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• Oracle Solaris Zones Physical to virtual (P2V)

  - by user939057

  IntroductionThis document describes the process of creating and installing a Solaris 10 image build from physical system and migrate it into a virtualized operating system environment using the Oracle Solaris 10 Zones Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) capability.Using an example and various scenarios, this paper describes how to take advantage of theOracle Solaris 10 Zones Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) capability with other Oracle Solaris features to optimize performance using the Solaris 10 resource management advanced storage management using Solaris ZFS plus improving operating system visibility with Solaris DTrace. The most common use for this tool is when performing consolidation of existing systems onto virtualization enabled platforms, in addition to that we can use the Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) capability  for other tasks for example backup your physical system and move them into virtualized operating system environment hosted on the Disaster Recovery (DR) site another option can be building an Oracle Solaris 10 image repository with various configuration and a different software packages in order to reduce provisioning time.Oracle Solaris ZonesOracle Solaris Zones is a virtualization and partitioning technology supported on Oracle Sun servers powered by SPARC and Intel processors.This technology provides an isolated and secure environment for running applications. A zone is a virtualized operating system environment created within a single instance of the Solaris 10 Operating System.Each virtual system is called a zone and runs a unique and distinct copy of the Solaris 10 operating system.Oracle Solaris Zones Physical-to-Virtual (P2V)A new feature for Solaris 10 9/10.This feature provides the ability to build a Solaris 10 images from physical system and migrate it into a virtualized operating system environmentThere are three main steps using this tool1. Image creation on the source system, this image includes the operating system and optionally the software in which we want to include within the image. 2. Preparing the target system by configuring a new zone that will host the new image.3. Image installation on the target system using the image we created on step 1. The host, where the image is built, is referred to as the source system and the host, where theimage is installed, is referred to as the target system. Benefits of Oracle Solaris Zones Physical-to-Virtual (P2V)Here are some benefits of this new feature:  Simple- easy build process using Oracle Solaris 10 built-in commands.  Robust- based on Oracle Solaris Zones a robust and well known virtualization technology.  Flexible- support migration between V series servers into T or -M-series systems.For the latest server information, refer to the Sun Servers web page. PrerequisitesThe target Oracle Solaris system should be running the latest version of the patching patch cluster. and the minimum Solaris version on the target system should be Solaris 10 9/10.Refer to the latest Administration Guide for Oracle Solaris for a complete procedure on how todownload and install Oracle Solaris. NOTE: If the source system that used to build the image is an older version then the targetsystem, then during the process, the operating system will be upgraded to Solaris 10 9/10(update on attach).Creating the Image Used to distribute the software.We will create an image on the source machine. We can create the image on the local file system and then transfer it to the target machine, or build it into a NFS shared storage andmount the NFS file system from the target machine.Optional  before creating the image we need to complete the software installation that we want to include with the Solaris 10 image.An image is created by using the flarcreate command:Source # flarcreate -S -n s10-system -L cpio /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flarThe command does the following:  -S specifies that we skip the disk space check and do not write archive size data to the archive (faster).  -n specifies the image name.  -L specifies the archive format (i.e cpio). Optionally, we can add descriptions to the archive identification section, which can help to identify the archive later.Source # flarcreate -S -n s10-system -e "Oracle Solaris with Oracle DB10.2.0.4" -a "oracle" -L cpio /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flarYou can see example of the archive identification section in Appendix A: archive identification section.We can compress the flar image using the gzip command or adding the -c option to the flarcreate commandSource # gzip /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flarAn md5 checksum can be created for the image in order to ensure no data tamperingSource # digest -v -a md5 /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flar Moving the image into the target system.If we created the image on the local file system, we need to transfer the flar archive from the source machine to the target machine.Source # scp /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flar target:/var/tmpConfiguring the Zone on the target systemAfter copying the software to the target machine, we need to configure a new zone in order to host the new image on that zone.To install the new zone on the target machine, first we need to configure the zone (for the full zone creation options see the following link: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18752_01/html/817-1592/index.html  )ZFS integrationA flash archive can be created on a system that is running a UFS or a ZFS root file system.NOTE: If you create a Solaris Flash archive of a Solaris 10 system that has a ZFS root, then bydefault, the flar will actually be a ZFS send stream, which can be used to recreate the root pool.This image cannot be used to install a zone. You must create the flar with an explicit cpio or paxarchive when the system has a ZFS root.Use the flarcreate command with the -L archiver option, specifying cpio or pax as themethod to archive the files. (For example, see Step 1 in the previous section).Optionally, on the target system you can create the zone root folder on a ZFS file system inorder to benefit from the ZFS features (clones, snapshots, etc...).Target # zpool create zones c2t2d0 Create the zone root folder:Target # chmod 700 /zones Target # zonecfg -z solaris10-up9-zonesolaris10-up9-zone: No such zone configuredUse 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.zonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> createzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> set zonepath=/zoneszonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> set autoboot=truezonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> add netzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone:net> set address=192.168.0.1zonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone:net> set physical=nxge0zonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone:net> endzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> verifyzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> commitzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> exit Installing the Zone on the target system using the imageInstall the configured zone solaris10-up9-zone by using the zoneadm command with the install -a option and the path to the archive.The following example shows how to create an Image and sys-unconfig the zone.Target # zoneadm -z solaris10-up9-zone install -u -a/var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flarLog File: /var/tmp/solaris10-up9-zone.install_log.AJaGveInstalling: This may take several minutes...The following example shows how we can preserve system identity.Target # zoneadm -z solaris10-up9-zone install -p -a /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flar Resource management Some applications are sensitive to the number of CPUs on the target Zone. You need tomatch the number of CPUs on the Zone using the zonecfg command:zonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone>add dedicated-cpuzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> set ncpus=16DTrace integrationSome applications might need to be analyzing using DTrace on the target zone, you canadd DTrace support on the zone using the zonecfg command:zonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone>setlimitpriv="default,dtrace_proc,dtrace_user" Exclusive IP stack An Oracle Solaris Container running in Oracle Solaris 10 can have a shared IP stack with the global zone, or it can have an exclusive IP stack (which was released in Oracle Solaris 10 8/07). An exclusive IP stack provides a complete, tunable, manageable and independent networking stack to each zone. A zone with an exclusive IP stack can configure Scalable TCP (STCP), IP routing, IP multipathing, or IPsec. For an example of how to configure an Oracle Solaris zone with an exclusive IP stack, see the following example zonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone set ip-type=exclusivezonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> add netzonecfg:solaris10-up9-zone> set physical=nxge0 When the installation completes, use the zoneadm list -i -v options to list the installedzones and verify the status.Target # zoneadm list -i -vSee that the new Zone status is installedID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP0 global running / native shared- solaris10-up9-zone installed /zones native sharedNow boot the ZoneTarget # zoneadm -z solaris10-up9-zone bootWe need to login into the Zone order to complete the zone set up or insert a sysidcfg file beforebooting the zone for the first time see example for sysidcfg file in Appendix B: sysidcfg filesectionTarget # zlogin -C solaris10-up9-zoneTroubleshootingIf an installation fails, review the log file. On success, the log file is in /var/log inside the zone. Onfailure, the log file is in /var/tmp in the global zone.If a zone installation is interrupted or fails, the zone is left in the incomplete state. Use uninstall -F to reset the zone to the configured state.Target # zoneadm -z solaris10-up9-zone uninstall -FTarget # zonecfg -z solaris10-up9-zone delete -FConclusionOracle Solaris Zones P2V tool provides the flexibility to build pre-configuredimages with different software configuration for faster deployment and server consolidation.In this document, I demonstrated how to build and install images and to integrate the images with other Oracle Solaris features like ZFS and DTrace.Appendix A: archive identification sectionWe can use the head -n 20 /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flar command in order to access theidentification section that contains the detailed description.Target # head -n 20 /var/tmp/solaris_10_up9.flarFlAsH-aRcHiVe-2.0section_begin=identificationarchive_id=e4469ee97c3f30699d608b20a36011befiles_archived_method=cpiocreation_date=20100901160827creation_master=mdet5140-1content_name=s10-systemcreation_node=mdet5140-1creation_hardware_class=sun4vcreation_platform=SUNW,T5140creation_processor=sparccreation_release=5.10creation_os_name=SunOScreation_os_version=Generic_142909-16files_compressed_method=nonecontent_architectures=sun4vtype=FULLsection_end=identificationsection_begin=predeploymentbegin 755 predeployment.cpio.ZAppendix B: sysidcfg file sectionTarget # cat sysidcfgsystem_locale=Ctimezone=US/Pacificterminal=xtermssecurity_policy=NONEroot_password=HsABA7Dt/0sXXtimeserver=localhostname_service=NONEnetwork_interface=primary {hostname= solaris10-up9-zonenetmask=255.255.255.0protocol_ipv6=nodefault_route=192.168.0.1}name_service=NONEnfs4_domain=dynamicWe need to copy this file before booting the zoneTarget # cp sysidcfg /zones/solaris10-up9-zone/root/etc/

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• How to change time (Advanced Eastern Time) on Slackware 8.1

  - by r0ca

  Hi all, I have a linux (Slackware) machine and the time/date is like, June 23rd 2003, 10:00am (It's 11 here) and I am not able to set the time to have it correct. I change the timezome to Montreal but the time is still wrong. Is there a way to force it to sync with my domain controler or even another online NTP server? Thanks, David.

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• Amazon EC2 instances changes server time/date on reboots and other time weirdness

  - by puffpio

  I have a windows instance up in EC2. I manually set the timezone to Pacific. 1) For some reason using window's built in time sync doesn't work in the instance...but whatever. I turn off automatic time syncing... but 2) On reboot the time on the server changes! For example, if i reboot it at 4PM on Wednesday, when the server comes back up it will read 12 noon on Thursday! As a result any access to Amazon's other services like SImpleDB fail because the timestamps generated are too far off the current time. Has anyone seen this or figured this out?

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• Time Warp

  - by Jesse

  It’s no secret that daylight savings time can wreak havoc on systems that rely heavily on dates. The system I work on is centered around recording dates and times, so naturally my co-workers and I have seen our fair share of date-related bugs. From time to time, however, we come across something that we haven’t seen before. A few weeks ago the following error message started showing up in our logs: “The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward, any time in the period that is skipped is invalid.” This seemed very cryptic, especially since it was coming from areas of our application that are typically only concerned with capturing date-only (no explicit time component) from the user, like reports that take a “start date” and “end date” parameter. For these types of parameters we just leave off the time component when capturing the date values, so midnight is used as a “placeholder” time. How is midnight an “invalid time”? Globalization Is Hard Over the last couple of years our software has been rolled out to users in several countries outside of the United States, including Brazil. Brazil begins and ends daylight savings time at midnight on pre-determined days of the year. On October 16, 2011 at midnight many areas in Brazil began observing daylight savings time at which time their clocks were set forward one hour. This means that at the instant it became midnight on October 16, it actually became 1:00 AM, so any time between 12:00 AM and 12:59:59 AM never actually happened. Because we store all date values in the database in UTC, always adjust any “local” dates provided by a user to UTC before using them as filters in a query. The error we saw was thrown by .NET when trying to convert the Brazilian local time of 2011-10-16 12:00 AM to UTC since that local time never actually existed. We hadn’t experienced this same issue with any of our US customers because the daylight savings time changes in the US occur at 2:00 AM which doesn’t conflict with our “placeholder” time of midnight. Detecting Invalid Times In .NET you might use code similar to the following for converting a local time to UTC: var localDate = new DateTime(2011, 10, 16); //2011-10-16 @ midnight const string timeZoneId = "E. South America Standard Time"; //Windows system timezone Id for "Brasilia" timezone. var localTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(timeZoneId); var convertedDate = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localDate, localTimeZone); The code above throws the “invalid time” exception referenced above. We could try to detect whether or not the local time is invalid with something like this: var localDate = new DateTime(2011, 10, 16); //2011-10-16 @ midnight const string timeZoneId = "E. South America Standard Time"; //Windows system timezone Id for "Brasilia" timezone. var localTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(timeZoneId); if (localTimeZone.IsInvalidTime(localDate)) localDate = localDate.AddHours(1); var convertedDate = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localDate, localTimeZone); This code works in this particular scenario, but it hardly seems robust. It also does nothing to address the issue that can arise when dealing with the ambiguous times that fall around the end of daylight savings. When we roll the clocks back an hour they record the same hour on the same day twice in a row. To continue on with our Brazil example, on February 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM, it will immediately become February 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM all over again. In this scenario, how should we interpret February 18, 2011 11:30 PM? Enter Noda Time I heard about Noda Time, the .NET port of the Java library Joda Time, a little while back and filed it away in the back of my mind under the “sounds-like-it-might-be-useful-someday” category.  Let’s see how we might deal with the issue of invalid and ambiguous local times using Noda Time (note that as of this writing the samples below will only work using the latest code available from the Noda Time repo on Google Code. The NuGet package version 0.1.0 published 2011-08-19 will incorrectly report unambiguous times as being ambiguous) : var localDateTime = new LocalDateTime(2011, 10, 16, 0, 0); const string timeZoneId = "Brazil/East"; var timezone = DateTimeZone.ForId(timeZoneId); var localDateTimeMaping = timezone.MapLocalDateTime(localDateTime); ZonedDateTime unambiguousLocalDateTime; switch (localDateTimeMaping.Type) { case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Unambiguous: unambiguousLocalDateTime = localDateTimeMaping.UnambiguousMapping; break; case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Ambiguous: unambiguousLocalDateTime = localDateTimeMaping.EarlierMapping; break; case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Skipped: unambiguousLocalDateTime = new ZonedDateTime( localDateTimeMaping.ZoneIntervalAfterTransition.Start, timezone); break; default: throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Unexpected mapping result type: {0}", localDateTimeMaping.Type)); } var convertedDateTime = unambiguousLocalDateTime.ToInstant().ToDateTimeUtc(); Let’s break this sample down: I’m using the Noda Time ‘LocalDateTime’ object to represent the local date and time. I’ve provided the year, month, day, hour, and minute (zeros for the hour and minute here represent midnight). You can think of a ‘LocalDateTime’ as an “invalidated” date and time; there is no information available about the time zone that this date and time belong to, so Noda Time can’t make any guarantees about its ambiguity. The ‘timeZoneId’ in this sample is different than the ones above. In order to use the .NET TimeZoneInfo class we need to provide Windows time zone ids. Noda Time expects an Olson (tz / zoneinfo) time zone identifier and does not currently offer any means of mapping the Windows time zones to their Olson counterparts, though project owner Jon Skeet has said that some sort of mapping will be publicly accessible at some point in the future. I’m making use of the Noda Time ‘DateTimeZone.MapLocalDateTime’ method to disambiguate the original local date time value. This method returns an instance of the Noda Time object ‘ZoneLocalMapping’ containing information about the provided local date time maps to the provided time zone.  The disambiguated local date and time value will be stored in the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ variable as an instance of the Noda Time ‘ZonedDateTime’ object. An instance of this object represents a completely unambiguous point in time and is comprised of a local date and time, a time zone, and an offset from UTC. Instances of ZonedDateTime can only be created from within the Noda Time assembly (the constructor is ‘internal’) to ensure to callers that each instance represents an unambiguous point in time. The value of the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ might vary depending upon the ‘ResultType’ returned by the ‘MapLocalDateTime’ method. There are three possible outcomes: If the provided local date time is unambiguous in the provided time zone I can immediately set the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ variable from the ‘Unambiguous Mapping’ property of the mapping returned by the ‘MapLocalDateTime’ method. If the provided local date time is ambiguous in the provided time zone (i.e. it falls in an hour that was repeated when moving clocks backward from Daylight Savings to Standard Time), I can use the ‘EarlierMapping’ property to get the earlier of the two possible local dates to define the unambiguous local date and time that I need. I could have also opted to use the ‘LaterMapping’ property in this case, or even returned an error and asked the user to specify the proper choice. The important thing to note here is that as the programmer I’ve been forced to deal with what appears to be an ambiguous date and time. If the provided local date time represents a skipped time (i.e. it falls in an hour that was skipped when moving clocks forward from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time),  I have access to the time intervals that fell immediately before and immediately after the point in time that caused my date to be skipped. In this case I have opted to disambiguate my local date and time by moving it forward to the beginning of the interval immediately following the skipped period. Again, I could opt to use the end of the interval immediately preceding the skipped period, or raise an error depending on the needs of the application. The point of this code is to convert a local date and time to a UTC date and time for use in a SQL Server database, so the final ‘convertedDate’  variable (typed as a plain old .NET DateTime) has its value set from a Noda Time ‘Instant’. An 'Instant’ represents a number of ticks since 1970-01-01 at midnight (Unix epoch) and can easily be converted to a .NET DateTime in the UTC time zone using the ‘ToDateTimeUtc()’ method. This sample is admittedly contrived and could certainly use some refactoring, but I think it captures the general approach needed to take a local date and time and convert it to UTC with Noda Time. At first glance it might seem that Noda Time makes this “simple” code more complicated and verbose because it forces you to explicitly deal with the local date disambiguation, but I feel that the length and complexity of the Noda Time sample is proportionate to the complexity of the problem. Using TimeZoneInfo leaves you susceptible to overlooking ambiguous and skipped times that could result in run-time errors or (even worse) run-time data corruption in the form of a local date and time being adjusted to UTC incorrectly. I should point out that this research is my first look at Noda Time and I know that I’ve only scratched the surface of its full capabilities. I also think it’s safe to say that it’s still beta software for the time being so I’m not rushing out to use it production systems just yet, but I will definitely be tinkering with it more and keeping an eye on it as it progresses.

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• Internet Time tab has disappeared from the Date and Time applet of the Control Panel

  - by Robert Thornton

  Previously, there was an Internet Time tab on the Date and Time applet of the Control Panel, wherein one could force a query of an internet time server and also type in a different server from the ones supplied. However, this tab has now disappeared, and I need to have it back. I should mention that this machine has never been part of a domain, since it seems that machines that are such do not have such a tab. I should be obliged to anyone who can help me restore the missing tab. Windows 7 Home Premium Service Pack 1

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• Work Time Start / Stop Tracking Software

  - by Shaharyar

  Is there a software that allows you to keep track of someones working time digitally? We are growing to an extent where we work remotely and we would like to have fixed working times. All it should do is kind of register when someone starts working (i.e. someone needs to login somewhere or set a flag.. really it could be anything) Do you have any ideas?

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• How to generate portal zones?

  - by Meow

  I'm developing a portal-based scene manager. Basically all it does is to check the portals against the camera frustum, and render their associated portal zones accordingly. Is there any way my editor can generate portal zones automatically with the user having to set the portals themselves only? For example, the Max Payne 1/2 engine ("Max-FX") only required to set the portal quads, unlike the C4 engine where you also have to explicitly set the portal zones.

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• Performance impact of Zones.

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

  I was really astonished when i saw this question. Because this question was a old acquaintance from years ago, that i didn't heard for a long time. However there was it again. The question: "What's the overhead of Zones?". Sun was and Oracle is not saying "zero". We saying saying minimal. However during all the performance analysis gigs on customer systems i made since the introduction of Zones i failed to measure any overhead caused by zones. What i saw however, was additional load intoduced by processes that wouldn't be there when you would use only one zone Like additional monitoring daemons, like additional daemons having a controlling or supervising job for the application that resulted in slighly longer runtimes of processes, because such additional daemons wanted some cycles on the CPU as well. So i ask when someone wants to tell me that he measured a slight slowdown, if he or she has really measured the impact of the virtualization layer or of a side effect described above. It seems to be a little bit hard to believe, that a virtualisation technology has no overhead, however keep in mind that there is no hypervisor and just one kernel running that looks and behaves like many operating system instances to apps and users. While this imposes some limits to the technology (because there is just one kernel running you can't have zones with different kernels versions running ... obvious even to the cursory observer), but that is key to it's lightweightness and thus to the low overhead. Continue reading "Performance impact of Zones."

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• How to make a system time-zone sensitive?

  - by Jerry Dodge

  I need to implement time zones in a very large and old Delphi system, where there's a central SQL Server database and possibly hundreds of client installations around the world in different time zones. The application already interacts with the database by only using the date/time of the database server. So, all the time stamps saved in both the database and on the client machines are the date/time of the database server when it happened, never the time of the client machine. So, when a client is about to display the date/time of something (such as a transaction) which is coming from this database, it needs to show the date/time converted to the local time zone. This is where I get lost. I would naturally assume there should be something in SQL to recognize the time zone and convert a DateTime field dynamically. I'm not sure if such a thing exists though. If so, that would be perfect, but if not, I need to figure out another way. This Delphi system (multiple projects) utilizes the SQL Server database using ADO components, VCL data-aware controls, and QuickReports (using data sources). So, there's many places where the data goes directly from the database query to rendering on the screen, without any code to actually put this data on the screen. In the end, I need to know when and how should I get the properly converted time? There must be a standard method for this, and I'm hoping SQL Server 2008 R2 has this covered...

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• Time management and self improvement

  - by Filip

  I hope I can open a discussion on this topic as this is not a specific problem. It's a topic I hope to get some ideas on how people in similar situation as mine manage their time. OK, I'm a single developer on a software project for the last 6-8 months. The project I'm working on uses several technologies, mainly .net stuff: WPF, WF, NHibernate, WCF, MySql and other third party SDKs relevant for the project nature. My experience and knowledge vary, for example I have a lot of experience in WPF but much less in WCF. I work full time on the project and im curios on how other programmers which need to multi task in many areas manage their time. I'm a very applied type of person and prefer to code instead of doing research. I feel that doing research "might" slow down the progress of the project while I recognize that research and learning more in areas which I'm not so strong will ultimately make me more productive. How would you split up your daily time in productive coding time and time to and experiment, read blogs, go through tutorials etc. I would say that Im coding about 90%+ of my day and devoting some but very little time in research and acquiring new knowledge. Thanks for your replies. I think I will adopt a gradual transition to Dominics block parts. I kinda knew that coding was taking up way to much of my time but it feels good having a first version of the project completed and ready. With a few months of focused hard work behind me I hope to get more time to experiment and expand my knowlegde. Now I only hope my boss will cut me some slack and stop pressuring me for features...

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• Daylight Saving Time Visualized

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  When you map out the Daylight Saving Time adjusted sunrise and sunset times over the course of the year, an interesting pattern emerges. Chart designer Germanium writes: I tried to come up with the reason for the daylight saving time change by just looking at the data for sunset and sunrise times. The figure represents sunset and sunrise times thought the year. It shows that the daylight saving time change marked by the lines (DLS) is keeping the sunrise time pretty much constant throughout the whole year, while making the sunset time change a lot. The spread of sunrise times as measured by the standard deviation is 42 minutes, which means that the sunrise time changes within that range the whole year, while the standard deviation for the sunset times is 1:30 hours. Whatever the argument for doing this is, it’s pretty clear that reason is to keep the sunrise time constant. You can read more about the controversial history of Daylight Saving Time here. Daylight Saving Time Explained [via Cool Infographics] 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• Time Tracking on an Agile Team

  - by Stephen.Walther

  What’s the best way to handle time-tracking on an Agile team? Your gut reaction to this question might be to resist any type of time-tracking at all. After all, one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.  Forcing the developers on your team to track the amount of time that they devote to completing stories or tasks might seem like useless bureaucratic red tape: an impediment to getting real work done. I completely understand this reaction. I’ve been required to use time-tracking software in the past to account for each hour of my workday. It made me feel like Fred Flintstone punching in at the quarry mine and not like a professional. Why You Really Do Need Time-Tracking There are, however, legitimate reasons to track time spent on stories even when you are a member of an Agile team.  First, if you are working with an outside client, you might need to track the number of hours spent on different stories for the purposes of billing. There might be no way to avoid time-tracking if you want to get paid. Second, the Product Owner needs to know when the work on a story has gone over the original time estimated for the story. The Product Owner is concerned with Return On Investment. If the team has gone massively overtime on a story, then the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on the story and reconsider the story’s business value. Finally, you might want to track how much time your team spends on different types of stories or tasks. For example, if your team is spending 75% of their time doing testing then you might need to bring in more testers. Or, if 10% of your team’s time is expended performing a software build at the end of each iteration then it is time to consider better ways of automating the build process. Time-Tracking in SonicAgile For these reasons, we added time-tracking as a feature to SonicAgile which is our free Agile Project Management tool. We were heavily influenced by Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) in the way that we implemented time-tracking (see his article http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2007/03/time-tracking-is-anti-scrum-what-do-you.html). In SonicAgile, time-tracking is disabled by default. If you want to use this feature then the project owner must enable time-tracking in Project Settings. You can choose to estimate using either days or hours. If you are estimating at the level of stories then it makes more sense to choose days. Otherwise, if you are estimating at the level of tasks then it makes more sense to use hours. After you enable time-tracking then you can assign three estimates to a story: Original Estimate – This is the estimate that you enter when you first create a story. You don’t change this estimate. Time Spent – This is the amount of time that you have already devoted to the story. You update the time spent on each story during your daily standup meeting. Time Left – This is the amount of time remaining to complete the story. Again, you update the time left during your daily standup meeting. So when you first create a story, you enter an original estimate that becomes the time left. During each daily standup meeting, you update the time spent and time left for each story on the Kanban. If you had perfect predicative power, then the original estimate would always be the same as the sum of the time spent and the time left. For example, if you predict that a story will take 5 days to complete then on day 3, the story should have 3 days spent and 2 days left. Unfortunately, never in the history of mankind has anyone accurately predicted the exact amount of time that it takes to complete a story. For this reason, SonicAgile does not update the time spent and time left automatically. Each day, during the daily standup, your team should update the time spent and time left for each story. For example, the following table shows the history of the time estimates for a story that was originally estimated to take 3 days but, eventually, takes 5 days to complete: Day Original Estimate Time Spent Time Left Day 1 3 days 0 days 3 days Day 2 3 days 1 day 2 days Day 3 3 days 2 days 2 days Day 4 3 days 3 days 2 days Day 5 3 days 4 days 0 days In the table above, everything goes as predicted until you reach day 3. On day 3, the team realizes that the work will require an additional two days. The situation does not improve on day 4. All of the sudden, on day 5, all of the remaining work gets done. Real work often follows this pattern. There are long periods when nothing gets done punctuated by occasional and unpredictable bursts of progress. We designed SonicAgile to make it as easy as possible to track the time spent and time left on a story. Detecting when a Story Goes Over the Original Estimate Sometimes, stories take much longer than originally estimated. There’s a surprise. For example, you discover that a new software component is incompatible with existing software components. Or, you discover that you have to go through a month-long certification process to finish a story. In those cases, the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on a story and re-evaluate the business value of the story. For example, the Product Owner discovers that a story will require weeks to implement instead of days, then the story might not be worth the expense. SonicAgile displays a warning on both the Backlog and the Kanban when the time spent on a story goes over the original estimate. An icon of a clock is displayed. Time-Tracking and Tasks Another optional feature of SonicAgile is tasks. If you enable Tasks in Project Settings then you can break stories into one or more tasks. You can perform time-tracking at the level of a story or at the level of a task. If you don’t break a story into tasks then you can enter the time left and time spent for the story. As soon as you break a story into tasks, then you can no longer enter the time left and time spent at the level of the story. Instead, the time left and time spent for a story is rolled up from its tasks. On the Kanban, you can see how the time left and time spent for each task gets rolled up into each story. The progress bar for the story is rolled up from the progress bars for each task. The original estimate is never rolled up – even when you break a story into tasks. A story’s original estimate is entered separately from the original estimates of each of the story’s tasks. Summary Not every Agile team can avoid time-tracking. You might be forced to track time to get paid, to detect when you are spending too much time on a particular story, or to track the amount of time that you are devoting to different types of tasks. We designed time-tracking in SonicAgile to require the least amount of work to track the information that you need. Time-tracking is an optional feature. If you enable time-tracking then you can track the original estimate, time left, and time spent for each story and task. You can use time-tracking with SonicAgile for free. Register at http://SonicAgile.com.

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• Get time zone or local time from cell tower (GPRS)

  - by Trevor Balcom

  I have been asked to set the system time of a Windows Mobile 6.0 handheld to the "local time." The local time in this case means the current time of the time zone the handheld is physically located in. Is there a way to request the local time from the GPRS cell tower?

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• get the current time in C

  - by Antrromet

  I want to get the current time of my system. For that i'm using the following code in C. time_t now; struct tm *mytime = localtime(&now); if ( strftime(buffer, sizeof buffer, "%X", mytime) ) { printf("time1 = \"%s\"\n", buffer); } But the problem of this code is that its giving some random time.Also the random time is different all the time.I want the current time of my system. Can anyone please tell me how to solve this issue?

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• Developing web application with time zones support

  - by outcoldman

  When you develop web application you should know that client PCs can be located anywhere on earth. Even if you develop app just for your country users you should remember it (in Russia now we have 9 time zones, before 28 of March we had 11 time zones). On big sites with many members do it very easy – you can place field “time zone” in member profile, in Sharepoint I saw this solution, and many enterprise app do it like this. But if we have simple website with blog publications or website with news and we don’t have member profiles on server, how we can support user’s time zones? I thought about this question because I wanted to develop time zone support on my own site. My case is ASP.NET MVC app and MS SQL Server DB. First, I started from learning which params we have at HTTP headers, but it doesn’t have information about it. So we can’t use regional settings and methods DateTime.ToLocalTime and DateTime.ToUniversalTime until we get user time zone on server. If we used our app before without time zones support we need to change dates from local time zone to UTC time zone (something like Greenwich Mean Time). Read more...(Redirect to http://outcoldman.ru)

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• time(NULL) returning different time

  - by cornerback84

  I am trying to get current time in C using time_t current_time = time(NULL). As I understand, it would return me the current time of system. I am later trying to convert it into GMT time using struct tm* gmt = gmtime(&current_time). I print both times using ctime() and asctime() functions. The current time on my system is GMT + 1. But gmtime() returns me the same time as current_time is. I could not understand why gmtime() is returning me same time. Any help will be appreciated.

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• Should Professional Development occur on company time?

  - by jshu

  As a first-time part-time software developer at a small consulting company, I'm struggling to organise time to further my own software development knowledge - whether that's reading a book, keeping up with the popular questions on StackOverflow, researching a technology we're using in-depth, or following the front page of Hacker News. I can see results borne from my self-allocated study time, but listing and demonstrating the skills and knowledge gained through Professional Development is difficult. The company does not have any defined PD policy, and there's a lot of pressure to get something deliverable done now! when working for consultants. I've checked what my coworkers do, and they don't appear to allocate any time to self-improvement; they just work at the problems they're given, looking up specific MSDN references, code samples, and the like as they need them. I realise that PD policy is going to vary across companies of different size and culture, and a company like my own is probably a bit of an edge case. I'd love to hear views and experiences from more seasoned developers; especially those who have to make the PD policy choices in their team or company. I'd also like to learn about the more radical approaches to PD, even if they're completely out there; it's always interesting to see what other people are trying. Not quite a summary, but what I'm trying to ask: Is it common or recommended for companies to allocate PD time? Whose responsibility is it to ensure a developer's knowledge and skills are up to date? Should a part-time work schedule inspire a lower ratio of PD time : work? How can a developer show non-developer coworkers that reading blogs and books is net productive? Is reading blogs and books actually net productive? (references welcomed) Is writing blogs effective as a way of PD? (a recent theme on Hacker News) This is sort of a broad question because I don't know exactly which questions I need to ask here, so any thoughts on relevant issues I haven't addressed are very welcome.

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• How to bill a client for frequently-interrupted time

  - by Greg

  I find that when I'm working on hourly-billable projects (in particular, those that are research/design/architecture-oriented as opposed to straight coding) that I'm easily distracted by any number of things (email, grab a drink (loss of focus, but nature happens), link off the webpage I was reading, wandering mind (easy when the job calls for a lot of thinking), etc.) This results in very fragmented time, far too incremental IMO to accurately track with a timeclock, and some time very gray. I frequently end up billing for only some fraction of the elapsed time I spent in order to feel fair, but sometimes it takes a really long time to put in an 8-hour day. By contrast, when I've worked for salary I've not worried about whether I'm actively working at any given minute, I just get the job done, and I've never had anything but stellar reviews/feedback from past salaried employers, so I think I get the job done well. I personally believe in an 80/20 cycle: I get 80% of my work done during an inspired 20% of my time. But I have to screw around the other 80% of the time in order to get that first 20%. So the question: what billing/time-tracking policy can I adopt in order to be fair to my hourly customers without having to write off my own less-productive 80% that a salaried employer is willing to overlook in light of the complete package? Note: This question is not about how to be more productive or focused. It's about how to work around whatever salient limitations that I have in a way that's both fair to me and to my customers. Update: A little clarification (to pre-emptively stop some righteous indignation): I currently have a half dozen different project/client groups. It's not a great situation and I'm working at reducing it down to two, but that's my current reality. It's very easy to get off on a thread related to a different project than the one I'm clocking, and I'm not always conscious of it at the time. [I did not intend the question to mean that I was off playing games or making personal calls, etc., and have adjusted wording above to be clearer. Most of the time. I am only human, and sometimes the mind does force you to take a break! :-)]

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• Problem measuring N times the execution time of a code block

  - by Nazgulled

  EDIT: I just found my problem after writing this long post explaining every little detail... If someone can give me a good answer on what I'm doing wrong and how can I get the execution time in seconds (using a float with 5 decimal places or so), I'll mark that as accepted. Hint: The problem was on how I interpreted the clock_getttime() man page. Hi, Let's say I have a function named myOperation that I need to measure the execution time of. To measure it, I'm using clock_gettime() as it was recommend here in one of the comments. My teacher recommends us to measure it N times so we can get an average, standard deviation and median for the final report. He also recommends us to execute myOperation M times instead of just one. If myOperation is a very fast operation, measuring it M times allow us to get a sense of the "real time" it takes; cause the clock being used might not have the required precision to measure such operation. So, execution myOperation only one time or M times really depends if the operation itself takes long enough for the clock precision we are using. I'm having trouble dealing with that M times execution. Increasing M decreases (a lot) the final average value. Which doesn't make sense to me. It's like this, on average you take 3 to 5 seconds to travel from point A to B. But then you go from A to B and back to A 5 times (which makes it 10 times, cause A to B is the same as B to A) and you measure that. Than you divide by 10, the average you get is supposed to be the same average you take traveling from point A to B, which is 3 to 5 seconds. This is what I want my code to do, but it's not working. If I keep increasing the number of times I go from A to B and back A, the average will be lower and lower each time, it makes no sense to me. Enough theory, here's my code: #include <stdio.h> #include <time.h> #define MEASUREMENTS 1 #define OPERATIONS 1 typedef struct timespec TimeClock; TimeClock diffTimeClock(TimeClock start, TimeClock end) { TimeClock aux; if((end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec) < 0) { aux.tv_sec = end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec - 1; aux.tv_nsec = 1E9 + end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec; } else { aux.tv_sec = end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec; aux.tv_nsec = end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec; } return aux; } int main(void) { TimeClock sTime, eTime, dTime; int i, j; for(i = 0; i < MEASUREMENTS; i++) { printf(" » MEASURE %02d\n", i+1); clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &sTime); for(j = 0; j < OPERATIONS; j++) { myOperation(); } clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &eTime); dTime = diffTimeClock(sTime, eTime); printf(" - NSEC (TOTAL): %ld\n", dTime.tv_nsec); printf(" - NSEC (OP): %ld\n\n", dTime.tv_nsec / OPERATIONS); } return 0; } Notes: The above diffTimeClock function is from this blog post. I replaced my real operation with myOperation() because it doesn't make any sense to post my real functions as I would have to post long blocks of code, you can easily code a myOperation() with whatever you like to compile the code if you wish. As you can see, OPERATIONS = 1 and the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 27456580 - NSEC (OP): 27456580 For OPERATIONS = 100 the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 218929736 - NSEC (OP): 2189297 For OPERATIONS = 1000 the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 862834890 - NSEC (OP): 862834 For OPERATIONS = 10000 the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 574133641 - NSEC (OP): 57413 Now, I'm not a math wiz, far from it actually, but this doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. I've already talked about this with a friend that's on this project with me and he also can't understand the differences. I don't understand why the value is getting lower and lower when I increase OPERATIONS. The operation itself should take the same time (on average of course, not the exact same time), no matter how many times I execute it. You could tell me that that actually depends on the operation itself, the data being read and that some data could already be in the cache and bla bla, but I don't think that's the problem. In my case, myOperation is reading 5000 lines of text from an CSV file, separating the values by ; and inserting those values into a data structure. For each iteration, I'm destroying the data structure and initializing it again. Now that I think of it, I also that think that there's a problem measuring time with clock_gettime(), maybe I'm not using it right. I mean, look at the last example, where OPERATIONS = 10000. The total time it took was 574133641ns, which would be roughly 0,5s; that's impossible, it took a couple of minutes as I couldn't stand looking at the screen waiting and went to eat something.

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• Missing time zones in OSX and Windows

  - by pellepim

  I am working on a javascript to automatically detect a user's timezone (https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect/). But there are two timezones that I have a really hard time to test, since I can not set my system to observe these timezones. The timezones I am talking about are UTC+1245 (Chatham Islands, NZ) and UTC+0845 (Australia/Eucla). As far as I can tell in OSX (Snow Leopard) and in Windows 7 these timezones do not exist as a setting. Granted, very few people live in these areas, and it might just not be worth it. Does anyone know of a way to set these timezones on a system level? In any operating system? If it is not possible in a trivial way, what do people who live in these areas do to get their systems working as they would like?

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• Time management and self improvement

  - by Filip

  Hi, I hope I can open a discussion on this topic as this is not a specific problem. It's a topic I hope to get some ideas on how people in similar situation as mine manage their time. OK, I'm a single developer on a software project for the last 6-8 months. The project I'm working on uses several technologies, mainly .net stuff: WPF, WF, NHibernate, WCF, MySql and other third party SDKs relevant for the project nature. My experience and knowledge vary, for example I have a lot of experience in WPF but much less in WCF. I work full time on the project and im curios on how other programmers which need to multi task in many areas manage their time. I'm a very applied type of person and prefer to code instead of doing research. I feel that doing research "might" slow down the progress of the project while I recognize that research and learning more in areas which I'm not so strong will ultimately make me more productive. How would you split up your daily time in productive coding time and time to and experiment, read blogs, go through tutorials etc. I would say that Im coding about 90%+ of my day and devoting some but very little time in research and acquiring new knowledge.

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• R adding infrequent date 'events' to a time series plot

  - by flyingcrab

  Hi, I am just starting on R - and have hit a bit of a deadlock with some time series data. I have a time series (date and value) in 'zoo' format, that I want to annotate with a cross when an event occurs. The events are irregular and in a csv format (just the dates, sometimes repeated). I've managed to read in the dates etc into a format that R accepts - but i cant seem to get a means to chart the main time series with the secondary events annotated on top?

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• How to implement time traveling into a game?

  - by Billy

  I was wondering how to implement time travel into a game. Nothing super complex, just time-reversal like what's in Braid, where the user can rewind/fast forward time by 30 seconds or whatever. I searched around the web a lot, but my results usually referred to using time as in like "it's 3:00" or a timer and such. The only thing I could think of was using 2 arrays, one for the player's x position and the other for the player's y position, and then iterating through those arrays and placing the character at that position as they rewind/fast forward time. Could that work? If it would work, how large would the array have to be and how often should I store the player's x and y? If it doesn't work, what else could I try? Thanks in advance!

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• Project Manager that wants to lock in time estimate with a signed contract

  - by sunpech

  At a previous employment, a project manager (PM) wasn't satisfied with the delivery time of the code on a project I was on. I was told by my project lead that that the PM was considering having me sign a contract to lock-in my time estimates I gave for tasks and delivery dates. The situation on the project was that we were working with new technologies, codebase, coding standards, and very prone-to-change requirements. I was learning new things and applying them the best I could on requirements that kept on changing. The requirements throughout the iterations grew by 2-3 times, with my estimate-to-complete growing by roughly 5-8 times. The only things that didn't change were the estimates and delivery dates. Yes, I did end up missing most deadlines. And I was working on some very new technologies that no one else on the entire development team could really help out on because they wouldn't be familiar with it. At least not easily. It seemed to me then, that the PM wanted his numbers to add up-- and thus wanted me to sign a contract to "ensure" that I would always deliver working code on time. I suppose with a signed contract the PM could use it against me if I couldn't deliver on time. I believe what happened next was that other project managers and/or project leads defended me, and didn't let this happen. My question is, should this raise a red flag about the manager? Is it common practice for a manager to lock-in time estimates of a software developer with a signed contract? Or in this case, try to. Please note, I was a full time employee, not an independent consultant. Update: I want to add that I did give new estimates weekly, but it seems the original estimates and delivery dates were what the PM was fixated on.

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• Stop Time Sync Between Host and Guest - VirtualBox

  - by KoopaTroopa

  So I've been googling and I've tried the following commands. I want to stop the virtual machine from having the correct time and just to stick with what time it last recorded. The host operating system is Ubuntu 12.04 and the guest is Windows XP. I've turned time syncing off in XP so it won't do that when I connect to the Internet. However it does appear to take the time from ubuntu and set it as it's own. VBoxManage setextradata XP11 “VBoxInternal/TM/WarpDrivePercentage” 200 vboxmanage setextradata XP11 "VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled" "1" Both commands haven't work as the time is always set to the exact same as Ubuntu's. I've located the extradata entry in the virtualbox XML file. It states both changes that the commands above are set to make. But of course it still hasn't stopped updating the time. <ExtraData> <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastGuestSizeHint" value="1152,864"/> <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastNormalWindowPosition" value="74,52,1152,911"/> <ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled" value="1"/> <ExtraDataItem name="&#x201C;VBoxInternal/TM/WarpDrivePercentage&#x201D;" value="200"/> </ExtraData>

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