StartNew(() => { var tRequest = Task<WebResponse>.Factory.FromAsync( webReq.BeginGetResponse, webReq.EndGetResponse, null, TaskCreationOptions.AttachedToParent); var tError = tRequest.ContinueWith<HttpResult>( t => HandleWebRequestError(t, result), TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent |TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted); var tSuccess = tRequest.ContinueWith<HttpResult>( t => HandleWebRequestSuccess(t, result), TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent |TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnRanToCompletion); return result; }); return taskOuter; } with: private static HttpDownloaderResult HandleWebRequestError( Task<WebResponse> respTask, HttpResult result) { Debug.Assert(respTask.Status == TaskStatus.Faulted); Debug.Assert(respTask.Exception.InnerException is WebException); // Try and observe the fault: Doesn't help. try { respTask.Wait(); } catch (AggregateException e) { Log("HandleWebRequestError: waiting on antecedent task threw inner: " + e.InnerException.Message); } // ... populate result with details of the failure for the client ... return result; } (HandleWebRequestSuccess will eventually spin off further tasks to get the content of the response...) The client should be able to wait on the task and then look at its result, without it throwing due to a fault that is expected and already handled.

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• Appropriate programming design questions.

  - by Edward

  I have a few questions on good programming design. I'm going to first describe the project I'm building so you are better equipped to help me out. I am coding a Remote Assistance Tool similar to TeamViewer, Microsoft Remote Desktop, CrossLoop. It will incorporate concepts like UDP networking (using Lidgren networking library), NAT traversal (since many computers are invisible behind routers nowadays), Mirror Drivers (using DFMirage's Mirror Driver (http://www.demoforge.com/dfmirage.htm) for realtime screen grabbing on the remote computer). That being said, this program has a concept of being a client-server architecture, but I made only one program with both the functionality of client and server. That way, when the user runs my program, they can switch between giving assistance and receiving assistance without having to download a separate client or server module. I have a Windows Form that allows the user to choose between giving assistance and receiving assistance. I have another Windows Form for a file explorer module. I have another Windows Form for a chat module. I have another Windows Form form for a registry editor module. I have another Windows Form for the live control module. So I've got a Form for each module, which raises the first question: 1. Should I process module-specific commands inside the code of the respective Windows Form? Meaning, let's say I get a command with some data that enumerates the remote user's files for a specific directory. Obviously, I would have to update this on the File Explorer Windows Form and add the entries to the ListView. Should I be processing this code inside the Windows Form though? Or should I be handling this in another class (although I have to eventually pass the data to the Form to draw, of course). Or is it like a hybrid in which I process most of the data in another class and pass the final result to the Form to draw? So I've got like 5-6 forms, one for each module. The user starts up my program, enters the remote machine's ID (not IP, ID, because we are registering with an intermediary server to enable NAT traversal), their password, and connects. Now let's suppose the connection is successful. Then the user is presented with a form with all the different modules. So he can open up a File Explorer, or he can mess with the Registry Editor, or he can choose to Chat with his buddy. So now the program is sort of idle, just waiting for the user to do something. If the user opens up Live Control, then the program will be spending most of it's time receiving packets from the remote machine and drawing them to the form to provide a 'live' view. 2. Second design question. A spin off question #1. How would I pass module-specific commands to their respective Windows Forms? What I mean is, I have a class like "NetworkHandler.cs" that checks for messages from the remote machine. NetworkHandler.cs is a static class globally accessible. So let's say I get a command that enumerates the remote user's files for a specific directory. How would I "give" that command to the File Explorer Form. I was thinking of making an OnCommandReceivedEvent inside NetworkHandler, and having each form register to that event. When the NetworkHandler received a command, it would raise the event, all forms would check it to see if it was relevant, and the appropriate form would take action. Is this an appropriate/the best solution available? 3. The networking library I'm using, Lidgren, provides two options for checking networking messages. One can either poll ReadMessage() to return null or a message, or one can use an AutoResetEvent OnMessageReceived (I'm guessing this is like an event). Which one is more appropriate?

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• [C#][Design] Appropriate programming design questions.

  - by Edward

  I have a few questions on good programming design. I'm going to first describe the project I'm building so you are better equipped to help me out. I am coding a Remote Assistance Tool similar to TeamViewer, Microsoft Remote Desktop, CrossLoop. It will incorporate concepts like UDP networking (using Lidgren networking library), NAT traversal (since many computers are invisible behind routers nowadays), Mirror Drivers (using DFMirage's Mirror Driver (http://www.demoforge.com/dfmirage.htm) for realtime screen grabbing on the remote computer). That being said, this program has a concept of being a client-server architecture, but I made only one program with both the functionality of client and server. That way, when the user runs my program, they can switch between giving assistance and receiving assistance without having to download a separate client or server module. I have a Windows Form that allows the user to choose between giving assistance and receiving assistance. I have another Windows Form for a file explorer module. I have another Windows Form for a chat module. I have another Windows Form form for a registry editor module. I have another Windows Form for the live control module. So I've got a Form for each module, which raises the first question: 1. Should I process module-specific commands inside the code of the respective Windows Form? Meaning, let's say I get a command with some data that enumerates the remote user's files for a specific directory. Obviously, I would have to update this on the File Explorer Windows Form and add the entries to the ListView. Should I be processing this code inside the Windows Form though? Or should I be handling this in another class (although I have to eventually pass the data to the Form to draw, of course). Or is it like a hybrid in which I process most of the data in another class and pass the final result to the Form to draw? So I've got like 5-6 forms, one for each module. The user starts up my program, enters the remote machine's ID (not IP, ID, because we are registering with an intermediary server to enable NAT traversal), their password, and connects. Now let's suppose the connection is successful. Then the user is presented with a form with all the different modules. So he can open up a File Explorer, or he can mess with the Registry Editor, or he can choose to Chat with his buddy. So now the program is sort of idle, just waiting for the user to do something. If the user opens up Live Control, then the program will be spending most of it's time receiving packets from the remote machine and drawing them to the form to provide a 'live' view. 2. Second design question. A spin off question #1. How would I pass module-specific commands to their respective Windows Forms? What I mean is, I have a class like "NetworkHandler.cs" that checks for messages from the remote machine. NetworkHandler.cs is a static class globally accessible. So let's say I get a command that enumerates the remote user's files for a specific directory. How would I "give" that command to the File Explorer Form. I was thinking of making an OnCommandReceivedEvent inside NetworkHandler, and having each form register to that event. When the NetworkHandler received a command, it would raise the event, all forms would check it to see if it was relevant, and the appropriate form would take action. Is this an appropriate/the best solution available? 3. The networking library I'm using, Lidgren, provides two options for checking networking messages. One can either poll ReadMessage() to return null or a message, or one can use an AutoResetEvent OnMessageReceived (I'm guessing this is like an event). Which one is more appropriate?

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• can a python script know that another instance of the same script is running... and then talk to it?

  - by Justin Grant

  I'd like to prevent multiple instances of the same long-running python command-line script from running at the same time, and I'd like the new instance to be able to send data to the original insance before the new instance commits suicide. How can I do this in a cross-platform way? Specifically, I'd like to enable the following behavior: "foo.py" is launched from the command line, and it will stay running for a long time-- days or weeks until the machine is rebooted or the parent process kills it. every few minutes the same script is launched again, but with different command-line parameters when launched, the script should see if any other instances are running. if other instances are running, then instance #2 should send its command-line parameters to instance #1, and then instance #2 should exit. instance #1, if it receives command-line parameters from another script, should spin up a new thread and (using the command-line parameters sent in the step above) start performing the work that instance #2 was going to perform. So I'm looking for two things: how can a python program know another instance of itself is running, and then how can one python command-line program communicate with another? Making this more complicated, the same script needs to run on both Windows and Linux, so ideally the solution would use only the Python standard library and not any OS-specific calls. Although if I need to have a Windows codepath and an *nix codepath (and a big if statement in my code to choose one or the other), that's OK if a "same code" solution isn't possible. I realize I could probably work out a file-based approach (e.g. instance #1 watches a directory for changes and each instance drops a file into that directory when it wants to do work) but I'm a little concerned about cleaning up those files after a non-graceful machine shutdown. I'd ideally be able to use an in-memory solution. But again I'm flexible, if a persistent-file-based approach is the only way to do it, I'm open to that option. More details: I'm trying to do this because our servers are using a monitoring tool which supports running python scripts to collect monitoring data (e.g. results of a database query or web service call) which the monitoring tool then indexes for later use. Some of these scripts are very expensive to start up but cheap to run after startup (e.g. making a DB connection vs. running a query). So we've chosen to keep them running in an infinite loop until the parent process kills them. This works great, but on larger servers 100 instances of the same script may be running, even if they're only gathering data every 20 minutes each. This wreaks havoc with RAM, DB connection limits, etc. We want to switch from 100 processes with 1 thread to one process with 100 threads, each executing the work that, previously, one script was doing. But changing how the scripts are invoked by the monitoring tool is not possible. We need to keep invocation the same (launch a process with different command-line parameters) but but change the scripts to recognize that another one is active, and have the "new" script send its work instructions (from the command line params) over to the "old" script.

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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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