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• New Wine in New Bottles

  - by Tony Davis

  How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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• Desktop login fails, terminal works

  - by Tobias

  I have a freshly setup 12.04 LTS pc system (120 GB SSD, 1 TB HDD, 16 GiB RAM); since a few days, I can't login to the graphical desktop anymore: there is very short flashing shell window which disappears very quickly, and I'm confronted with the login screen again. I believe there is something about modprobe and vbox, but I can't read it fast enough ... I can login to a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1). It did not help to chown all contents of my home directory to me:my-group, like suggested here. This is what I could find in /var/log, grepping for the date and time (I inserted linebreaks after <my-hostname>; real time values preserved): auth.log: <date> 22:43:01 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_succeed_if(lightdm:auth): requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met by user "tobias" <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session closed for user lightdm <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user tobias by (uid=0) <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_ck_connector(lightdm:session): nox11 mode, ignoring PAM_TTY :0 <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session closed for user tobias <date> 22:43:09 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user lightdm by (uid=0) <date> 22:43:09 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_ck_connector(lightdm:session): nox11 mode, ignoring PAM_TTY :0 <date> 22:43:10 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_succeed_if(lightdm:auth): requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met by user "tobias" <date> 22:43:10 <my-hostname> dbus[756]: [system] Rejected send message, 2 matched rules; type="method_call", sender="1:43" (uid=104 pid=1639 comm="/usr/lib/indicator-datetime/indicator-datetime-ser") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="GetAll" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination=":1.15" (uid=0 pid=1005 comm="/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon ") kern.log: <date> 22:43:00 <my-hostname> kernel: [ 16.084525] eth0: no IPv6 routers present syslog: <date> 22:43:00 <my-hostname> kernel: [ 16.084525] eth0: no IPv6 routers present <date> 22:43:01 <my-hostname> ntpdate[1492]: adjust time server 91.189.94.4 offset -0.162831 sec <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> acpid: client 969[0:0] has disconnected <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> acpid: client connected from 1553[0:0] <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> acpid: 1 client rule loaded I have Virtualbox and Truecrypt installed, but I can't think of a reason why they might prevent a graphical login. I'm confused: What is this about requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met? I do login using a password, and the password works ok when logging in to a terminal! Can I somehow read the error output, e.g. by delaying it, redirecting it to a file, or having the system prompt me for pressing a key? Has possibly any recent update caused my problem? Should I install the pending updates? How, btw, without access to the graphical UI? I have some working knowledge about the Linux shell, but I'm new to Ubuntu. Any help would be appreciated.

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• SQL SERVER – Select the Most Optimal Backup Methods for Server

  - by pinaldave

  Backup and Restore are very interesting concepts and one should be very much with the concept if you are dealing with production database. One never knows when a natural disaster or user error will surface and the first thing everybody wants is to get back on point in time when things were all fine. Well, in this article I have attempted to answer a few of the common questions related to Backup methodology. How to Select a SQL Server Backup Type In order to select a proper SQL Server backup type, a SQL Server administrator needs to understand the difference between the major backup types clearly. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me offer it to you below. Select a Recovery Model First The very first question that you should ask yourself is: Can I afford to lose at least a little (15 min, 1 hour, 1 day) worth of data? Resist the temptation to save it all as it comes with the overhead – majority of businesses outside finances can actually afford to lose a bit of data. If your answer is YES, I can afford to lose some data – select a SIMPLE (default) recovery model in the properties of your database, otherwise you need to select a FULL recovery model. The additional advantage of the Full recovery model is that it allows you to restore the data to a specific point in time vs to only last backup time in the Simple recovery model, but it exceeds the scope of this article Backups in SIMPLE Recovery Model In SIMPLE recovery model you can select to do just Full backups or Full + Differential. Full Backup This is the simplest type of backup that contains all information needed to restore the database and should be your first choice. It is often sufficient for small databases, but note that it makes a big impact on the performance of your database Full + Differential Backup After Full, Differential backup picks up all of the changes since the last Full backup. This means if you made Full, Diff, Diff backup – the last Diff backup contains all of the changes and you don’t need the previous Differential backup. Differential backup is obviously smaller and carries less performance overhead Backups in FULL Recovery Model In FULL recovery model you can select Full + Transaction Log or Full + Differential + Transaction Log backup. You have to create Transaction Log backup, because at that time the log is being truncated. Otherwise your Transaction Log will grow uncontrollably. Full + Transaction Log Backup You would always need to perform a Full backup first. Then a series of Transaction log backup. Note that (in contrast to Differential) you need ALL transactions to log since the last Full of Diff backup to properly restore. Transaction log backups have the smallest performance overhead and can be performed often. Full + Differential + Transaction Log Backup If you want to ease the performance overhead on your server, you can replace some of the Full backup in the previous scenario with Differential. You restore scenario would start from Full, then the Last Differential, then all of the remaining transactions log backups Typical backup Scenarios You may say “Well, it is all nice – give me the examples now”. As you may already know, my favorite SQL backup software is SQLBackupAndFTP. If you go to Advanced Backup Schedule form in this program and click “Load a typical backup plan…” link, it will give you these scenarios that I think are quite common – see the image below. The Simplest Way to Schedule SQL Backups I hate to repeat myself, but backup scheduling in SQL agent leaves a lot to be desired. I do not know the simple way to schedule your SQL server backups than in SQLBackupAndFTP – see the image below. The whole backup scheduling with compression, encryption and upload to a Network Folder / HDD / NAS Drive / FTP / Dropbox / Google Drive / Amazon S3 takes just a few minutes – see my previous post for the review. Final Words This post offered an explanation for major backup types only. For more complicated scenarios or to research other options as usually go to MSDN. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Windows 7 - traceroute hop with high latency! [closed]

  - by Mac

  I've been experiencing this problem for quite a while, and it's quite frustrating. I'll do a traceroute, to www.l.google.com, for example. This is the result (please note: I will replace some parts of personal information with text - i.e. ISP.IP is in reality an actual IP address, and ISPNAME replaces the actual ISP name): Tracing route to www.l.google.com [173.194.34.212] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1 2 9 ms 8 ms 10 ms ISP.EXCHANGE.NAME [ISP.IP.172.205] 3 161 ms 171 ms 177 ms host-ISP.IP.215.246.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.215.246] 4 12 ms 9 ms 10 ms host-ISP.IP.215.246.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.215.246] 5 10 ms 9 ms 17 ms host-ISP.IP.224.165.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.224.165] 6 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms 10.42.0.3 7 9 ms 9 ms 10 ms host-ISP.IP.202.129.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.202.129] 8 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms host-ISP.IP.209.33.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.209.33] 9 77 ms 129 ms 164 ms host-ISP.IP.198.162.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.198.162] 10 43 ms 42 ms 43 ms 72.14.212.13 11 42 ms 42 ms 42 ms 209.85.252.36 12 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms 209.85.241.210 13 60 ms 76 ms 68 ms 72.14.237.124 14 59 ms 59 ms 58 ms mad01s08-in-f20.1e100.net [173.194.34.212] Trace complete. Notice that there is a spike on the 3rd hop, but also notice that the 3rd and 4th hop are to the exact same destination. Furthermore, when I ping the offended hop separately, I get the low latency I would expect to that server: Pinging ISP.IP.215.246 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Ping statistics for ISP.IP.215.246: Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 12ms, Average = 9ms I'm baffled as to why or how this is happening, and it seems to "fix itself" at random times. Here is an example of where it was working as expected: http://i.imgur.com/bysno.png Notice how many fewer hops were taken. Please note that all the posted results occurred within 10 minutes of testing. I've tried contacting my ISP, and they seem clueless; in their eyes, as long as "the download speed is not slow", then they're doing everything right. Any insight would be very much appreciated, and thanks in advanced!

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• How I might think like a hacker so that I can anticipate security vulnerabilities in .NET or Java before a hacker hands me my hat [closed]

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  Premise I make a living developing web-based applications for all form-factors (mobile, tablet, laptop, etc). I make heavy use of SOA, and send and receive most data as JSON objects. Although most of my work is completed on the .NET or Java stacks, I am also recently delving into Node.js. This new stack has got me thinking that I know reasonably well how to secure applications using known facilities of .NET and Java, but I am woefully ignorant when it comes to best practices or, more importantly, the driving motivation behind the best practices. You see, as I gain more prominent clientele, I need to be able to assure them that their applications are secure and, in order to do that, I feel that I should learn to think like a malevolent hacker. What motivates a malevolent hacker: What is their prime mover? What is it that they are most after? Ultimately, the answer is money or notoriety I am sure, but I think it would be good to understand the nuanced motivators that lead to those ends: credit card numbers, damning information, corporate espionage, shutting down a highly visible site, etc. As an extension of question #1--but more specific--what are the things most likely to be seeked out by a hacker in almost any application? Passwords? Financial info? Profile data that will gain them access to other applications a user has joined? Let me be clear here. This is not judgement for or against the aforementioned motivations because that is not the goal of this post. I simply want to know what motivates a hacker regardless of our individual judgement. What are some heuristics followed to accomplish hacker goals? Ultimately specific processes would be great to know; however, in order to think like a hacker, I would really value your comments on the broader heuristics followed. For example: "A hacker always looks first for the low-hanging fruit such as http spoofing" or "In the absence of a CAPTCHA or other deterrent, a hacker will likely run a cracking script against a login prompt and then go from there." Possibly, "A hacker will try and attack a site via Foo (browser) first as it is known for Bar vulnerability. What are the most common hacks employed when following the common heuristics? Specifics here. Http spoofing, password cracking, SQL injection, etc. Disclaimer I am not a hacker, nor am I judging hackers (Heck--I even respect their ingenuity). I simply want to learn how I might think like a hacker so that I may begin to anticipate vulnerabilities before .NET or Java hands me a way to defend against them after the fact.

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• Given the presentation model pattern, is the view, presentation model, or model responsible for adding child views to an existing view at runtime?

  - by Ryan Taylor

  I am building a Flex 4 based application using the presentation model design pattern. This application will have several different components to it as shown in the image below. The MainView and DashboardView will always be visible and they each have corresponding presentation models and models as necessary. These views are easily created by declaring their MXML in the application root. <s:HGroup width="100%" height="100%"> <MainView width="75% height="100%"/> <DashboardView width="25%" height="100%"/> </s:HGroup> There will also be many WidgetViewN views that can be added to the DashboardView by the user at runtime through a simple drop down list. This will need to be accomplished via ActionScript. The drop down list should always show what WidgetViewN has already been added to the DashboardView. Therefore some state about which WidgetViewN's have been created needs to be stored. Since the list of available WidgetViewN and which ones are added to the DashboardView also need to be accessible from other components in the system I think this needs to be stored in a Model object. My understanding of the presentation model design pattern is that the view is very lean. It contains as close to zero logic as is practical. The view communicates/binds to the presentation model which contains all the necessary view logic. The presentation model is effectively an abstract representation of the view which supports low coupling and eases testability. The presentation model may have one or more models injected in in order to display the necessary information. The models themselves contain no view logic whatsoever. So I have a several questions around this design. Who should be responsible for creating the WidgetViewN components and adding these to the DashboardView? Is this the responsibility of the DashboardView, DashboardPresentationModel, DashboardModel or something else entirely? It seems like the DashboardPresentationModel would be responsible for creating/adding/removing any child views from it's display but how do you do this without passing in the DashboardView to the DashboardPresentationModel? The list of available and visible WidgetViewN components needs to be accessible to a few other components as well. Is it okay for a reference to a WidgetViewN to be stored/referenced in a model? Are there any good examples of the presentation model pattern online in Flex that also include creating child views at runtime?

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• Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration. Then it was thought that marketers should focus their efforts on a relative few super-influencers that would then sway the masses. History shows a few successes with this approach but lacked any consistency or predictability. After all, if super-influencers were easy to find, most campaigns would easily go viral. Alas, research shows that most wide-spread trends were the result of several fortunate events, including some luck. So do people exert influence over each other when it comes to purchase decisions? Of course they do, all the time. But that influence is usually limited to a small set of friends and specific specialization. For instance, although I have 165 friends on Facebook, I am only able to influence my close friends and family on PC purchases, and I have no sway at all for fashion purchases. People trust my knowledge on technology, but nobody asks my advice on shoes. How then should retailers leverage social networks in order to reinforce brand image and push promotions? Two obvious ways are Like and Share. Online advertisements or wall-postings receive more clicks when the viewer sees that friends have "liked" the posting. That's our modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. Statistics show that endorsements from friends make it more likely a person will engage. If my friends and I liked it, then I might also "share" (or "retweet" in the case of Twitter) it with other friends. In that case the retailer has paid for X showings of the advertisement, but sharing has pushed it to an additional Y people at no cost. And further, the implicit endorsement by the sharer makes it more likely the recipient will engage. So a good first step is to find people active in social networks that will Like and Share in order to exert influence. Its still tough to go viral, but doubling engagement is still a big step in the right direction. More complex social graph analysis would be a second step, but I'll leave that topic for another day. If you're interested in the academic side of social dynamics, I suggest reading Duncan Watts' work.

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• AZURE - Stairway To Heaven

  - by Waclaw Chrabaszcz

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Wchrabaszcz/archive/2014/08/02/azure---stairway-to-heaven.aspx  Before you’ll start reading please start to play this song.   OK boys and girls, time get familiar with clouds. Time to become a meteorologist. To be honest I don’t know how to start. Is cloud better or worse than on campus resources … hmm … it is just different. I think for successful adoption in cloud world IT Dinosaurs need to forget some “Private Cloud” virtualization bad habits, and learn new way of thinking. Take a look: - I don’t need any  tapes or  CDs  (Physical Kingdom of Windows XP and 2000) - I don’t need any locally stored MP3s (CD virtualization :-) - I can just stream music to your computer no matter whether my on-site infrastructure is powered on. Why not to do exactly the same with WebServer, SQL, or just rented for a while Windows server ? Let’s go, to the other side of the mirror. 1st  - register yourself for free one month trial, as happy MSDN subscriber you’ve got monthly budget to spent. In addition in default setting your limit protects you against loosing real money, if your toys will consume too much traffic and space. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/ Once your account is ready forget WebPortal, we are PowerShell knights. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9811175&clcid=0x409 #Authenticate yourself in Azure Add-AzureAccount #download once your settings file Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile #Import it to your PowerShell Module Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\Azure\[filename].publishsettings" #validation Get-AzureAccount Get-AzureSubscription #where are Azure datacenters Get-AzureLocation #You will need it Update-Help #storage account is related to physical location, there are two datacenters on each continent, try nearest to you # all your VMs will store VHD files on your storage account #your storage account must be unique globally, so I assume that words account or server are already used New-AzureStorageAccount -StorageAccountName "[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]" -Label "AzureTwo" -Location "West Europe" Get-AzureStorageAccount #it looks like you are ready to deploy first VM, what templates we can use Get-AzureVMImage | Select ImageName #what a mess, let’s choose Server 2012 $ImageName = (Get-AzureVMImage)[74].ImageName $cloudSvcName = '[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]' $AdminUsername = "[YOUR-ADMIN]" $adminPassword = '[YOUR_PA$$W0RD]' $MediaLocation = "West Europe" $vmnameDC = 'DC01' #burn baby burn !!! $vmDC01 = New-AzureVMConfig -Name $vmnameDC -InstanceSize "Small" -ImageName $ImageName   `     | Add-AzureProvisioningConfig -Windows -Password $adminPassword -AdminUsername $AdminUsername   `     | New-AzureVM -ServiceName $cloudSvcName #ice, ice baby … Get-AzureVM Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -ServiceName "[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]" -Name "DC01" -LocalPath "c:\AZURE\DC01.rdp" As you can see it is not just a new-VM, you need to associate your VM with AzureVMConfig (it sets your template), AzureProvisioningConfig (it sets your customizations), and Storage account. In next releases you’ll need to put this machine in specific subnet, attach a HDD and many more. After second reading I found that I am using the same name for STORAGE and SERVICE account, please be aware of it if you need to split these values. Conclusions: - pipe rules ! - at the beginning it is hard to change your mind and agree with fact that it is easier to remove and recreate a VM than move it to different subnet - by default everything is firewalled, limited access to DNS, but NATed outside on custom ports. It is good to check these translations sometimes on the webportal. - if you remove your VMs your harddrives remains on storage and MS will charge you . Remove-AzureVM -DeleteVHD For me AZURE it is a lot of fun, once again I can be newbie and learn every page. For me Azure offers real freedom in deployment of VMs without arguing with NetAdmins, WinAdmins, DBAs, PMs and other Change Managers. Unfortunately soon or later they will come to my haven and change it into …

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• What are the software design essentials? [closed]

  - by Craig Schwarze

  I've decided to create a 1 page "cheat sheet" of essential software design principles for my programmers. It doesn't explain the principles in any great depth, but is simply there as a reference and a reminder. Here's what I've come up with - I would welcome your comments. What have I left out? What have I explained poorly? What is there that shouldn't be? Basic Design Principles The Principle of Least Surprise – your solution should be obvious, predictable and consistent. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) - the simplest solution is usually the best one. You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI) - create a solution for the current problem rather than what might happen in the future. Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) - rigorously remove duplication from your design and code. Advanced Design Principles Program to an interface, not an implementation – Don’t declare variables to be of a particular concrete class. Rather, declare them to an interface, and instantiate them using a creational pattern. Favour composition over inheritance – Don’t overuse inheritance. In most cases, rich behaviour is best added by instantiating objects, rather than inheriting from classes. Strive for loosely coupled designs – Minimise the interdependencies between objects. They should be able to interact with minimal knowledge of each other via small, tightly defined interfaces. Principle of Least Knowledge – Also called the “Law of Demeter”, and is colloquially summarised as “Only talk to your friends”. Specifically, a method in an object should only invoke methods on the object itself, objects passed as a parameter to the method, any object the method creates, any components of the object. SOLID Design Principles Single Responsibility Principle – Each class should have one well defined purpose, and only one reason to change. This reduces the fragility of your code, and makes it much more maintainable. Open/Close Principle – A class should be open to extension, but closed to modification. In practice, this means extracting the code that is most likely to change to another class, and then injecting it as required via an appropriate pattern. Liskov Substitution Principle – Subtypes must be substitutable for their base types. Essentially, get your inheritance right. In the classic example, type square should not inherit from type rectangle, as they have different properties (you can independently set the sides of a rectangle). Instead, both should inherit from type shape. Interface Segregation Principle – Clients should not be forced to depend upon methods they do not use. Don’t have fat interfaces, rather split them up into smaller, behaviour centric interfaces. Dependency Inversion Principle – There are two parts to this principle: High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions. Abstractions should not depend on details. Details should depend on abstractions. In modern development, this is often handled by an IoC (Inversion of Control) container.

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• Free RAM disappears - Memory leak?

  - by Izzy

  On a fresh started system, free reports about 1.5G used RAM (8G RAM alltogether, Ubuntu 12.04 with lightdm and plasma desktop, one konsole window started). Having the apps running I use, it still consumes not more than 2G. However, having the system running for a couple of days, more and more of my free RAM disappears -- without showing up in the list of used apps: while smem --pie=name reports less than 20% used (and 80% being available), everything else says differently. free -m for example reports on about day 7: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 7013 446 0 178 997 -/+ buffers/cache: 5836 1623 Swap: 9536 296 9240 (so you can see, it's not the buffers or the cache). Today this finally ended with the system crashing completely: the windows manager being gone, apps "hanging in the air" (frameless) -- and a popup notifying me about "too many open files". Syslog reports: kernel: [856738.020829] VFS: file-max limit 752838 reached So I closed those applications I was able to close, and killed X using Ctrl-Alt-backspace. X tried to come up again after that with failsafeX, but was unable to do so as it could no longer detect its configuration. So I switched to a console using Ctrl-Alt-F2, captured all information I could think of (vmstat, free, smem, proc/meminfo, lsof, ps aux), and finally rebooted. X again came up with failsafeX; this time I told it to "recover from my backed-up configuration", then switched to a console and successfully used startx to bring up the graphical environment. I have no real clue to what is causing this issue -- though it must have to do either with X itself, or with some user processes running on X -- as after killing X, free -m output looked like this: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 2677 4781 0 62 419 -/+ buffers/cache: 2195 5263 Swap: 9536 59 9477 (~3.5GB being freed) -- to compare with the output after a fresh start: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 1483 5975 0 63 730 -/+ buffers/cache: 689 6769 Swap: 9536 0 9536 Two more helpful outputs are provided by memstat -u. Shortly before the crash: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 200 207 616 whoopsie 1 764 740 817 2300 colord 1 3200 836 894 2156 root 62 70404 352996 382260 569920 izzy 80 177508 1465416 1519266 1851840 After having X killed: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 184 188 356 izzy 1 1400 708 739 1080 whoopsie 1 848 668 826 1772 colord 1 3204 804 888 1728 root 62 54876 131708 149950 267860 And after a restart, back in X: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 212 217 628 whoopsie 1 0 1536 1880 5096 colord 1 0 3740 4217 7936 root 54 0 148668 180911 345132 izzy 47 0 370928 437562 915056 Edit: Just added two graphs from my monitoring system. Interesting to see: everytime when there's a "jump" in memory consumption, CPU peaks as well. Just found this right now -- and it reminds me of another indicator pointing to X itself: Often when returning to my machine and unlocking the screen, I found something doing heavvy work on my CPU. Checking with top, it always turned out to be /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none. So after this long explanation, finally my questions: What could be the possible causes? How can I better identify involved processes/applications? What steps could be taken to avoid this behaviour -- short from rebooting the machine all X days? I was running 8.04 (Hardy) for about 5 years on my old machine, never having experienced the like (always more than 100 days uptime, before rebooting for e.g. kernel updates). This now is a complete new machine with a fresh install of 8.04. In case it matters, some specs: AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, using the open-source ati/radeon driver (so no fglrx installed), 8GB RAM, WDC WD1002FAEX-0 hdd (1TB), Asus F1A75-V Evo mainboard. Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit with KDE4/Plasma. Apps usually open more or less permanently include Evolution, Firefox, konsole (with Midnight Commander running inside, about 4 tabs), and LibreOffice -- plus occasionally Calibre, Gimp and Moneyplex (banking software I'm already using for almost 20 years now, in a version which did fine on Hardy).

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• What does the `dmesg` error: "composite sync not supported" mean?

  - by M. Tibbits

  Question: I see [ 20.473125] composite sync not supported and several such entries when I run dmesg. What do they mean? Background: I'm trying to debug a problem where my laptop won't suspend. Since acpi seems happy and I can suspend easily from the command line, I've turned to tracking down all boot-up errors/warnings. So I run dmesg | grep not and, amongst other shtuff, I get: 728:[ 17.267120] composite sync not supported 733:[ 18.009061] composite sync not supported 740:[ 18.159289] registered panic notifier 749:[ 18.162500] vga16fb: not registering due to another framebuffer present 757:[ 18.598251] composite sync not supported 776:[ 20.473125] composite sync not supported 777:[ 20.932266] composite sync not supported 778:[ 28.350231] composite sync not supported 779:[ 28.924913] composite sync not supported 780:[ 35.480658] composite sync not supported And the full log for the few lines right around that first appearance (line 728) is listed at the bottom of my post (I'd happily include anything else). Any ideas what could be causing this? I've read several sites: Ubuntuforums #1 IRC Chat #1 One post talks about ??Adobe flash?? causing this error? Some others also suggest that it might be an nvidia related problem, but I've got a Dell Latitude D630 with an integrated Intel graphics -- so nvidia isn't the problem. [ 17.207142] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel' [ 17.207833] Registered led device: b43-phy0::tx [ 17.207849] Registered led device: b43-phy0::rx [ 17.207865] Registered led device: b43-phy0::radio [ 17.207927] Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PL, Firmware-ID: FW13 ] [ 17.267120] composite sync not supported [ 17.415795] EXT4-fs (sda2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode [ 17.602131] [drm] initialized overlay support [ 17.620201] input: DualPoint Stick as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7 [ 17.641192] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input8 [ 18.009061] composite sync not supported [ 18.106042] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: IO port probe 0x100-0x3af: clean. [ 18.108115] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: IO port probe 0x3e0-0x4ff: clean. [ 18.108941] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: IO port probe 0x820-0x8ff: clean. [ 18.109676] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: IO port probe 0xc00-0xcf7: clean. [ 18.110356] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: IO port probe 0xa00-0xaff: clean. [ 18.159286] fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device [ 18.159289] registered panic notifier [ 18.160218] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0A03:00/LNXVIDEO:01/input/input9 [ 18.160286] ACPI: Video Device [VID1] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) [ 18.160334] ACPI Warning for \_SB_.PCI0.VID2._DOD: Return Package has no elements (empty) (20090903/nspredef-433) [ 18.160432] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0A03:00/LNXVIDEO:02/input/input10 [ 18.160491] ACPI: Video Device [VID2] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) [ 18.160539] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0 [ 18.162494] vga16fb: initializing [ 18.162497] vga16fb: mapped to 0xc00a0000 [ 18.162500] vga16fb: not registering due to another framebuffer present [ 18.176091] HDA Intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [ 18.176123] HDA Intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 18.285752] input: HDA Digital PCBeep as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/input/input11 [ 18.312497] input: HDA Intel Mic at Ext Left Jack as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input12 [ 18.312586] input: HDA Intel HP Out at Ext Left Jack as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input13 [ 18.328043] usbcore: registered new interface driver ndiswrapper [ 18.460909] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 180x56 [ 18.598251] composite sync not supported

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• Removing hard-coded values and defensive design vs YAGNI

  - by Ben Scott

  First a bit of background. I'm coding a lookup from Age - Rate. There are 7 age brackets so the lookup table is 3 columns (From|To|Rate) with 7 rows. The values rarely change - they are legislated rates (first and third columns) that have stayed the same for 3 years. I figured that the easiest way to store this table without hard-coding it is in the database in a global configuration table, as a single text value containing a CSV (so "65,69,0.05,70,74,0.06" is how the 65-69 and 70-74 tiers would be stored). Relatively easy to parse then use. Then I realised that to implement this I would have to create a new table, a repository to wrap around it, data layer tests for the repo, unit tests around the code that unflattens the CSV into the table, and tests around the lookup itself. The only benefit of all this work is avoiding hard-coding the lookup table. When talking to the users (who currently use the lookup table directly - by looking at a hard copy) the opinion is pretty much that "the rates never change." Obviously that isn't actually correct - the rates were only created three years ago and in the past things that "never change" have had a habit of changing - so for me to defensively program this I definitely shouldn't store the lookup table in the application. Except when I think YAGNI. The feature I am implementing doesn't specify that the rates will change. If the rates do change, they will still change so rarely that maintenance isn't even a consideration, and the feature isn't actually critical enough that anything would be affected if there was a delay between the rate change and the updated application. I've pretty much decided that nothing of value will be lost if I hard-code the lookup, and I'm not too concerned about my approach to this particular feature. My question is, as a professional have I properly justified that decision? Hard-coding values is bad design, but going to the trouble of removing the values from the application seems to violate the YAGNI principle. EDIT To clarify the question, I'm not concerned about the actual implementation. I'm concerned that I can either do a quick, bad thing, and justify it by saying YAGNI, or I can take a more defensive, high-effort approach, that even in the best case ultimately has low benefits. As a professional programmer does my decision to implement a design that I know is flawed simply come down to a cost/benefit analysis?

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• Interview with Koen Aben, Supply Chain Director of WE Fashion

  - by user801960

  We recently spoke to Koen Aben, the Supply Chain Director of WE Fashion, who gave us some insight into how Oracle supported the international fashion retailer through the completion of a large scale integration project across its 340 European stores. Koen explains the reasoning behind the project which was to create a common retail foundation and to integrate and align working processes to drive insight and enable continued growth. It is always good to hear from someone of Koen’s experience who can articulate the benefits of partnering with the right company for such an extensive project as this. Koen explains that a crucial element of such a project is to unify business applications into a common platform, adding that for successful growth, retailers really need to achieve enterprise-wide alignment. At the start of the three year project, WE Fashion’s application platform was fragmented impacting the company’s ability to support sustained growth. In light of this, WE Fashion invested in its processes, systems, teams and partnerships to build the needed retail foundation. Now after successfully completing the project, the basis is in place to ensure that growth is unimpeded. In the video, Koen Aben highlights some of the factors necessary for the success of the project as: Having an understanding that the process of creating a growth platform for a company is a long journey Accepting that during a lengthy project such as this, there will be high and low points experienced within the project team and the business, but that the relationship with your partners is crucial to the success of the project. Having the correct team in place will prove to be the “lynch –pin” of any successful project Oracle supported Koen and his team in implementing this project, and is recognised for the role it played during this development in partnership with the company. On his experience with working with the Oracle team, Koen points out that in the critical situations, Oracle was there to ensure that the right people were in place whenever needed and this was key to ensuring the project’s success. Since Oracle is one of the few providers that can offer an enterprise-wide retail platform, our best practice approach is key to connecting interactions throughout the business to enable insight and optimise operations. This is a great example of a large scale international retail project, where the true success of its completion is reflected in how proud the company is about what has been achieved, and the fact that results are already being seen.

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• Cellbi Silverlight Controls Giveaway (5 License to give away)

  - by mbcrump

  Cellbi recently updated their new Silverlight Controls to version 4 and to support Visual Studio 2010. I played with a couple of demos on their site and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. The first thing that I noticed was all of the special text effects and animations included. I emailed them asking if I could give away their controls in my January 2011 giveaway and they said yes. They also volunteered to give away 5 total license so the changes for you to win would increase.  I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Cellbi Silverlight Controls! (5 License to give away) Random winner will be announced on February 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump and @cellbi http://mcrump.me/cscfree ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Cellbi because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The What's new in this release page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. That is installed to your local HDD during the installation process. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the program. After everything is installed then you will see the following screen: After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. After you add the controls from the “Choose Items” in Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. It’s hard to show with a static screenshot just how powerful the controls actually are so I will refer you to the demo page to learn more about them. Since all of these are animations/effects it just doesn’t work with a static screenshot. It is worth noting that the Sfx pack really focuses on the following core effects: I will show you the best route to get started building a new project with them below. The best page to start is the sample browser which you can access by going to SvFx Launcher. In my case, I want to build a new Carousel. I simple navigate to the Carousel that I want to build and hit the “Cs” code at the top. This launches Visual Studio 2010 and now I can copy/paste the XAML into my project. That is all there is to it. Hopefully this post was helpful and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win a set of the controls!  Subscribe to my feed

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• How important is knowing functionality before coding?

  - by minusSeven

  I work for a software development company where the development work have been off shored to us. The on shore team handle the support and talk directly to the clients. We never talk to the clients directly we just talk people from the on shore team who talk directly to the clients. When requirements come, on shore team talk to the clients and make requirement documents and informs us. We make design documents after studying the requirements (we follow traditional waterfall model ). But there is one problem in the whole process: nobody in the either off-shore or on-shore understand the functionality of the application completely. We just know its a big complex web app handling complex order processing, catalog management, campaign management and other activities. We struggle with the design document as the requirements would not be clear. It then goes into a series of questions/answers back and forth between the on shore team,off shore team and clients. We would often be told to understand functionality from the code. But that's usually not feasible as the code base is huge and even understanding a simple menu item take days if not weeks. We tried telling the clients to give us knowledge transfer about the application but to no avail. Our manager would often tell us to start coding even if the design document is not complete or requirements not clear. We would start by coding part of the requirement that seems clear and wait for the rest. This usually would delay the deployment by a month. In extreme cases we would have very low errors in the development and production but the clients would say that's not what they asked. That would start a blame game and a series of change requests and we would end up developing something very different. My question is how would you do development work if you don't know the functionality of the app fully? UPDATE About development methodology it isn't really my choice and I am not my team's lead It is the way it began. I tried to tell people about the advantages of agile but to no avail. Besides I don't think my team has the necessary mindset to work in AGILE environment.

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• 2010 is gone and Welcome 2011

  - by anirudha

  last days i spent my week @ firozabadthe town is much small and near to agraso i never forget to see the taj mahal and red fort their even it’s first chance to see them.i make a plan that i go to Agra last Saturday. firstly i go to red fort and i talking with many foreigner and they love to talking with me because their is only one man who with with them who is their GUIDE a person like a  book they never can talk with you but tell you about everything of the location because you buy them. their are many person come from various country such as German , Japan,  Russ , Italy and many other. their is no problem to talk with them perhaps they happen with talk to me. when i completely watch the Red fort at least i see a girl who are look like a foreigner. i talk themselves where they come from they tell me Francewhen i go elsewhere i thing to propose them to be  a friend of mine. i never propose any girl for friendship with me even in school and college. so i propose them to be a friend of mine.  they accept it i put the email ID in their hand whenever they gone. but i still not get their mail. 2ndly i go to Taj mahal the taj experience is not so good i spent 3 or 4 hours in rush. i found their is no security even their are many army force. they all person are too slow to work. they spent 10 minute to check  a person for security . their hands work very slow just like a low configuration computer. i talk many person their too. i talk to a person who tell themselves Jacob and they from Chicago. they speak very fast and i not know what they tell in speech. a another problem i got with some Chinese person. when i talking with them that i found they speak only Chinese language. Wish you a very very happy new year.

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• Brightness Crash and Fan issues in 12.04.1

  - by S.A. McIntosh

  I would just like to state beforehand that I am a total novice in using Ubuntu when it comes to the more complex issues. So I thought it would be best to finally come here and ask for help before being re-directed or closed out for a solution. I have already looked high and low on this board for one but nothing came up for my particular case, so I might as well take a shot asking for the first time here. This is what I have at the moment: -Dell Insprion 1764 w/ 64-bit Intel i5 Core -Dual Boot: Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04.1 32-bit (from 12.04 install) -Unity shell -Linux kernel: 3.2.0-32 generic-pae ...and this is my fglrxinfo: OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series OpenGL version string: 4.2.11627 Compatibility Profile Context The one issue I have with using Ubuntu is brightness. With the driver in every time I use the slider in the brightness and lock settings or use the keyboard function, it freezes, goes black and comes up with a scrambled colors page like this in the video. So I have looked all over this board and the web for answers looking for a solution that might have an answer. This is what I have done so far to fix this: -First Solution: Looking around, I found this small fix using terminal: sudo gedit /etc/rc.local followed by adding this into "rc.local" echo # > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness This works rarely with the graphics driver still in and I often get lucky say during restart but reboot would only snap back the brightness at max. -Second Solution Simply remove the graphics driver while leaving the solution of first behind. This solves the issue but results in having the monitor flicker and flash at startup which in itself is not a problem to me but maybe not so good for monitor health. Also it causes the fan to speed up throughout the session and render any program that needs the driver useless. -Third Solution This is the most obvious. Just simply use the brightness on AMD Catalyst Control Center software that came with the driver, and I can say that it's form of brightness is HORRIBLE compared to the actual settings. Which leads up to where I am now, back to the driver to stop the fan speed-up and seems that the only solution to the brightness crash is to use the keyboard-controlled brightness at the login screen NOT the desktop if I want the issued effect but will just snap at max bright again if I restart. Fan speed problem is dealt with but now run the risk of crashing my computer if I so much touch the brightness settings. Speaking of which I found this on launchpad and it seems that the issue has been going far since June of 2012. Any help, redirect link or reference would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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• TDC: The Developer's Conference Day One

  - by Tori Wieldt

  The Developer's Conference (TDC) kicked off Wednesday in São Paulo, Brazil. With over 3000 developers in attendance over five days, it is the premier multi-community developer conference in Brazil, organized by Globalcode. Yara Senger, one of the organizers said, "We like to say multi-community rather than multi-technology because it is interesting and benefical when various communities get together. They learn so much from each other!" TDC includes tracks on Java and several other technologies, including SOA, Python, Ruby, mobile and digital TV. In the mobile track, developers who create a Java ME app will get a Nokia S40 phone!New this year at TDC is the Java University track, sponsored by Oracle.  It is aimed at university students and professionals who are new to Java. The lectures are introductory level, with an educational focus and practical exercises. The Java track and other tracks, such as SOA, mobile and Digital TV, are getting lots of help from the expertise of Brazilian JUGS members. Thanks to GoJava, JavaBahia, JavaNoroeste and SouJava!Carlos Fernando, one of the coordinators on the Digital TV track, said "My goal is to teach developers the basics of digital TV, and show them the tools used to build interactive TV applications." Fernando explained the concept of "the second screen:" that many people watch TV and have second smart device (tablet or smartphone) with them, and this creates many opportunities for developers. For example, while watching TV, a viewer can get extra content (interviews, behind the scenes) on their tablet. More interestingly, while watching their favorite TV show a viewer likes an outfit one of the actors is wearing, their smartphone can tell them where they can buy it nearby, or they can order it online immediately. Fernando exclaimed, "The opportunities for developers are nearly infinite in the area of digital TV!" At the TDC opening keynote, Debora Palermo, Oracle University country manager for Brazil, reminded attendees that Java is present in many devices, from simple to complex, and knowledge of this platform can open many doors in the labor market. She explained Oracle's Workforce Development Program (WDP), managed by Oracle University, which allows educational institutions to deliver Oracle training. WDP allows for easy and low-cost access to Oracle training in local communities across the world. "Oracle University is committed to creating the next generation of Java developers, and WDP can make that happen," Palermo said. As of March 2012, Oracle University is partnering with Globalcode to offer WDP. Students can earn official Oracle Course Certifications, a great way to learn Java.Brazilian developers that cannot attend TDC can watch live streaming.

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• Hardware and Software Working Together - What Does LJE say?

  - by Stephen Slade

   IDG News Service - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Oracle will continue to bet on selling high-end custom hardware for its software products, even amidst a growing trend toward roomfuls of cheap, generic servers. "You have to be in the hardware business and the software business, to get the best possible system," he said during a keynote speech at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in Tokyo. "We believe it's the right idea, we believe it's the next generation of computing, we believe all the pieces have to fit together." Ellison, as he has often done in the past, repeatedly referred to Apple as his "favorite example" of such tight integration. He was a close friend of Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs and previously served on Apple's board of directors.He said sales of Oracle's advanced servers were booming and generating around a billion dollars a year in revenue for the company, which has until recent years focused almost exclusively on its software offerings. With the explosion of popular online services and the increasing number of mobile devices that access them, demand is high for databases that can quickly respond to high numbers of relatively simple queries. While Oracle is pitching its expensive, finely-tuned machines to meet this requirement, Internet behemoths like Google, Facebook and Microsoft increasingly rely on armies of low-cost, easily replaceable servers. Ellison emphasized the high specifications of Oracle's servers, which come packed with multiple terabytes of RAM and flash-based storage for speed. Such machines are superior to large server farms, he said, because they require far less electricity and floor space, and are also cost competitive. When asked about whether purchasing such products would lock customers in to expensive hardware from Oracle, he promised that the company's software would always run on "multiple hardware sources."  Ellison, who spoke from Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital, was shown live online via webcast. The Oracle founder has a fondness for Japanese architecture and is staying in his large garden residence in the city Source: Ellison: Hardware-software integration key, Apple is best example. Oracle's founder and CEO reaffirmed his commitment to custom hardware for its software products  LINK to Computerworld article Apr 5, 2012 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225858/Ellison_Hardware_software_integration_key_Apple_is_best_example?source=CTWNLE_nlt_entsoft_2012-04-09&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fs%2Ffeed%2Ftopic%2F173+%28Computerworld+Databases+News%29#disqus_thread

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• Rights and use of developed software

  - by Nils Munch

  I have been working on a piece of software for a company, that they wish to resell. There was an mail-based agreement upon a flat hourly rate for my work, and eager me chose to accept a rather low fee. Due to the stress and tempo of the task, a direct contract was never formed or signed. The software was developed locally on my machine, and I was pretty much alone with it, except by excellent help from StackOverflow when I got stuck. Now, the software is nearing completion, I suddenly hear that they have hired a new developer to make the same piece of software as me, and that I was expected to resign within long. Confused I ask around, and realize that the CEO of the company had informed the rest of the company that I was terminally ill and had cancer, and was expected to leave the company soon. Since I'm perfectly healthy, this confused me even more, until I realized what was going on. When I confronted my boss with this, I was no longer seen as a member of the company, and I left the same day, never to return. Later, I raised the question about my missing pay, since I had been working for quite a bit, and not received any payment for my software. I saw that they had already sold a fair copy of my software, and since it's not exactly sold cheap, the company should have plenty of gold to pay me. The company refused, and said that they owned the software, and everything it contained. That was a lot of drama, but my question is this: Who has the rights to the software ? The source code had my personal watermarks and copyrights inprinted, but they have since simply deleted it. The company claim that they have all the rights, because they have a website made about the product, where they write that they have "All rights reserved" in the bottom. My instinct tells me that if a company buys a service like this, and then refuses to pay their developer, then they should not be allowed to keep, and much less resell the product. I have not signed any agreements about giving the company the use of this product, I have made it in my own time and without help from the rest of the company. This all takes place in Denmark, Europe, but I would guess that the rules about this is somewhat universal. Im not the strongest person to legal-talk, so I might be wrong.

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• Producing a smooth mesh from density cloud and marching cubes

  - by Wardy

  Based on my results from this question I decided to build myself a 3D noise map containing float values in place of my existing boolean point values. The effect I'm trying to produce is something like this, rather than typical rolling hills; which should explain the "missing cubes" in the image below. If I render my density map in normal "minecraft mode" (1 block per point in the density map) varying the size of the cube based on the value in my density map (floats in the range 0 to 1) I get something like this: I'm now happy that I can produce a density map for the marching cubes algorithm (which will need a little tweaking) but for some reason when I run it through my implementation it's not producing what I expect. My problem is that I'm getting something like the first image in this answer to my previous question, when I want to achieve the effect in the second image. Upon further investigation I can't see how marching cubes does the "move vertex along the edge" type logic (i.e. the difference between the two images on my previous link). I see that it does do some interpolation, but I'm not convinced I have the correct understanding of what I think it should do, because the code in question appears to give the same result regardless of whether I use boolean or float values. I took the code from here which is a C# implementation of marching cubes, but instead of using the MarchingCubesPrimitive I modified it to accept an object of type IDrawable, containing lists for the various collections (vertices, normals, UVs, indices), the logic was otherwise untouched. My understanding is that given a very low isovalue the accuracy level of the surface being rendered should increase, so in short "less 45 degree slows more rolling hills" type mesh output. However this isn't what I'm seeing. Have I missed something or is the implementation flawed and need to be fixed? EDIT: A little more detail on what I am seeing when I "marching cube" the data. Ok so firstly, ignore the fact that the meshes created by the chunks don't "connect" (i'll probably raise another question about this later). Then look at the shaping of the island, it's too ... square, from the voxels rendered as boxes you get the impression there's a clean soft gradual hill and yet from the image there are sharp falling edges even in the most central areas where the gradient in the first image looks the most smooth. The data is "regenerated" each time I run this so no 2 islands come out the same, and it's purely random so not based on noise, but still, how can it look so smooth in 1 image and so not smooth in the other?

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• ADF Code Guidelines

  - by Chris Muir

  During Oracle Open World 2012 the ADF Product Management team announced a new OTN website, the ADF Architecture Square.  While OOW represents a great opportunity to let customers know about new and exciting developments, the problem with making announcements during OOW however is customers are bombarded with so many messages that it's easy to miss something important. So in this blog post I'd like to highlight as part of the ADF Architecture Square website, one of the initial core offerings is a new document entitled ADF Code Guidelines. Now the title of this document should hopefully make it obvious what the document contains, but what's the purpose of the document, why did Oracle create it? Personally having worked as an ADF consultant before joining Oracle, one thing I noted amongst ADF customers who had successfully deployed production systems, that they all approached software development in a professional and engineered way, and all of these customers had their own guideline documents on ADF best practices, conventions and recommendations.  These documents designed to be consumed by their own staff to ensure ADF applications were "built right", typically sourced their guidelines from their team's own expert learnings, and the huge amount of ADF technical collateral that is publicly available.  Maybe from manuals and whitepapers, presentations and blog posts, some written by Oracle and some written by independent sources. Now this is all good and well for the teams that have gone through this effort, gathering all the information and putting it into structured documents, kudos to them.  But for new customers who want to break into the ADF space, who have project pressures to deliver ADF solutions without necessarily working on assembling best practices, creating such a document is understandably (regrettably?) a low priority.  So in recognising this hurdle, at Oracle we've devised the ADF Code Guidelines.  This document sets out ADF code guidelines, practices and conventions for applications built using ADF Business Components and ADF Faces Rich Client (release 11g and greater).  The guidelines are summarized from a number of Oracle documents and other 3rd party collateral, with the goal of giving developers and development teams a short circuit on producing their own best practices collateral. The document is not a final production, but a living document that will be extended to cover new information as discovered or as the ADF framework changes. Readers are encouraged to discuss the guidelines on the ADF EMG and provide constructive feedback to me (Chris Muir) via the ADF EMG Issue Tracker. We hope you'll find the ADF Code Guidelines useful and look forward to providing updates in the near future. Image courtesy of paytai / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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• Does Your Customer Engagement Create an Ah Feeling?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  An (Oracle CX Blog) article by Christina McKeon Companies that successfully engage customers all have one thing in common. They make it seem easy for the customer to get what they need. No one would argue that brands don’t want to leave customers with this “ah” feeling. Since 94% of customers who have a low-effort service experience will buy from that company again, it makes financial sense for brands.1 Some brands are thinking differently about how they engage their customers to create ah feelings. How do they do it? Toyota is a great example of using smart assistance technology to understand customer intent and answer questions before customers hit the submit button online. What is unique in this situation is that Toyota captures intent while customers are filling out email forms. Toyota analyzes the data in the form and suggests responses before the customer sends the email. The customer gets the right answer, and the email never makes it to your contact center — which makes you and the customer happy. Most brands are fully aware of chat as a service channel, but some brands take chat to a whole new level. Beauty.com, part of the drugstore.com and Walgreens family of brands, uses live chat to replicate the personal experience that one would find at high-end department store cosmetic counters. Trained beauty advisors, all with esthetician or beauty counter experience, engage in live chat sessions with online shoppers to share immediate advice on the best products for their personal needs. Agents can watch customer activity online and determine the right time to reach out and offer help, just as help would be offered in a brick-and-mortar store. And, agents can co-browse along with the customer helping customers with online check-out. These personal chat discussions also give Beauty.com the opportunity to present products, advertise promotions, and resolve customer issues when they arise. Beauty.com converts approximately 25% of chat sessions into product orders. Photobox, the European market leader in online photo services, wanted to deliver personal and responsive service to its 24 million members. It ensures customer inquiries on personalized photo products are routed based on agent knowledge so customers get what they need from the company experts. By using a queuing system to ensure that the agent with the most appropriate knowledge handles the query, agent productivity increased while response times to 1,500 customer queries per day decreased. A real-time dashboard prevents agents from being overloaded with queries. This approach has produced financial results with a 15% increase in sales to existing customers and a 45% increase in orders from newly referred customers.

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• Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

  - by Chris

  One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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• Wifi disabled for Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 Intel in 12.04

  - by new_bie

  Laptop model - HP- dm4 - 2070. I had faced the same problem for wireless being disabled in case of 11.10. It had to do with the new kernel. I thought with 12.04 this problem will be handled but the problem persists. Is there no way to get the wireless working except for the way mentioned in the following link ?? Wifi for Centrino Wireless-N 1000 Intel Corporation (HP pavillion dm4 - 2070us) is not working Output for sudo lshw -class network *-network UNCLAIMED description: Network controller product: Centrino Wireless-N 1000 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:c2500000-c2501fff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: c0 serial: 2c:41:38:07:f3:e3 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1c driverversion=1.0.1.0-NAPI duplex=full firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.116 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:43 memory:c1400000-c143ffff ioport:2000(size=128) Output for dmesg | grep iwl [ 14.742886] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 14.742897] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 14.743013] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: pci_resource_len = 0x00002000 [ 14.743016] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: pci_resource_base = ffffc90000c78000 [ 14.743018] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: HW Revision ID = 0x0 [ 14.743119] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: irq 42 for MSI/MSI-X [ 14.743161] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 1000 BGN, REV=0x6C [ 14.743229] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: L1 Enabled; Disabling L0S [ 14.765147] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: device EEPROM VER=0x15d, CALIB=0x6 [ 14.765151] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Device SKU: 0X50 [ 14.765154] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Valid Tx ant: 0X1, Valid Rx ant: 0X3 [ 14.765907] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 0 802.11a channels [ 14.912840] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: request for firmware file 'iwlwifi-1000-5.ucode' failed. [ 14.914254] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: request for firmware file 'iwlwifi-1000-4.ucode' failed. [ 14.915718] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: request for firmware file 'iwlwifi-1000-3.ucode' failed. [ 14.916986] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: request for firmware file 'iwlwifi-1000-2.ucode' failed. [ 14.919391] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: request for firmware file 'iwlwifi-1000-1.ucode' failed. [ 14.919445] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: no suitable firmware found! [ 14.919783] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A disabled [ 2868.960807] Modules linked in: snd_hda_codec_hdmi snd_hda_codec_idt rfcomm bnep bluetooth parport_pc ppdev binfmt_misc hid_logitech_dj usbhid hid joydev snd_hda_intel snd_hda_codec snd_hwdep snd_pcm snd_seq_midi snd_rawmidi snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq hp_wmi sparse_keymap hp_accel lis3lv02d input_polldev snd_timer snd_seq_device wmi iwlwifi snd mac80211 i915 cfg80211 rts_pstor(C) drm_kms_helper drm uvcvideo videodev psmouse soundcore mei(C) v4l2_compat_ioctl32 mac_hid serio_raw snd_page_alloc i2c_algo_bit video lp parport atl1c

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