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• My Rails session is getting reset when I have concurrent requests

  - by alex_c

  I think I might be misunderstanding something about Rails sessions, so please bear with me, I might not be phrasing my question the best way. I'm working on an iPhone app with a Ruby on Rails backend. I have a web view which by default goes to the index action of one controller (and uses sessions), and in the background a bunch of API calls going to a different controller (and which don't need to use sessions). The problem is, the sessions set by my web view seem to be overwitten by the API calls. My staging server is pretty slow, so there's lots of time for the requests to overlap each other - what I see in the logs is basically this: Request A (first controller) starts. Session is empty. Request B (second controller) starts. Session is empty. Request A finishes. Request A has done authentication, and stored the user ID in the session. Session contains user ID. Request B finishes. Session is empty. Request C starts. Session is empty - not what I want. Now, the strange thing is that request B should NOT be writing anything to the session. I do have before and after filters which READ from the session - things like: user = User.find_by_id(session[:id]) or logger.debug session.inspect and if I remove all of those, then everything works as expected - session contents get set by request A, and they're still there when request C starts. So. I think I'm missing something about how sessions work. Why would reading from the session overwrite it? Should I be accessing it some other way? Am I completely on the wrong track and the problem is elsewhere? Thank you for any insights!

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• Organising files and classes in XCode (iPhone application)

  - by pulegium

  It's a generic question and really a newbie one too, so bear with me... I'm playing with some iPhone development, and trying to create a simple "flip type" application. Nothing sophisticated, let's say on the flip side is a short application summary, bit like 'help' and on the main screen is a simple board game, let's say tic-tac-toe or similar. Now, XCode has generated me 'Main View', 'Flipside View' and 'Application Delegate' folders, with default template files in them. Now the question is where do I create appropriate 'MVC' classes? Let's say (V)iew classes are going to be the ones that have been automatically created. So the Flipside view class is responsible for generating text/images etc on the 'help' view. 'Main View' class is what draws the items on the table and updates the counters, etc. Where should I place the 'controller' class? And also, should it only be dealing with proxying only to the model? According to this the controller method is called from the view and manipulates the method classes. Similarly, the results from model are passed back to the view class by the controller issuing the calls to appropriate view methods. Similarly, where does the model class go? or should I just create a new folder for each, controller and model class files? What I'm after is the best practices, or just a short description how people normally structure their applications. I know it's very specific and also undefined... I came from Django background, so the way stuff is organised there is slightly different. Hope this makes sense, sorry if it's all bit vague, but I have to start somewhere :) And yes I've read quite few docs on the apple developer site, but trouble is that the documents are either going into too much detail about the language/framework/etc and the examples are way too simplistic. Actually, this leads me to the final question, has anyone know any good example of relatively complete application tutorial which I could use as a reference in organising my files?...

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• Cakephp 1.3, Weird behavior on firefox when using $this->Html->link ...

  - by ion

  Greetings, I am getting a very weird and unpredictable result in firefox when using the following syntax: $this->Html->link($this->Html->div('p-cpt',$project['Project']['name']) . $this->Html->div('p-img',$this->Html->image('/img/projects/'.$project['Project']['slug'].'/project.thumb.jpg', array('alt'=>$project['Project']['name'],'width'=>100,'height'=>380))),array('controller' => 'projects', 'action' => 'view', $project['Project']['slug']),array('title' => $project['Project']['name'], 'escape' => false),false); OK I know it is big but bear with me. The point is to get the following output: <a href="x" title="x"> <div class="p-ctp">Name</div> <div class="p-img"><img src="z width="y" height="a" alt="d" /></div> </a> I'm not sure if this validates correctly both on cakephp and html but it works everywhere else apart from firefox. You can actually see the result here: http://www.gnomonconstructions.com/projects/browser To reproduce the result use the form with different categories and press search. At some point it will happen!! Although most of the time it renders the way it should, sometimes it produces an invalid output like that: <a href="x" title="x"></a> <div class="p-cpt"> <a href="x" title="x">name</a> </div> <div class="p-img"> <a href="x" title="x"><img src="x" width="x" height="x" alt="x" /></a> </div> Looks like it repeats the link inside each element. To be honest the only reason I used this syntax was because cakephp encourages it. Any help will be much appreciated :)

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• Creating a C++ DLL and then using it in C#

  - by Major

  Ok I'm trying to make a C++ DLL that I can then call and reference in a c# App. I've already made a simple dll using the numberous guides out there, however when I try to reference it in the C# app I get the error Unable to load DLL 'SDES.dll': The specified module could not be found. The code for the program is as follows (bear with me I'm going to include all the files) //These are the DLL Files. ifndef TestDLL_H define TestDLL_H extern "C" { // Returns a + b __declspec(dllexport) double Add(double a, double b); // Returns a - b __declspec(dllexport) double Subtract(double a, double b); // Returns a * b __declspec(dllexport) double Multiply(double a, double b); // Returns a / b // Throws DivideByZeroException if b is 0 __declspec(dllexport) double Divide(double a, double b); } endif //.cpp include "test.h" include using namespace std; extern double __cdecl Add(double a, double b) { return a + b; } extern double __cdecl Subtract(double a, double b) { return a - b; } extern double __cdecl Multiply(double a, double b) { return a * b; } extern double __cdecl Divide(double a, double b) { if (b == 0) { throw new invalid_argument("b cannot be zero!"); } return a / b; } //C# Program using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; namespace ConsoleApplication1 { class Program { [DllImport("SDES.dll")] public static extern void SimulateGameDLL(int a, int b); static void Main(string[] args) { SimulateGameDLL(1, 2); //Error here... } } } Anyone have any idea's what I may be missing in my program? Let me know if I missed some code or if you have any questions.

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• complete nub.. iostream file not found

  - by user1742389

  folks I am almost completely new to programming so please bear with me. I am using the first example from lydia.com c++ videos and failing. I am using Xcode 4.5.1 with a c++ command line project instead of eclipse and I am getting an error on compile of iostream file not found. the code is simple and I will include exactly what I have at the end of this message. I thought that iostream was a standard header that came with all even remotely recent versions of c++ compilers and am shocked to get this error and I cannot find any way to fix this. please tell me whats going on. #include <iostream> #include <stdio.h> #include <sstream> #include <vector> int main(int argc, char ** argv) { stringstream version; version << "GCC Version"; _GNUC_<<"."<<_GNUC_MINOR_<<"."<<_GNUC_PATCHLEVEL_<<_"\nVersion String: " <<_VERSION_; cout <<version.string() endl; vector<string> v={"one","two","three"}; for ( s : v ) { cout << s <<endl; } // insert code here... printf("Hello, World!\n"); return 0; } Thanks.

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• (HTML) PNG on top of another PNG - possible to eliminate full transparency?

  - by MHTri

  I'd like to put a logo png onto of another coloured png. They both have transparent backgrounds. When I try this the images blend together. Curiously, in Photoshop the logo retains its opaque-ness - I put colours on the layers underneath it, another image, etc etc, the logo is still opaque. I'd like to do it this way so I can rotate the background images. How do I fix this? [edit]I've cooked up an example image: http://i.imgur.com/XtoGn.png The left is what I want to happen, the right is what happens on all browsers (I know the background isn't transparent but bear with me - they're both transparent pngs, with the background having a gradient layer mask). I've put the images like this <div> <img id="backgroundImg" style="position: absolute; top: 0;" src="/Images/background.png" /> <img id="logoImg" src="/Images/logo.png" /> </div> I'm not entirely sure what blending mode I'm using in PS.

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• Java applet wont run

  - by Courtney

  I am trying to get a Java applet to run properly when linked to an HTML page in Dreamweaver CC. I'm new to all this so please bear with me here. First I saved this code to a .java file //Triangle.java import java.awt.*; import java.applet.Applet; public class Triangle extends Applet { public void paint (Graphics g){ int bottomX=80; int bottomY=200; int base=100; int height=100; g.drawLine(bottomX,bottomY,bottomX+base,bottomY); g.drawLine(bottomX+base,bottomY,bottomX+base/2,bottomY-height); g.drawLine(bottomX+base/2,bottomY-height, bottomX,bottomY); } } I then compiled it entering javac Triangle.java After that, I inserted it into a Dreamwever page using: <html> <applet code=Triangle.class width=400 height=400 > </applet> </html> Now when I try and open the page in Chrome I get an error reading: UnsupportedClassVersionError Triangle: Unsupported major.minor version 52.0 This, as I have read, is an issue with using two incompatible Java versions? In my Java Control Panel it says I am using version 1.8.0_20 and my JDK is jdk1.8.0_20. Does anyone see anything super obvious that I am doing wrong here?

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• Is CDS a valid analogy for pointers? [closed]

  - by Flinkman

  So.. bear with me. I just found an analogy to c++ pointers and CDS. This clip describes CDS(Credit Default Swaps). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPNdYtrlgaU#t=120s "Here we know we have an instrument of a particular financial instrument that is demonstrably dangerous, it creates long chains of risk which are vulnerable to the failure of individual trader or market partipants, in that chain and these instruments in an affect permit the creation of vicious spirals. In which the CDS price interact with the bound price, the market price and you can have a downward spiral." What my ears are telling me: "Don't create dependences that will create long chains of crashing systems." Update: Trying to clarify with something that is closer to the readers. If I change the words: instrument = construct financial = language trader = object market partipants = c structs CDS price = uptime bound price = outcome market price = ROI(return on incestment) The quote become more understandable. Look: "Here we know we have construct of a particular language construct that is demonstrably dangerous, it creates long chains of risk which are vulnerable to the failure of individual object or structs in that chain and these system in an affect permit the creation of vicious spirals. In which the uptime interact with the outcome, the ROI and you can have a downward spiral."

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• Python: Calling method A from class A within class B?

  - by Tommo

  There are a number of questions that are similar to this, but none of the answers hits the spot - so please bear with me. I am trying my hardest to learn OOP using Python, but i keep running into errors (like this one) which just make me think this is all pointless and it would be easier to just use methods. Here is my code: class TheGUI(wx.Frame): def __init__(self, title, size): wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, 1, title, size=size) # The GUI is made ... textbox.TextCtrl(panel1, 1, pos=(67,7), size=(150, 20)) button1.Bind(wx.EVT_BUTTON, self.button1Click) self.Show(True) def button1Click(self, event): #It needs to do the LoadThread function! class WebParser: def LoadThread(self, thread_id): #It needs to get the contents of textbox! TheGUI = TheGUI("Text RPG", (500,500)) TheParser = WebParser TheApp.MainLoop() So the problem i am having is that the GUI class needs to use a function that is in the WebParser class, and the WebParser class needs to get text from a textbox that exists in the GUI class. I know i could do this by passing the objects around as parameters, but that seems utterly pointless, there must be a more logical way to do this that doesn't using classes seem so pointless? Thanks in advance!

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• .NET Development of iPhone App with MonoTouch - which development environment?

  - by Click Ahead

  Hi All, I'm a .NET developer (C#) with several years developing Windows Mobile Apps. I would like to get into developing iPhone Apps and MonoTouch looks good based on reviews I've read. So I'm going to go with MonoTouch. My understanding is that I'll need a new Mac, but as it happens I also need a new PC for my .NET windows development. My question is should I (a) Purchase a Mac Book Pro and dual boot with Windows 7 (b) Purchase a Mac Pro and dual boot with Windows 7 (c) Purchase a good Dev PC and a slighlty less well spec'd Mac Book Pro or Mac Pro Bear in mind I'm only doing MonoTouch development with the Mac, most of my development (approx. 80% initially) will be done on the Windows side. My budget is approx. €3,000 / $4,000 and I'd like a good, fast development environment.It's purely for development so on the windows side installing SQL 2008/VS 2010/Office and on the OS X side installing MonoTouch. BTW - my budget excludes licensing for VS/MonoTouch/etc, I have a MonoTouch and MSDN license. Any opinions are greatly appreciated. I'm a newbie to Mac's !

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• UPDATE Table SET Field

  - by davlyo

  This is my Very first Post! Bear with me. I have an Update Statement that I am trying to understand how SQL Server handles it. UPDATE a SET a.vField3 = b.vField3 FROM tableName a INNER JOIN tableName b ON a.vField1 = b.vField1 AND b.nField2 = a.nField2 – 1 This is my query in its simplest form. vField1 is a Varchar nField2 is an int (autonumber) vField3 is a Varchar I have left the WHERE clause out so understand there is logic that otherwise makes this a nessessity. Say vField1 is a Customer Number and that Customer has 3 records The value in nField2 is 1, 2, and 3 consecutively. vField3 is a Status When the Update comes to a.nField2 = 1 there is no a.nField2 -1 so it continues When the Update comes to a.nField2 = 2, b.nField2 = 1 When the Update comes to a.nField2 = 3, b.nField2 = 2 So when the Update is on a.nField2 = 2, alias b reflects what is on the line prior (b.nField2 = 1) And it SETs the Varchar Value of a.vField3 = b.vField3 When the Update is on a.nField2 = 3, alias b reflects what is on the line prior (b.nField2 = 2) And it (should) SET the Varchar Value of a.vField3 = b.vField3 When the process is complete –the Second of three records looks as expected –hence the value in vField3 of the second record reflects the value in vField3 from the First record However, vField3 of the Third record does not reflect the value in vField3 from the Second record. I think this demonstrates that SQL Server may be producing a transaction of some sort and then an update. Question: How can I get the DB to Update after each transaction so I can reference the values generated by each transaction?

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• MySQL table doesn't update, can't find the error message

  - by mobius1ski

  My knowledge level here is like zilch, but please bear with me. I have a site built in PHP/MySQL that uses the Smarty template engine. There's a registration form that, for some reason, isn't posting the data to the DB. Here's the function: $u = new H_User; $u->setFrom($p); $smarty->assign('user', $u); $val = $u->validate(); if ($val === true) { $temp = new H_User; $temp->orderBy('user_id desc'); $temp->find(true); $next_id = $temp->user_id + 1; $u->user_id = $next_id; $u->user_password = md5($p['user_password']); $u->user_regdate = mktime(); $u->user_active = 0; $u->insert(); $hash = md5($u->user_email . $u->user_regdate); $smarty->assign('hash', $hash); $smarty->assign('user', $u); $smarty->assign('registration_complete', true); $d = new H_Demographic; $d->setFrom($p); $d->insert(); How can I figure out what's wrong here? I don't get any PHP errors and I don't know how to get MySQL to display the errors that might indicate what's wrong with that syntax.

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• how to organize classes in ruby if they are literal subclasses

  - by RetroNoodle

  I know that title didn't make sense, Im sorry! Its hard to word what I am trying to ask. I had trouble googling it for the same reason. So this isn't even Ruby specific, but I am working in ruby and I am new to it, so bear with me. So you have a class that is a document. Inside each document, you have sentences, and each sentence has words. Words will have properties, like "noun" or a count of how many times they are used in the document, etc. I would like each of the elements, document, sentence, word be an object. Now, if you think literally - sentences are in documents, and words are in sentences. Should this be organized literally like this as well? Like inside the document class you will define and instantiate the sentence objects, and inside the sentence class you will define and instantiate the words? Or, should everything be separate and reference each other? Like the word class would sit outside the sentence class but the sentence class would be able to instantiate and work with words? This is a basic OOP question I guess, and I suppose you could argue to do it either way. What do you guys think? Each sentence in the document could be stored in a hash of sentence objects inside the document object, and each word in the sentence could be stored in a hash of word objects inside the sentence. I dont want to code myself into a corner here, thats why I am asking, plus I have wondered this before in other situations. Thank you!

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• Filter design for audio signal.

  - by beanyblue

  What I am trying to do is simple. I have a few .wav files. I want to remove noise and filter out specific frequencies. I don't have matlab and I intend to write my own code for all the filters. Right now, I have a way to read the .wav file and dump out the structure into a text file. My questions are the following: Can I directly apply the digital filters on this sampled data?{ ie, can I directly do a convolution between my input samples and h(n) for the filter function that i choose?). How do I choose the number of coefficients for the Window function? I have octave, so if someone can point me to anything that gives me some idea on how to process the .wav file using octave, that would be great too. I want to be able to filter out the frequency and then listen to the sound again. Is this possible with octave? I'm just a beginner with these kinds of things, so please bear with me if my questions are too naive. Any help will be great.

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• Applying iterative algorithm to a set of rows from database

  - by Corvin

  Hello, this question may seem too basic to some, but please bear with be, it's been a while since I dealt with decent database programming. I have an algorithm that I need to program in PHP/MySQL to work on a website. It performs some computations iteratively on an array of objects (it ranks the objects based on their properties). In each iteration the algorithm runs through all collection a couple of times, accessing various data from different places of the whole collection. The algorithm needs several hundred iterations to complete. The array comes from a database. The straightforward solution that I see is to take the results of a database query and create an object for each row of the query, put the objects to an array and pass the array to my algorithm. However, I'm concerned with efficacy of such solution when I have to work with an array of several thousand of items because what I do is essentially mirror the results of a query to memory. On the other hand, making database query a couple of times on each iteration of the algorithm also seems wrong. So, my question is - what is the correct architectural solution for a problem like this? Is it OK to mirror the query results to memory? If not, which is the best way to work with query results in such an algorithm? Thanks!

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• android app doesn't show on the emulator

  - by Anna Finela Constantino

  I made an android application using eclipse and it is working fine when I started developing my app. But then as I continue to develop the app the emulator seems to be not updating the application prior to the changes I have made on the code. So I tried deleting my avd and create a new one every time I run my app, and that seems to have worked. Now my problem is that my emulator doesn't show my app. It says "Failed to install *.apk on device 'emulator-5554': An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine". I searched for ways to solved it but none of it seems to have worked. I tried killing the adb process (as most my searches would say) on the task manager but still my app doesn't show on the emulator. The emulator is running and all but my icon is nowhere to be found. Am I misssing out something? Is the problem connected to the first problem i had before? As I said, I started developing android app recently, so please bear with me. :) I appreciate all your help.Thanks in advance.

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• Setting default values for object properties in AS3

  - by Paul T

  I'm an actionscript newbie so please bear with me. Below is a function, and I am curious how to set default property values for objects that are being created in a loop. In the example below, these propeties are the same for each object created in the loop: titleTextField.selectable, titleTextField.wordWrap, titleTextField.x If you pull these properties out of the loop, they are null because the TextField objects have not been created, but it seems silly to have to set them each time. What is the correct way to do this. Thanks! var titleTextFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat(); titleTextFormat.size = 10; titleTextFormat.font = "Arial"; titleTextFormat.color = 0xfff200; for (var i=0; i<arrThumbPicList.length; i++) { var yPos = 55 * i var titleTextField:TextField = new TextField(); titleTextField.selectable = false; titleTextField.wordWrap = true; titleTextField.text = arrThumbTitles[i]; titleTextField.x = 106; titleTextField.y = 331 + yPos; container.addChild(titleTextField); titleTextField.setTextFormat(titleTextFormat); }

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• PHP: Need help with simple XML.

  - by Jack

  I am beginner in PHP. I am trying to parse this xml file. <relationship> <target> <following type="boolean">true</following> <followed_by type="boolean">true</followed_by> <screen_name>xxxx</screen_name> <id type="integer">xxxx</id> </target> </relationship> I need to get the value of the field 'following type="boolean" ' and here's my code - $xml = simplexml_load_string($response); foreach($xml->children() as $child) { if ($child->getName() == 'target') { foreach($child->children() as $child_1) if ( $child_1->getName() == 'following') { $is_my_friend = (bool)$child_1; break; } break; } } but I am not getting the correct output. I think the ' type="boolean" ' part of the field is creating problems. I know this might be a very trivial problem. Kindly bear with my ignorance. Please help.

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• SQLAuthority News – SQL Server Technology Evangelists and Evangelism

  - by pinaldave

  This is the exact conversation that I had with three people during the recent SQL Server Public Training. Person 1: “Are you an SQL Server Evangelist?” Pinal : “No, but Vinod Kumar is.” Person 1: “Who are you?” Person 2: “He is Pinal, haha!” Person 1: “I know that, but don’t you evangelize SQL Server Technology?” Pinal : “Hmm… I do that…” Person 1: “In that case, why don’t you call yourself an Evangelist?” Pinal : “…! …” Person 2: “Good Question! Who are you Pinal?” Pinal : “I think you are asking my title, is that correct?” Person 1: “Maybe.” Pinal : “I am a Mentor, and I work for Solid Quality Mentors.” Person 2: “I have seen you listing yourself as the Founder of SQLAuthority.com… so…” Pinal : “Yeah that’s true.” Person 3: “Let me summarize what these people are asking. What they are asking is that you can have multiple titles, so is being an evangelist one of your titles or not?” Pinal : “Well, I am an SQL Server MVP and lots of people say that we are also evangelists of technology. In fact,  we are all evangelists of technology, aren’t we?” Person 1: “So let me come back to my original topic: If you are an SQL Server Evangelist, then what is this evangelism?” Person 2: “And who is Vinod Kumar – I have heard about him a lot.” Pinal : “Oh okay. Now I got it. Let me explain …” The answer was quite long but since this conversation, I have been thinking about the words “evangelist” and “evangelism.” I think being an evangelist is one of the most respected jobs in the world and to do this job one must bear lots of responsibilities. There were two questions asked to me, so let me answer both one by one. Who is Vinod Kumar? Vinod Kumar is a Technology Evangelist for Microsoft and one of the most respected persons in the SQL Server Community in India. Let me copy-paste my note from the previous TechEd India 2010 article. “I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller so there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod was the best speaker in the event. He did not have a single time that disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL.” Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar What is Technology Evangelism? Here I am listing three posts written by Vinod Kumar, wherein he talks about Technology Evangelism and Technology Evangelist in an in-depth manner. They are highly-regarded articles in the Community. Evangelism beyond boundaries with an Evangelists !!! Technology Evangelism Demystified New face of Online Technology Evangelism I strongly recommend reading them all. These are wonderful blog posts. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Batman

  - by Pinal Dave

  Batman is one of the darkest superheroes in the fantasy canon.  He does not come to his powers through any sort of magical coincidence or radioactive insect, but through a lot of psychological scarring caused by witnessing the death of his parents.  Despite his dark back story, he possesses a lot of admirable abilities that I feel bear comparison to developers. Batman has the distinct advantage that his alter ego, Bruce Wayne is a millionaire (or billionaire in today’s reboots).  This means that he can spend his time working on his athletic abilities, building a secret lair, and investing his money in cool tools.  This might not be true for developers (well, most developers), but I still think there are many parallels. So how are developers like Batman? Well, read on my list of reasons. Develop Skills Batman works on his skills.  He didn’t get the strength to scale Gotham’s skyscrapers by inheriting his powers or suffering an industrial accident.  Developers also hone their skills daily.  They might not be doing pull-ups and scaling buldings, but I think their skills are just as impressive. Clear Goals Batman is driven to build a better Gotham.  He knows that the criminal who killed his parents was a small-time thief, not a super villain – so he has larger goals in mind than simply chasing one villain.  He wants his city as a whole to be better.  Developers are also driven to make things better.  It can be easy to get hung up on one problem, but in the end it is best to focus on the well-being of the system as a whole. Ultimate Teamplayers Batman is the hero Gotham needs – even when that means appearing to be the bad guys.  Developers probably know that feeling well.  Batman takes the fall for a crime he didn’t commit, and developers often have to deliver bad news about the limitations of their networks and servers.  It’s not always a job filled with glory and thanks, but someone has to do it. Always Ready Batman and the Boy Scouts have this in common – they are always prepared.  Let’s add developers to this list.  Batman has an amazing tool belt with gadgets and gizmos, and let’s not even get into all the functions of the Batmobile!  Developers’ skills might be the knowledge and skills they have developed, not tools they can carry in a utility belt, but that doesn’t make them any less impressive. 100% Dedication Bruce Wayne cultivates the personality of a playboy, never keeping the same girlfriend for long and spending his time partying.  Even though he hides it, his driving force is his deep concern and love for his friends and the city as a whole.  Developers also care a lot about their company and employees – even when it is driving them crazy.  You do your best work when you care about your job on a personal level. Quality Output Batman believes the city deserves to be saved.  The citizens might have a love-hate relationship with both Batman and Bruce Wayne, and employees might not always appreciate developers.  Batman and developers, though, keep working for the best of everyone. I hope you are all enjoying reading about developers-as-superheroes as much as I am enjoying writing about them.  Please tell me how else developers are like Superheroes in the comments – especially if you know any developers who are faster than a speeding bullet and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Developer, Superhero

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• Text Expansion Awareness for UX Designers: Points to Consider

  - by ultan o'broin

  Awareness of translated text expansion dynamics is important for enterprise applications UX designers (I am assuming all source text for translation is in English, though apps development can takes place in other natural languages too). This consideration goes beyond the standard 'character multiplication' rule and must take into account the avoidance of other layout tricks that a designer might be tempted to try. Follow these guidelines. For general text expansion, remember the simple rule that the shorter the word is in the English, the longer it will need to be in English. See the examples provided by Richard Ishida of the W3C and you'll get the idea. So, forget the 30 percent or one inch minimum expansion rule of the old Forms days. Unfortunately remembering convoluted text expansion rules, based as a percentage of the US English character count can be tough going. Try these: Up to 10 characters: 100 to 200% 11 to 20 characters: 80 to 100% 21 to 30 characters: 60 to 80% 31 to 50 characters: 40 to 60% 51 to 70 characters: 31 to 40% Over 70 characters: 30% (Source: IBM) So it might be easier to remember a rule that if your English text is less than 20 characters then allow it to double in length (200 percent), and then after that assume an increase by half the length of the text (50%). (Bear in mind that ADF can apply truncation rules on some components in English too). (If your text is stored in a database, developers must make sure the table column widths can accommodate the expansion of your text when translated based on byte size for the translated character and not numbers of characters. Use Unicode. One character does not equal one byte in the multilingual enterprise apps world.) Rely on a graceful transformation of translated text. Let all pages to resize dynamically so the text wraps and flow naturally. ADF pages supports this already. Think websites. Don't hard-code alignments. Use Start and End properties on components and not Left or Right. Don't force alignments of components on the page by using texts of a certain length as spacers. Use proper label positioning and anchoring in ADF components or other technologies. Remember that an increase in text length means an increase in vertical space too when pages are resized. So don't hard-code vertical heights for any text areas. Don't be tempted to manually create text or printed reports this way either. They cannot be translated successfully, and are very difficult to maintain in English. Use XML, HTML, RTF and so on. Check out what Oracle BI Publisher offers. Don't force wrapping by using tricks such as /n or /t characters or HTML BR tags or forced page breaks. Once the text is translated the alignment will be destroyed. The position of the breaking character or tag would need to be moved anyway, or even removed. When creating tables, then use table components. Don't use manually created tables that reply on word length to maintain column and row alignment. For example, don't use codeblock elements in HTML; use the proper table elements instead. Once translated, the alignment of manually formatted tabular data is destroyed. Finally, if there is a space restriction, then don't use made-up acronyms, abbreviations or some form of daft text speak to save space. Besides being incomprehensible in English, they may need full translations of the shortened words, even if they can be figured out. Use approved or industry standard acronyms according to the UX style rules, not as a space-saving device. Restricted Real Estate on Mobile Devices On mobile devices real estate is limited. Using shortened text is fine once it is comprehensible. Users in the mobile space prefer brevity too, as they are on the go, performing three-minute tasks, with no time to read lengthy texts. Using fragments and lightning up on unnecessary articles and getting straight to the point with imperative forms of verbs makes sense both on real estate and user experience grounds.

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• Challenge 19 – An Explanation of a Query

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  I have received a number of requests for an explanation of my winning query of TSQL Challenge 19. This involved traversing a hierarchy of employees and rolling a count of orders from subordinates up to superiors. The first concept I shall address is the hierarchyId , which is constructed within the CTE called cteTree.   cteTree is a recursive cte that will expand the parent-child hierarchy of the personnel in the table @emp.  One useful feature with a recursive cte is that data can be ‘passed’ from the parent to the child data.  The hierarchyId column is similar to the hierarchyId data type that was introduced in SQL Server 2008 and represents the position of the person within the organisation. Let us start with a simplistic example Albert manages Bob and Eddie.  Bob manages Carl and Dave. The hierarchyId will represent each person’s position in this relationship in a single field.  In this simple example we could append the userID together into a varchar field as detailed below. This will enable us to select a branch of the tree by filtering using Where hierarchyId  ‘1,2%’ to select Bob and all his subordinates.  Naturally, this is not comprehensive enough to provide a full solution, but as opposed to concatenating the Id’s together into a varchar datatyped column, we can apply the same theory to a varbinary.  By CASTing the ID’s into a datatype of varbinary(4) ,4 is used as 4 bytes of data are used to store an integer and building a hierarchyId  from those.  For example: The important point to bear in mind for later in the query is that the binary data generated is 'byte order comparable'. ie We can ORDER a dataset with it and the resulting data, will be in the order required. Now, would probably be a good time to download the example file and, after the cte ‘cteTree’, uncomment the line ‘select * from cteTree’.  Mark this and all prior code and execute.  This will show you how this theory directly relates to the actual challenge data.  The only deviation from the above, is that instead of using the ID of an employee, I have used the row_number() ranking function to order each level by LastName,Firstname.  This enables me to order by the HierarchyId in the final result set so that the result set is in the required order. Your output should be something like the below.  Notice also the ‘Level’ Column that contains the depth that the employee is within the tree.  I would encourage you to ‘play’ with the query, change the order in the row_number() or the length of the cast in the hierarchyId to see how that effects the outcome.  The next cte, ‘cteTreeWithOrderCount’, is a join between cteTree and the @ord table, and COUNT’s the number of orders per employee.  A LEFT JOIN is employed here to account for the occasion where an employee has made no sales.   Executing a ‘Select * from cteTreeWithOrderCount’ will return the result set as below.  The order here is unimportant as this is only a staging point of the data and only the final result set in a cte chain needs an Order by clause, unless TOP is utilised. cteExplode joins the above result set to the tally table (Nums) for Level Occurances.  So, if level is 2 then 2 rows are required.  This is done to expand the dataset, to create a new column (PathInc), which is the (n+1) integers contained within the heirarchyid.  For example, with the data for Robert King as given above, the below 3 rows will be returned. From this you can see that the pathinc column now contains the values for Andrew Fuller and Steven Buchanan who are Robert King’s superiors within the tree.    Finally cteSumUp, sums the orders for each person and their subordinates using the PathInc generated above, and the final select does the final simple mathematics and filters to restrict the result set to only the ‘original’ row per employee.

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• If You Could Cut Your Meeting Times in ½ Would You?

  - by [email protected]

  By Brian Dayton on April 22, 2010 2:02 PM I know it sounds like a big promise. And what I'm thinking about may not cut a :60 minute meeting into :30 minutes, but it could make meetings and interactions up to 2X more productive. How? Social Media for the Enterprise, Not Social Media In the Enterprise Bear with me. I'm not talking about whether or not workers should or shouldn't have access to Facebook on corporate networks. That topic has been discussed @ length. I'm also not talking about the direct benefits of Social Networking tools like Presence (the ability to see someone online and ask a question in real-time), blogs, RSS feeds or external tools like Twitter. The Un-Measurable Benefits Would you do something that you believe will have a positive effect--but can't be measured? It's impossible to quantify the effectiveness of a meeting. However, what I am talking about would be more of a byproduct of all of the social networking tools above. Here's the hypothesis: As I've gotten more and more busy with work, family, travel and kids--and the same has happened to my friends and family--I'm less and less connected. But by introducing Facebook to my life I've not only made connections with longtime friends whom I haven't spoken to in years--but I've increased the pace and quality of interactions, on and offline, with close friends who I see and speak to every week. In some cases it even enhances the connections and interactions with those I see or speak to every day. The same holds true in an organization. Especially a larger one with highly matrixed organizational structures. You work with people on a project, new people come in with each different project and a disproportionate amount of time is spent getting oriented and staying current. Going back to the initial value proposition--making meetings shorter/more effective--a large amount of time is spent: - At Project Kick-off: Meeting and understanding team member's histories, goals & roles - Ongoing: Summarizing events since the last meeting or update email In my personal, Facebook life today I know that: - My best friend from college - has been stranded in India for 5 days because of the volcano in Iceland and is now only 250 miles from home - One of my co-workers started conference calls at 6:30 this morning - My wife wasn't terribly pleased with my painting skills in our new bathroom (disclosure: she told me this face to face too) Strengthening Weak Links A recent article in CIO Magazine, Three Dangerous Social Media Misconceptions (Kristen Burnham, March 12, 2010) calls out the #1 misconception as follows: 1. "Face-to-face relationships are far more valuable than virtual ones." While some level of physical interaction will always add value to relationships, Gartner says that come 2020, most relationships and teams will be based on "weak links"--that is, you may not have personally met a contact, but you'll know of or may have interacted with him via social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The sooner your enterprise adopts these tools, the sooner your employees will learn them, and the sooner you'll begin to cultivate these relationships-of-the-future. I personally believe that it's not an either/or choice between face-to-face and virtual interactions. In fact, I'll be as bold as saying it doesn't matter. I can point to two extremely valuable work relationships that I've had over the past 5 years: - I shared an office with one of them - I met the other person, face-to-face, only once Both relationships were very productive. The dynamics were similar. The communication tactics differed immensely. What does matter is the quality, frequency and relevance of interactions. Still sound like too much? An over-promise? Stay tuned for my next post The Gap Between Facebook and LinkedIn. I'll also connect some of the dots with where Oracle Applications and technologies are headed.

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• “Query cost (relative to the batch)” <> Query cost relative to batch

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  OK, so that is quite a contradictory title, but unfortunately it is true that a common misconception is that the query with the highest percentage relative to batch is the worst performing.  Simply put, it is a lie, or more accurately we dont understand what these figures mean. Consider the two below simple queries: SELECT * FROM Person.BusinessEntity JOIN Person.BusinessEntityAddress ON Person.BusinessEntity.BusinessEntityID = Person.BusinessEntityAddress.BusinessEntityID go SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail JOIN Sales.SalesOrderHeader ON Sales.SalesOrderDetail.SalesOrderID = Sales.SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderID After executing these and looking at the plans, I see this : So, a 13% / 87% split ,  but 13% / 87% of WHAT ? CPU ? Duration ? Reads ? Writes ? or some magical weighted algorithm ?  In a Profiler trace of the two we can find the metrics we are interested in. CPU and duration are well out but what about reads (210 and 1935)? To save you doing the maths, though you are more than welcome to, that’s a 90.2% / 9.8% split.  Close, but no cigar. Lets try a different tact.  Looking at the execution plan the “Estimated Subtree cost” of query 1 is 0.29449 and query 2 its 1.96596.  Again to save you the maths that works out to 13.03% and 86.97%, round those and thats the figures we are after.  But, what is the worrying word there ? “Estimated”.  So these are not “actual”  execution costs,  but what’s the problem in comparing the estimated costs to derive a meaning of “Most Costly”.  Well, in the case of simple queries such as the above , probably not a lot.  In more complicated queries , a fair bit. By modifying the second query to also show the total number of lines on each order SELECT *,COUNT(*) OVER (PARTITION BY Sales.SalesOrderDetail.SalesOrderID) FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail JOIN Sales.SalesOrderHeader ON Sales.SalesOrderDetail.SalesOrderID = Sales.SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderID The split in percentages is now 6% / 94% and the profiler metrics are : Even more of a discrepancy. Estimates can be out with actuals for a whole host of reasons,  scalar UDF’s are a particular bug bear of mine and in-fact the cost of a udf call is entirely hidden inside the execution plan.  It always estimates to 0 (well, a very small number). Take for instance the following udf Create Function dbo.udfSumSalesForCustomer(@CustomerId integer) returns money as begin Declare @Sum money Select @Sum= SUM(SalesOrderHeader.TotalDue) from Sales.SalesOrderHeader where CustomerID = @CustomerId return @Sum end If we have two statements , one that fires the udf and another that doesn't: Select CustomerID from Sales.Customer order by CustomerID go Select CustomerID,dbo.udfSumSalesForCustomer(Customer.CustomerID) from Sales.Customer order by CustomerID The costs relative to batch is a 50/50 split, but the has to be an actual cost of firing the udf. Indeed profiler shows us : No where even remotely near 50/50!!!! Moving forward to window framing functionality in SQL Server 2012 the optimizer sees ROWS and RANGE ( see here for their functional differences) as the same ‘cost’ too SELECT SalesOrderDetailID,SalesOrderId, SUM(LineTotal) OVER(PARTITION BY salesorderid ORDER BY Salesorderdetailid RANGE unbounded preceding) from Sales.SalesOrderdetail go SELECT SalesOrderDetailID,SalesOrderId, SUM(LineTotal) OVER(PARTITION BY salesorderid ORDER BY Salesorderdetailid Rows unbounded preceding) from Sales.SalesOrderdetail By now it wont be a great display to show you the Profiler trace reads a *tiny* bit different. So moral of the story, Percentage relative to batch can give a rough ‘finger in the air’ measurement, but dont rely on it as fact.

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• Software development stack 2012

  A couple of months ago, I posted on Google+ about my evaluation period for a new software development stack in general. "Analysing existing 'jungle' of multiple applications and tools in various languages for clarification and future design decisions. Great fun and lots of headaches... #DevelopersLife" Surprisingly, there was response... ;-) - And this series of articles is initiated by this post. Thanks Olaf. The past few years... Well, after all my first choice of software development in the past was Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 - 9.0 in combination with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 2008 and Crystal Reports 9.x - XI. Honestly, it is my main working environment due to exisiting maintenance and support plans with my customers, but also for new project requests. And... hands on, it is still my first choice for data manipulation and migration options. But the earth is spinning, and as a software craftsman one has to be flexible with the choice of tools. In parallel to my knowledge and expertise in the above mentioned tools, I already started very early to get my hands dirty with the Microsoft .NET Framework. If I remember correctly, I started back in 2002/2003 with the first version ever. But this was more out of curiousity. During the years this kind of development got more serious and demanding, and I focused myself on interop and integrational libraries and applications. Mainly, to expose exisitng features of the .NET Framework to Visual FoxPro - I even had a session about that at the German Developer's Conference in Frankfurt. Observation of recent developments With the recent hype on Javascript and HTML5, especially for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development, I had several 'Deja vu' events... Back in early 2006 (roughly) I had a conversation on the future of Web and Desktop development with my former colleagues Golo Roden and Thomas Wilting about the underestimation of Javascript and its root as a prototype-based, dynamic, full-featured programming language. During this talk with them I took the Mozilla applications, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, as a reference which are mainly based on XML, CSS, Javascript and images - besides the core rendering engine. And that it is very simple to write your own extensions for the Gecko rendering engine. Looking at the Windows Vista Sidebar widgets, just underlines this kind of usage. So, yes the 'Modern UI' of Windows 8 based on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript didn't come as any surprise to me. Just allow me to ask why did it take so long for Microsoft to come up with this step? A new set of tools Ok, coming from web development in HTML 4, CSS and Javascript prior to Visual FoxPro, I am partly going back to that combination of technologies. What is the other part of the software development stack here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd? Frankly, it is easy and straight forward to describe: Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP 2 - still going strong! Visual Studio 2012 (C# on latest .NET Framework) MonoDevelop Telerik DevCraft Suite WPF ASP.NET MVC Windows 8 Kendo UI OpenAccess ORM Reporting JustCode CODE Framework by EPS Software MonoTouch and Mono for Android Subversion and additional tools for the daily routine: Notepad++, JustCode, SQL Compare, DiffMerge, VMware, etc. Following the principles of Clean Code Developer and the Agile Manifesto Actually, nothing special about this combination but rather a solid fundament to work with and create line of business applications for customers.Honestly, I am really interested in your choice of 'weapons' for software development, and hopefully there might be some nice conversations in the comment section. Over the next coming days/weeks I'm going to describe a little bit more in detail about the reasons for my decision. Articles will be added bit by bit here as reference, too. Please bear with me... Regards, JoKi

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