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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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• SharePoint Thoughts

  - by Tim Murphy

  I was listening to .NET Rocks episode #713 and it got me thinking about a number of SharePoint related topics. I have been working with SharePoint since the 2001 product came out and have watched it evolve over the years.  Today SharePoint is one of the most powerful and flexible products in the market.  Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement (a lot of improvement in fact) and with much power comes much responsibility. My main gripe these days is that you have to develop on a server instance.  This adds a real barrier to entry for developers.  You either have to run VMWare or Hyper-V on your developer machine or actually develop on your dev server for most tasks.  Yes, there is a way to setup a Windows 7 machine with the SharePoint components but it is very hackish. Beyond that the tools in VS2010 are a great leap forward from past generations.  Not requiring a separate package creation tool is not the least of the improvements.  Better workflow and web part development have also eased the burden of many developers. The other thing the show brought up in my thoughts was more around usage.  Users want to be able to self server everything without regard to what affect that has on leveraging their data from a corporate perspective.  My coworkers who work on Lotus Notes ask why the user can’t just do what ever they want? Part of the reason is that those features have not been built, but the other part is that giving them those features is often like giving an infant a loaded hand gun.  You can do it but it doesn’t make it the smart thing to do. As with any tool that is going to be used in the enterprise it should be subject to governance.  If controls are not in place as they said in the episode of DNR the document libraries and I believe SharePoint in general starts to look as disarrayed and unusable as a shared drive.  Consider these factors before giving into every whim of the users.  You should be able to explain to them the tradeoffs of giving them full control versus being able to leverage the information they collect to the benefit of the organization. These are just a couple of the thoughts that were triggered by the show.  I’m sure there are more discussions that can be had.  Feel free to leave your comments about the pros and cons of SharePoint. del.icio.us Tags: .NET Rocks,SharePoint,software development

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• How to handle this unfortunately non hypothetical situation with end-users?

  - by User Smith

  I work in a medium sized company but with a very small IT force. Last year (2011), I wrote an application that is very popular with a large group of end-users. We hit a deadline at the end of last year and some functionality (I will call funcA from now on) was not added into the application that was wanted at the very end. So, this application has been running in live/production since the end of 2011, I might add without issue. Yesterday, a whole group of end-users started complaining that funcA that was never in the application is no longer working. Our priority at this company is that if an application is broken it must be fixed first prior to prioritized projects. I have compared code and queries and there is no difference since 2011, which is proofA. I then was able to get one of the end-users to admit that it never worked proofB, but since then that end-user has went back and said that it was working previously......I believe the horde of end-users has assimilated her. I have also reviewed my notes for this project which has requirements and daily updates regarding the project which specifically states, "funcA not achieved due to time constraints", proofC. I have spoken with many of them and I can see where they could be confused as they are very far from a programming background, but I also know they are intelligent enough to act in a group in order to bypass project prioritization orders in order to get functionality that they want to make their job easier. The worst part is is that now group think is setting in and my boss and the head of IT is actually starting to believe them, even though there is no code or query changes. As far as reviewing the state of the logic it is very cut and dry to the point of if 1 = 1, funcA will not work. So, this is the end of the description of my scenario, but I am trying not to get severally dinged on my performance metrics due to this which would essentially have me moved to fixing a production problem that doesn't exist that will probably take over 1 month. I am looking for direct answers to this question. This question is not for rants, polling, or discussions as this is not the format for StackExchange. Please don't downvote me too terribly it is pretty common on this specific site of stack, I am looking for honest answers to this situation and I couldn't find a forum more appropriate.

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• How employable am I as a programmer?

  - by dsimcha

  I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• My Doors - Why Standards Matter to Business

  - by [email protected]

  By Brian Dayton on April 8, 2010 9:27 PM "Standards save money." "Standards accelerate projects." "Standards make better solutions." What do these statements mean to you? You buy technology solutions like Oracle Applications but you're a business person--trying to close the quarter, get performance reviews processed, negotiate a new sourcing contract, etc. When "standards" come up in presentations and discussions do you: - Nod your head politely - Tune out and check your smart phone - Turn to your IT counterpart and say "Bob's all over this standards thing, right Bob?" Here's why standards matter. My wife wants new external doors downstairs, ones that would get more light into the rooms. Am I OK with that? "Uhh, sure...it's a little dark in the kitchen." - 24 hours ago - wife calls to tell me that she's going to the hardware store and may look at doors - 20 hours ago - wife pulls into driveway, informs me that two doors are in the back of her station wagon, ready for me to carry - 19 hours ago - I re-discovered the fact that it's not fun to carry a solid wood door by myself - 5 hours ago - Local handyman, who was at our house anyway, tells me that the doors we bought will likely cost 2-3x the material cost in installation time and labor...the doors are standard but our doorways aren't We could have done more research. I could be more handy. Sure. But the fact is, my 1951 house wasn't built with me in mind. They built what worked and called it a day. The same holds true with a lot of business applications. They were designed and architected for one-time use with one use-case in mind. Today's business climate is different. If you're going to use your processes and technology to differentiate your business you should have at least a working knowledge of: - How standards can benefit your business - Your IT organization's philosophy around standards - Your vendor's track-record around standards...and watch for those who pay lip-service to standards but don't follow through The rallying cry in most IT organizations today is "learn more about the business, drop the acronyms." I'm not advocating that you go out and learn how to code in Java. But I do believe it will help your business and your decision-making process if you meet IT ½...even ¼ of the way there. Epilogue: The door project has been put on hold and yours truly has to return the doors to the hardware store tomorrow.

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• MOSSLover Lives On&hellip;

  - by MOSSLover

  A while back, maybe 6 months, I got some bad news about 2010.  Microsoft was removing Office from the MOSS equivalent of 2010, so basically my alias would be obsolete the second 2010 caught on in the community.  I thought about it for some time.  I had some discussions with friends in the community.  I even noticed that the MOSSMan changed his twitter id.  I started my blog around a WSS 3.0 project when I worked for LRS in there St. Louis Office in February/March 2007.  So I think it’s fitting to keep the name, because my community involvement centers around 2007.  My first ever speaking ordeal was at the Kansas City Office Geeks meeting in November of 2007 on Disaster Recovery where about three people attended.  The first user group meeting I ever attended was around the month of June 2007 at the KC .Net User Group about two weeks after my braces were installed.  It’s definitely fitting to say that 2007 paved the way for everything that happened in the past 2/2 1/2 years.  If anyone asks what MOSSLover means I added a description on twitter and I also added my name.  I added my name for other reasons, because I’m sick of people thinking I am the guy in the photo.  Also, I’d like people to recognize me for who I am.  Everyone should expect less of the hat in the upcoming year and more of my hair.  I’ve taken a vow to wear the hat less and less this year.  I am sick of buying hats, plus I want to move forward to gain more self confidence.  The hat does not really help.  I will still wear a t-shirt and jeans in most of my presentations.  That is who I am and it will not change any time soon.  If you expect to see me in a skirt good luck with that as it won’t be happening unless I am forced at gun point.  I hope you guys have a good weekend.  Later all… Technorati Tags: MOSSLover,Cardinal's Hat,Becky Isserman

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• Enterprise with eyes on NoSQL

  - by thegreeneman

  Since joining Oracle a few months back, I have had the fortune of being able to interact with a number of large enterprise organizations and discuss their current state of adoption for NoSQL database technology.   It is worth noting that a large percentage of these organizations do have some NoSQL use and have been steadily increasing their understanding of its applicability for certain data management workloads.   Thru those discussions I’ve learned that it seems one of the biggest issues confronting enterprise adoption of NoSQL databases is the lack of standards for access, administration and monitoring.    This was not so much of an issue with the early adopters of NoSQL technology because they employed a highly DevOps centric approach to application deployment leaving a select few highly qualified developers with the task of managing the production of the system that they designed and implemented. However, as NoSQL technology moves out of the startup and into the hands of larger corporate entities, developers with a broad skill set that are capable of both development and I.T. type production management are in short supply and quickly get moved on to do new projects, often moving to different roles within the company.  This difference in the way smaller more agile startups operate as compared to more established companies is revealing a gap in the NoSQL technology segment that needs to get addressed.    This is one of places that a company such as Oracle has a leg up in the NoSQL Database front.  A combination of having gone thru a past database maturization process,  combined with a vast set of corporate relationships that have grown hand in hand to solve these types of issues, Oracle is in a great place to lead the way in closing the requirements gap for NoSQL technology.  Oracle's understanding of the needs specific to mature organizations have already made their way into the Oracle’s NoSQL Database offering with features such as:  One click cluster deployment with visual topology planning,  standards based monitoring protocols such as SNMP, support for data access for reporting via standard SQL  and integration with emerging standards for data access such as MapReduce.  Given the exciting developments we’re driving in the Oracle NoSQL Database group, I will have a lot more to say about this topic as we move into the second half of the year.

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• Is return-type-(only)-polymorphism in Haskell a good thing?

  - by dainichi

  One thing that I've never quite come to terms with in Haskell is how you can have polymorphic constants and functions whose return type cannot be determined by their input type, like class Foo a where foo::Int -> a Some of the reasons that I do not like this: Referential transparency: "In Haskell, given the same input, a function will always return the same output", but is that really true? read "3" return 3 when used in an Int context, but throws an error when used in a, say, (Int,Int) context. Yes, you can argue that read is also taking a type parameter, but the implicitness of the type parameter makes it lose some of its beauty in my opinion. Monomorphism restriction: One of the most annoying things about Haskell. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole reason for the MR is that computation that looks shared might not be because the type parameter is implicit. Type defaulting: Again one of the most annoying things about Haskell. Happens e.g. if you pass the result of functions polymorphic in their output to functions polymorphic in their input. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but this would not be necessary without functions whose return type cannot be determined by their input type (and polymorphic constants). So my question is (running the risk of being stamped as a "discussion quesion"): Would it be possible to create a Haskell-like language where the type checker disallows these kinds of definitions? If so, what would be the benefits/disadvantages of that restriction? I can see some immediate problems: If, say, 2 only had the type Integer, 2/3 wouldn't type check anymore with the current definition of /. But in this case, I think type classes with functional dependencies could come to the rescue (yes, I know that this is an extension). Furthermore, I think it is a lot more intuitive to have functions that can take different input types, than to have functions that are restricted in their input types, but we just pass polymorphic values to them. The typing of values like [] and Nothing seems to me like a tougher nut to crack. I haven't thought of a good way to handle them. I doubt I am the first person to have had thoughts like these. Does anybody have links to good discussions about this Haskell design decision and the pros/cons of it?

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• Remote Graphics Diagnostics with Windows RT 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2013/11/12/remote-graphics-diagnostics-with-windows-rt-8.1-and-visual-studio.aspxThis blog post is a brief follow up to my What’s New in Graphics and Game Development in Visual Studio 2013 post on the MVP Award blog. While writing that post I was testing out various features to try to make sure everything worked as expected. I had some trouble getting Remote Graphics Diagnostics (a/k/a remote graphics debugging) working on my first generation Surface RT (upgraded to Windows RT 8.1). It was more strange since I could use remote debugging when doing CPU debugging; it was just graphics debugging that was causing trouble. After some discussions with the great folks who work on the graphics tools in Visual Studio, they were able to repro the problem and recommend a solution. My Surface RT needed the ARM Kits policy installed on it. Once I followed the instructions on the previous link, I could successfully use Remote Graphics Diagnostics on my Surface RT. Please note that this requires Windows RT 8.1 RTM (i.e. not Preview) and that Remote Graphics Diagnostics on ARM only works when you are using Visual Studio 2013 as it is a new feature (it should work just fine using the Express for Windows version). Also, when I installed the ARM Kits policy I needed to do two things to get it to work properly. First, when following the “How to install the Kits policy” instructions, I needed to copy the SecureBoot folder into Program Files on my Surface RT (specifically, I copied the SecureBoot folder to “C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\arm\” on my Surface RT, creating any necessary directories). It may work if it’s in any system folder; I didn’t test any others after I got it working. I had initially put it in my Downloads folder and tried installing it from there. When the machine restarted it displayed a worrisome error message. I repeatedly pressed the button that would allow me to retry and eventually the machine rebooted and managed to recover itself to its previous state. Second, I needed to install it as an Administrator. The instructions say that this might be necessary. For me it was. This is a Remote Graphics Diagnostics is a great new feature in Visual Studio 2013 so I definitely encourage all of you to check it out!

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• Oracle OpenWorld is on the Horizon

  - by Matthew Haavisto

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is only a few months away, and we're excited about our slate of sessions and other activities scheduled this year.  PeopleSoft sessions are perennially among the best attended and well-received sessions, and we plan to keep that trend going. We have a full complement of sessions planned, from updates for some of your yearly favorites to lots of completely new topics.  Some of the long-standing favorites include the PeopleSoft Technology Roadmap, PeopleTools Tips and Techniques and a number of candid panel discussions. Coverage of the latest trends include new sessions on PeopleSoft on mobile platforms, PeopleSoft's new user experience and interaction model, advances in reporting and analytics and employing virtualization to reduce costs.  The PeopleTools team is also working closely with Applications groups this year to demonstrate to users how advances in PeopleTools will have a direct and beneficial impact on the latest applications releases.  There are plenty of sessions for developers and administrators as well, from sessions on enhancing, integrating, maintaining, and securing your applications, to tuning for performance.  We'll also update you on the latest platform roadmap. In addition to these conventional sessions, we will of course be manning the demo pods, where you'll be able to see the latest functionality first hand. We plan to engage in lots of direct customer interaction.  One of the highlights each year for our team as well as attendees is the session in which a panel of senior PeopleTools leaders talks candidly and engages in open Q&A with customers about our products.  This is definitely a discussion worth joining in on. Keep your eyes on this blog in the coming weeks for details on many of the sessions we have planned.  We look forward to seeing you at OpenWorld 2012!

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• JCP.next.3: time to get to work

  - by Patrick Curran

  As I've previously reported in this blog, we planned three JSRs to improve the JCP’s processes and to meet our members’ expectations for change. The first - JCP.next.1, or more formally JSR 348: Towards a new version of the Java Community Process - was completed in October 2011. This focused on a small number of simple but important changes to make our process more transparent and to enable broader participation. We're already seeing the benefits of these changes as new and existing JSRs adopt the new requirements. However, because we wanted to complete this JSR quickly we deliberately postponed a number of more complex items, including everything that would require modifying the JSPA (the legal agreement that members sign when they join the organization) to a follow-on JSR. The second JSR (JSR 355: JCP Executive Committee Merge) is in progress now and will complete later this year. This JSR is even simpler than the first, and is focused solely on merging the two Executive Committees into one for greater efficiency and to encourage synergies between the Java ME and Java SE platforms. Continuing the momentum to move Java and the JCP forward we have just filed the third JSR (JCP.next.3) as JSR 358: A major revision of the Java Community Process. This JSR will modify the JSPA as well as the Process Document, and will tackle a large number of complex issues, many of them postponed from JSR 348. For these reasons we expect to spend a considerable amount of time working on it - at least a year, and probably more. The current version of the JSPA was created back in 2002, although some minor changes were introduced in 2005. Since then the organization and the environment in which we operate have changed significantly, and it is now time to revise our processes to ensure that they meet our current needs. We have a long list of topics to be considered, including the role of independent implementations (those not derived from the Reference Implementation), licensing and open source, ensuring that our new transparency requirements are implemented correctly, compatibility policy and TCKs, the role of individual members, patent policy, and IP flow. The Expert Group for JSR 358, as with all process-change JSRs, consists of all members of the Executive Committees. Even though the JSR has just been filed we started discussions on the various topics several months ago (see the EC's meeting minutes for details) and our EC members - including the new members who joined within the last year or two - are actively engaged. Now it's your opportunity to get involved. As required by version 2.8 of our Process (introduced with JSR 348) we will conduct all our business in the open. We have a public java.net project where you can follow and participate in our work. All of our deliberations will be copied to a public Observer mailing list, we'll track our issues on a public Issue Tracker, and all our documents (meeting agendas and minutes, task lists, working drafts) will be published in our Document Archive. We're just getting started, but we do want your input. Please visit us on java.net where you can learn how to participate. Let's get to work...

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• Getting started with object detection - Image segmentation algorithm

  - by Dev Kanchen

  Just getting started on a hobby object-detection project. My aim is to understand the underlying algorithms and to this end the overall accuracy of the results is (currently) more important than actual run-time. I'm starting with trying to find a good image segmentation algorithm that provide a good jump-off point for the object detection phase. The target images would be "real-world" scenes. I found two techniques which mirrored my thoughts on how to go about this: Graph-based Image Segmentation: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~dph/papers/seg-ijcv.pdf Contour and Texture Analysis for Image Segmentation: http://www.eng.utah.edu/~bresee/compvision/files/MalikBLS.pdf The first one was really intuitive to understand and seems simple enough to implement, while the second was closer to my initial thoughts on how to go about this (combine color/intensity and texture information to find regions). But it's an order of magnitude more complex (at least for me). My question is - are there any other algorithms I should be looking at that provide the kind of results that these two, specific papers have arrived at. Are there updated versions of these techniques already floating around. Like I mentioned earlier, the goal is relative accuracy of image segmentation (with an eventual aim to achieve a degree of accuracy of object detection) over runtime, with the algorithm being able to segment an image into "naturally" or perceptually important components, as these two algorithms do (each to varying extents). Thanks! P.S.1: I found these two papers after a couple of days of refining my search terms and learning new ones relevant to the exact kind of techniques I was looking for. :) I have just about reached the end of my personal Google creativity, which is why I am finally here! Thanks for the help. P.S.2: I couldn't find good tags for this question. If some relevant ones exist, @mods please add them. P.S.3: I do not know if this is a better fit for cstheory.stackexchange (or even cs.stackexchange). I looked but cstheory seems more appropriate for intricate algorithmic discussions than a broad question like this. Also, I couldn't find any relevant tags there either! But please do move if appropriate.

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• Why shouldn't I be using public variables in my Java class?

  - by Omega

  In school, I've been told many times to stop using public for my variables. I haven't asked why yet. This question: Are Java's public fields just a tragic historical design flaw at this point? seems kinda related to this. However, they don't seem to discuss why is it "wrong", but instead focus on how can they use them instead. Look at this (unfinished) class: public class Reporte { public String rutaOriginal; public String rutaNueva; public int bytesOriginales; public int bytesFinales; public float ganancia; /** * Constructor para objetos de la clase Reporte */ public Reporte() { } } No need to understand Spanish. All this class does is hold some statistics (those public fields) and then do some operations with them (later). I will also need to be modifying those variables often. But well, since I've been told not to use public, this is what I ended up doing: public class Reporte { private String rutaOriginal; private String rutaNueva; private int bytesOriginales; private int bytesFinales; private float ganancia; /** * Constructor para objetos de la clase Reporte */ public Reporte() { } public String getRutaOriginal() { return rutaOriginal; } public String getRutaNueva() { return rutaNueva; } public int getBytesOriginales() { return bytesOriginales; } public int getBytesFinales() { return bytesFinales; } public float getGanancia() { return ganancia; } public void setRutaOriginal(String rutaOriginal) { this.rutaOriginal = rutaOriginal; } public void setRutaNueva(String rutaNueva) { this.rutaNueva = rutaNueva; } public void setBytesOriginales(int bytesOriginales) { this.bytesOriginales = bytesOriginales; } public void setBytesFinales(int bytesFinales) { this.bytesFinales = bytesFinales; } public void setGanancia(float ganancia) { this.ganancia = ganancia; } } Looks kinda pretty. But seems like a waste of time. Google searches about "When to use public in Java" and "Why shouldn't I use public in Java" seem to discuss about a concept of mutability, although I'm not really sure how to interpret such discussions. I do want my class to be mutable - all the time.

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• MVC Can the model know ANYTHING about the view?

  - by AwDogsGo2Heaven

  I'm working on a game, and without getting into any details I am using MVC "patterns", "rules" or whatever you want to call it to make the game. The view includes everything needed to draw things on the screen, the controller passes input to the model. And the Model contains game logic. Here's my problem, the game is being made for mobile devices that vary in screen sizes. I feel my model needs to know the view size so it can appropriately adjust for it. I've thought about it for a while I could put all the adjustments in the view, but it just seems inefficient to translate the model positioning to the view's needed positioning every time. If the model knows the size it only needed to adjust itself once. So my question is can I pass the view size to the model without 'breaking' MVC? I feel personally they are still decoupled this way because a size is just a number, I could still change the view any time as long as it has a size. But I wanted to get a community response on this because I haven't seen many discussions of MVC being used in a game. (And to be clear I don't want an answer of why I shouldn't use it in a game, but do I break MVC by letting it know the view's size) EDIT - More details on the game's needs and why I wanted to pass the view. Some objects positions need to be set relative to the edge of the screen (such as UI elements) so that they appear relatively in the same place. Sprite sizes are not stretched if the window size is wider such as an IPhone 5 screen. They will just be placed relatively to the screen edge. .If I gave it to the view to handle this, I will need a flag saying that this element is positioned say x number of pixels from TOP BOTTOM RIGHT LEFT. Then allow the view to draw it with that information. Its acceptable, I just wanted to know if there was a better way while still being MVC because it seems this way will be repeating a logic over and over, where as if I knew the view size in the model, I could convert all the relative positions into absolute positions in one run, but with this I have to convert on every update to the screen.

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• Performance of file operations on thousands of files on NTFS vs HFS, ext3, others

  - by peterjmag

  [Crossposted from my Ask HN post. Feel free to close it if the question's too broad for superuser.] This is something I've been curious about for years, but I've never found any good discussions on the topic. Of course, my Google-fu might just be failing me... I often deal with projects involving thousands of relatively small files. This means that I'm frequently performing operations on all of those files or a large subset of them—copying the project folder elsewhere, deleting a bunch of temporary files, etc. Of all the machines I've worked on over the years, I've noticed that NTFS handles these tasks consistently slower than HFS on a Mac or ext3/ext4 on a Linux box. However, as far as I can tell, the raw throughput isn't actually slower on NTFS (at least not significantly), but the delay between each individual file is just a tiny bit longer. That little delay really adds up for thousands of files. (Side note: From what I've read, this is one of the reasons git is such a pain on Windows, since it relies so heavily on the file system for its object database.) Granted, my evidence is merely anecdotal—I don't currently have any real performance numbers, but it's something that I'd love to test further (perhaps with a Mac dual-booting into Windows). Still, my geekiness insists that someone out there already has. Can anyone explain this, or perhaps point me in the right direction to research it further myself?

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• Can’t connect to SQL Server 2008 - looks like Shared Memory problem

  - by user38556

  I am unable to connect to my local instance of SQL Server 2008 Express using SQL Server Management Studio. I believe the problem is related to a change I made to the connection protocols. Before the error occurred, I had Shared Memory enabled and Named Pipes and TCP/IP disabled. I then enabled both Named Pipes and TCP/IP, and this is when I started experiencing the problem. When I try to connect to the server with SSMS (with either my SQL server sysadmin login or with windows authentication), I get the following error message: A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 0 - No process is on the other end of the pipe.) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 233) Why is it returning a Named Pipes error? Why would it not just use Shared Memory, as this has a higher priority order in the list of connection protocols? It seems like it is not listening on Shared Memory for some reason? When I set Named Pipes to enabled and try to connect, I get the same error message. My windows account is does not have administrator priviliges on my computer - perhaps this is making a difference in some way (as some of the discussions in this post about an "SuperSocketNetLib\Lpc" registry key seems to suggest). I have tried restarting the SQL Server service, by the way, and also tried to get someone to log onto the machine with an admin account to restart the SQL Server service. Still no luck.

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• Authenticating Active Directory Users to Mac OS X Mavericks Server L2TP VPN Service

  - by dean

  We have a Windows Server 2012 Active Directory Infrastructure that consists of two domain controllers. Bound to the Active Directory Domain is a Mac OS X Mavericks Server 10.9.3. The server runs Profile Manager and VPN Services. My Active Directory users are able to authenticate to the Profile Manager, but not the VPN. I have found several threads on other forums of other users reporting similar issues, here is just one of many references: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5174619 It appears as though the issue is related to a CHAP authentication failure. Can anyone suggest what next troubleshooting steps I might take? Is there a way to liberalize the authentication mechanism to include MSCHAP? Here is an excerpt of the transaction from the logs. Please note the domain has been changed to example.com. Jun 6 15:25:03 profile-manager.example.com vpnd[10317]: Incoming call... Address given to client = 192.168.55.217 Jun 6 15:25:03 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: publish_entry SCDSet() failed: Success! Jun 6 15:25:03 --- last message repeated 2 times --- Jun 6 15:25:03 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: pppd 2.4.2 (Apple version 727.90.1) started by root, uid 0 Jun 6 15:25:03 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: L2TP incoming call in progress from '108.46.112.181'... Jun 6 15:25:03 profile-manager.example.com racoon[257]: pfkey DELETE received: ESP 192.168.55.12[4500]->108.46.112.181[4500] spi=25137226(0x17f904a) Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: L2TP connection established. Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager kernel[0]: ppp0: is now delegating en0 (type 0x6, family 2, sub-family 0) Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: Connect: ppp0 <--> socket[34:18] Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: CHAP peer authentication failed for alex Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: Connection terminated. Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: L2TP disconnecting... Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com pppd[10677]: L2TP disconnected Jun 6 15:25:04 profile-manager.example.com vpnd[10317]: --> Client with address = 192.168.55.217 has hung up

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• Thunderbird: how to move mails into correct thread? (mailing lists)

  - by unor

  I'm subscribed to some mailing lists and every day people reply to a wrong mail (or they don't reply at all), so that their mail lands in the wrong (or a new) thread. I set the mail display in "View ? Sort by" to "Threaded". Example: mailing list "Foobar": [Foobar] random topic Re: [Foobar] random topic Re: [Foobar] random topic Re: [Foobar] random topic Re: [Foobar] random topic [Foobar] I'm John Doe Re: [Foobar] I'm John Doe Re: [Foobar] Welcome, John Re: [Foobar] random topic There are two discussions, one about "random topic", one about "John Doe". The subject line changes in the discussion about John Doe, which is fine (no problem here). But the last mail should be pigeonholed in the first thread. Instead it is at the top-level. Now, how can I move that last mail into the correct thread? I tried to drag&drop it at the mail I think it should be a reply to, but this doesn't work. I think theoretically it should be possible by fiddling with the mail headers after receiving the mail, but this doesn't seem to be a comfortable way.

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• How do I export address book from N97

  - by mplungjan

  Hi, I need to copy my numbers from my private Nokia to my office BB. I have not found a way to export my phone numbers from ovi or elsewhere. On Mac iSync stopped working with snow leopard and OVI on windows does not export. I do not mind using a windows suggestion. I lost a description on how to use the ovi backup files in another program. What I have done so far terminal: sudo open -a iSync.app - it launched but iSync said "this device is not supported by iSync" went here http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/isync/compatibility-and-download found a plugin (I am sure that was not there a while ago :| ) Checked software version 22.0.110 installed plugin Ran iSync which found and installed my N97 device successfully. synced. It stopped with The connection was lost while talking to the phone. http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/N97-iSync-Multimedia-Transfer-Modem/m-p/568560 no news since Jan 2010. Tried to download and install http://best-vcard.en.softonic.com/symbian but the installer fails :( I simply do not understand why Nokia is giving us such a hard time. I would not have considered switching from Nokia if Mac had been better supported. It is so frustrating that they just seem not to care losing Nokia fanbois like me - especially since I am this outspoken on the net and what i say on popular forums gets indexed by google fast. I am very close to just go iPhone here. Hope someone has Nokia's ears UPDATE: I Downloaded NbuExplorer from sourceforge. It will extract everything from an OVI backup into VCF, VCS and VMG files. Very useful software and free.

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• Huge or minimal performance hit running game servers on a Virtual Machine? [closed]

  - by Damainman

  I have a two dedicated servers to choose from depending on which one would do a better job. I plan on updating the Hard Drive space and RAM at a later date depending on how I move forward. Server 1: 500GB Hard Drive 8GB RAM 2x 64bit Intel Xeon L5420(Quad Core) @ 2.50Ghz Server2: 500GB Hard Drive 8GB RAM 2x 64bit Intel Xeon E5420(Quad Core) @ 2.50GHz I want to run a virtual machine that will host about 10 game servers, with about 16 active slots per server. It will be a mix and match from: Minecraft Counter Strike( 1.6, Source, Global Offensive) Battlefield Team Fortress I know the general consensus is virtualization is a horrible idea if you plan on running virtual servers on them. The issue is, the discussions I read do not really clearly state whether they are speaking about a virtual server running inside an OS(ie: VMware Player running on Windows with the game server in a VM) or a Hypervisor such as Xen Cloud Platform. I am trying to get a definite answer on how feasible the above would be and how much of a performance hit it might be if the VM running the game servers is on a hypervisor such as Xen Cloud Platform. My initial research lead me to believe that there wouldn't be a performance hit since the virtualization is different than running it via inside of a OS.

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• Mac Security - Which one?

  - by Bob Rivers

  Hi, Recently I had my credit card cloned. A few hours after shopping at an online store (in which I trust and buy since 2006) I received a call from my bank asking if I recognize a $5,000 debt to a store(?!) called Church of Christ... I'm a Mac user (OS X 10.6.3). I always kept my system updated and I have firewall enabled (in my Mac and in my broadband router), but I decided to adopt some kind of protection. I don't want to rise passionate discussions. Real or not, snake oil or not, I need to have back my peace of mind... I read this and this posts. I selected two software that I think that could help me (both have more features other than just an antivirus). Does someone have feedback about Intego's VirusBarrier X6 or Trendmicro's Smart Surfing? Intego solutions seems to be better, but TrendMicro brand/name is stronger in corporate environment, so their solution should be good. Both solutions have 30 day free trial, but I would like to hear something from you. Any other solution that I should look? TIA, Bob

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• Apache2 process stuck at 100% cpu, CLOSE_WAIT socket lingering

  - by mmazing

  I've troubleshooted the heck out of this today, and I can't seem to find any information on how to determine what is happening exactly. Basically, on my development server, another developer is causing CLOSE_WAIT connections that eat up one or more apache2 processes for several hours if I don't restart apache2. strace on any of the processes yields no information, only that it was able to attach. mod_proxy is not enabled. KeepAlive is on, KeepAliveTimeout is 15 seconds, MaxKeepAliveRequests is 100. From what I've been reading, this may or may not be an apache issue at all, just that that's how CLOSE_WAIT works (the server is waiting for a FIN packet to close the connection). I just can't believe that a server would be crippled so easily by not receiving a packet from a remote host telling it to close the connection. Especially without any intervention for well over an hour. Any tips? I'm about to pull my hair out. Edit : Also, there are no unusual entries in any apache log files. Edit 2: lsof -i shows only a single CLOSE_WAIT per hanging process. (That's what has been bothering me about this, as most other discussions talk about many CLOSE_WAIT connections, while I only have one per process.) The nature of the code that is running (php) doesn't really lend itself to closing open connections and whatnot. I can run the same code that he is executing with the same session data, and not result in a hanging process.

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• Share Point ACL on OSX Lion Server - Posix group always takes over ACLs

  - by Ben

  Trying to configure a share point on a Lion Server machine. The directory is created by the local server admin (serveradmin) and has rwxr-x--- given to it. The serveradmin user belongs to the local staff group so serveradmin readwrite staff group read Others none We have an OD group for all the employees (Workers) . Using the Server tool we've given Full Control to the share point: Workers Full Control serveradmin readwrite staff group read Others none We would assume that Workers could then do what they want on the share but that doesn't seem to be the case. It appears the POSIX permissions take over the ACL permissions for Worker. If I change the staff permission to readwrite then the Workers can create a file or folder in the share point. I would think the ACL should take over but it doesn't, posix always win, rendering ACL useless. Furthermore if I leave the readwrite permission for staff and take Write permission away for the Workers group then the posix group still wins. Essentially the Workers ACL does absolutely nothing. There are reports of similar problems in this Apple forum thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3722901 The directory nesting fix suggested there doesn't work for us. Has anyone had similar issues and know how to fix this? Edit: in Workgroup Manager the employees user are set to primary group staff and given the additional OD group Workers. Changing their primary group doesn't help, it only shifts the problem onto Others taking over rights (logically) Edit 2: Ok, this is interesting, adding OD Users to the share's ACL works totally fine

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• How to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Apple Macbook Pro MacBookPro4,1

  - by Todd V. Rovito

  I have a one year old Mac Book Pro that I am trying to get RHEL 5.4 installed on via bootcamp. No matter what I do I can't get the installer to boot. I have tried multiple DVD's and even verified the install works on a new Mac Book Pro. Most of the time the installer simply locks up. I usually use Linux text with all-generic-ide on the boot line. I removed the ide parameter and I just used linux text. The results I get are that a bunch of kernel messages appear then the background turns blue and a thin text box pops up saying its loading ata..... something it disappears too fast for me to read. Then the machine freezes. I pressed the alt function keys to see if I could look at the system log, here is what it says: Alt-f3 says "trying to mount CD device hda" Alt-f4 says status error: hda: lastFailedSense Hda: Failed opcode was: unknown Hda: Lost interrupt Hda: Drive not ready for command Ide-cd: command 0x3 timed out Above this junk it looks like it found the partition because it knew it was 20 GB and listed as /dev/sda3. I think it has something to do with the CD drive, is that possible? Thanks again for the support. PS I posted in the apple support forums ( Apple.com Support Discussions Boot Camp Installation and Storage) and didn't get an answer.

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