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• Looking for personal scheduling software / todo list with rather particular requirements

  - by Cthulhu

  I've been scouring the web for a couple of (my boss') hours, looking for a piece of software that can organize my tasks in two ways. First, I have a list of bullet points / todo items I can do at any given time. Think of stuff like solve issue X, ask X about Y, write documentation about Z, etcetera. Second, I have a number of running projects I'd like to organize better, as in schedule for a certain part of a day of the week. Ideally (I think), my day would be organized as 50% spent on projects and 50% on the other small things. Now, I don't like most calendar applications (such as Outlook & friends), their UI is too 'official', not really easy to move stuff around (in my experience). I don't like most todo lists either, too static and things. I like new, fast and hip software. I've looked at GTD versions of Tiddlywiki, and I like mGSD for one particular feature. You can make lists of tasks and basically give them one of three statusses - Now (nothing required, you can do it right away), Waiting (you need someone or something before you can work on this), or the most gratifying of all, Done. I like that feature because it's a simple todo list, but indicates more accurately the things you can do right now and the things you depend on someone else for to do. Anyways, that's just a small aspect of that program - most of the other things in there I can't find a particularly good use for. If there's something like that (maybe something that works even snappier, cleaner UI), combined with an easy to use bit of scheduling software (optionally separated into two applications, but preferrably not), I think I'd like that. (Besides something like that, I also use several instances of Trac to monitor tasks and bugs and things for the various clients and projects I have to serve, and TaskCoach to monitor the amount of time I spend on each task / each client. An easy / low-maintenance time tracking software would be neat too) Of course, the software has to be free to use. I don't like shareware, trials, limited software and the like. I could develop my own too, but I'm lazy like that and there's a dozen other projects I'd like to do in my free time (neither of which I actually do). Edit: I like David Seah's printable CEO stuff, if something like that (with some video game / instant achievement / gratification) exists in software, it'd be awesome.

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• Ask How-To Geek: Dropbox in the Start Menu, Understanding Symlinks, and Ripping TV Series DVDs

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week we take a look at how to incorporate Dropbox into your Windows Start Menu, understanding and using symbolic links, and how to rip your TV series DVDs right to unique and high-quality episode files. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Add Drobox to Your Start Menu Dear How-To Geek, I use Dropbox all the time and would like to add it right onto my start menu along side the other major shortcuts like Documents, Pictures, etc. It seems like adding Dropbox into the menu should be part of the Dropbox installation package! Sincerely, Dropboxing in Des Moines Dear Dropboxing, We agree, it would be a nice installation option. As it stands you’re going to have to do a little simple hacking to get Dropbox nestled neatly into your start menu. The hack isn’t super elegant but when you’re done you’ll have the link you want and it’ll look like it was there all along. Check out this step-by-step guide here in order to take an existing Library shortcut and rework it to be a Dropbox link. Understanding and Using Symbolic Links Dear How-To Geek, I was talking to a coworker the other day about an issue I’d been having with a media center application I’m running. He suggested using symbolic links to better organize my media and make it easier for the application to access my collection. I had no idea what he was talking about and never got a chance to bug him about it later. Can you clear up this whole symbolic links business for me? I’ve been using computers for years and I’ve never even heard of it! Sincerely, Symbolic Who? Dear Symbolic, Symbolic links aren’t commonly used by many Windows users which is why you likely haven’t run into the concept. Symbolic links are essentially supercharged shortcuts—the newly introduced Windows library system is really just a type of symbolic link system. You can use symbolic links to do all sorts of neat stuff like link folders to your Dropbox folder, organize media, and more. The concept of symbolic links is pretty simple but the execution can be really tricky. We’d suggest reading over our guide to creating symbolic links in Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubunutu to get a clearer idea what you’re getting into. Rip Your TV DVDs into Handy Episode Files Dear How-To Geek, My wife got me an iPod for Christmas and I still haven’t got around to filling it up. I have tons of entire TV show seasons on DVD and would like to get them on the iPod but I have absolutely no idea where to start. How do I get the shows off the discs? I thought it would be as easy to import the TV shows into iTunes as it is to import tracks off a CD but I was totally wrong. I tried downloading some applications to rip them but those didn’t work at all. Very frustrating! Surely there is an easy and/or automated way to do this, right? Sincerely, Free My DVDs Dear DVDs, Oh man is this a frustration we can relate to. It’s inordinately difficult to get movies and TV shows off physical media and into digital (and portable media player-friendly) formats. There are a multitude of ways to rip DVDs and quite a few applications out there (some good, some mediocre, and some outright malware). We’d recommend a two-part punch to solve your ripping woes. You’ll need a copy of DVDFab to strip away the protections on the discs and rip the disc and Handbrake to load the disc image and convert the files. It’s not quite as smooth as the CD-to-iTunes workflow but it’s still pretty easy. Check out all the steps and settings you’ll want to toggle here. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines Google’s New Personal Blocklist Extension Kills Search Engine Spam KeyCounter Tracks Your Keystrokes and Mouse Clicks Add Custom LED Ambient Lighting to Your PC or Media Center The Trackor Monitors Amazon Prices; Integrates with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Four Awesome TRON Legacy Themes for Chrome and Iron Anger is Illogical – Old School Style Instructional Video [Star Trek Mashup]

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• Dynamic Data Connections

  - by Tim Dexter

  I have had a long running email thread running between Dan and David over at Valspar and myself. They have built some impressive connectivity between their in house apps and BIP using web services. The crux of their problem has been that they have multiple databases that need the same report executed against them. Not such an unusual request as I have spoken to two customers in the last month with the same situation. Of course, you could create a report against each data connection and just run or call the appropriate report. Not too bad if you have two or three data connections but more than that and it becomes a maintenance nightmare having to update queries or layouts. Ideally you want to have just a single report definition on the BIP server and to dynamically set the connection to be used at runtime based on the user or system that the user is in. A quick bit of digging and help from Shinji on the development team and I had an answer. Rather embarassingly, the solution has been around since the Oct 2010 rollup patch last year. Still, I grabbed the latest Jan 2011 patch - check out Note 797057.1 for the latest available patches. Once installed, I used the best web service testing tool I have yet to come across - SoapUI. Just point it at the WSDL and you can check out the available services and their parameters and then test them too. The XML packet has a new dynamic data source entry. You can set you own custom JDBC connection or just specify an existing data source name thats defined on the server. <pub:runReport> <pub:reportRequest> <pub:attributeFormat>xml</pub:attributeFormat> <pub:attributeTemplate>0</pub:attributeTemplate> <pub:byPassCache>true</pub:byPassCache> <pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:JDBCDataSource> <pub:JDBCDriverClass></pub:JDBCDriverClass> <pub:JDBCDriverType></pub:JDBCDriverType> <pub:JDBCPassword></pub:JDBCPassword> <pub:JDBCURL></pub:JDBCURL> <pub:JDBCUserName></pub:JDBCUserName> <pub:dataSourceName>Conn1</pub:dataSourceName> </pub:JDBCDataSource> </pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:reportAbsolutePath>/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo</pub:reportAbsolutePath> </pub:reportRequest> <pub:userID>Administrator</pub:userID> <pub:password>Administrator</pub:password> </pub:runReport> So I have Conn1 and Conn2 defined that are connections to different databases. I can just flip the name, make the WS call and get the appropriate dataset in my report. Just as an example, here's my web service call java code. Just a case of bringing in the BIP java libs to my java project. publicReportServiceService = new PublicReportServiceService(); PublicReportService publicReportService = publicReportServiceService.getPublicReportService_v11(); String userID = "Administrator"; String password = "Administrator"; ReportRequest rr = new ReportRequest(); rr.setAttributeFormat("xml"); rr.setAttributeTemplate("1"); rr.setByPassCache(true); rr.setReportAbsolutePath("/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo"); rr.setReportOutputPath("c:\\temp\\output.xml"); BIPDataSource bipds = new BIPDataSource(); JDBCDataSource jds = new JDBCDataSource(); jds.setDataSourceName("Conn1"); bipds.setJDBCDataSource(jds); rr.setDynamicDataSource(bipds); try { publicReportService.runReport(rr, userID, password); } catch (InvalidParametersException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (AccessDeniedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (OperationFailedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } Note, Im no java whiz kid or whizzy old bloke, at least not unless Ive had a coffee. JDeveloper has a nice feature where you point it at the WSDL and it creates everything to support your calling code for you. Couple of things to remember: 1. When you call the service, remember to set the bypass the cache option. Forget it and much scratching of your head and taking my name in vain will ensue. 2. My demo actually hit the same database but used two users, one accessed the base tables another views with the same name. For far too long I thought the connection swapping was not working. I was getting the same results for both users until I realized I was specifying the schema name for the table/view in my query e.g. select * from EMP.EMPLOYEES. So remember to have a generic query that will depend entirely on the connection. Its a neat feature if you want to be able to switch connections and only define a single report and call it remotely. Now if you want the connection to be set dynamically based on the user and the report run via the user interface, thats going to be more tricky ... need to think about that one!

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity PeterPaul ? RT @JDeveloper: EJB 3 Deployment guide for WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0 dlvr.it/1J5VcV Andrejus Baranovskis ?Open ADF PopUp on Page Load fb.me/1Rx9LP3oW Sten Vesterli ? RT @OracleBlogs: Using the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java on ADF Applications ow.ly/1hVKbB <- Neat! No more WS calls Java Buddy ?JavaFX 2.0: Example of MediaPlay java-buddy.blogspot.com/2012/03/javafx… Georges Saab Build improvements coming to #openJDK for #jdk8 mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/buil… NetBeans Team Share your #Java experience! JavaOne 2012 India call for papers: ow.ly/9xYg0 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 Screencasts & Videos – bit.ly/zmQjn2 chriscmuir ?G+: New blog post: ADF Runtimes vs WLS versions as of JDeveloper 11.1.1.6.0 – bit.ly/y8tkgJ Michael Heinrichs New article: Creating a Sprite Animation with JavaFX blog.netopyr.com/2012/03/09/cre… Oracle WebLogic ? #WebLogic Devcast Webinar Series for March: Enterprise Java Scale Out, JPA, Distributed Grid Data Cache bit.ly/zeUXEV #Coherence Andrejus Baranovskis ?Extending Application Module for ADF BC Proxy User DB Connection fb.me/Bj1hLUqm OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7 | Mark Nelson bit.ly/w7IroZ OTNArchBeat ? Java Champion Jonas Bonér Explains the Akka Platform bit.ly/x2GbXm Adam Bien ? (Java) FX Experience Tools–Feels Like Native Mac App: FX Experience Tools application comes with a native Mac O… bit.ly/waHF3H GlassFish ? GlassFish new recruit and Eclipse integration progress – bit.ly/y5eEkk JDeveloper & ADF Prototyping ADF Libraries dlvr.it/1Hhnw0 Eric Elzinga ?Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7, bit.ly/xkphFQ ADF EMG ? Working with ADF in Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left-written language? Oracle UX asks for your help. groups.google.com/forum/?fromgro… Java ? A simple #JavaFX Login Form with a TRON like effect ow.ly/9n9AG JDeveloper & ADF ? Logging in Oracle ADF Applications dlvr.it/1HZhcX OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide bit.ly/ywXydR UK Oracle User Group ? Simon Haslam, ACE Director present on #WebLogic for DBAs at #oug_ire2012 j.mp/zG6vz3 @oraclewebcenter @oracleace #dublin Steven Davelaar ? Working with ADF and not a member of ADF EMG? You miss lots of valuable info, join now! sites.google.com/site/oracleemg… Simon Haslam @MaciejGruszka: Oracle plans to provide Forms & Reports plug-in for OVAB next year to help deployment. #ukoug MW SIG GlassFish ? Introducing JSR 357: Social Media API – bit.ly/yC8vez JAX London ? Are you coming to Java EE workshops by @AdamBien at JAX Days? Save £100 by registering today. #jaxdays #javaee jaxdays.com WebLogic Community ?Welcome to our Munich WebLogic 12c Bootcamp in Munich! If you also want to attend a training register for the Community oracle.com/partners/goto/… chriscmuir ? My first webcast for Oracle! (be kind) Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object bit.ly/ArKija OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Weblogic Server 12c is available on Oracle Solaris 11 (SPARC and x86) bit.ly/xE3TLg JDeveloper & ADF ? Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object – YouTube dlvr.it/1H93Qr OTNArchBeat ? Application-Driven Virtualization with Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder | Ronen Kofman bit.ly/wF1C1N Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server Singleton Services ow.ly/1hOu4U Barbara Ann May ?@oracledevtools: New update: #NetBeans IDE 7.1.1, with support for #GlassFish 3.1.2 bit.ly/mOLcQd #java #developer OTNArchBeat ? Using Coherence with JDeveloper: bit.ly/AkoEQb WebLogic Community ? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p1LMIb-f3 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 – new Podcast episode : bit.ly/wc6oBE Frank Nimphius ?Cool! Open JDeveloper 11.1.1.5, go help–>check for updates. First thing shown is that 11.1.1.6 is available. Never miss a new release Adam Bien ?5 Minutes (Video) With Java EE …Or With NetBeans + GlassFish: This screencast covers a 5-minute development of a… bit.ly/xkOJMf WebLogic Community ? Free Oracle WebLogic Certification Application Grid Implementation Specialist wp.me/p1LMIb-eT OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Coherence: First Steps Using Clusters and Basic API Usage | Ricardo Ferreira bit.ly/yYQ3Wz GlassFish ? JMS 2.0 Early Draft is here – bit.ly/ygT1VN OTNArchBeat ? Exalogic Networking Part 2 | The Old Toxophilist bit.ly/xuYMIi OTNArchBeat ?New Release: GlassFish Server 3.1.2. Read All About It! | Paul Davies bit.ly/AtlGxo Oracle WebLogic ?OTN Virtual Developer Day: #WebLogic 12c & #Coherence ost-conference on-demand page live with bonus #Virtualbox lab – bit.ly/xUy6BJ Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server 11g (10.3.6) Documentation ow.ly/1hJgUB Lucas Jellema ? Just published an article on the AMIS blog: technology.amis.nl/2012/03/adf-11… ADF 11g – programmatically sorting rich table columns. Java Certification ? New Course! Learn how to create mobile applications using Java ME: bit.ly/xZj1Jh Simon Haslam ? @MaciejGruszka WebLogic 12c can run against 11g domain config without changes …and can rollback to 11. #ukoug MW SIG Justin Kestelyn ? Learn Advanced ADF, free and online bit.ly/wEKSRc WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress,WebLogic 12c

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• Mocking successive calls of similar type via sequential mocking

  - by mehfuzh

  In this post , i show how you can benefit from  sequential mocking feature[In JustMock] for setting up expectations with successive calls of same type.  To start let’s first consider the following dummy database and entity class. public class Person {     public virtual string Name { get; set; }     public virtual int Age { get; set; } }   public interface IDataBase {     T Get<T>(); } Now, our test goal is to return different entity for successive calls on IDataBase.Get<T>(). By default, the behavior in JustMock is override , which is similar to other popular mocking tools. By override it means that the tool will consider always the latest user setup. Therefore, the first example will return the latest entity every-time and will fail in line #12: Person person1 = new Person { Age = 30, Name = "Kosev" }; Person person2 = new Person { Age = 80, Name = "Mihail" };   var database = Mock.Create<IDataBase>();   Queue<Person> queue = new Queue<Person>();   Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(() => queue.Dequeue()); Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(person2);   // this will fail Assert.Equal(person1.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode());   Assert.Equal(person2.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); We can solve it the following way using a Queue and that removes the item from bottom on each call: Person person1 = new Person { Age = 30, Name = "Kosev" }; Person person2 = new Person { Age = 80, Name = "Mihail" };   var database = Mock.Create<IDataBase>();   Queue<Person> queue = new Queue<Person>();   queue.Enqueue(person1); queue.Enqueue(person2);   Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(queue.Dequeue());   Assert.Equal(person1.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); Assert.Equal(person2.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); This will ensure that right entity is returned but this is not an elegant solution. So, in JustMock we introduced a  new option that lets you set up your expectations sequentially. Like: Person person1 = new Person { Age = 30, Name = "Kosev" }; Person person2 = new Person { Age = 80, Name = "Mihail" };   var database = Mock.Create<IDataBase>();   Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(person1).InSequence(); Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(person2).InSequence();   Assert.Equal(person1.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); Assert.Equal(person2.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); The  “InSequence” modifier will tell the mocking tool to return the expected result as in the order it is specified by user. The solution though pretty simple and but neat(to me) and way too simpler than using a collection to solve this type of cases. Hope that helps P.S. The example shown in my blog is using interface don’t require a profiler  and you can even use a notepad and build it referencing Telerik.JustMock.dll, run it with GUI tools and it will work. But this feature also applies to concrete methods that includes JM profiler and can be implemented for more complex scenarios.

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• 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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• PeopleSoft at Alliance 2012 Executive Forum

  - by John Webb

  Guest Posting From Rebekah Jackson This week I jointed over 4,800 Higher Ed and Public Sector customers and partners in Nashville at our annual Alliance conference.   I got lost easily in the hallways of the sprawling Gaylord Opryland Hotel. I carried the resort map with me, and I would still stand for several minutes at a very confusing junction, studying the map and the signage on the walls. Hallways led off in many directions, some with elevators going down here and stairs going up there. When I took a wrong turn I would instantly feel stuck, lose my bearings, and occasionally even have to send out a call for help.    It strikes me that the theme for the Executive Forum this year outlines a less tangible but equally disorienting set of challenges that our higher education customer’s CIOs are facing: Making Decisions at the Intersection of Business Value, Strategic Investment, and Enterprise Technology. The forces acting upon higher education institutions today are not neat, straight-forward decision points, where one can glance to the right, glance to the left, and then quickly choose the best course of action. The operational, technological, and strategic factors that must be considered are complex, interrelated, messy…and the stakes are high. Michael Horn, co-author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns”, set the tone for the day. He introduced the model of disruptive innovation, which grew out of the research he and his colleagues have done on ‘Why Successful Organizations Fail’. Highly simplified, the pattern he shared is that things start out decentralized, take a leap to extreme centralization, and then experience progressive decentralization. Using computers as an example, we started with a slide rule, then developed the computer which centralized in the form of mainframes, and gradually decentralized to mini-computers, desktop computers, laptops, and now mobile devices. According to Michael, you have more computing power in your cell phone than existed on the planet 60 years ago, or was on the first rocket that went to the moon. Applying this pattern to Higher Education means the introduction of expensive and prestigious private universities, followed by the advent of state schools, then by community colleges, and now online education. Michael shared statistics that indicate 50% of students will be taking at least one on line course by 2014…and by some measures, that’s already the case today. The implication is that technology moves from being the backbone of the campus, the IT department’s domain, and pushes into the academic core of the institution. Innovative programs are underway at many schools like Bellevue and BYU Idaho, joined by startups and disruptive new players like the Khan Academy.   This presents both threat and opportunity for higher education institutions, and means that IT decisions cannot afford to be disconnected from the institution’s strategic plan. Subsequent sessions explored this theme.    Theo Bosnak, from Attain, discussed the model they use for assessing the complete picture of an institution’s financial health. Compounding the issue are the dramatic trends occurring in technology and the vendors that provide it. Ovum analyst Nicole Engelbert, shared her insights next and suggested that incremental changes are no longer an option, instead fundamental changes are affecting the landscape of enterprise technology in higher ed.    Nicole closed with her recommendation that institutions focus on the trends in higher education with an eye towards the strategic requirements and business value first. Technology then is the enabler.   The last presentation of the day was from Tom Fisher, Sr. Vice President of Cloud Services at Oracle. Tom runs the delivery arm of the Cloud Services group, and shared his thoughts candidly about his experiences with cloud deployments as well as key issues around managing costs and security in cloud deployments. Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground at this point, from financials planning, business strategy, and cloud computing, with the possibility that half of the institutions in the US might not be around in their current form 10 years from now. Did I forget to mention that was raised in the morning session? Seems a little hard to believe, and yet Michael Horn made a compelling point. Apparently 100 years ago, 8 of the top 10 education institutions in the world were German. Today, the leading German school is ranked somewhere in the 40’s or 50’s. What will the landscape be 100 years from now? Will there be an institution from China, India, or Brazil in the top 10? As Nicole suggested, maybe US parents will be sending their children to schools overseas much sooner, faced with the ever-increasing costs of a US based education. Will corporations begin to view skill-based certification from an online provider as a viable alternative to a 4 year degree from an accredited institution, fundamentally altering the education industry as we know it?

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• How to setup SyntaxHighlighter with GeeksWithBlogs in about 10 minutes.

  - by mbcrump

  SyntaxHighlighter is a fully functional self-contained code syntax highlighter developed in JavaScript. Below is a sample of what it looks like in your blog. class Test { static void Main() { System.Console.WriteLine("Sample SyntaxHighlighter"); } } This tutorial will help you setup SyntaxHighlighter with GeeksWithBlogs.net in about 10 minutes. Even though this guide is specifically for GWB, you can use it on any other hosting provider that does not allow you to upload custom CSS/JavaScript. It is recommended that if you are using LiveWriter to go ahead and download Code Snippet with SyntaxHighlighter Support to integrate this functionality within Live Writer. 1) Log into GWB and select Options->Configure Now under the Custom CSS insert the following code at the top of the textbox: @import url("http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css"); @import url("http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css"); Please note that you can change the default theme by changing the shThemeDefault.css to one listed below: shThemeDefault.css shThemeDjango.css shThemeEmacs.css shThemeFadeToGrey.css shThemeMidnight.css shThemeRDark.css 2) Under the Static News/Announcements insert the following code at the top: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script language='javascript'> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> Please note that this will only give you support for Java, JavaScript and C Sharp. If you want more languages like Ruby and SQL. Then add the proper tags listed below. The reason that I didn’t add them is because I do not want to load languages that I will not be blogging about. <link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPhp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPython.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushRuby.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPerl.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script language='javascript'> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> 3) Now install Code Snippet with SyntaxHighlighter Support and launch Windows Live Writer. Click on the PreCode Snippet plugin add copy/paste your code into the windows. Make sure you select “PRE” and the Language that you are using. It should look similar to the following screenshot.  After you finish editing the post, hit publish and your code should look nice and neat like the example shown earlier.

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• Using a Predicate as a key to a Dictionary

  - by Tom Hines

  I really love Linq and Lambda Expressions in C#.  I also love certain community forums and programming websites like DaniWeb. A user on DaniWeb posted a question about comparing the results of a game that is like poker (5-card stud), but is played with dice. The question stemmed around determining what was the winning hand.  I looked at the question and issued some comments and suggestions toward a potential answer, but I thought it was a neat homework exercise. [A little explanation] I eventually realized not only could I compare the results of the hands (by name) with a certain construct – I could also compare the values of the individual dice with the same construct. That piece of code eventually became a Dictionary with the KEY as a Predicate<int> and the Value a Func<T> that returns a string from the another structure that contains the mapping of an ENUM to a string.  In one instance, that string is the name of the hand and in another instance, it is a string (CSV) representation of of the digits in the hand. An added benefit is that the digits re returned in the order they would be for a proper poker hand.  For instance the hand 1,2,5,3,1 would be returned as ONE_PAIR (1,1,5,3,2). [Getting to the point] 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3:   4: namespace DicePoker 5: { 6: using KVP_E2S = KeyValuePair<CDicePoker.E_DICE_POKER_HAND_VAL, string>; 7: public partial class CDicePoker 8: { 9: /// <summary> 10: /// Magical construction to determine the winner of given hand Key/Value. 11: /// </summary> 12: private static Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Func<List<KVP_E2S>, string>> 13: map_prd2fn = new Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Func<List<KVP_E2S>, string>> 14: { 15: {new Predicate<int>(i => i.Equals(0)), PlayerTie},//first tie 16:   17: {new Predicate<int>(i => i > 0), 18: (m => string.Format("Player One wins\n1={0}({1})\n2={2}({3})", 19: m[0].Key, m[0].Value, m[1].Key, m[1].Value))}, 20:   21: {new Predicate<int>(i => i < 0), 22: (m => string.Format("Player Two wins\n2={2}({3})\n1={0}({1})", 23: m[0].Key, m[0].Value, m[1].Key, m[1].Value))}, 24:   25: {new Predicate<int>(i => i.Equals(0)), 26: (m => string.Format("Tie({0}) \n1={1}\n2={2}", 27: m[0].Key, m[0].Value, m[1].Value))} 28: }; 29: } 30: } When this is called, the code calls the Invoke method of the predicate to return a bool.  The first on matching true will have its value invoked. 1: private static Func<DICE_HAND, E_DICE_POKER_HAND_VAL> GetHandEval = dh => 2: map_dph2fn[map_dph2fn.Keys.Where(enm2fn => enm2fn(dh)).First()]; After coming up with this process, I realized (with a little modification) it could be called to evaluate the individual values in the dice hand in the event of a tie. 1: private static Func<List<KVP_E2S>, string> PlayerTie = lst_kvp => 2: map_prd2fn.Skip(1) 3: .Where(x => x.Key.Invoke(RenderDigits(dhPlayerOne).CompareTo(RenderDigits(dhPlayerTwo)))) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .First().Invoke(lst_kvp); After that, I realized I could now create a program completely without “if” statements or “for” loops! 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Action<Action<string>>> main = new Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Action<Action<string>>> 4: { 5: {(i => i.Equals(0)), PlayGame}, 6: {(i => true), Usage} 7: }; 8:   9: main[main.Keys.Where(m => m.Invoke(args.Length)).First()].Invoke(Display); 10: } …and there you have it. :) ZIPPED Project

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• Manage Your Amazon S3 Account with CloudBerry Explorer

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you have an Amazon S3 account you’re using to backup your data, you might want an easy way to manage it. CloudBerry Explorer is a free app that runs on your desktop an provides an easy way to manage your S3 account. Installation and Setup Just download and install the application with the defaults. When the application launches you’ll be prompted to enter in your username and email to get a registration key. Or you can continue on by clicking Register later. Now you will want to set up your Amazon S3 account. Click on File \ Amazon S3 Accounts. Double-click on the New Account icon.   Next enter in your Amazon account Access and Secret keys, select SSL if you want, then click the Test Connection button. Provided everything was entered correctly, you’ll see the Connection Success screen, just close out of it. Browse and Manage files Once you have your account setup through the Explorer, you can start viewing and managing your files on S3. The left pane shows your S3 buckets and stored files, while the right side shows your local computer. This allows you to manage your files in your Amazon S3 buckets directly from your desktop! It’s very easy to use, and you can drag and drop files from your computer to the S3 account or vice versa. There is also the ability to transfer files between Amazon S3 accounts from within the explorer. Go into Tools and Content Types and you can control the file types by adding, removing, or editing them. If you end up messing something up along the lines, you can always select Reset to defaults and everything will be back to normal. There is a multiple tabbed view so you can easily keep track of your different accounts and local machine. It allows the ability to create new storage buckets directly in the Explorer. Or you can delete buckets as well… Different actions can be accessed from the toolbars or by right-clicking and selecting from the context menu. Here we see a cool option that lets you move your data inside Amazon S3. It is faster and doesn’t cost money by moving the files to your computer first, then to another account. However, if you want data moved to your local machine first, you have that option as well.   Not all features are available in the free version, and if it’s not, you’ll be prompted to purchase a license for the Pro version. We will have a comprehensive review of the Pro version in the near future.    If you ever need help with CloudBerry Explorer, go to Tools \ Diagnostics. It will run a quick diagnostics check and you can send the information to the CloudBerry team for assistance. Delete Files from Amazon S3 To delete a file from you Amazon S3 account, simply highlight the files or folder you want to get rid of then click Delete on the toolbar. You can also right-click the file and select Delete from the Context Menu. Click Yes to the confirmation dialog box… Then you can watch the progress as your files are deleted in the bottom section of the explorer. Conclusion CloudBerry Explorer free version has several neat features that will allow you easy and basic control over you Amazon S3 account. The free version may be enough for basic users, but power users will want to upgrade to the pro version, as it includes a lot more features. Using the free version allows you to get a feel for what CloudBerry Explorer has to offer, and is a good starting point. Keep in mind that Amazon S3 is introducing Reduced Redundancy Storage which will lower the price of data stored. The price drops from $0.15 per GB to only $0.10 per GB. If you’re a Windows Home Server user, check out our review of CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for WHS. Download CloudBerry Explorer Free for Amazon S3 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home ServerReopen Closed Tabs in Internet ExplorerPreview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PCTroubleshoot and Manage Addons in Internet Explorer 8Beginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor

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• Discover What Powers Your Favorite Websites

  - by Matthew Guay

  Have you ever wondered if the site you’re visiting is powered by WordPress or if the webapp you’re using is powered by Ruby on Rails?  With these extensions for Google Chrome, you’ll never have to wonder again. Geeks love digging under the hood to see what makes their favorite apps and sites tick.  But opening the “View Source” window today doesn’t tell you everything there is to know about a website.  Plus, even if you can tell what CMS is powering a website from its source, it can be tedious to dig through lines of code to find what you’re looking for.  Also, the HTML code never tells you what web server a site is running on or what version of PHP it’s using.  With three extensions for Google Chrome you’ll never have to wonder again.  Note that some sites may not give as much information, but still, you’ll find enough data from most sites to be interesting. Discover Web Frameworks and Javascript Libraries with Chrome Sniffer If you want to know what CMS is powering a site or if it’s using Google Analytics or Quantcast, this is the extension for you.  Chrome Sniffer (link below) identifies over 40 different frameworks, and is constantly adding more.  It shows the logo of the main framework on the site on the left of your address bar.  Here wee see Chrome Sniffer noticed that How-To Geek is powered by WordPress.   Click the logo to see other frameworks on the site.  We can see that the site also has Google Analytics and Quantcast.  If you want more information about the framework, click on its logo and the framework’s homepage will open in a new tab. As another example, we can see that the Tumblr Staff blog is powered by Tumblr (of course), the Discus comment system, Quantcast, and the Prototype JavaScript framework. Or here’s a site that’s powered by Drupal, Google Analytics, Mollom spam protection, and jQuery.  Chrome Sniffer definitely uncovers a lot of neat stuff, so if you’re into web frameworks you’re sure to enjoy this extension. Find Out What Web Server The Site is Running On Want to know whether the site you’re looking at is running on IIS or Appache?  The Web Server Notifier extension for Chrome (link below) lets you easily recognize the web server a site is running on by its favicon on the right of the address bar.  Click the icon to see more information. Some web servers will show you a lot of information about their server, including version, operating system, PHP version, OpenSSL version, and more. Others will simply tell you their name. If the site is powered by IIS, you can usually tell the version of Windows Server its running on since the IIS versions are specific to a version of Windows.  Here we see that Microsoft.com is running on the latest and greatest – Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS 7.5. Discover Web Technologies Powering Sites Wondering if a webapp is powered by Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET?  The Web Technology Notifier extension for Chrome (link below), from the same developer as the Web Server Notifier, will let you easily discover the backend of a site.  You’ll see the technology’s favicon on the right of your address bar, and, as with the other extension, can get more information by clicking the icon. Here we can see that Backpack from 37signals is powered by the Phusion Passenger module to run Ruby on Rails.   Microsoft’s new Docs.com Office Online apps is powered by ASP.NET…   And How-To Geek has PHP running to power WordPress. Conclusion With all these tools at hand, you can find out a lot about your favorite sites.  For example, with all three extensions we can see that How-To Geek runs on WordPress with PHP, uses Google Analytics and Quantcast, and is served by the LightSpeed web server.  Fun info, huh?   Links Download the Chrome Sniffer extension Download the Web Server Notifier extension Download the Web Technology Notifier extension Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Enjoy a Clean Start Page with New Tab PageEnjoy Image Zooming on Your Favorite Photo Websites in ChromeAdd Your Own Folders to Favorites in Windows 7Find User Scripts for Your Favorite Websites the Easy WayAdd Social Elements to Your Gmail Contacts with Rapportive TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere) 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes

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• Many Different Things Rolled into a Ball

  - by MOSSLover

  Yeah I know I don’t blog much anymore, because life has taken me places that don’t involve the interwebs unfortunately.  I am in the midst of planning two events, starting a non for profit, creating more sessions for various conferences, submitting to various conferences, working a 40 hour a week job, attempting to hang out with boyfriend/friends/family.  So you can see that list does not include this blog sadly that’s how it goes sometimes.  The bottom piece very important over any of the top pieces.  I haven’t seen St. Louis in a while and I get to go back.  I was gone from home for MVP Summit and Best Practices Conference, so the boyfriend and cat didn’t get to see me either for a bit.  Then you have to add in the whole toilet being broken fiasco this week.  Maintenance really thought it would be cool to turn off the ability to flush.  I mean who does that?  Then when we call the owner he comes by turns it on and we figure it was an accident, because well the next day no one came by to tell us there was a leak.  It was all kinds of strangeness and involved me running to other people’s toilets.  As Dan Usher would say, I was a sad panda for a few days.  So I guess I wanted to post a few thoughts here just because I can.  I do not like multiple content editor webparts embedded with html files in numerous pages doing the same thing.  I will tell you why I don’t like these particular webparts and the way they are being used.  First off if you have a bunch of pages with script includes it’s about time you should just dump them into the masterpage.  Why bother finding all 20 pages and changing those pages when you can just use a single masterpage that already exists? The other thing that is bothering me days is screen scraping.  Just don’t do it, because in 2010 you will find the UI is substantially slower.  I understand you are new and you have no idea what to do.  You are also using 2007 am I right?  So then you need to go to codeplex.com and type in a search for SPServices.  Download it, use it, love it and then have it’s babies (well maybe don’t go so far this is not the GRID in Tron). If you have a ton of constants in your code why did you not go in and create a webpart with a bunch of properties and/or link to a configuration list hidden in the browser?  This type of property and list could help you out in the long run.  The power users and administrators can now change the control without you having to compile it over and over again.  It’s good stuff.  Also, you can change the control without compiling it, especially in 2007 where you have to do a farm solution.  In 2010 you can do a sandbox solution I guess, but shouldn’t you make it as easy and supportable as possible for other users? In conclusion I’m an angry person when it comes to viewing something repeatedly and analyzing it in a system.  Now we will move on to the next topic…MVP Summit…So yeah I can’t really talk about particulars, but I can talk about my experience as a person.  Don’t build something up to be cooler than it is only to be dropped from your 10,000 foot perch.  My experience was great, but the content overall was something to be desired.  It’s ok I got to meet a lot of people I would not have met if I had not gone.  Some of it was surreal, such as product group members showing up and talking to us.  It was pretty neat.  Plus I never had the chance to get to that mythical MS Office in Redmond.  Prior to Summit it was like Rainbow Brites unicorn trying taunting me on television when I was a kid.  So I guess with all that said I give it a B.  It was awesome in some way, but lacking in other ways.  The cool part is that I got to go.  Would I have lived without going? Yes, but it was still cool. I could prattle on about other things and make this post massive, but I’m going to pass and give myself a piece of Sunday to play Rockband and do 800 other things.  I hope the two of you who read this blog are well.  I’ll catch you all at another juncture.  Have a good weekend and varying holidays in between. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MVP Summit,JQuery,Javascript

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• About Solaris 11 and UltraSPARC II/III/IV/IV+

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  I know that I will get the usual amount of comments like "Oh, Jörg ? you can't be negative about Oracle" for this article. However as usual I want to explain the logic behind my reasoning. Yes ? I know that there is a lot of UltraSPARC III, IV and IV+ gear out there. But there are some very basic questions: Does your application you are currently running on this gear stops running just because you can't run Solaris 11 on it? What is the need to upgrade a system already in production to Solaris 11? I have the impression, that some people think that the systems get useless in the moment Oracle releases Solaris 11. I know that Sun sold UltraSPARC IV+ systems until 2009. The Sun SF490 introduced 2004 for example, that was a Sun SF480 with UltraSPARC IV and later with UltraSPARC IV+. And yes, Sun made some speedbumps. At that time the systems of the UltraSPARC III to IV+ generations were supported on Solaris 8, on Solaris 9 and on Solaris 10. However from my perspective we sold them to customers, which weren't able to migrate to Solaris 10 because they used applications not supported on Solaris 9 or who just didn't wanted to migrate to Solaris 10. Believe it or not ? I personally know two customers that migrated core systems to Solaris 10 in ? well 2008/9. This was especially true when the M3000 was announced in 2008 when it closed the darned single socket gap. It may be different at you site, however that's what I remember about that time when talking with customers. At first: Just because there is no Solaris 11 for UltraSPARC III, IV and IV+, it doesn't mean that Solaris 10 will go away anytime soon. I just want to point you to "Expect Lifetime Support - Hardware and Operating Systems". It states about Premier Support:Maintenance and software upgrades are included for Oracle operating systems and Oracle VM for a minimum of eight years from the general availability date.GA for Solaris 10 was in 2005. Plus 8 years ? 2013 ? at minimum. Then you can still opt for 3 years of "Extended Support" ? 2016 ? at minimum. 2016 your systems purchased in 2009 are 7 years old. Even on systems purchased at the very end of the lifetime of that system generation. That are the rules as written in the linked document. I said minimum The actual dates are even further in the future: Premier Support for Solaris 10 ends in 2015, Extended support ends 2018. Sustaining support ? indefinite. You will find this in the document "Oracle Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Hardware and Operating Systems".So I don't understand when some people write, that Oracle is less protective about hardware investments than Sun. And for hardware it's the same as with Sun: Service 5 years after EOL as part of Premier Support. I would like to write about a different perspective as well: I have to be a little cautious here, because this is going in the roadmap area, so I will mention the public sources here: John Fowler told last year that we have to expect at at least 3x the single thread performance of T3 for T4. We have 8 cores in T4, as stated by Rick Hetherington. Let's assume for a moment that a T4 core will have the performance of a UltraSPARC core (just to simplify math and not to disclosing anything about the performance, all existing SPARC cores are considered equal). So given this pieces of information, you could consolidate 8 V215, 4 or 8 V245, 2 full blown V445,2 full blown 490, 2 full blown M3000 on a single T4 SPARC processor. The Fowler roadmap prezo talked about 4-socket systems with T4. So 32 V215, 16 to 8 V245, 8 fullblown V445, 8 full blown V490, 8 full blown M3000 in a system image. I think you get the idea. That said, most of the systems we are talking about have already amortized and perhaps it's just time to invest in new systems to yield other advantages like reduced space consumptions, like reduced power consumption, like some of the neat features sun4v gives you, and yes ? reduced number of processor licenses for Oracle and less money for Oracle HW/SW support. As much as I dislike it myself that my own UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC II based systems won't run on Solaris 11 (and I have quite a few of them in my personal lab), I really think that the impact on production environments will be much less than most people think now. By the way: The reason for this move is a quite significant new feature. I will tell you that it was this feature, when it's out. I assume, telling just a word more could lead to much more time to blog.

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• Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  It is pretty much accepted that you should use Areas instead of having many small Team Projects when you are using Team Foundation Server 2010. I have implemented this scenario many times and this is the current iteration of layout and considerations. If like me you work with many customers you will find that you get into a grove for how to set these things up to make them as easily understandable for everyone, while giving the best functionality. The trick is in making it as intuitive as possible for both you and the developers that need to work with it. There are five main places where you need to have the Product or Project name in prominence of any other value. Area Iteration Source Code Work Item Queries Build Once you decide how you are doing this in each of these places you need to keep to it religiously. Evan if you have one source code file to keep, make sure it is in the right place. This makes your developers and others working with the format familiar with where everything should go, as well as building up mussel memory. This prevents the neat system degenerating into a nasty mess. Areas Areas are traditionally used to separate out parts of your product / project so that you can see how much effort has gone into each. Figure: The top level areas are for reporting and work item separation There are massive advantages of using this method. You can: move work from one project to another rename a project / product It is far more likely that a project or product gets renamed than a department. Tip: If you have many projects, over 100, you should consider categorising them here, but make sure that the actual project name always sits at the same level so you know which is which. Figure: Always keep things that are the same at the same level Note: You may use these categories only at the Area/Iteration level to make it easier to select on drop down lists. You may not want to use them everywhere. On the other hand, for consistency it would be better to. Iterations Iterations are usually used to some sort of time based consideration. Here I am splitting into Iterations with periodic releases. Figure: Each product needs to be able to have its own cadence The ability to have each project run at its own pace and to enable them to have their own release schedule is often of paramount importance and you don’t want to fix your 100+ projects to all be released on the same date. Source Code Having a good structure for your source even if you are not branching or having multiple products under the same structure is always a good idea. Figure: Separate out your products source You need to think about both your branches as well as the structure of your source. All your code should be under “Source” and everything you need to build your solution including Build Scripts and 3rd party tools should be under your “Main” (branch) folder. This should them be branched by “Quality”, “Release” or both to get the most out of your branching structure. The important thing is to make sure you branch (or be able to branch) everything you need to build, test and deploy your application to an environment. That environment may be development, test or even production, but I can’t stress the importance of having everything your need. Note: You usually will not be able to install custom software on your build server. Store any *.dll’s or *.exe’s that you need under the “Tools\Tool1” folder. Note: Consult the Branching Guidance for Team Foundation Server 2010 for more on branching Figure: Adding category may be a necessary evil Even if you have to have a couple of categories called “Default”, it is better than not knowing the difference between a folder, Product and Branch. Work Item Queries Queries are used to load lists of Work Items out of TFS so you can see what work you have. This means that you want to also separate queries out by Product / project to make it easier to Figure: Again you have the same first level structure Having Folders also in Work Item Tracking we do the same thing. We put all the queries under a folder named for the Product / Project and change each query to have “AreaPath=[TeamProject]\[ProductX]” in the query instead of the standard “Project=@Project”. Tip: Don’t have a folder with new queries for each iteration. Instead have a single “Current” folder that has queries that point to the current iteration. Just change the queries as you move from one iteration to another. Tip: You can ctrl+drag the “Product1” folder to create your “Product2” folder. Builds You may have many builds both for individual products but also for different quality's. This can be further complicated by having some builds that action “Gated Check-In” and others that are specifically for “Release”, “Test” or another purpose. Figure: There are no folders, yet, for the builds so you need a good naming convention Its a pity that there are no folders under builds, some way to categorise would be nice. In lue of that at the moment you can use a functional naming convention that at least allows you to find what you want. Conclusion It is really easy to both achieve and to stick to this format if you take the time to do it. Unless you have 1000+ builds or 100+ Products you are unlikely run into any issues. Even then there are things you can do to mitigate the issues and I have describes some of them above. Let me know if you can think of any other things to make this easier.

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• Navigation in a #WP7 application with MVVM Light

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  In MVVM applications, it can be a bit of a challenge to send instructions to the view (for example a page) from a viewmodel. Thankfully, we have good tools at our disposal to help with that. In his excellent series “MVVM Light Toolkit soup to nuts”, Jesse Liberty proposes one approach using the MVVM Light messaging infrastructure. While this works fine, I would like to show here another approach using what I call a “view service”, i.e. an abstracted service that is invoked from the viewmodel, and implemented on the view. Multiple kinds of view services In fact, I use view services quite often, and even started standardizing them for the Windows Phone 7 applications I work on. If there is interest, I will be happy to show other such view services, for example Animation services, responsible to start/stop animations on the view. Dialog service, in charge of displaying messages to the user and gathering feedback. Navigation service, in charge of navigating to a given page directly from the viewmodel. In this article, I will concentrate on the navigation service. The INavigationService interface In most WP7 apps, the navigation service is used in quite a straightforward way. We want to: Navigate to a given URI. Go back. Be notified when a navigation is taking place, and be able to cancel. The INavigationService interface is quite simple indeed: public interface INavigationService { event NavigatingCancelEventHandler Navigating; void NavigateTo(Uri pageUri); void GoBack(); } Obviously, this interface can be extended if necessary, but in most of the apps I worked on, I found that this covers my needs. The NavigationService class It is possible to nicely pack the navigation service into its own class. To do this, we need to remember that all the PhoneApplicationPage instances use the same instance of the navigation service, exposed through their NavigationService property. In fact, in a WP7 application, it is the main frame (RootFrame, of type PhoneApplicationFrame) that is responsible for this task. So, our implementation of the NavigationService class can leverage this. First the class will grab the PhoneApplicationFrame and store a reference to it. Also, it registers a handler for the Navigating event, and forwards the event to the listening viewmodels (if any). Then, the NavigateTo and the GoBack methods are implemented. They are quite simple, because they are in fact just a gateway to the PhoneApplicationFrame. The whole class is as follows: public class NavigationService : INavigationService { private PhoneApplicationFrame _mainFrame; public event NavigatingCancelEventHandler Navigating; public void NavigateTo(Uri pageUri) { if (EnsureMainFrame()) { _mainFrame.Navigate(pageUri); } } public void GoBack() { if (EnsureMainFrame() && _mainFrame.CanGoBack) { _mainFrame.GoBack(); } } private bool EnsureMainFrame() { if (_mainFrame != null) { return true; } _mainFrame = Application.Current.RootVisual as PhoneApplicationFrame; if (_mainFrame != null) { // Could be null if the app runs inside a design tool _mainFrame.Navigating += (s, e) => { if (Navigating != null) { Navigating(s, e); } }; return true; } return false; } } Exposing URIs I find that it is a good practice to expose each page’s URI as a constant. In MVVM Light applications, a good place to do that is the ViewModelLocator, which already acts like a central point of setup for the views and their viewmodels. Note that in some cases, it is necessary to expose the URL as a string, for instance when a query string needs to be passed to the view. So for example we could have: public static readonly Uri MainPageUri = new Uri("/MainPage.xaml", UriKind.Relative); public const string AnotherPageUrl = "/AnotherPage.xaml?param1={0}&param2={1}"; Creating and using the NavigationService Normally, we only need one instance of the NavigationService class. In cases where you use an IOC container, it is easy to simply register a singleton instance. For example, I am using a modified version of a super simple IOC container, and so I can register the navigation service as follows: SimpleIoc.Register<INavigationService, NavigationService>(); Then, it can be resolved where needed with: SimpleIoc.Resolve<INavigationService>(); Or (more frequently), I simply declare a parameter on the viewmodel constructor of type INavigationService and let the IOC container do its magic and inject the instance of the NavigationService when the viewmodel is created. On supported platforms (for example Silverlight 4), it is also possible to use MEF. Or, of course, we can simply instantiate the NavigationService in the ViewModelLocator, and pass this instance as a parameter of the viewmodels’ constructor, injected as a property, etc… Once the instance has been passed to the viewmodel, it can be used, for example with: NavigationService.NavigateTo(ViewModelLocator.ComparisonPageUri); Testing Thanks to the INavigationService interface, navigation can be mocked and tested when the viewmodel is put under unit test. Simply implement and inject a mock class, and assert that the methods are called as they should by the viewmodel. Conclusion As usual, there are multiple ways to code a solution answering your needs. I find that view services are a really neat way to delegate view-specific responsibilities such as animation, dialogs and of course navigation to other classes through an abstracted interface. In some cases, such as the NavigationService class exposed here, it is even possible to standardize the implementation and pack it in a class library for reuse. I hope that this sample is useful! Happy coding. Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• javaf, problem...plz help someone...urgent [closed]

  - by innovative_aj

  i have made a word guessing game, when i click myButton to check if the guessed word is right or wrong, ball1 is moved into the "container" if its right, i want that when i click the button again and if the typed word is right, the 2nd ball should move into the container too... means one ball per correct answer...plz help me someone and provide me with the code that i can implement, its quite urgent... controller class coding /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ package project3; import java.net.URL; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import javafx.event.ActionEvent; import javafx.event.EventHandler; import javafx.fxml.FXML; import javafx.fxml.Initializable; import javafx.scene.control.Button; import javafx.scene.control.Label; import javafx.scene.control.TextField; import javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; import javafx.scene.shape.Circle; /** * FXML Controller class * * @xxx */ public class MyFxmlController implements Initializable { @FXML // fx:id="ball1" private Circle ball1; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="ball2" private Circle ball2; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="ball3" private Circle ball3; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="ball4" private Circle ball4; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="container" private Circle container; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="myButton" private Button myButton; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="myLabel1" private Label myLabel1; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="myLabel2" private Label myLabel2; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="pane" private StackPane pane; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="txt" private TextField txt; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @Override // This method is called by the FXMLLoader when initialization is complete public void initialize(URL fxmlFileLocation, ResourceBundle resources) { assert ball1 != null : "fx:id=\"ball1\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert ball2 != null : "fx:id=\"ball2\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert ball3 != null : "fx:id=\"ball3\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert ball4 != null : "fx:id=\"ball4\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert container != null : "fx:id=\"container\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert myButton != null : "fx:id=\"myButton\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert myLabel1 != null : "fx:id=\"myLabel1\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert myLabel2 != null : "fx:id=\"myLabel2\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert pane != null : "fx:id=\"pane\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert txt != null : "fx:id=\"txt\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; // initialize your logic here: all @FXML variables will have been injected myButton.setOnAction(new EventHandler<ActionEvent>(){ @Override public void handle(ActionEvent event) { int count = 0; String guessed=txt.getText(); boolean result; result=MyCode.check(guessed); if(result) { ball1.setTranslateX(600); ball1.setTranslateY(250-container.getRadius()); //ball2.setTranslateX(600); // ball2.setTranslateY(250-container.getRadius()); } else System.out.println("wrong"); } }); } } word guessing logic public class MyCode { static String x="Netbeans"; static String y[]={"net","beans","neat","beat","bet"}; //static int counter; // public MyCode() { // counter++; //} static boolean check(String guessed) { int count=0; boolean result=false; //counter++; //System.out.println("turns"+counter); for(count=0;count<5;count++) { if(guessed.equals(y[count])) { result=true; break; } } if(result) System.out.println("Right"); else System.out.println("Wrong"); return result; } }

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 1 of 3&ndash;Features)

  - by ToStringTheory

  It wasn’t very long ago that I first began to get into CSS precompilers such as SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and LESS (The Dynamic Stylesheet Language) and I had been hooked on the idea since.  When I finally had a new project come up, I leapt at the opportunity to try out one of these languages. Introduction To be honest, I was hesitant at first to add either framework as I didn’t really know much more than what I had read on their homepages, and I didn’t like the idea of adding too much complexity to a project - I couldn’t guarantee I would be the only person to support it in the future. Thankfully, both of these languages just add things into CSS.  You don’t HAVE to know LESS or SASS to do anything, you can still do your old school CSS, and your output will be the same.  However, when you want to start doing more advanced things such as variables, mixins, and color functions, the functionality is all there for you to utilize. From what I had read, SASS has a few more features than LESS, which is why I initially tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a MVC 4 project. However, through my research, I couldn’t find a way to accomplish this without including some bit of the Ruby on Rails framework on the computer running it, and I hated the fact that I had to do that.  Besides SASS, there is little chance of me getting into the RoR framework, at least in the next couple years.  So in the end, I settled with using LESS. Features So, what can LESS (or SASS) do for you?  There are several reasons I have come to love it in the past few weeks. 1 – Constants Using LESS, you can finally declare a constant and use its value across an entire CSS file. The case that most people would be familiar with is colors.  Wanting to declare one or two color variables that comprise the theme of the site, and not have to retype out their specific hex code each time, but rather a variable name.  What’s great about this is that if you end up having to change it, you only have to change it in one place.  An important thing to note is that you aren’t limited to creating constants just for colors, but for strings and measurements as well. 2 – Inheritance This is a cool feature in my mind for simplicity and organization.  Both LESS and SASS allow you to place selectors within other selectors, and when it is compiled, the languages will break the rules out as necessary and keep the inheritance chain you created in the selectors. Example LESS Code: #header {   h1 {     font-size: 26px;     font-weight: bold;   }   p {     font-size: 12px;     a     {       text-decoration: none;       &:hover {         border-width: 1px       }     }   } } Example Compiled CSS: #header h1 {   font-size: 26px;   font-weight: bold; } #header p {   font-size: 12px; } #header p a {   text-decoration: none; } #header p a:hover {   border-width: 1px; } 3 - Mixins Mixins are where languages like this really shine.  The ability to mixin other definitions setup a parametric mixin.  There is really a lot of content in this area, so I would suggest looking at http://lesscss.org for more information.  One of the things I would suggest if you do begin to use LESS is to also grab the mixins.less file from the Twitter Bootstrap project.  This file already has a bunch of predefined mixins for things like border-radius with all of the browser specific prefixes.  This alone is of great use! 4 – Color Functions This is the last thing I wanted to point out as my final post in this series will be utilizing these functions in a more drawn out manner.  Both LESS and SASS provide functions for getting information from a color (R,G,B,H,S,L).  Using these, it is easy to define a primary color, and then darken or lighten it a little for your needs.  Example: Example LESS Code: @base-color: #111; @red:        #842210; #footer {   color: (@base-color + #003300);   border-left:  2px;   border-right: 2px;   border-color: desaturate(@red, 10%); } Example Compiled CSS: #footer {    color: #114411;    border-left:  2px;    border-right: 2px;    border-color: #7d2717; } I have found that these can be very useful and powerful when constructing a site theme. Conclusion I came across LESS and SASS when looking for the best way to implement some type of CSS variables for colors, because I hated having to do a Find and Replace in all of the files using the colors, and in some instances, you couldn’t just find/replace because of the color choices interfering with other colors (color to replace of #000, yet come colors existed like #0002bc).  So in many cases I would end up having to do a Find and manually check each one. In my next post, I am going to cover how I’ve come to set up these items and the structure for the items in the project, as well as the conventions that I have come to start using.  In the final post in the series, I will cover a neat little side project I built in LESS dealing with colors!

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• What is in your Mathematica tool bag?

  - by Timo

  We all know that Mathematica is great, but it also often lacks critical functionality. What kind of external packages / tools / resources do you use with Mathematica? I'll edit (and invite anyone else to do so too) this main post to include resources which are focused on general applicability in scientific research and which as many people as possible will find useful. Feel free to contribute anything, even small code snippets (as I did below for a timing routine). Also, undocumented and useful features in Mathematica 7 and beyond you found yourself, or dug up from some paper/site are most welcome. Please include a short description or comment on why something is great or what utility it provides. If you link to books on Amazon with affiliate links please mention it, e.g., by putting your name after the link. Packages: LevelScheme is a package that greatly expands Mathematica's capability to produce good looking plots. I use it if not for anything else then for the much, much improved control over frame/axes ticks. David Park's Presentation Package ($50 - no charge for updates) Tools: MASH is Daniel Reeves's excellent perl script essentially providing scripting support for Mathematica 7. (This is finally built in as of Mathematica 8 with the -script option.) Resources: Wolfram's own repository MathSource has a lot of useful if narrow notebooks for various applications. Also check out the other sections such as Current Documentation, Courseware for lectures, and Demos for, well, demos. Books: Mathematica programming: an advanced introduction by Leonid Shifrin (web, pdf) is a must read if you want to do anything more than For loops in Mathematica. Quantum Methods with Mathematica by James F. Feagin (amazon) The Mathematica Book by Stephen Wolfram (amazon) (web) Schaum's Outline (amazon) Mathematica in Action by Stan Wagon (amazon) - 600 pages of neat examples and goes up to Mathematica version 7. Visualization techniques are especially good, you can see some of them on the author's Demonstrations Page. Mathematica Programming Fundamentals by Richard Gaylord (pdf) - A good concise introduction to most of what you need to know about Mathematica programming. Undocumented (or scarcely documented) Features: How to customize Mathematica keyboard shortcuts. See this question. How to inspect patterns and functions used by Mathematica's own functions. See this answer How to achieve Consistent size for GraphPlots in Mathematica? See this question.

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• Efficiency of Java "Double Brace Initialization"?

  - by Jim Ferrans

  In Hidden Features of Java the top answer mentions Double Brace Initialization, with a very enticing syntax: Set<String> flavors = new HashSet<String>() {{ add("vanilla"); add("strawberry"); add("chocolate"); add("butter pecan"); }}; This idiom creates an anonymous inner class with just an instance initializer in it, which "can use any [...] methods in the containing scope". Main question: Is this as inefficient as it sounds? Should its use be limited to one-off initializations? (And of course showing off!) Second question: The new HashSet must be the "this" used in the instance initializer ... can anyone shed light on the mechanism? Third question: Is this idiom too obscure to use in production code? Summary: Very, very nice answers, thanks everyone. On question (3), people felt the syntax should be clear (though I'd recommend an occasional comment, especially if your code will pass on to developers who may not be familiar with it). On question (1), The generated code should run quickly. The extra .class files do cause jar file clutter, and slow program startup slightly (thanks to coobird for measuring that). Thilo pointed out that garbage collection can be affected, and the memory cost for the extra loaded classes may be a factor in some cases. Question (2) turned out to be most interesting to me. If I understand the answers, what's happening in DBI is that the anonymous inner class extends the class of the object being constructed by the new operator, and hence has a "this" value referencing the instance being constructed. Very neat. Overall, DBI strikes me as something of an intellectual curiousity. Coobird and others point out you can achieve the same effect with Arrays.asList, varargs methods, Google Collections, and the proposed Java 7 Collection literals. Newer JVM languages like Scala, JRuby, and Groovy also offer concise notations for list construction, and interoperate well with Java. Given that DBI clutters up the classpath, slows down class loading a bit, and makes the code a tad more obscure, I'd probably shy away from it. However, I plan to spring this on a friend who's just gotten his SCJP and loves good natured jousts about Java semantics! ;-) Thanks everyone!

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• WPF customer control and direct content support

  - by Mmarquee

  I am fairly new to WPF, and am a bit stuck, so any help would be appreciated. I am trying to write WPF custom control that encapsulates several elements of functionality that I already having working (i.e sorting, filtering, standard menus, etc.), but in a nice neat package to avoid repetition. Anyway I have created the custom control (based on control), and then have the following in the Generic.Xaml <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="clr-namespace:Controls.ListViewExtended"> <Style TargetType="{x:Type local:ListViewExtended}"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type local:ListViewExtended}"> <Border Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}"> <ListView> <ListView.View> <GridView> <!-- Content goes here --> </GridView> </ListView.View> </ListView> </Border> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </ResourceDictionary> When I try to add GridViewColumns (or any control really), as below ... <elv:ListViewExtended> <GridView> <GridViewColumn Width="140" Header="Column 1" /> <GridViewColumn Width="140" Header="Column 2" /> <GridViewColumn Width="140" Header="Column 3" /> </GridView> </elv:ListViewExtended> I get the "... does not support direct content" error. I have created a dependancy property (again below) that allows the adding of GridView, but it still doesn't work. public static DependencyProperty GridViewProperty; public static string GridViewHeader(DependencyObject target) { return (string)target.GetValue(GridViewProperty); } public static void GridViewHeader(DependencyObject target, string value) { target.SetValue(GridViewProperty, value); } Thanks in advance

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• Is this scatter-brained workflow realizable in Git?

  - by Luke Maurer

  This is what I'd like my workflow to look like at a conceptual level: I hack on my new feature for a while I notice a typo in a comment I change it Since the typo is completely unrelated to anything else, I put that change in a pile of comment fixes I keep working on the code I realize I need to flesh out a few utility functions I do so I put that change in its own pile Steps 2, 3, and 4 each repeat throughout the day I finish the new feature and put the changes for that feature in a pile I push nice patches upstream: One with the new feature, a few for the other tweaks, and one with a bunch of comment fixes if enough have accumulated Since I'm both lazy and a perfectionist, I want to be able to do some things out of order: I might correct a typo but forget to put it in the comment fix pile; when I prepare the upstream patches (I'm using git-svn, so I need to be pretty deliberate about these), I'll then pull out the comment fixes at that point. I might forget to separate things altogether until the very end. But I might /also/ have committed some of the piles along the way (sorry, the metaphor is breaking down …). This is all rather like just using Eclipse changesets with SVN, only I can have different changes to the same file in different piles (having to disentangle changes into different commits is what motivated me to move to git-svn, in fact …), and with Git I can have my full discombobulated change history, experimental branches and all, but still make a nice, neat patch. I've just recently started with Git after having wanted to for a good while, and I'm quite happy so far. The biggest way in which the above workflow doesn't really map into Git, though, is that a “bin” can't really be just a local branch, since the working tree only ever reflects the state of a single branch. Or maybe the Git index is a “pile,” and what I want is to have more than one somehow (effectively). I can think of a few ways to approximate what I want (maybe creative use of stash? Intricate stash-checkout-merge dances?), but my grasp on Git isn't solid enough to be sure of how best to put all the pieces together. It's said that Git is more a toolkit than a VCS, so I guess the question comes down to: How do I build this thing with these tools?

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• What are the types and inner workings of a query optimizer?

  - by Frank Developer

  As I understand it, most query optimizers are cost-based. Some can be influenced by hints like FIRST_ROWS(). Others are tailored for OLAP. Is it possible to know more detailed logic about how Informix IDS and SE's optimizers decide what's the best route for processing a query, other than SET EXPLAIN? Is there any documentation which illustrates the ranking of SELECT statements? I would imagine that "SELECT col FROM table WHERE ROWID = n" ranks 1st. What are the rest of them?.. If I'm not mistaking, Informix's ROWID is a SERIAL(INT) which allows for a max. of 2GB nrows, or maybe it uses INT9 for TB's nrows?.. However, I think Oracle uses HEX values for ROWID. Too bad ROWID can't be oftenly used, since a rows ROWID can change. So maybe ROWID is used by the optimizer as a counter? Perhaps, it could be used for implementing the query progress idea I mentioned in my "Begin viewing query results before query completes" question? For some reason, I feel it wouldn't be that difficult to report a query's progress while being processed, perhaps at the expense of some slight overhead, but it would be nice to know ahead of time: A "Google-like" estimate of how many rows meet a query's criteria, display it's progress every 100, 200, 500 or 1,000 rows, give users the ability to cancel it at anytime and start displaying the qualifying rows as they are being put into the current list, while it continues searching?.. This is just one example, perhaps we could think other neat/useful features, the ingridients are more or less there. Perhaps we could fine-tune each query with more granularity than currently available? OLTP queries tend to be mostly static and pre-defined. The "what-if's" are more OLAP, so let's try to add more control and intelligence to it? So, therefore, being able to more precisely control, not "hint-influence" a query is what's needed and therefore it would be necessary to know how the optimizers logic is programmed. We can then have Dynamic SELECT and other statements for specific situations! Maybe even tell IDS to read blocks of indexes nodes at-a-time instead of one-by-one, etc. etc.

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• Counting Alphabetic Characters That Are Contained in an Array with C

  - by Craig

  Hello everyone, I am having trouble with a homework question that I've been working at for quite some time. I don't know exactly why the question is asking and need some clarification on that and also a push in the right direction. Here is the question: (2) Solve this problem using one single subscripted array of counters. The program uses an array of characters defined using the C initialization feature. The program counts the number of each of the alphabetic characters a to z (only lower case characters are counted) and prints a report (in a neat table) of the number of occurrences of each lower case character found. Only print the counts for the letters that occur at least once. That is do not print a count if it is zero. DO NOT use a switch statement in your solution. NOTE: if x is of type char, x-‘a’ is the difference between the ASCII codes for the character in x and the character ‘a’. For example if x holds the character ‘c’ then x-‘a’ has the value 2, while if x holds the character ‘d’, then x-‘a’ has the value 3. Provide test results using the following string: “This is an example of text for exercise (2).” And here is my source code so far: #include<stdio.h> int main() { char c[] = "This is an example of text for exercise (2)."; char d[26]; int i; int j = 0; int k; j = 0; //char s = 97; for(i = 0; i < sizeof(c); i++) { for(s = 'a'; s < 'z'; s++){ if( c[i] == s){ k++; printf("%c,%d\n", s, k); k = 0; } } } return 0; } As you can see, my current solution is a little anemic. Thanks for the help, and I know everyone on the net doesn't necessarily like helping with other people's homework. ;P

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