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• PASS: Election Changes for 2011

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee.  This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process.  You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White.  This group worked from October to April on our election process.  Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did.  They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections.  I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting.  We reviewed those and made a few modifications.  I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes.  Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page.  Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections.  If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in.  If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members.  Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions.  I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC.  I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist.  Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom.  There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members.  Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large.  The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly).  We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members.  It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members.  That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails.  If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate.  Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care.  I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes.  This is something I suggested.  I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be.  I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes.  Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President).  My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified.  As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them.  This has interesting implications.  This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it.  This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates.  You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it.  It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are.  I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom.  This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot.  Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair.  After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place.  We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board.  If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board.  The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process.  That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others.  I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently.  I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents.  I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates.  That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill.  The first is the NomCom.  We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role.  It won’t be easy.  You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members.  Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be.  There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday.  This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates.  If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year.  We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before.  Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year.  Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election.  And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process?  It isn’t.  Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed.  Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes.  After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

  - by John Murphy

  During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

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• How I Work: Staying Productive Whilst Traveling

  - by BuckWoody

  I travel a lot. Not like some folks that are gone every week, mind you, although in the last month I’ve been to: Cambridge, UK; Anchorage, AK; San Jose, CA; Copenhagen, DK, Boston, MA; and I’m currently en-route to Anaheim, CA.  While this many places in a month is a bit unusual for me, I would say I travel frequently. I’ve travelled most of my 28+ years in IT, and at one time was a consultant traveling weekly.   With that much time away from my primary work location, I have to find ways to stay productive. Some might say “just rest – take a nap!” – but I’m not able to do that. For one thing, I’m a very light sleeper and I’ve never slept on a plane - even a 30+ hour trip to New Zealand in Business Class - so that just isn’t option. I also am not always in the plane, of course. There’s the hotel, the taxi/bus/train, the airport and then all that over again when I arrive. Since my regular jobs have many demands, I have to get work done.   Note: No, I’m not always focused on work. I need downtime just like everyone else. Sometimes I just think, watch a movie or listen to tunes – and I give myself permission to do that anytime – sometimes the whole trip. I have too fewheartbeats left in life to only focus on work – it’s just not that important, and neither am I. Some of these tasks are letters to friends and family, or other personal things. What I’m talking about here is a plan, not some task list I have to follow. When I get to the location I’m traveling to, I always build in as much time as I can to ensure I enjoy those sights and the people I’m with. I would find traveling to be a waste if not for that.   The Unrealistic Expectation As I would evaluate the trip I was taking – say a 6-8 hour flight – I would expect to get 10-12 hours of work done. After all, there’s the time at the airport, the taxi and so on, and then of course the time in the air with all of the room, power, internet and everything else I needed to get my work done. I would pile up tasks at home, pack my bags, and head happily to the magical land of the TSA.   Right. On return from the trip, I had accomplished little, had more e-mails and other work that had piled up, and I was tired, hungry, and unorganized. This had to change. So, I decided to do three things: Segment my work Set realistic expectations Plan accordingly  Segmenting By Available Resources The first task was to decide what kind of work I could do in each location – if any. I found that I was dependent on a few things to get work done, such as power, the Internet, and a place to sit down. Before I fly, I take some time at home to get all of the work I’d like to accomplish while away segmented into these areas, and print that out on paper, which goes in my suit-coat pocket along with a mechanical pencil. I print my tickets, and I’m all set for the adventure ahead. Then I simply do each kind of work whenever I’m in that situation. No power There are certain times when I don’t have power available. But not only that, I might not even be able to use most of my electronics. So I now schedule as many phone calls as I can for the taxi/bus/train ride and the airports as I can. I have a paper notebook (Moleskine, of course) and a pencil and I print out any notes or numbers I need prior to the trip. Once I’m airborne or at the airport, I work on my laptop. I check and respond to e-mails, create slides, write code, do architecture, whatever I can.  If I can’t use any electronics, or once the power runs out, I schedule time for reading. I can read at the airport or anywhere, actually, even in-flight or any other transport. I “read with a pencil”, meaning I take a lot of notes, which I liketo put in OneNote, but since in most cases I don’t have power, I use the Moleskine to do that. Speaking of which, sometimes as I’m thinking I come up with new topics, ideas, blog posts, or things to teach in my classes. Once again I take out the notebook and write it down. All of these notes get a check-mark when I get back to the office and transfer the writing to OneNote. I’ve tried those “smart pens” and so on to automate this, but it just never works out. Pencil and paper are just fine. As I mentioned, sometime I just need to think. I’ll do nothing, and let my mind wander, thinking of nothing in particular, or some math problem or science question I’m interested in. My only issue with this is that I communicate tothink, and I don’t want to drive people crazy by being that guy that won’t shut up, so I think in a different way. Power, but no Internet or Phone If I have power but no Internet or phone, I focus on the laptop and the tablet as before, and I also recharge my other gadgets. Power, Internet, Phone and a Place to Work At first I thought that when I arrived at the hotel or event I could get the same amount of work done that I do at the office. Not so. There’s simply too many distractions, things you need, or other issues that allow this. Of course, Ican work on any device, read, think, write or whatever, but I am simply not as productive as I am in my home office. So I plan for about 25-50% as much work getting done in this environment as I think I could really do. I’ve done some measurements, and this holds out to be true almost every time. The key is that I re-set my expectations (and my co-worker’s expectations as well) that this is the case. I use the Out-Of-Office notices to let people know that I’m just not going to be 100% at this time – it’s hard for everyone, but it’s more honest and realistic, and I’d rather they know that – and that I realize that – than to let them think I’m totally available. Because I’m not – I’m traveling. I don’t tend to put too much detail, because after all I don’t necessarily want to let people know when I’m not home :) but I do think it’s important to let people that depend on my know that I’ll get back with them later. I hope this helps you think through your own methodology of staying productive when you travel. Or perhaps you just go offline, and don’t worry about any of this – good for you! That’s completely valid as well.   (Oh, and yes, I wrote this at 35K feet, on Alaska Airlines on a trip. :)  Practice what you preach, Buck.)

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

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

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

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• Letter to Ballmer: Making Better Consumer Devices

  - by andrewbrust

  Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back.  The email contained a scan of a column I wrote praising Microsoft’s BI strategy.  His reply contained three simple words: “Super nice  thanks.” Well, now I’d like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher.  But I’m still super earnest. The past two days have been eventful ones for Microsoft: The company announced the departure of company veterans Robbie Bach and J Allard and the market announced Apple is now besting Microsoft in market capitalization. Plus, announcements were made that make it plain that Ballmer will, in effect, be running Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division himself. With that in mind, I’d like to offer my list of a dozen things I think Microsoft’s CEO should do to improve that division’s offerings and, hopefully, its bottom line. So here goes:   1. On Windows Phone 7, Stay the Course The press is teeming with headlines and reader comments proclaiming the death-before-arrival of Windows Phone 7.  That’s plain silly.  You’ve got the makings of a great and unique SmartPhone platform, and you’re the only company (even considering RIM) that can offer full fidelity Exchange integration, not to mention implementing Office on the device.  Let the existing team finish this puppy and ship it. And then have them pump out a few updates, over-the-air, quickly.  Show them that Google Android’s not the only product that can do good, rapid dot releases. And another thing: make sure your OEMs’ devices have flawless touch screens.  If they don’t, then you shouldn’t certify them for delivery to customers.  Period. Oh, and kill the Kin, quietly.  It was DOA, and you know it.   2. Move Media Center to the Xbox Platform Media Center is, at its core, a good product.  But delivering a media distribution and DVR platform on a sophisticated PC operating system like Windows 7 just creates too many moving parts.  Xbox already functions as the best Media Center extender device – it should actually be the hub as well. Media Center is mostly based on .NET code – and XNA is a .NET environment for Xbox – find a way to bridge that small gap and make Media Center a joy to work with instead of a frustration.  Beating Apple TV out of this sub-market is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree (goofy pun, but it’s true).   3. Integrate Media Center with Mediaroom, or Kill the Latter You have two media products with almost identical names.  One is for standalone DVRs and the other is for IPTV cable set tops with DVR capabilities.  Can we merge these please?  My previous request of putting Media Center on Xbox would seem to tie into this nicely, since you’ve announced plans to do that with Mediaroom already.   4. Fix the Red Ring of Death People love the Xbox, but they really don’t love sending their consoles back every 18-24 months, when they get a bunch of red lights flashing on power up.  You’ve handled this defect about as gracefully as possible, but it’s been around for a long time now and it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.  You can do better.  In fact, you must do better, or you insult your customers.   5. Add Blu Ray to Xbox I know, streaming movies are the future; physical media is legacy technology.  So if that’s true, why did you back HD DVD so hard?  You know why: for now, the film studios won’t allow a large selection of new release, HD, surround sound content be distributed on any medium other than Blu Ray or cable pay per view/on-demand.  Don’t you want home theater buffs to see the Xbox as a fantastic device for their rigs?  Don’t you want to put PlayStation 3 out of its misery?  And if you follow my suggestions above (move Media Center to the Xbox and fix the Red Ring problem), you’d have it all sewn up.  Do I think Blu Ray functionality will move a lot of units?  No.  Do I think that it would move more units with desperately needed influential home theater consumers?  You bet.  And you might sell more ZunePass subscriptions in the process. But while you’re at it, make the fan quieter, please.   6. Make More of Windows Home Server Home Server is a fantastic product.  And for reasons unknown to me, it seems like you’re letting it languish.  Development of the add-in ecosystem seems underfunded.  WHS’ unparalleled ease of use and reliability for home PC backup (and emergency restores) goes unsung.  Product cycles are slow.  Support for your OEMs, who are doing great work, especially in the green space with Atom CPUs, seems lacking.  You’ve married a trophy girl and you keep her cloistered at home!  That’s cruel, unusual and, um, incredibly ill-advised.  Make use of this ace card, and while you’re at it, give it real integration with Media Center.  The integration thus far proof-of-concept quality.  You should go way past that – both products will benefit immeasurably.   7. Set Up a Partner Platform for Custom Installers There’s a whole sub-industry of companies that install, integrate and configure home theater, security and connected home products.  They have an industry group. They are influential in the high-end of the consumer electronics industry, and so are their customers.  They love Media Center and they love Windows Home Server.  But I have talked to several of them at the Consumer Electronics Show and they tell me you don’t love them.  They find it very difficult to do business with Microsoft, even though they want nothing more than to sell and evangelize your platform.  This is a travesty.  Please fix it.  Get Allison Watson and the Microsoft Partner Network on board and have her hire someone who knows how to run a channel program for consumer electronics companies.  Problem solved.  Markets expanded.   8. Make Your Own Hardware In other areas, I know you love your partners.  I help run one, so I appreciate that.  But when it came to Xbox and Zune you built them it yourself (albeit on a contract basis, which is fine).  Windows Phone 7 has a chance to work as an OEM play, but it would work better if you produced the devices.  At least consider building a reference device that sells alongside your OEMs’ offerings.  That’s what Google did with the Nexxus One.  And while that phone was not itself a big seller, it catalyzed two wonderful things : (1) a quality bar was set and (2) partners exceeded it.  Before the Nexxus One, the best Android handset out there was the Motorola Droid. The Nexxus One was better, and the HTC Droid Incredible and Evo 4G are now even better than Google’s phone, which is why Verizon and Sprint decided not to carry it.  Imagine if all Windows Phone 6.x devices were on par with the HTC HD2.  I tend to believe you’d have a lot bigger market share than you do now.   9. Continue with Your Retail Initiative From what I hear, it sounds like it’s going well.  And this goes right along with making your own hardware.  When you build it, they will come.  And then it makes the likes of Best Buy and Staples do better.   10. Make an Acquisition (or Two) TiVo and/or Moxi look ripe for the picking.  With their ability to build stuff people love and your ability to run a business, you might just have something.  But do a better job than you did when you bought Danger.  Buy the ideas, not just the customers, eh?   11. Make Beautiful Stuff You’ve heard this one before, I know.  But I have some head-shrinking advice on this one.  You know that Apple obsesses over its industrial design.  You know that appeals to consumers.  But it seems you think doing so is Apple’s game exclusively and so you shouldn’t even try.  Bull dinky.  Come to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design gallery.  You’ll see that lots of companies and product categories have had very high design value well before Apple existed.  You can do this, and the Zune HD was a great start.  Now run with that.  Find those negative voices in your head that are telling you that you can’t and shut them up.  For good.   12. Burst the Bubble Some of the products you’ve built seem like they were conceived in a bizarro world.  That would appear to be the result of groupthink.  You must do better.  And there’s lots of people willing to advise you.  This includes just about everyone in the Regional Director program, and probably a bunch of MVPs.  Heck, I bet the guys at Engadget could help out too.  Imagine if you let them see the Kin before it shipped.  Talk to high-end gear consumers.  Talk to Best Buy and CostCo customers too.   Signing Off I hope this was of value to you.  As I wrote this I kept telling myself how obvious, even trite, some of these pieces of advice were and then, because of that, doubting they’d really help.  But I decided that they must not be obvious to Microsoft.  Sometimes when you get wrapped up in stuff, it’s hard to clear your head.  I think my head’s pretty clear here though (I’m wrapped up in other stuff), so maybe my perspective can help.  If not, well, then, I guess they all can’t be super nice.

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• Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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• Mr Flibble: As Seen Through a Lens, Darkly

  - by Phil Factor

  One of the rewarding things about getting involved with Simple-Talk has been in meeting and working with some pretty daunting talents. I’d like to say that Dom Reed’s talents are at the end of the visible spectrum, but then there is Richard, who pops up on national radio occasionally, presenting intellectual programs, Andrew, master of the ukulele, with his pioneering local history work, and Tony with marathon running and his past as a university lecturer. However, Dom, who is Red Gate’s head of creative design and who did the preliminary design work for Simple-Talk, has taken the art photography to an extreme that was impossible before Photoshop. He’s not the first person to take a photograph of himself every day for two years, but he is definitely the first to weave the results into a frightening narrative that veers from comedy to pathos, using all the arts of Photoshop to create a fictional character, Mr Flibble.   Have a look at some of the Flickr pages. Uncle Spike The B-Men – Woolverine The 2011 BoyZ iN Sink reunion tour turned out to be their last Error 404 – Flibble not found Mr Flibble is not a normal type of alter-ego. We generally prefer to choose bronze age warriors of impossibly magnificent physique and stamina; superheroes who bestride the world, scorning the forces of evil and anarchy in a series noble and righteous quests. Not so Dom, whose Mr Flibble is vulnerable, and laid low by an addiction to toxic substances. His work has gained an international cult following and is used as course material by several courses in photography. Although his work was for a while ignored by the more conventional world of ‘art’ photography they became famous through the internet. His photos have received well over a million views on Flickr. It was definitely time to turn this work into a book, because the whole sequence of images has its maximum effect when seen in sequence. He has a Kickstarter project page, one of the first following the recent UK launch of the crowdfunding platform. The publication of the book should be a major event and the £45 I shall divvy up will be one of the securest investments I shall ever make. The local news in Cambridge picked up on the project and I can quote from the report by the excellent Cabume website , the source of Tech news from the ‘Cambridge cluster’ Put really simply Mr Flibble likes to dress up and take pictures of himself. One of the benefits of a split personality, however is that Mr Flibble is supported in his endeavour by Reed’s top notch photography skills, supreme mastery of Photoshop and unflinching dedication to the cause. The duo have collaborated to take a picture every day for the past 730-plus days. It is not a big surprise that neither Mr Flibble nor Reed watches any TV: In addition to his full-time role at Cambridge software house,Red Gate Software as head of creativity and the two to five hours a day he spends taking the Mr Flibble shots, Reed also helps organise the . And now Reed is using Kickstarter to see if the world is ready for a Mr Flibble coffee table book. Judging by the early response it is. At the time of writing, just a few days after it went live, ‘I Drink Lead Paint: An absurd photography book by Mr Flibble’ had raised £1,545 of the £10,000 target it needs to raise by the Friday 30 November deadline from 37 backers. Following the standard Kickstarter template, Reed is offering a series of rewards based on the amount pledged, ranging from a Mr Flibble desktop wallpaper for pledges of £5 or more to a signed copy of the book for pledges of £45 or more, right up to a starring role in the book for £1,500. Mr Flibble is unquestionably one of the more deranged Kickstarter hopefuls, but don’t think for a second that he doesn’t have a firm grasp on the challenges he faces on the road to immortalisation on 150 gsm stock. Under the section ‘risks and challenges’ on his Kickstarter page his statement begins: “An angry horde of telepathic iguanas discover the world’s last remaining stock of vintage lead paint and hold me to ransom. Gosh how I love to guzzle lead paint. Anyway… faced with such brazen bravado, I cower at the thought of taking on their combined might and die a sad and lonely Flibble deprived of my one and only true liquid love.” At which point, Reed manages to wrestle away the keyboard, giving him the opportunity to present slightly more cogent analysis of the obstacles the project must still overcome. We asked Reed a few questions about Mr Flibble’s Kickstarter adventure and felt that his responses were worth publishing in full: Firstly, how did you manage it – holding down a full time job and also conceiving and executing these ideas on a daily basis? I employed a small team of ferocious gerbils to feed me ideas on a daily basis. Whilst most of their ideas were incomprehensibly rubbish and usually revolved around food, just occasionally they’d give me an idea like my B-Men series. As a backup plan though, I found that the best way to generate ideas was to actually start taking photos. If I were to stand in front of the camera, pull a silly face, place a vegetable on my head or something else equally stupid, the resulting photo of that would typically spark an idea when I came to look at it. Sitting around idly trying to think of an idea was doomed to result in no ideas. I admit that I really struggled with time. I’m proud that I never missed a day, but it was definitely hard when you were late from work, tired or doing something socially on the same day. I don’t watch TV, which I guess really helps, because I’d frequently be spending 2-5 hours taking and processing the photos every day. Are there any overlaps between software development and creative thinking? Software is an inherently creative business and the speed that it moves ensures you always have to find solutions to new things. Everyone in the team needs to be a problem solver. Has it helped me specifically with my photography? Probably. Working within teams that continually need to figure out new stuff keeps the brain feisty I suppose, and I guess I’m continually exposed to a lot of possible sources of inspiration. How specifically will this Kickstarter project allow you to test the commercial appeal of your work and do you plan to get the book into shops? It’s taken a while to be confident saying it, but I know that people like the work that I do. I’ve had well over a million views of my pictures, many humbling comments and I know I’ve garnered some loyal fans out there who anticipate my next photo. For me, this Kickstarter is about seeing if there’s worth to my work beyond just making people smile. In an online world where there’s an abundance of freely available content, can you hope to receive anything from what you do, or would people just move onto the next piece of content if you happen to ask for some support? A book has been the single-most requested thing that people have asked me to produce and it’s something that I feel would showcase my work well. It’s just hard to convince people in the publishing industry just now to take any kind of risk – they’ve been hit hard. If I can show that people would like my work enough to buy a book, then it sends a pretty clear picture that publishers might hear, or it gives me the confidence enough to invest in myself a bit more – hard to do when you’re riddled with self-doubt! I’d love to see my work in the shops, yes. I could see it being the thing that someone flips through idly as they’re Christmas shopping and recognizing that it’d be just the perfect gift for their difficult to buy for friend or relative. That said, working in the software industry means I’m clearly aware of how I could use technology to distribute my work, but I can’t deny that there’s something very appealing to having a physical thing to hold in your hands. If the project is successful is there a chance that it could become a full-time job? At the moment that seems like a distant dream, as should this be successful, there are many more steps I’d need to take to reach any kind of business viability. Kickstarter seems exactly that – a way for people to help kick start me into something that could take off. If people like my work and want me to succeed with it, then taking a look at my Kickstarter page (and hopefully pledging a bit of support) would make my elbows blush considerably. So there is is. An opportunity to open the wallet just a bit to ensure that one of the more unusual talents sees the light in the format it deserves.  

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• Nginx + php-fpm "504 Gateway Time-out" error with almost zero load (on a test-server)

  - by rahul286

  After debugging for 6-hours - I am giving this up :| We have a nginx+php-fpm+mysql in LAN with almost 100 wordpress (created and used by different designers/developers all working on test wordpres setup) We are using nginx without any issues from long. Today, all of a sudden - nginx started returning "504 Gateway Time-out" out of the blue... I checked nginx error log for a virtual host... 2010/09/06 21:24:24 [error] 12909#0: *349 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 21:25:11 [error] 12909#0: *349 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 21:25:11 [error] 12909#0: *443 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /info.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 21:25:12 [error] 12909#0: *443 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 22:08:32 [error] 12909#0: *1025 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 22:09:33 [error] 12909#0: *1025 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 22:09:40 [error] 12909#0: *1064 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /info.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 22:09:40 [error] 12909#0: *1064 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 22:24:44 [error] 12909#0: *1313 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" 2010/09/06 22:24:53 [error] 12909#0: *1313 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.1, server: rahul286.rtcamp.info, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "rahul286.rtcamp.info" As I run php-fpm on port 9000 via TCP mode, I ran "netstat | grep 9000" and noticed something unusual... (Pasting partial output here for ease of read) tcp 9 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36094 CLOSE_WAIT 14269/php5-fpm tcp 0 0 localhost:46664 localhost:9000 FIN_WAIT2 - tcp 1257 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36135 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 1257 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36125 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 9 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36102 CLOSE_WAIT 14268/php5-fpm tcp 0 0 localhost:46662 localhost:9000 FIN_WAIT2 - tcp 745 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46644 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 0 0 localhost:46658 localhost:9000 FIN_WAIT2 - tcp 1265 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46607 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 0 0 localhost:46672 localhost:9000 ESTABLISHED 12909/nginx: worker tcp 1257 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36119 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 1265 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46613 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 0 0 localhost:46646 localhost:9000 FIN_WAIT2 - tcp 1257 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36137 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 0 0 localhost:46670 localhost:9000 ESTABLISHED 12909/nginx: worker tcp 1265 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46619 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 1336 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46668 ESTABLISHED - tcp 0 0 localhost:46648 localhost:9000 FIN_WAIT2 - tcp 1336 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46670 ESTABLISHED - tcp 9 0 localhost:9000 localhost:36108 CLOSE_WAIT 14274/php5-fpm tcp 1336 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46684 ESTABLISHED - tcp 0 0 localhost:46674 localhost:9000 ESTABLISHED 12909/nginx: worker tcp 1336 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46666 ESTABLISHED - tcp 1257 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46648 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 1336 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46678 ESTABLISHED - tcp 0 0 localhost:46668 localhost:9000 ESTABLISHED 12909/nginx: wo There are plenty of "CLOSE_WAIT" & "FIN_WAIT2" pairs as highlighted below (in above output): tcp 1337 0 localhost:9000 localhost:46680 CLOSE_WAIT - tcp 0 0 localhost:46680 localhost:9000 FIN_WAIT2 - Please note port 46680 in above. I enabled mysql slow queries error log, but it didn't work. As of now restarting php5-fpm every minute via a cronjob (see command below) keeping everything running "smoothly" but I hate patchwork and want to solve this... 1 * * * * service php5-fpm restart > /dev/null I searched extensively on Google - got no help. As mentioned, this a test-server in LAN, CPU load is never crossed 0.10 and memory usage is also below 25% (System has 2GB RAM and ubuntu-server installed) So if you find its time-confusing to help me out, please atleast drop a hint. Thanks in advance for help. -Rahul (note - this is reposting of - http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?11,127694) Update: I found answer, which is posted below.

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• Table Variables: an empirical approach.

  - by Phil Factor

  It isn’t entirely a pleasant experience to publish an article only to have it described on Twitter as ‘Horrible’, and to have it criticized on the MVP forum. When this happened to me in the aftermath of publishing my article on Temporary tables recently, I was taken aback, because these critics were experts whose views I respect. What was my crime? It was, I think, to suggest that, despite the obvious quirks, it was best to use Table Variables as a first choice, and to use local Temporary Tables if you hit problems due to these quirks, or if you were doing complex joins using a large number of rows. What are these quirks? Well, table variables have advantages if they are used sensibly, but this requires some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. You can be hit by a badly-performing join involving a table variable. Table Variables are a compromise, and this compromise doesn’t always work out well. Explicit indexes aren’t allowed on Table Variables, so one cannot use covering indexes or non-unique indexes. The query optimizer has to make assumptions about the data rather than using column distribution statistics when a table variable is involved in a join, because there aren’t any column-based distribution statistics on a table variable. It assumes a reasonably even distribution of data, and is likely to have little idea of the number of rows in the table variables that are involved in queries. However complex the heuristics that are used might be in determining the best way of executing a SQL query, and they most certainly are, the Query Optimizer is likely to fail occasionally with table variables, under certain circumstances, and produce a Query Execution Plan that is frightful. The experienced developer or DBA will be on the lookout for this sort of problem. In this blog, I’ll be expanding on some of the tests I used when writing my article to illustrate the quirks, and include a subsequent example supplied by Kevin Boles. A simplified example. We’ll start out by illustrating a simple example that shows some of these characteristics. We’ll create two tables filled with random numbers and then see how many matches we get between the two tables. We’ll forget indexes altogether for this example, and use heaps. We’ll try the same Join with two table variables, two table variables with OPTION (RECOMPILE) in the JOIN clause, and with two temporary tables. It is all a bit jerky because of the granularity of the timing that isn’t actually happening at the millisecond level (I used DATETIME). However, you’ll see that the table variable is outperforming the local temporary table up to 10,000 rows. Actually, even without a use of the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint, it is doing well. What happens when your table size increases? The table variable is, from around 30,000 rows, locked into a very bad execution plan unless you use OPTION (RECOMPILE) to provide the Query Analyser with a decent estimation of the size of the table. However, if it has the OPTION (RECOMPILE), then it is smokin’. Well, up to 120,000 rows, at least. It is performing better than a Temporary table, and in a good linear fashion. What about mixed table joins, where you are joining a temporary table to a table variable? You’d probably expect that the query analyzer would throw up its hands and produce a bad execution plan as if it were a table variable. After all, it knows nothing about the statistics in one of the tables so how could it do any better? Well, it behaves as if it were doing a recompile. And an explicit recompile adds no value at all. (we just go up to 45000 rows since we know the bigger picture now)   Now, if you were new to this, you might be tempted to start drawing conclusions. Beware! We’re dealing with a very complex beast: the Query Optimizer. It can come up with surprises What if we change the query very slightly to insert the results into a Table Variable? We change nothing else and just measure the execution time of the statement as before. Suddenly, the table variable isn’t looking so much better, even taking into account the time involved in doing the table insert. OK, if you haven’t used OPTION (RECOMPILE) then you’re toast. Otherwise, there isn’t much in it between the Table variable and the temporary table. The table variable is faster up to 8000 rows and then not much in it up to 100,000 rows. Past the 8000 row mark, we’ve lost the advantage of the table variable’s speed. Any general rule you may be formulating has just gone for a walk. What we can conclude from this experiment is that if you join two table variables, and can’t use constraints, you’re going to need that Option (RECOMPILE) hint. Count Dracula and the Horror Join. These tables of integers provide a rather unreal example, so let’s try a rather different example, and get stuck into some implicit indexing, by using constraints. What unusual words are contained in the book ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker? Here we get a table of all the common words in the English language (60,387 of them) and put them in a table. We put them in a Table Variable with the word as a primary key, a Table Variable Heap and a Table Variable with a primary key. We then take all the distinct words used in the book ‘Dracula’ (7,558 of them). We then create a table variable and insert into it all those uncommon words that are in ‘Dracula’. i.e. all the words in Dracula that aren’t matched in the list of common words. To do this we use a left outer join, where the right-hand value is null. The results show a huge variation, between the sublime and the gorblimey. If both tables contain a Primary Key on the columns we join on, and both are Table Variables, it took 33 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and the other is a heap, and both are Table Variables, it took 46 Ms. If both Table Variables use a unique constraint, then the query takes 36 Ms. If neither table contains a Primary Key and both are Table Variables, it took 116383 Ms. Yes, nearly two minutes!! If both tables contain a Primary Key, one is a Table Variables and the other is a temporary table, it took 113 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and both are Temporary Tables, it took 56 Ms.If both tables are temporary tables and both have primary keys, it took 46 Ms. Here we see table variables which are joined on their primary key again enjoying a  slight performance advantage over temporary tables. Where both tables are table variables and both are heaps, the query suddenly takes nearly two minutes! So what if you have two heaps and you use option Recompile? If you take the rogue query and add the hint, then suddenly, the query drops its time down to 76 Ms. If you add unique indexes, then you've done even better, down to half that time. Here are the text execution plans.So where have we got to? Without drilling down into the minutiae of the execution plans we can begin to create a hypothesis. If you are using table variables, and your tables are relatively small, they are faster than temporary tables, but as the number of rows increases you need to do one of two things: either you need to have a primary key on the column you are using to join on, or else you need to use option (RECOMPILE) If you try to execute a query that is a join, and both tables are table variable heaps, you are asking for trouble, well- slow queries, unless you give the table hint once the number of rows has risen past a point (30,000 in our first example, but this varies considerably according to context). Kevin’s Skew In describing the table-size, I used the term ‘relatively small’. Kevin Boles produced an interesting case where a single-row table variable produces a very poor execution plan when joined to a very, very skewed table. In the original, pasted into my article as a comment, a column consisted of 100000 rows in which the key column was one number (1) . To this was added eight rows with sequential numbers up to 9. When this was joined to a single-tow Table Variable with a key of 2 it produced a bad plan. This problem is unlikely to occur in real usage, and the Query Optimiser team probably never set up a test for it. Actually, the skew can be slightly less extreme than Kevin made it. The following test showed that once the table had 54 sequential rows in the table, then it adopted exactly the same execution plan as for the temporary table and then all was well. Undeniably, real data does occasionally cause problems to the performance of joins in Table Variables due to the extreme skew of the distribution. We've all experienced Perfectly Poisonous Table Variables in real live data. As in Kevin’s example, indexes merely make matters worse, and the OPTION (RECOMPILE) trick does nothing to help. In this case, there is no option but to use a temporary table. However, one has to note that once the slight de-skew had taken place, then the plans were identical across a huge range. Conclusions Where you need to hold intermediate results as part of a process, Table Variables offer a good alternative to temporary tables when used wisely. They can perform faster than a temporary table when the number of rows is not great. For some processing with huge tables, they can perform well when only a clustered index is required, and when the nature of the processing makes an index seek very effective. Table Variables are scoped to the batch or procedure and are unlikely to hang about in the TempDB when they are no longer required. They require no explicit cleanup. Where the number of rows in the table is moderate, you can even use them in joins as ‘Heaps’, unindexed. Beware, however, since, as the number of rows increase, joins on Table Variable heaps can easily become saddled by very poor execution plans, and this must be cured either by adding constraints (UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY) or by adding the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint if this is impossible. Occasionally, the way that the data is distributed prevents the efficient use of Table Variables, and this will require using a temporary table instead. Tables Variables require some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. If you are not prepared to do any performance monitoring of your code or fine-tuning, and just want to pummel out stuff that ‘just runs’ without considering namby-pamby stuff such as indexes, then stick to Temporary tables. If you are likely to slosh about large numbers of rows in temporary tables without considering the niceties of processing just what is required and no more, then temporary tables provide a safer and less fragile means-to-an-end for you.

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• The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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• The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers.

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• Wireless internet connection connects but internet does not work (no packets received). Wired does.

  - by Rodney

  When I connect my PC via ethernet cable to my ADSL router it works fine. When I connect via Wireless it connects and the internet will work for a random amount of time and then stop working. It stays connected with a strong signal but no packets are received. My laptop/iphone are right next to it and wireless works fine. If I open the Wireless USB status, it says it is connected to my SSID with full strength (54 mps - I am 3 meteres away from my router) and the activty shows as Packets 594 SENT and 105 RECEIVED (this goes up VERY slowly) I have tried the following: Turned off anitvirus and firewall completely. Tested the wifi signal- I am writing this on my laptop which is next to my PC and also has full wifi strength. Tried a different wireless adapter - I dug out an old PCI wireless card - it does the exact same thing. Compared all wireless settings to my laptop. I can ping google.com and it replies (sometimes with packet loss) When I reboot the PC it will connect for a minute or two (random time) and then just stops again. I tried Firefox, IE etc. no joy I have updated all latest versions (Netgear WG111v2) and drivers Checked Event Log - nothing unusual Ping the router (and even connect as admin for the few minutes when the internet does work) Changed the MTU down to 1200 using DrTCP Checked Device Manager for conflicts - none. I ping the router from the PC (192.168.0.10 - 192.168.0.1) and it replies with 4 packets. BUT, on my router admin page (which I access via http on my laptop wirelessly) - if I ping 192.168.0.10 all packets timeout (pinging my laptop 192.168.0.12 works fine) My router admin page shows the leased IP address for 192.168.0.10 (ie it is definitely talking to the router initially) Now I am out of ideas - please help. I think it is an OS/Software issue as I have tried 2 different wireless adapaters (PCI and USB) with the same result but all other wireless devices work fine around mine). It's not the firewall. It is getting assigned an IP address correctly (my PC gets 192.168.0.10, my laptop is .12) It is assigned by DHCP. As soon as I plug in the ethernet cable it all works fine. Repairing the adapter sometimes helps but it will always stop working after a random time. The wireless adapter always shows as connected with Excellent signal but the internet does not work. I am running Windows XP SP3 and have tried a Netgear WG111v2 USB adapter. Thanks in advance! UPDATE: The internet seems to be working, it is just either sending packets too small or slow to work (some small pages load bits of them very slowly but then hang). XP seems to have a networking diagnostic app - here is the output: Last diagnostic run time: 08/30/10 08:16:38 IP Configuration Diagnostic Invalid IP address info Valid IP address detected: 192.168.0.10 IP Layer Diagnostic Corrupted IP routing table info The default route is valid info The loopback route is valid info The local host route is valid info The local subnet route is valid Invalid ARP cache entries action The ARP cache has been flushed Gateway Diagnostic Gateway info The following proxy configuration is being used by IE: Automatically Detect Settings:Disabled Automatic Configuration Script: Proxy Server: Proxy Bypass list: info This computer has the following default gateway entry(ies): 192.168.0.1 info This computer has the following IP address(es): 192.168.0.10 info The default gateway is in the same subnet as this computer info The default gateway entry is a valid unicast address info The default gateway address was resolved via ARP in 1 try(ies) info The default gateway was reached via ICMP Ping in 1 try(ies) info TCP port 80 on host 65.55.12.249 was successfully reached info The Internet host www.microsoft.com was successfully reached info The default gateway is OK DNS Client Diagnostic DNS - Not a home user scenario info Using Web Proxy: no info Resolving name ok for (www.microsoft.com): yes No DNS servers DNS failure HTTP, HTTPS, FTP Diagnostic HTTP, HTTPS, FTP connectivity info FTP (Passive): Successfully connected to ftp.microsoft.com. info HTTP: Successfully connected to www.microsoft.com. warn HTTPS: Error 12002 connecting to www.microsoft.com: The operation timed out warn HTTPS: Error 12002 connecting to www.passport.net: The operation timed out error Could not make an HTTPS connection. info Redirecting user to support call WinSock Diagnostic WinSock status info All base service provider entries are present in the Winsock catalog. info The Winsock Service provider chains are valid. info Provider entry MSAFD Tcpip [TCP/IP] passed the loopback communication test. info Provider entry MSAFD Tcpip [UDP/IP] passed the loopback communication test. info Provider entry RSVP UDP Service Provider passed the loopback communication test. info Provider entry RSVP TCP Service Provider passed the loopback communication test. info Connectivity is valid for all Winsock service providers. Wireless Diagnostic Wireless - Service disabled Wireless - User SSID action User input required: Specify network name or SSID Wireless - First time setup info The Wireless Network name (SSID) to which the user would like to connect = RodSof Wifi. Wireless - Radio off info Valid IP address detected: 192.168.0.10 Wireless - Out of range Wireless - Hardware issue Wireless - Novice user Wireless - Ad-hoc network Wireless - Less preferred Wireless - 802.1x enabled Wireless - Configuration mismatch Wireless - Low SNR Network Adapter Diagnostic Network location detection info Using home Internet connection Network adapter identification info Network connection: Name=Local Area Connection 2, Device=Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC, MediaType=LAN, SubMediaType=LAN info Network connection: Name=Wireless USB, Device=NETGEAR WG111v2 54Mbps Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter, MediaType=LAN, SubMediaType=WIRELESS info Both Ethernet and Wireless connections available, prompting user for selection action User input required: Select network connection info Wireless connection selected Network adapter status info Network connection status: Connected HTTP, HTTPS, FTP Diagnostic HTTP, HTTPS, FTP connectivity info FTP (Active): Successfully connected to ftp.microsoft.com. warn HTTP: Error 12007 connecting to www.microsoft.com: The server name or address could not be resolved warn HTTP: Error 12002 connecting to www.hotmail.com: The operation timed out warn HTTPS: Error 12002 connecting to www.passport.net: The operation timed out warn HTTPS: Error 12002 connecting to www.microsoft.com: The operation timed out error Could not make an HTTP connection. error Could not make an HTTPS connection.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 12, 2012Popular ReleasesTorrents-List Organizer: Torrents-list organizer v 0.5.0.3: ????????? ? 0.5.0.3: 1) ?????????? ??????? ??? ?????????? ???-??????? ? ???????-??????. 2) ? ??????? ?????? ??????????? ?????????????? ????? ?????????? ?????????: ???? ?? ??????-???? ?????????? ?? ????????? ?? ????? ???????, ?? ? ????? ????? ????????? ????? ????????? ?? ????, ? ????????? ??? ???? ?????? ??????????.Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 2.0: Prva prava produkcijska verzija - Zakon je tu, ova je verzija uskladena sa trenutno važecom Tehnickom specifikacijom (v1.2. od 04.12.2012.) i spremna je za produkcijsko korištenje. Verzije iza ove ce ovisiti o naknadnim izmjenama Zakona i/ili Tehnicke specifikacije, odnosno, o eventualnim greškama u radu/zahtjevima community-a za novim feature-ima. Novosti u v2.0 su: - That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/699) - scheme IznosType...Simple Injector: Simple Injector v1.6.1: This patch release fixes a bug in the integration libraries that disallowed the application to start when .NET 4.5 was not installed on the machine (but only .NET 4.0). The following packages are affected: SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.Mvc.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Wcf.dll SimpleInjector.Extensions.LifetimeScoping.dllBootstrap Helpers: Version 1: First releasesheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.2.0: Main featuresOptimizations for intersectionsThe main purpose of this release was to further optimize rendering performance by skipping object intersections with other sheets. From now by default an object's sheets will only intersect its own sheets and never other static or dynamic sheets. This is the usual scenario since objects will never bump into other sheets when using collision detection. DocumentationMany of you have been asking for proper documentation, so here it goes. Check out the...MySqlBackup.NET - MySQL Backup Solution for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET: MySqlBackup.NET 1.5.5 beta: Fix Bug: max_allowed_packet is modified to 1GB, but does not take effect in import & export process. This bug is fixed by re-initialize the MySqlConnection. Modified max_allowed_packet will only take effect on new connection, not on current connection.DirectX Tool Kit: December 11, 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Removed use of ATL's CComPtr in favor of WRL's ComPtr for all platforms to support VS Express editions Updated VS 2010 project for official 'property sheet' integration for Windows 8.0 SDK Minor fix to CommonStates for Feature Level 9.1 Tweaked AlphaTestEffect.cpp to work around ARM NEON compiler codegen bug Added dxguid.lib as a default library for Debug builds to resolve GUID link issuesDirectXTex texture processing library: December 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of CreateTexture, CreateShaderResourceView, DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Fixed BC2 and BC3 decompression issue for unusual color encoding case Converted annotation to SAL2 for improved VS 2012 /analyze experience Updated DirectXTex, DDSView, and Texconv with VS 2010 + Windows 8.0 SDK project using official 'property sheets'ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.1 Final for 10.1: We are proud to announce the release of ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 2.1. This download is compatible with ArcGIS 10.1, and includes setups for the Desktop Component, Desktop Component when 64 bit Background Geoprocessing is installed, and the Server Component. Important: if you already have ArcGIS Editor for OSM installed but want to install this new version, you will need to uninstall your previous version and then install this one. This release includes support for the ArcGIS 1...Ad Rotator for Windows & Windows Phone: AdRotator v1.3 Silverlight: Note now also available via NuGet for both WP7 and WP8 v 1.3 Changelog: *Updated Ad Providers to Latest releases, inc: - Inneractive (new Nokia release) - Updated WP Smaato - MS Ad SDK Changed Caching strategy to always grab from network unless unavailable Pubcenter (Suspend/Resume) feature added Pubcenter "Active" fix option Cleaned up some threaded calls Other minor fixes For usage details check out the following tutorial blog post - http://bit.ly/S5CD4T *Note Included bin...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8.2: This release just contains some fixes that have been done since the last release. Plus, this is strong named as well. I apologize for the lack of updates but my free time is less these days.Media Companion: MediaCompanion3.511b release: Two more bug fixes: - General Preferences were not getting restored - Fanart and poster image files were being locked, preventing changes to themVodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.5: The following enhancements and fixes are included in Vodigi 5.5. Vodigi Administrator - Manage Music Files - Add Music Files to Image Slide Shows - Manage System Messages - Display System Messages to Users During Login - Ported to Visual Studio 2012 and MVC 4 - Added New Vodigi Administrator User Guide Vodigi Player - Improved Login/Schedule Startup Procedure - Startup Using Last Known Schedule when Disconnected on Startup - Improved Check for Schedule Changes - Now Every 15 Minutes - Pla...Secretary Tool: Secretary Tool v1.1.0: I'm still considering this version a beta version because, while it seems to work well for me, I haven't received any feedback and I certainly don't want anyone relying solely on this tool for calculations and such until its correct functioning is verified by someone. This version includes several bug fixes, including a rather major one with Emergency Contact Information not saving. Also, reporting is completed. There may be some tweaking to the reporting engine, but it is good enough to rel...VidCoder: 1.4.10 Beta: Added progress percent to the title bar/task bar icon. Added MPLS information to Blu-ray titles. Fixed the following display issues in Windows 8: Uncentered text in textbox controls Disabled controls not having gray text making them hard to identify as disabled Drop-down menus having hard-to distinguish white on light-blue text Added more logging to proxy disconnect issues and increased timeout on initial call to help prevent timeouts. Fixed encoding window showing the built-in pre...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.400: Version 2.5.0.400 (Release): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Update the documentation. InfoMan: Write the documentation. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewHome Access Plus+: v8.5: v8.5.1211.1240 Fixed: changed to using the thumbnailPhoto attribute instead of jpegPhoto v8.5.1208.1500 This is a point release, for the other parts of HAP+ see the v8.3 release. Fixed: #me#me issue with the Edit Profile Link Updated: 8.5.1208 release Updated: Documentation with hidden booking system feature Added: Room Drop Down to the Booking System (no control panel interface), can be Resource Specific Fixed: Recursive AD Group Membership Lookup Fixed: User.IsInRole with recursive lookup...Http Explorer: httpExplorer-1.1: httpExplorer now has the ability to connect to http server via web proxies. The proxy may be explicitly specified by hostname or IP address. Or it may be specified via the Internet Options settings of Windows. You may also specify credentials to pass to the proxy if the proxy requires them. These credentials may be NTLM or basic authentication (clear text username and password).Bee OPOA Platform: Bee OPOA Demo V1.0.001: Initial version.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.78: Fix for issue #18924 - using -pretty option left in ///#DEBUG blocks. Fix for issue #18980 - bad += optimization caused bug in resulting code. Optimization has been removed pending further review.New ProjectsBattle of Colors: Vacation project. Summary.blockme: This is a Blog using C#, ASP.Net MVC3 & RazorCoevery for Windows Phone: Coevery for Windows Phone is a free CRM Windows Phone application developed by Nova Software which is a .NET focused software development company.DNN Flash Viewer: Simple module for displaying flash content within a DNN pane.DonablRow Line Follower Simulator: This Application helps you to find the best Algorithm for your line follower robot.ExcelMerge: Merge microsoft excel file to a single.FCMGAAI: project ini merupakan implementasi algoritma fuzzy Cmeans dengan optimasi algoritma genetikaLIRC#: LIRC# is a simple client library to allow a .NET application to interact with an LIRC server to control or be controlled by IR devices.Managed Media Aggregation: Allowing developers to aggregate media from Rtsp sources over Rtsp without degrading the source bandwidth. Agnostic of Video or Audio format. Decodes Jpeg / RTPMarket Data Server: Local database server with quotes and trade-related data associated with equity, fixed-income, financial derivatives, currency, and other investment instrumentsproject13251212: papproject13271212: paPutovanje: Android aplikacija napisana za Mtel android ligu 2Questionario dinâmico: Questionario dinâmico para fins de estudos.Rasoulian: my RepoSharepoint Blog Archive Web Part: This Web Part is an alternative of the standart SharePoint Blog Site Archives Web Part. It's based on SharePoint 2010 Blog Site Archives Web Part by Bandar AlSimpleSocket for Windows Phone: SimpleSocket for Windows Phone is a super simple to use wrap around the built in socket framework that makes using socket connections incredibly easy and fast.

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• Web browsing is fast, but downloads are slow

  - by Ricket

  I work for a company on my university's campus, helping with general IT problems and some web development. But lately there has been a problem that has me and my boss completely stumped. We, plus one contractor, make up the entire IT department, so I'm reaching out to you for help. All around the office, we have wall jacks. These collect in a closet down the hall and all plug into a switch. This switch, along with our individual server jacks, plugs into another switch, and that switch plugs into our firewall hardware. Then the firewall is connected out to our campus network. Our campus internet is, well, very fast. I don't know exactly the terms, tiers, etc., but we have thousands of students and downloads can run as fast as 10 MB/s at night; uploads are sometimes even faster. I think we're practically ISP level. In short, I have a lot of faith that it is not the campus side of things that is causing a problem, combined with other evidence I'll mention in a moment. So our symptoms: web browsing is fast. Web pages, images, etc. load instantly. No problems there. But then when I go to download something, the download starts fast but very quickly (a matter of seconds) drops to nearly 0. Often it will actually drop to 0 and time out. This happens with even very small files, 1 MB or less. It smells to me like a QoS sort of thing. I'm not entirely sure, and I wanted to get your opinions first. My boss is hesitant to touch our firewall, much less let me touch it, and it was set up and is managed by a consultant remotely. These problems don't seem tied to a time of the day. I've tried downloads after 5:00 and still the same thing happens. From my desk, I can turn on my wireless adapter and pick up the campus wireless access point. If I unplug ethernet and connect to it, downloads are fast. This adds to my suspicion that it's limited to our company network. Also, a number of weeks ago the consultant upgraded our firewall firmware. Suddenly everything was very fast. I tested with downloads from Sun and speedtest.net and things were blazing fast, as they should be with our campus internet! It was wonderful, and I figured the slow speeds were an old firmware bug. In a matter of days, things steadily declined until they were back to the old symptoms. Oh, and we have antivirus installed on every computer, and we keep it up to date. Though I suppose the possibility is still there that someone could have spyware which is bogging down our internet, in which case what is the easiest/best way to find this out? (maybe this should go in a separate question) Thank you for your patience in reading all of this. Do you have any ideas as to what I can try? Is this something that you've experienced before? What sort of tools or methods can I use to try and diagnose the problem? P.S. everything here is Windows. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 on our servers, and Windows XP on employees' machines. Update: We are submitting a ticket to the university to just take a look and see if they see anything unusual and/or can suggestion methods for us to try and pinpoint our problem. Hopefully they'll be helpful! I'll update this to let you know what goes on. Update again: We found a hub (yes, a HUB) right between our campus connection and our firewall. It had only those two ethernet cables plugged into it, nothing else. After removing the hub, our speeds have jumped up to several mbps. However in talking with the campus, we got them to run a gigabit line to our firewall in place of the 100mbps line. As of friday, we are at about 65 mbps up and down (according to speedtest.net at 8am)!! Go NC State!!

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• Windows 7: Search indexing is stuck

  - by Ricket

  When I open Indexing Options, it says: 4,317 items indexed Indexing in progress. Search results might not be complete during this time. It's stuck at 4,317 though; no more items have been indexed. Worst of all, SearchIndexer.exe is taking up 100% CPU (well, 50%, but I have a dual core CPU; it's taking up all processing power it can). It is not causing hard drive activity though. I tried clicking "Troubleshoot search and indexing" at the bottom of the Indexing Options window, but it couldn't find any problem. I've also tried the repair registry key that several websites suggest; I change HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search SetupCompletedSuccessfully to 0 and restarted the computer, and it apparently repaired because it flipped back to 1, but the same problem continues to occur. It's reducing the battery life of my laptop and making it really hot so that my fans are running all the time. I've had to disable the Windows Search service. How can I fix this? Do I need to just flat-out reformat my computer? Update: I've tried rebuilding a couple times. There's nothing unusual about the locations I have to index, and I don't have any downloads in progress or anything like that. I don't see any reason why it stopped, and I noticed it much too late to do a system restore. At this point, I'm hoping someone will offer up some secret answer that will fix the problem, thus the bounty. Another update: I tried starting the service again, just to let it try yet again. It seemed okay at first (Indexing Options showed it operating at reduced speed due to user activity, and the number of files was going up). A while later I checked, and the service had stopped. Event viewer revealed some errors like this: Log Name: Application Source: Application Error Date: 2/1/2010 7:34:23 PM Event ID: 1000 Task Category: (100) Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: ricky-win7 Description: Faulting application name: SearchIndexer.exe, version: 7.0.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bcdd0 Faulting module name: NLSData0007.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bda88 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x002141ba Faulting process id: 0x13a0 Faulting application start time: 0x01caa39f2a70ec02 Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\NLSData0007.dll Report Id: b4f7a7ae-0f92-11df-87fc-e5d65d8794c2 Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Application Error" /> <EventID Qualifiers="0">1000</EventID> <Level>2</Level> <Task>100</Task> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-02-02T00:34:23.000000000Z" /> <EventRecordID>10689</EventRecordID> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>ricky-win7</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data>SearchIndexer.exe</Data> <Data>7.0.7600.16385</Data> <Data>4a5bcdd0</Data> <Data>NLSData0007.dll</Data> <Data>6.1.7600.16385</Data> <Data>4a5bda88</Data> <Data>c0000005</Data> <Data>002141ba</Data> <Data>13a0</Data> <Data>01caa39f2a70ec02</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\System32\NLSData0007.dll</Data> <Data>b4f7a7ae-0f92-11df-87fc-e5d65d8794c2</Data> </EventData> </Event> If you are having the same error and arrived here from a Google search, please comment or add an answer detailing your progress on this, if any...

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• xen domUs crashes or unavailability

  - by Rush

  I've xen server with 8 domU. Server is Xeon E31270 with 16gb ram. I think it is enough for 8 machines. Sometimes domU's crashes and i can't figure out the reason. After crash i can connect to console and there is somthing like this: Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320780] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0 0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320790] Node 0 DMA: 10*4kB 3*8kB 13*16kB 10*32kB 7*64kB 3*128kB 2*256kB 2*512kB 1*1024kB 2*2048kB 0*4096kB = 8080kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320817] Node 0 DMA32: 648*4kB 2*8kB 1*16kB 0*32kB 1*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 1*1024kB 1*2048kB 0*4096kB = 5760kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320842] 1491 total pagecache pages Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320847] 0 pages in swap cache Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320852] Swap cache stats: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320858] Free swap = 0kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.320862] Total swap = 0kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.324024] 524288 pages RAM Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.324024] 11010 pages reserved Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.324024] 424467 pages shared Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.324024] 503538 pages non-shared Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330308] apache2 invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x200da, order=0, oom_adj=0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330322] apache2 cpuset=/ mems_allowed=0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330330] Pid: 23938, comm: apache2 Not tainted 2.6.32-5-xen-amd64 #1 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330337] Call Trace: Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330349] [<ffffffff810b7180>] ? oom_kill_process+0x7f/0x23f Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330358] [<ffffffff810b76a4>] ? __out_of_memory+0x12a/0x141 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330367] [<ffffffff810b77fb>] ? out_of_memory+0x140/0x172 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330376] [<ffffffff810bb59c>] ? __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x4e5/0x5f5 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330385] [<ffffffff810cc224>] ? do_wp_page+0x386/0x707 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330395] [<ffffffff8100c3a5>] ? __raw_callee_save_xen_pud_val+0x11/0x1e Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330404] [<ffffffff8100c369>] ? __raw_callee_save_xen_pmd_val+0x11/0x1e Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330412] [<ffffffff810cdfc7>] ? handle_mm_fault+0x7aa/0x80f Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330422] [<ffffffff8130f906>] ? do_page_fault+0x2e0/0x2fc Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330433] [<ffffffff8130d7a5>] ? page_fault+0x25/0x30 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330439] Mem-Info: Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330443] Node 0 DMA per-cpu: Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330450] CPU 0: hi: 0, btch: 1 usd: 0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330463] CPU 1: hi: 0, btch: 1 usd: 0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330466] Node 0 DMA32 per-cpu: Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330469] CPU 0: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330472] CPU 1: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 60 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330476] active_anon:342076 inactive_anon:115398 isolated_anon:0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330477] active_file:268 inactive_file:481 isolated_file:0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330477] unevictable:1125 dirty:2 writeback:13 unstable:0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330478] free:3410 slab_reclaimable:1718 slab_unreclaimable:6946 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330478] mapped:899 shmem:113 pagetables:35697 bounce:0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330502] Node 0 DMA free:8036kB min:32kB low:40kB high:48kB active_anon:1144kB inactive_anon:1268kB active_file:8kB inactive_file:8kB unevictable:0kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:11792kB mlocked:0kB dirty:0kB writeback:0kB mapped:0kB shmem:0kB slab_reclaimable:0kB slab_unreclaimable:224kB kernel_stack:16kB pagetables:1228kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330518] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 2004 2004 2004 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330523] Node 0 DMA32 free:5604kB min:5708kB low:7132kB high:8560kB active_anon:1367160kB inactive_anon:460324kB active_file:1064kB inactive_file:1916kB unevictable:4500kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:2052320kB mlocked:4500kB dirty:8kB writeback:52kB mapped:3600kB shmem:452kB slab_reclaimable:6872kB slab_unreclaimable:27560kB kernel_stack:3528kB pagetables:141560kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:992 all_unreclaimable? no Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330539] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0 0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330544] Node 0 DMA: 1*4kB 2*8kB 13*16kB 10*32kB 7*64kB 3*128kB 2*256kB 2*512kB 1*1024kB 2*2048kB 0*4096kB = 8036kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330579] Node 0 DMA32: 609*4kB 2*8kB 1*16kB 0*32kB 1*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 1*1024kB 1*2048kB 0*4096kB = 5604kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330605] 1522 total pagecache pages Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330610] 0 pages in swap cache Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330615] Swap cache stats: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0 Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330621] Free swap = 0kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.330625] Total swap = 0kB Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.333018] 524288 pages RAM Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.333018] 11010 pages reserved Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.333018] 424367 pages shared Oct 8 22:20:49 server kernel: [30892.333018] 503658 pages non-shared Seems like there isn't enough memory for this domU. But there is no any memory problems reported in munin monitoring: As you see system uses around 0.2G and 1G is available. So my question is: Is it xen specific problem, that real memory usage and memory usage that shows munin are different (I've never seen such problems oh real hardware machines)? Or maybe it is just monitoring problem, that can't catch moment when there is unusual high load and domU go down? And how I can to defeat this problem? it is really annoying to catch messages in e-mail that domU went down. Btw, such situation was when domU had 2G memory.

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• Database Migration Scripts: Getting from place A to place B

  - by Phil Factor

  We’ll be looking at a typical database ‘migration’ script which uses an unusual technique to migrate existing ‘de-normalised’ data into a more correct form. So, the book-distribution business that uses the PUBS database has gradually grown organically, and has slipped into ‘de-normalisation’ habits. What’s this? A new column with a list of tags or ‘types’ assigned to books. Because books aren’t really in just one category, someone has ‘cured’ the mismatch between the database and the business requirements. This is fine, but it is now proving difficult for their new website that allows searches by tags. Any request for history book really has to look in the entire list of associated tags rather than the ‘Type’ field that only keeps the primary tag. We have other problems. The TypleList column has duplicates in there which will be affecting the reporting, and there is the danger of mis-spellings getting there. The reporting system can’t be persuaded to do reports based on the tags and the Database developers are complaining about the unCoddly things going on in their database. In your version of PUBS, this extra column doesn’t exist, so we’ve added it and put in 10,000 titles using SQL Data Generator. /* So how do we refactor this database? firstly, we create a table of all the tags. */IF  OBJECT_ID('TagName') IS NULL OR OBJECT_ID('TagTitle') IS NULL  BEGIN  CREATE TABLE  TagName (TagName_ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY ,     Tag VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL UNIQUE)  /* ...and we insert into it all the tags from the list (remembering to take out any leading spaces */  INSERT INTO TagName (Tag)     SELECT DISTINCT LTRIM(x.y.value('.', 'Varchar(80)')) AS [Tag]     FROM     (SELECT  Title_ID,          CONVERT(XML, '<list><i>' + REPLACE(TypeList, ',', '</i><i>') + '</i></list>')          AS XMLkeywords          FROM   dbo.titles)g    CROSS APPLY XMLkeywords.nodes('/list/i/text()') AS x ( y )  /* we can then use this table to provide a table that relates tags to articles */  CREATE TABLE TagTitle   (TagTitle_ID INT IDENTITY(1, 1),   [title_id] [dbo].[tid] NOT NULL REFERENCES titles (Title_ID),   TagName_ID INT NOT NULL REFERENCES TagName (Tagname_ID)   CONSTRAINT [PK_TagTitle]       PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([title_id] ASC, TagName_ID)       ON [PRIMARY])        CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX idxTagName_ID  ON  TagTitle (TagName_ID)  INCLUDE (TagTitle_ID,title_id)        /* ...and it is easy to fill this with the tags for each title ... */        INSERT INTO TagTitle (Title_ID, TagName_ID)    SELECT DISTINCT Title_ID, TagName_ID      FROM        (SELECT  Title_ID,          CONVERT(XML, '<list><i>' + REPLACE(TypeList, ',', '</i><i>') + '</i></list>')          AS XMLkeywords          FROM   dbo.titles)g    CROSS APPLY XMLkeywords.nodes('/list/i/text()') AS x ( y )    INNER JOIN TagName ON TagName.Tag=LTRIM(x.y.value('.', 'Varchar(80)'))    END    /* That's all there was to it. Now we can select all titles that have the military tag, just to try things out */SELECT Title FROM titles  INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID  INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  WHERE tagname.tag='Military'/* and see the top ten most popular tags for titles */SELECT Tag, COUNT(*) FROM titles  INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID  INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  GROUP BY Tag ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC/* and if you still want your list of tags for each title, then here they are */SELECT title_ID, title, STUFF(  (SELECT ','+tagname.tag FROM titles thisTitle    INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID    INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  WHERE ThisTitle.title_id=titles.title_ID  FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(max)')  ,1,1,'')    FROM titles  ORDER BY title_ID So we’ve refactored our PUBS database without pain. We’ve even put in a check to prevent it being re-run once the new tables are created. Here is the diagram of the new tag relationship We’ve done both the DDL to create the tables and their associated components, and the DML to put the data in them. I could have also included the script to remove the de-normalised TypeList column, but I’d do a whole lot of tests first before doing that. Yes, I’ve left out the assertion tests too, which should check the edge cases and make sure the result is what you’d expect. One thing I can’t quite figure out is how to deal with an ordered list using this simple XML-based technique. We can ensure that, if we have to produce a list of tags, we can get the primary ‘type’ to be first in the list, but what if the entire order is significant? Thank goodness it isn’t in this case. If it were, we might have to revisit a string-splitter function that returns the ordinal position of each component in the sequence. You’ll see immediately that we can create a synchronisation script for deployment from a comparison tool such as SQL Compare, to change the schema (DDL). On the other hand, no tool could do the DML to stuff the data into the new table, since there is no way that any tool will be able to work out where the data should go. We used some pretty hairy code to deal with a slightly untypical problem. We would have to do this migration by hand, and it has to go into source control as a batch. If most of your database changes are to be deployed by an automated process, then there must be a way of over-riding this part of the data synchronisation process to do this part of the process taking the part of the script that fills the tables, Checking that the tables have not already been filled, and executing it as part of the transaction. Of course, you might prefer the approach I’ve taken with the script of creating the tables in the same batch as the data conversion process, and then using the presence of the tables to prevent the script from being re-run. The problem with scripting a refactoring change to a database is that it has to work both ways. If we install the new system and then have to rollback the changes, several books may have been added, or had their tags changed, in the meantime. Yes, you have to script any rollback! These have to be mercilessly tested, and put in source control just in case of the rollback of a deployment after it has been in place for any length of time. I’ve shown you how to do this with the part of the script .. /* and if you still want your list of tags for each title, then here they are */SELECT title_ID, title, STUFF(  (SELECT ','+tagname.tag FROM titles thisTitle    INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID    INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  WHERE ThisTitle.title_id=titles.title_ID  FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(max)')  ,1,1,'')    FROM titles  ORDER BY title_ID …which would be turned into an UPDATE … FROM script. UPDATE titles SET  typelist= ThisTaglistFROM     (SELECT title_ID, title, STUFF(    (SELECT ','+tagname.tag FROM titles thisTitle      INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID      INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID    WHERE ThisTitle.title_id=titles.title_ID    ORDER BY CASE WHEN tagname.tag=titles.[type] THEN 1 ELSE 0  END DESC    FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(max)')    ,1,1,'')  AS ThisTagList  FROM titles)fINNER JOIN Titles ON f.title_ID=Titles.title_ID You’ll notice that it isn’t quite a round trip because the tags are in a different order, though we’ve managed to make sure that the primary tag is the first one as originally. So, we’ve improved the database for the poor book distributors using PUBS. It is not a major deal but you’ve got to be prepared to provide a migration script that will go both forwards and backwards. Ideally, database refactoring scripts should be able to go from any version to any other. Schema synchronization scripts can do this pretty easily, but no data synchronisation scripts can deal with serious refactoring jobs without the developers being able to specify how to deal with cases like this.

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• Computer won't reboot without waiting for a while

  - by Benjamin

  I've got an unusual problem with my computer. When ever I reboot my computer it won't boot, I get a few beeps from the BIOS and nothing else, however if I wait for a few minuets the computer will boot perfectly. I tried to count the beeps and I get around 7-9 of them; the first two are noticeably closer together than the rest. [Edit: I'm now reasonably confident it's 1 long followed by 8 short beeps. That would be a display related issue: http://www.bioscentral.com/beepcodes/amibeep.htm] My BIOS is American Megatrends Inc and version P1.80, the Motherboard is an ASRock X58 Extreme (both according to dmidecode) Here's an output from LSPCI, I'm not sure what else might be useful but I can provide whatever's asked. 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port (rev 13) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 13) 00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 13) 00:07.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 7 (rev 13) 00:14.0 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub System Management Registers (rev 13) 00:14.1 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub GPIO and Scratch Pad Registers (rev 13) 00:14.2 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Control Status and RAS Registers (rev 13) 00:14.3 PIC: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Throttle Registers (rev 13) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Port 2 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 6 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 90) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03) 02:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6315 Series Firewire Controller 02:00.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6415 PATA IDE Host Controller (rev a0) 03:00.0 SATA controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB360 AHCI Controller (rev 02) 05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT200b [GeForce GTX 285] (rev a1) ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-Core Registers (rev 05) ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 05) ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QPI Link 0 (rev 05) ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 QPI Physical 0 (rev 05) ff:03.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller (rev 05) ff:03.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Target Address Decoder (rev 05) ff:03.4 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Test Registers (rev 05) ff:04.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Control Registers (rev 05) ff:04.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Address Registers (rev 05) ff:04.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Rank Registers (rev 05) ff:04.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Thermal Control Registers (rev 05) ff:05.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Control Registers (rev 05) ff:05.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Address Registers (rev 05) ff:05.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Rank Registers (rev 05) ff:05.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Thermal Control Registers (rev 05) ff:06.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 2 Control Registers (rev 05) ff:06.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 2 Address Registers (rev 05) ff:06.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 2 Rank Registers (rev 05) ff:06.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon 5500/Core i7 Integrated Memory Controller Channel 2 Thermal Control Registers (rev 05) Update: ok I installed lm-sensors and here's the output. coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 0: +58.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 1: +59.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 2: +58.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 3: +57.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) it8720-isa-0a10 Adapter: ISA adapter in0: +0.93 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in1: +0.06 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in2: +3.25 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) +5V: +2.91 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in4: +3.04 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in5: +2.94 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in6: +2.14 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) 5VSB: +2.96 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) Vbat: +3.28 V fan1: 1869 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan2: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan3: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan4: 1106 RPM (min = -1 RPM) fan5: 225000 RPM (min = -1 RPM) temp1: +39.0°C (low = +0.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor temp2: +56.0°C (low = +0.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor temp3: +127.0°C (low = +0.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor cpu0_vid: +1.650 V intrusion0: ALARM If it helps here's the summery from sensors-detect Driver `it87': * ISA bus, address 0xa10 Chip `ITE IT8720F Super IO Sensors' (confidence: 9) Driver `adt7475': * Bus `NVIDIA i2c adapter 3 at 5:00.0' Busdriver `nvidia', I2C address 0x2e Chip `Analog Devices ADT7473' (confidence: 5) Driver `coretemp': * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9)

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• T60 Screen/LCD gets black after some minutes with a highpitched sound rising and fading

  - by edelwater

  Just now my T60 screen got "black" (so no display). On my second monitor: no problems so the VGA output works. Symptom: Screen blanks / no display, but it works on the second monitor Steps to reproduce: - boot - wait (it does not matter what you do you do not have to login or anything) - (now the monitor of the laptop slowly begins to make a ssssssssHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHWOEOEssssssss noise of about 10 seconds) - right after the sounds ends, the monitor gets black. Sometimes it seems to be the same each time. Software: Installed no new software before/after, running ZoneAlarm and antivirus. Other: It does not feel hot in any place, there don't seem to be running processes with strange behaviour. Warranty: Out of warranty What was I doing: Typing text on a website and doing some PHP coding in a text editor. What can I do here other than buy a new laptop? Does it sound familiar to known cases? Update 1: Exactly the same problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-Screen-Blackout/m-p/288772 and the second poster (garyj), http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/Black-Screen-on-T60/m-p/235053#M48627 And here: "I have that same problem. I replaced the CCRL on mine and it works fine when the screen is not screwed in. Once the frame of the LCD screen (metal portion) touches the metal on the laptop which holds the screen the screen goes black. If the metal is touching the screen when you boot up it boots up with it being very dimmly lit. " from http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-screen-problems/m-p/205047#M44995 (it seems replacing the LCD display is no use, he tried it three times). Same problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-black-screen/m-p/80604#M25914 Hmmm... not handy 3 or 4 months ago I ordered and installed a new fan. Now the LCD. Which does not seem the core issue but some electric issue so it seems replacing the LCD is not the thing to do here. If it is not the LCD that needs to be replaced (see other threads), which parts can I order to fix this? Is there any information which could lead me to identify the issue? I have read replacing the "inverter" AND the "backlightning" would that make sense? Update 2: I replaced the inverter with another inverter, but IO have the same problem. I DID notice that the inverter is the component that makes the sssssssssssssHHHHHHHHHH sound AND it becomes very hot in a few seconds. (So both the old and the test one) The problem is hmmm wat is then the thing that makes the inverter hot by (assumption) after which it shuts itself down. Is it either the input or the output? The output seems to me not, because the screen seems to function so it must be the electricity coming in. But what causes it to become so hot would it be the VGA card outputting some unusual high voltage seems unlikely? I am looking for the component to order / replace update 3: Great news. Ewendish gave me the hint to look in the BIOS. While I was in the BIOS I noticed that the screen did not switch off and there was not a high pitched sound. So I lowered some settings in the BIOS. I then noticed that with brightness turned to 0 (via FN End), it does not make a high pitched sound and does not turn off, with brightness turned up just three "stripes" it starts making the sound. So I could from now on work under lowest brightness modus or... see where the problem lies. So as stated below with either power management or display drivers / ATI Catalyst settings / Windows display settings. I'm trying to see where it lies, but I will google some first. Update 4: I wiped clean the Windows XP installation and installed Windows 7 on it. Unfortunately the problem remains: as soon as the brightness goes up the screen starts hissing. This means... back to original thought: it probably IS a hardware problem. Although ... again... if it is NOT the inverter, what is it? Could it be the backlightning component? I could try to switch that with a another T60... but this is quite tricky.

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• Migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL on Linux (Kubuntu)

  - by Dave Jarvis

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Trying to migrate a database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. All the documentation I have read covers, in great detail, how to migrate the structure. I have found very little documentation on migrating the data. The schema has 13 tables (which have been migrated successfully) and 9 GB of data. MySQL version: 5.1.x PostgreSQL version: 8.4.x I want to use the R programming language to analyze the data using SQL select statements; PostgreSQL has PL/R, but MySQL has nothing (as far as I can tell). A New Hope Create the database location (/var has insufficient space; also dislike having the PostgreSQL version number everywhere -- upgrading would break scripts!): sudo mkdir -p /home/postgres/main sudo cp -Rp /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main /home/postgres sudo chown -R postgres.postgres /home/postgres sudo chmod -R 700 /home/postgres sudo usermod -d /home/postgres/ postgres All good to here. Next, restart the server and configure the database using these installation instructions: sudo apt-get install postgresql pgadmin3 sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 stop sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/postgresql.conf Change data_directory to /home/postgres/main sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 start sudo -u postgres psql postgres \password postgres sudo -u postgres createdb climate pgadmin3 Use pgadmin3 to configure the database and create a schema. The episode continues in a remote shell known as bash, with both databases running, and the installation of a set of tools with a rather unusual logo: SQL Fairy. perl Makefile.PL sudo make install sudo apt-get install perl-doc (strangely, it is not called perldoc) perldoc SQL::Translator::Manual Extract a PostgreSQL-friendly DDL and all the MySQL data: sqlt -f DBI --dsn dbi:mysql:climate --db-user user --db-password password -t PostgreSQL > climate-pg-ddl.sql mysqldump --skip-add-locks --complete-insert --no-create-db --no-create-info --quick --result-file="climate-my.sql" --databases climate --skip-comments -u root -p The Database Strikes Back Recreate the structure in PostgreSQL as follows: pgadmin3 (switch to it) Click the Execute arbitrary SQL queries icon Open climate-pg-ddl.sql Search for TABLE " replace with TABLE climate." (insert the schema name climate) Search for on " replace with on climate." (insert the schema name climate) Press F5 to execute This results in: Query returned successfully with no result in 122 ms. Replies of the Jedi At this point I am stumped. Where do I go from here (what are the steps) to convert climate-my.sql to climate-pg.sql so that they can be executed against PostgreSQL? How to I make sure the indexes are copied over correctly (to maintain referential integrity; I don't have constraints at the moment to ease the transition)? How do I ensure that adding new rows in PostgreSQL will start enumerating from the index of the last row inserted (and not conflict with an existing primary key from the sequence)? How do you ensure the schema name comes through when transforming the data from MySQL to PostgreSQL inserts? Resources A fair bit of information was needed to get this far: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/site-mysql-postgresql-1 http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Converting_from_other_Databases_to_PostgreSQL#MySQL http://pgfoundry.org/frs/shownotes.php?release_id=810 http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/ Thank you!

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• NHibernate which cache to use for WinForms application

  - by chiccodoro

  I have a C# WinForms application with a database backend (oracle) and use NHibernate for O/R mapping. I would like to reduce communication to the database as much as possible since the network in here is quite slow, so I read about second level caching. I found this quite good introduction, which lists the following available cache implementations. I'm wondering which implementation I should use for my application. The caching should be simple, it should not significantly slow down the first occurrence of a query, and it should not take much memory to load the implementing assemblies. (With NHibernate and Castle, the application already takes up to 80 MB of RAM!) Velocity: uses Microsoft Velocity which is a highly scalable in-memory application cache for all kinds of data. Prevalence: uses Bamboo.Prevalence as the cache provider. Bamboo.Prevalence is a .NET implementation of the object prevalence concept brought to life by Klaus Wuestefeld in Prevayler. Bamboo.Prevalence provides transparent object persistence to deterministic systems targeting the CLR. It offers persistent caching for smart client applications. SysCache: Uses System.Web.Caching.Cache as the cache provider. This means that you can rely on ASP.NET caching feature to understand how it works. SysCache2: Similar to NHibernate.Caches.SysCache, uses ASP.NET cache. This provider also supports SQL dependency-based expiration, meaning that it is possible to configure certain cache regions to automatically expire when the relevant data in the database changes. MemCache: uses memcached; memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Basically a distributed hash table. SharedCache: high-performance, distributed and replicated memory object caching system. See here and here for more info My considerations so far were: Velocity seems quite heavyweight and overkill (the files totally take 467 KB of disk space, haven't measured the RAM it takes so far because I didn't manage to make it run, see below) Prevalence, at least in my first attempt, slowed down my query from ~0.5 secs to ~5 secs, and caching didn't work (see below) SysCache seems to be for ASP.NET, not for winforms. MemCache and SharedCache seem to be for distributed scenarios. Which one would you suggest me to use? There would also be a built-in implementation, which of course is very lightweight, but the referenced article tells me that I "(...) should never use this cache provider for production code but only for testing." Besides the question which fits best into my situation I also faced problems with applying them: Velocity complained that "dcacheClient" tag not specified in the application configuration file. Specify valid tag in configuration file," although I created an app.config file for the assembly and pasted the example from this article. Prevalence, as mentioned above, heavily slowed down my first query, and the next time the exact same query was executed, another select was sent to the database. Maybe I should "externalize" this topic into another post. I will do that if someone tells me it is absolutely unusual that a query is slowed down so much and he needs further details to help me.

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• Python/numpy tricky slicing problem

  - by daver

  Hi stack overflow, I have a problem with some numpy stuff. I need a numpy array to behave in an unusual manner by returning a slice as a view of the data I have sliced, not a copy. So heres an example of what I want to do: Say we have a simple array like this: a = array([1, 0, 0, 0]) I would like to update consecutive entries in the array (moving left to right) with the previous entry from the array, using syntax like this: a[1:] = a[0:3] This would get the following result: a = array([1, 1, 1, 1]) Or something like this: a[1:] = 2*a[:3] # a = [1,2,4,8] To illustrate further I want the following kind of behaviour: for i in range(len(a)): if i == 0 or i+1 == len(a): continue a[i+1] = a[i] Except I want the speed of numpy. The default behavior of numpy is to take a copy of the slice, so what I actually get is this: a = array([1, 1, 0, 0]) I already have this array as a subclass of the ndarray, so I can make further changes to it if need be, I just need the slice on the right hand side to be continually updated as it updates the slice on the left hand side. Am I dreaming or is this magic possible? Update: This is all because I am trying to use Gauss-Seidel iteration to solve a linear algebra problem, more or less. It is a special case involving harmonic functions, I was trying to avoid going into this because its really not necessary and likely to confuse things further, but here goes. The algorithm is this: while not converged: for i in range(len(u[:,0])): for j in range(len(u[0,:])): # skip over boundary entries, i,j == 0 or len(u) u[i,j] = 0.25*(u[i-1,j] + u[i+1,j] + u[i, j-1] + u[i,j+1]) Right? But you can do this two ways, Jacobi involves updating each element with its neighbours without considering updates you have already made until the while loop cycles, to do it in loops you would copy the array then update one array from the copied array. However Gauss-Seidel uses information you have already updated for each of the i-1 and j-1 entries, thus no need for a copy, the loop should essentially 'know' since the array has been re-evaluated after each single element update. That is to say, every time we call up an entry like u[i-1,j] or u[i,j-1] the information calculated in the previous loop will be there. I want to replace this slow and ugly nested loop situation with one nice clean line of code using numpy slicing: u[1:-1,1:-1] = 0.25(u[:-2,1:-1] + u[2:,1:-1] + u[1:-1,:-2] + u[1:-1,2:]) But the result is Jacobi iteration because when you take a slice: u[:,-2,1:-1] you copy the data, thus the slice is not aware of any updates made. Now numpy still loops right? Its not parallel its just a faster way to loop that looks like a parallel operation in python. I want to exploit this behaviour by sort of hacking numpy to return a pointer instead of a copy when I take a slice. Right? Then every time numpy loops, that slice will 'update' or really just replicate whatever happened in the update. To do this I need slices on both sides of the array to be pointers. Anyway if there is some really really clever person out there that awesome, but I've pretty much resigned myself to believing the only answer is to loop in C.

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• WCF DataContractSerializer Behavior

  - by sbanwart

  I'm seeing some unusual behavior when using the DataContractSerializer. I have defined a message contract like so: namespace MyNamespace.DataContracts { [MessageContract(WrapperName = "order", WrapperNamespace = @"http://example.com/v1/order")] public class MyOrder { [MessageBodyMember(Namespace = @"http://http://example.com/v1/order", Order = 1)] public MyStore store; [MessageBodyMember(Namespace = @"http://http://example.com/v1/order", Order = 2)] public MyOrderHeader orderHeader; [MessageBodyMember(Namespace = @"http://example.com/v1/order", Order = 3)] public List<MyPayment> payments; [MessageBodyMember(Namespace = @"http://example.com/v1/order", Order = 4)] public List<MyShipment> shipments; } . . I'm sending it an XML message that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <order xmlns="http://example.com/v1/order> <store> ... </store> <orderHeader> ... </orderHeader> <payments> <payment> ... </payment> </payments> <shipments> <shipment> ... </shipment> </shipments> </order> My service deserializes this XML as expected. Inside my service, I'm using the DataContractSerializer to create an XML string and that's where things get weird. I'm using the serializer like this: DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(MyOrder)); using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) { serializer.WriteObject(ms, order); ms.Position = 0; StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms); string outputMessage = sr.ReadToEnd(); } Once this finishes, the outputMessage contains the following XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <MyOrder xmlns="http://example.com/v1/order" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <order> <store> ... </store> <orderHeader> ... </orderHeader> <payments> <payment> ... </payment> </payments> <shipments> <shipment> ... </shipment> </shipments> </order> </MyOrder> Needless to say, anything expecting to receive the original XML message will fail to parse this. So I guess I have two questions: Why is the DataContractSerializer adding the extra outer node to my XML output? Is there a way to stop it from doing this? Thanks.

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• Log a user in to an ASP.net application using Windows Authentication without using Windows Authentic

  - by Rising Star

  I have an ASP.net application I'm developing authentication for. I am using an existing cookie-based log on system to log users in to the system. The application runs as an anonymous account and then checks the cookie when the user wants to do something restricted. This is working fine. However, there is one caveat: I've been told that for each page that connects to our SQL server, I need to make it so that the user connects using an Active Directory account. because the system I'm using is cookie based, the user isn't logged in to Active Directory. Therefore, I use impersonation to connect to the server as a specific account. However, the powers that be here don't like impersonation; they say that it clutters up the code. I agree, but I've found no way around this. It seems that the only way that a user can be logged in to an ASP.net application is by either connecting with Internet Explorer from a machine where the user is logged in with their Active Directory account or by typing an Active Directory username and password. Neither of these two are workable in my application. I think it would be nice if I could make it so that when a user logs in and receives the cookie (which actually comes from a separate log on application, by the way), there could be some code run which tells the application to perform all network operations as the user's Active Directory account, just as if they had typed an Active Directory username and password. It seems like this ought to be possible somehow, but the solution evades me. How can I make this work? Update To those who have responded so far, I apologize for the confusion I have caused. The responses I've received indicate that you've misunderstood the question, so please allow me to clarify. I have no control over the requirement that users must perform network operations (such as SQL queries) using Active Directory accounts. I've been told several times (online and in meat-space) that this is an unusual requirement and possibly bad practice. I also have no control over the requirement that users must log in using the existing cookie-based log on application. I understand that in an ideal MS ecosystem, I would simply dis-allow anonymous access in my IIS settings and users would log in using Windows Authentication. This is not the case. The current system is that as far as IIS is concerned, the user logs in anonymously (even though they supply credentials which result in the issuance of a cookie) and we must programmatically check the cookie to see if the user has access to any restricted resources. In times past, we have simply used a single SQL account to perform all queries. My direct supervisor (who has many years of experience with this sort of thing) wants to change this. He says that if each user has his own AD account to perform SQL queries, it gives us more of a trail to follow if someone tries to do something wrong. The closest thing I've managed to come up with is using WIF to give the user a claim to a specific Active Directory account, but I still have to use impersonation because even still, the ASP.net process presents anonymous credentials to the SQL server. It boils down to this: Can I log users in with Active Directory accounts in my ASP.net application without having the users manually enter their AD credentials? (Windows Authentication)

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