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• Is there an API for determining congressional districts?

  - by ardavis

  I'm looking to determine the congressional district based on an address my user is providing. This will avoid having the user to look it up themselves. Does an API of this sort exist? Note Through my attempts to find one, I've only come across these: http://www.govtrack.us/developers/api (not sure how to submit an an address or zip code however) The following resources are available in the API ...Bills and resolutions in the U.S. Congress since 1973 (the 93rd Congress). ...A (bill, person) pair indicating cosponsorship, with join and withdrawn dates. ...Members of Congress and U.S. Presidents since the founding of the nation. ...Terms held in office by Members of Congress and U.S. Presidents. Each term corresponds with an election, meaning each term in the House covers two years (one 'Congress'), as President four years, and in the Senate six years (three 'Congresses'). ...Roll call votes in the U.S. Congress since 1789. How people voted is accessed through the Vote_voter API. ...How people voted on roll call votes in the U.S. Congress since 1789. See the Vote API. Filter on the vote field to get the results of a particular vote... http://www.opencongress.org/api (seems to be a way to find congress information, but not districts) This API provides programmers with structured access to all the data on OpenCongress, everything from official bill info to news and blog coverage to user-generated votes on bills and much more... This API defaults to returning XML. All queries can also return JSON... https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/opendems-discuss/CeKyi_aANaE (similar question, no resolution) I've been looking over Open Dems, and seeing what's exposed at this point and what isn't. I work with Democrats Abroad, and am interested in using stuff from the lab for their sites. I quickly looked over the Precinct API, which does both more and less than what I'd need. An ideal resource would be any way of translating addresses into CD at the very least (getting state district data would be good as well), since that would make it easier for DA's membership to make a difference in races like last month's NY26 race... Update I'm looking at the source for the govtrack.us website and the 'doGeoCode' function may be useful. view-source:http://www.govtrack.us/congress/members If no one has any suggestions, I will try to go off of what they are doing.

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• 5 ways to stop code thrashing&hellip;

  - by MarkPearl

  A few days ago I was programming on a personal project and hit a roadblock. I was applying the MVVM pattern and for some reason my view model was not updating the view when the state changed??? I had applied this pattern many times before and had never had this problem. It just didn’t make sense. So what did I do… I did what anyone would have done in my situation and looked to pass the blame to someone or something else. I tried to blame one of the inherited base classes, but it looked fine, then to Visual Studio, but it seemed to be fine and eventually to any random segment of code I came across. My elementary problem had now mushroomed into one that had lost any logical basis and I was in thrashing mode! So what to do when you begin to thrash? 1) Do a general code cleanup – Now there is a difference between cleaning code and changing code . When you thrash you change code and you want to avoid this. What you really want to do is things like rename variables to have better meaning and go over your comments. 2) Do a proof of concept – if cleaning code doesn’t help. The  you want to isolate the problem and identify the key concepts. When you isolate code you ideally want it to be in a totally separate project with as little complexity as possible. Make the building blocks and try and replicate the functionality that you are getting in your current application. 3) Phone a friend – I have found speaking to someone else about the problem generally helps me solve any thrashing issues I am having. Usually they don’t even have to say anything to solve the problem, just you talking them through the problem helps you get clarity of mind. 4) Let the dust settle – Sometimes time is the best solution. I have had a few problems that no matter who I discussed them with and no matter how much code cleaning I had done I just couldn’t seem to fix it. My brain just seemed to be going in circles. A good nights rest has always helped and often just the break away from the problem has helped me find a solution. 5) Stack overflow it – So similar to phone a friend. I am really surprised to see what a melting pot stack overflow has been and what a help it has been in solving technology specific problems. Just be considerate to those using the site and explain clearly exactly what problem you are having and the technologies you are using or else you will probably not get any useful help…

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• Client-Server connection response timeout issues

  - by Srikar

  User creates a folder in client and in the client-side code I hit an API to the server to make this persistent for that user. But in some cases, my server is so busy that the request timesout. The server has executed my request but timedout before sending a response back to client. The timeout set is 10 seconds in client. At this point the client thinks that server has not executed its request (of creating a folder) and ends up sending it again. Now I have 2 folders on the server but the user has created only 1 folder in the client. How to prevent this? One of the ways to solve this is to use a unique ID with each new request. So the ID acts as a distinguisher between old and new requests from client. But this leads to storing these IDs on my server and do a lookup for each API call which I want to avoid. Other way is to increase the timeout duration. But I dont want to change this from 10 seconds. Something tells me that there are better solutions. I have posted this question in stackoverflow but I think its better suited here. UPDATE: I will make my problem even more explicit. The client is a webbrowser and the server is running nginx+django+mysql (standard stack). The user creates a folder in webbrowser. As a result I need to hit a server API. The API call responds back, thereby client knows API call was success. This is normal scenario. Sometimes though, server successfully completes the API request but the client-side (webbrowser) connection timesout before server can respond back. The client has no clue at this point. The user thinks the request was a fail & clicks again. This time it was a success but when the UI refreshes he sees 2 folders. I want to remedy this situation.

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• PASS Summit Location follow up - result analysis

  - by simonsabin

  I've had a chance to look at the results directly and it is clear that there is a tough choice. On the one hand people are saying that they prefer to have PASS put their money into chapters and things like 24hrs of PASS rather than an event on the east coast. Whilst at the same time almost 50% more people said they would be more likely to attend an East Coast event than a Seattle event, and 60% more said they would be more likley to attend a US Central region event. Whats more 60% said that the summit should be outside of Seattle every other year with only 19% saying it should always stay in Seattle. So clearly there is a huge desire for a non Seattle event. Looking at the other reasons for keeping in Seattle and the big one being that people want Microsoft speakers. More people think its somewhat important of very important that the conference is in walking distance of the hotels and restaurants. Essentially the Q6 questions show an even balance for normal conference, highlighting that they are prepared to travel, not with the family and they want a well laid out conference. Whats very annoying is that the questions, as people have commented, were biased towards certain answers. For instance there was no option about whether people feel its important to have industry leading speakers, MVPs etc at the conference. Only questions about Microsoft speakers. I know survey writing is very difficult to avoid biasing the answers one way or another. There was also no choice to show peoples preference, would people prefer Microsoft speakers or the summit to be held on the East Coast/Central US. I also find it amazing that people prefer hundres of developers rather than the SQLCAT and CSS teams, surely that indicates another issue about a lack of understanding of what the these teams do. All in all it is clear that people showed they want an event outside of Seattle and don't want PASS to be putting money into that instead of into other community activites. I find it suprising that there appears to have been a huge weighting against certain questions which have prioritised them over the huge desire for a PASS summit outside of Seattle. Lets see where we will be in 2013 or maybe they will rethink 2012 who knows.

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• Java JRE 1.6.0_37 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  My apologies: this certification announcement got lost in the OpenWorld maelstorm.  Better late than never. The section below entitled, "All JRE 1.6 releases are certified with EBS upon release" should obviate the need for these announcements, but I know that people have gotten used to seeing these certifications referenced explicitly.  The latest Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0_37 (a.k.a. JRE 6u37-b06) is now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12 desktop clients.   What's new in Java 1.6.0_37?See the 1.6.0_37 Update Release Notes for details about what has changed in this release.  This release is available for download from the usual Sun channels and through the 'Java Automatic Update' mechanism. 32-bit and 64-bit versions certified This certification includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit JRE versions. 32-bit JREs are certified on: Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 2 (SP2) Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) 64-bit JREs are certified only on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22.All JRE 1.6 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 releases to your EBS users' desktops. Important For important guidance about the impact of the JRE Auto Update feature on JRE 1.6 desktops, see: Planning Bulletin for JRE 7: What EBS Customers Can Do Today References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• Goodbye, Spreadsheets and Hello Modern ERP

  - by Christine Randle

  By: Steve Cox, Vice President, Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies     Signs of the resurging economy continue to sprout, with green shoots rising across different sectors and industries. With the economy on the rebound, businesses are increasing their investment in technology to keep up with growth and evolving demands; as proof, Gartner recently increased its worldwide IT spending forecast for 2012 to $3.6 trillion, anticipating a 3 percent increase from 2011 spending.   One of the segments most reliant on technology to catapult growth is midsize companies – established businesses leveraging every competitive efficiency and advantage to compete with much larger enterprises. We find that to compete against the big guys, they need to create an internal technology infrastructure to fuel that growth. Goodbye, spreadsheets and hello modern ERP.   While many businesses postponed upgrading or replacing financial and HR management systems during the recession, now some have started dusting off RFPs and revisiting technology options. Years ago, midsize organizations used spreadsheet-based systems and processes to manage employees, customers, partners, products and revenue. We’ve found that as companies scale up, they are apt to avoid heavily customizing their existing systems, and instead are more prone to standardize on a modern, enterprise-class ERP system.   Modern ERP platforms enable growing companies to immediately address the most pressing challenges – accounting, talent management, customer retention, et. al. Midsize companies implement these systems and processes to help them earn more, go public or expand globally.   And today, choice is a primary factor when selecting an ERP solution. Businesses have more deployment options now than ever before, depending on their unique structures and needs. Whether the preference is on demand, cloud, hosted or on premise, a modular, scalable deployment is available to meet the need.   With modern ERP systems, business that once struggled to do more with fewer resources have access to the same quality tools as larger competitors. By adopting top tier ERP systems tailored to individual business needs, midsize companies can support business operations while creating an enterprise system that seamlessly scales up to fuel future growth. Meaning that the ERP decision that your company makes today, will have legs to serve your business for years to come.

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• SQL 2014 does data the way developers want

  - by Rob Farley

  A post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, good that it fits with this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Joey D’Antoni (@jdanton) Ever since I got into databases, I’ve been a fan. I studied Pure Maths at university (as well as Computer Science), and am very comfortable with Set Theory, which undergirds relational database concepts. But I’ve also spent a long time as a developer, and appreciate that that databases don’t exactly fit within the stuff I learned in my first year of uni, particularly the “Algorithms and Data Structures” subject, in which we studied concepts like linked lists. Writing in languages like C, we used pointers to quickly move around data, without a database in sight. Of course, if we had a power failure all this data was lost, as it was only persisted in RAM. Perhaps it’s why I’m a fan of database internals, of indexes, latches, execution plans, and so on – the developer in me wants to be reassured that we’re getting to the data as efficiently as possible. Back when SQL Server 2005 was approaching, one of the big stories was around CLR. Many were saying that T-SQL stored procedures would be a thing of the past because we now had CLR, and that obviously going to be much faster than using the abstracted T-SQL. Around the same time, we were seeing technologies like Linq-to-SQL produce poor T-SQL equivalents, and developers had had a gutful. They wanted to move away from T-SQL, having lost trust in it. I was never one of those developers, because I’d looked under the covers and knew that despite being abstracted, T-SQL was still a good way of getting to data. It worked for me, appealing to both my Set Theory side and my Developer side. CLR hasn’t exactly become the default option for stored procedures, although there are plenty of situations where it can be useful for getting faster performance. SQL Server 2014 is different though, through Hekaton – its In-Memory OLTP environment. When you create a table using Hekaton (that is, a memory-optimized one), the table you create is the kind of thing you’d’ve made as a developer. It creates code in C leveraging structs and pointers and arrays, which it compiles into fast code. When you insert data into it, it creates a new instance of a struct in memory, and adds it to an array. When the insert is committed, a small write is made to the transaction to make sure it’s durable, but none of the locking and latching behaviour that typifies transactional systems is needed. Indexes are done using hashes and using bw-trees (which avoid locking through the use of pointers) and by handling each updates as a delete-and-insert. This is data the way that developers do it when they’re coding for performance – the way I was taught at university before I learned about databases. Being done in C, it compiles to very quick code, and although these tables don’t support every feature that regular SQL tables do, this is still an excellent direction that has been taken. @rob_farley

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• NHibernate Session Load vs Get when using Table per Hierarchy. Always use ISession.Get&lt;T&gt; for TPH to work.

  - by Rohit Gupta

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/rgupta/archive/2014/06/01/nhibernate-session-load-vs-get-when-using-table-per-hierarchy.aspxNHibernate ISession has two methods on it : Load and Get. Load allows the entity to be loaded lazily, meaning the actual call to the database is made only when properties on the entity being loaded is first accessed. Additionally, if the entity has already been loaded into NHibernate Cache, then the entity is loaded directly from the cache instead of querying the underlying database. ISession.Get<T> instead makes the call to the database, every time it is invoked. With this background, it is obvious that we would prefer ISession.Load<T> over ISession.Get<T> most of the times for performance reasons to avoid making the expensive call to the database. let us consider the impact of using ISession.Load<T> when we are using the Table per Hierarchy implementation of NHibernate. Thus we have base class/ table Animal, there is a derived class named Snake with the Discriminator column being Type which in this case is “Snake”. If we load This Snake entity using the Repository for Animal, we would have a entity loaded, as shown below: public T GetByKey(object key, bool lazy = false) { if (lazy) return CurrentSession.Load<T>(key); return CurrentSession.Get<T>(key); } var tRepo = new NHibernateReadWriteRepository<TPHAnimal>(); var animal = tRepo.GetByKey(new Guid("602DAB56-D1BD-4ECC-B4BB-1C14BF87F47B"), true); var snake = animal as Snake; snake is null As you can see that the animal entity retrieved from the database cannot be cast to Snake even though the entity is actually a snake. The reason being ISession.Load prevents the entity to be cast to Snake and will throw the following exception: System.InvalidCastException :  Message=Unable to cast object of type 'TPHAnimalProxy' to type 'NHibernateChecker.Model.Snake'. Thus we can see that if we lazy load the entity using ISession.Load<TPHAnimal> then we get a TPHAnimalProxy and not a snake. =============================================================== However if do not lazy load the same cast works perfectly fine, this is since we are loading the entity from database and the entity being loaded is not a proxy. Thus the following code does not throw any exceptions, infact the snake variable is not null: var tRepo = new NHibernateReadWriteRepository<TPHAnimal>(); var animal = tRepo.GetByKey(new Guid("602DAB56-D1BD-4ECC-B4BB-1C14BF87F47B"), false); var snake = animal as Snake; if (snake == null) { var snake22 = (Snake) animal; }

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• How can I achieve a 3D-like effect with spritebatch's rotation and scale parameters

  - by Alic44

  I'm working on a 2d game with a top-down perspective similar to Secret of Mana and the 2D Final Fantasy games, with one big difference being that it's an action rpg using a 3-dimensional physics engine. I'm trying to draw an aimer graphic (basically an arrow) at my characters' feet when they're aiming a ranged weapon. At first I just converted the character's aim vector to radians and passed that into spritebatch, but there was a problem. The position of every object in my world is scaled for perspective when it's drawn to the screen. So if the physics engine coordinates are (1, 0, 1), the screen coords are actually (1, .707) -- the Y and Z axis are scaled by a perspective factor of .707 and then added together to get the screen coordinates. This meant that the direction the aimer graphic pointed (thanks to its rotation value passed into spritebatch) didn't match up with the direction the projectile actually traveled over time. Things looked fine when the characters fired left, right, up, or down, but if you fired on a diagonal the perspective of the physics engine didn't match with the simplistic way I was converting the character's aim direction to a screen rotation. Ok, fast forward to now: I've got the aimer's rotation matched up with the path the projectile will actually take, which I'm doing by decomposing a transform matrix which I build from two rotation matrices (one to represent the aimer's rotation, and one to represent the camera's 45 degree rotation on the x axis). My question is, is there a way to get not just rotation from a series of matrix transformations, but to also get a Vector2 scale which would give the aimer the appearance of being a 3d object, being warped by perspective? Orthographic perspective is what I'm going for, I think. So, the aimer arrow would get longer when facing sideways, and shorter when facing north and south because of the perspective. At the same time, it would get wider when facing north and south, and less wide when facing right or left. I'd like to avoid actually drawing the aimer texture in 3d because I'm still using spritebatch's layerdepth parameter at this point in my project, and I don't want to have to figure out how to draw a 3d object within the depth sorting system I already have. I can provide code and more details if this is too vague as a question... This is my first post on stack exchange. Thanks a lot for reading! Note: (I think) I realize it can't be a technically correct 3D perspective, because the spritebatch's vector2 scaling argument doesn't allow for an object to be skewed the way it actually should be. What I'm really interested in is, is there a good way to fake the effect, or should I just drop it and not scale at all? Edit to clarify without the help of a picture (apparently I can't post them yet): I want the aimer arrow to look like it has been painted on the ground at the character's feet, so it should appear to be drawn on the ground plane (in my case the XZ plane) which should be tilted at a 45 degree angle (around the X axis) from the viewing perspective. Alex

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• Assessing Relative Maintainability

  - by João Bragança

  We (a contractor, actually) are implementing an off the shelf system to replace a legacy homegrown system for the core domain of the company (designing widgets). Unfortunately both systems will have to run concurrently for some time, as the product just isn't ready yet. Also, the decision was made to only migrate some of the widgets from the legacy system, based on date of last sale activity. Later on a new requirement came down: certain people in the company, most of them outside of the widget development context, want to search all widgets. The search results screen has 3 pieces of data: a GUID, a human readable id that is searchable, and a brief description (may need to be searchable in the future). In the widget details, there will be multiple screens. These screens align very well along SOA / bounded context lines - a screen for marketing data, a screen for sales history, etc. UML ahead! I am probably using the wrong kind of arrows here so please forgive me. The current solution - which is not in production yet - is something like the following: Both systems will be queried and the controller will merge the results. The new system has its own proprietary query language (we've alleviated this a bit with a LINQ provider). It also puts a lot of data on the wire. 15 search results typically run about 60k of unintelligible SOAP-wrapped xml. So I would prefer to avoid querying this system directly. These two systems publish events to help us integrate with other systems, mainly an ERP system. One of these events contains all the data necessary for the search screen. I proposed the following alternative: However I am being told that 'adding another database' will create more maintenance down the road. However, I believe this to be false, as I had to add a relatively simple feature that took several hours longer than anticipated because of this merging code. I want to get a feel for which system is more maintainable in the long run. I personally have not had the burden of maintaining any large system. I want something more than my gut. Specifically I'd like to know if having more, specialized physical databases is more or less maintainable than having less larger physical databases.

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• Announcing Key Functional White Papers for SIM and ReIM

  - by Oracle Retail Documentation Team

  Oracle Retail has published two new documents on My Oracle Support (https://support.oracle.com)  that provide partners and retailers with deeper functional information about two products: Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management (SIM) and Oracle Retail Invoice Matching. Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management Item Configuration White Paper (Doc ID 1507221.1) There is functionality within the Store Inventory Management system related to item configuration that spans across multiple concepts that apply to the application as a whole rather than to a specific area. This white paper covers numerous topics around item configuration including: Item Transaction Levels Item Long Description Pack Size Standard Unit of Measure Standard Unit of Measure Conversion Pack Items Simple Pack Conversion Items (Notional Packs) Ranging Items Item Status Non-Sellable Items Type-2 Item Recognition UPC-E Barcodes Non-Inventory Items Consignment and Concession Items Quick Response Codes Oracle Retail Invoice Matching Financial Transactions (Doc ID 1500209.1) This document explains the financial transactions that are posted by Oracle Retail Invoice Matching (ReIM). The scope of the document is limited to ReIM transactions only, and does not explain Retail Merchandising System (RMS), Finance, or Account Receivable transactions. ReIM follows the double-entry accounting standard, which works by recording the debit and credit of each financial transaction belonging to each party involved. Each transaction means a profit to one account (debit) and a loss to another account (credit). Full invoice match processing is completed in ReIM with payment recommendations communicated to Oracle Accounts Payable. ReIM matches merchandise orders and receipts against merchandise invoices, performing automated and manual matching, as well as discrepancy-resolution processing. Matched invoices are posted to interface staging tables specifying the amount and date to pay, vendor, site ID, General Ledger Chart of Accounts (GL CoA) information, and payment terms. Other payables documents, including debit memos, credit memos and credit notes are also interfaced to Accounts Payable through the ReIM staging tables (IM_AP_STAGE_HEAD and IM_AP_STAGE_DETAIL). For information about how ReIM engages in this processing, see the latest Oracle Retail Invoice Matching Operations Guide. Certain ReIM transactions are not interfaced to Oracle Payables, but instead are interfaced to Oracle General Ledger through the IM_FINANCIAL_STAGE table. When analyzing transactions posted through the staging tables, retailers should note the transaction type, Standard/Credit, as well as the sign in the amount field. Technically, a negative sign on a credit transaction changes the transaction to a debit entry, and vice versa. This document is concerned about the financial meaning of the transactions, and will avoid a discussion of negative numbers in T-charts.

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• Syncing client and server CRUD operations using json and php

  - by Justin

  I'm working on some code to sync the state of models between client (being a javascript application) and server. Often I end up writing redundant code to track the client and server objects so I can map the client supplied data to the server models. Below is some code I am thinking about implementing to help. What I don't like about the below code is that this method won't handle nested relationships very well, I would have to create multiple object trackers. One work around is for each server model after creating or loading, simply do $model->clientId = $clientId; IMO this is a nasty hack and I want to avoid it. Adding a setCientId method to all my model object would be another way to make it less hacky, but this seems like overkill to me. Really clientIds are only good for inserting/updating data in some scenarios. I could go with a decorator pattern but auto generating a proxy class seems a bit involved. I could use a generic proxy class that uses a __call function to allow for original object data to be accessed, but this seems wrong too. Any thoughts or comments? $clientData = '[{name: "Bob", action: "update", id: 1, clientId: 200}, {name:"Susan", action:"create", clientId: 131} ]'; $jsonObjs = json_decode($clientData); $objectTracker = new ObjectTracker(); $objectTracker->trackClientObjs($jsonObjs); $query = $this->em->createQuery("SELECT x FROM Application_Model_User x WHERE x.id IN (:ids)"); $query->setParameters("ids",$objectTracker->getClientSpecifiedServerIds()); $models = $query->getResults(); //Apply client data to server model foreach ($models as $model) { $clientModel = $objectTracker->getClientJsonObj($model->getId()); ... } //Create new models and persist foreach($objectTracker->getNewClientObjs() as $newClientObj) { $model = new Application_Model_User(); .... $em->persist($model); $objectTracker->trackServerObj($model); } $em->flush(); $resourceResponse = $objectTracker->createResourceResponse(); //Id mappings will be an associtave array representing server id resources with client side // id. //This method Dosen't seem to flexible if we want to return additional data with each resource... //Would have to modify the returned data structure, seems like tight coupling... //Ex return value: //[{clientId: 200, id:1} , {clientId: 131, id: 33}];

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• Oops, I left my kernel zone configuration behind!

  - by mgerdts

  Most people use boot environments to move in one direction.  A system starts with an initial installation and from time to time new boot environments are created - typically as a result of pkg update - and then the new BE is booted.  This post is of little interest to those people as no hackery is needed.  This post is about some mild hackery. During development, I commonly test different scenarios across multiple boot environments.  Many times, those tests aren't related to the act of configuring or installing zone and I so it's kinda handy to avoid the effort involved of zone configuration and installation.  A somewhat common order of operations is like the following: # beadm create -e golden -a test1 # reboot Once the system is running in the test1 BE, I install a kernel zone. # zonecfg -z a178 create -t SYSsolaris-kz # zoneadm -z a178 install Time passes, and I do all kinds of stuff to the test1 boot environment and want to test other scenarios in a clean boot environment.  So then I create a new one from my golden BE and reboot into it. # beadm create -e golden -a test2 # reboot Since the test2 BE was created from the golden BE, it doesn't have the configuration for the kernel zone that I configured and installed.  Getting that zone over to the test2 BE is pretty easy.  My test1 BE is really known as s11fixes-2. root@vzl-212:~# beadm mount s11fixes-2 /mnt root@vzl-212:~# zonecfg -R /mnt -z a178 export | zonecfg -z a178 -f - root@vzl-212:~# beadm unmount s11fixes-2 root@vzl-212:~# zoneadm -z a178 attach root@vzl-212:~# zoneadm -z a178 boot On the face of it, it would seem as though it would have been easier to just use zonecfg -z a178 create -t SYSolaris-kz within the test2 BE to get the new configuration over.  That would almost work, but it would have left behind the encryption key required for access to host data and any suspend image.  See solaris-kz(5) for more info on host data.  I very commonly have more complex configurations that contain many storage URIs and non-default resource controls.  Retyping them would be rather tedious.

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• What do I do when my offer letter is revoked? [closed]

  - by user-1134

  I was recently contacted for an interview by, I'd say, a top 20 tech company. I aced the technical interview and was offered an internship for the summer. I was very excited about this prospect and was very prompt in submitting required documents and forms. This was not my only offer for the summer, so I let them know I needed some time to consider. I asked if I could have two weeks and they said that was fine. Meanwhile I evaluated my 3 options. I asked the respective parties about the projects I'd be working on, work life, how hours and pay worked, housing, etc. I asked about salary and the relocation stipend. Of the three offers, this offer paid the lowest, but not poorly by any means. I inquired about the wage, challanging with a higher wage request. They declined, so, I inquired about the relocation stipend, reminding them I was coming from over seas. The recruiter said he had to check and see if they could adjust the stipend since it was originally calculated from my home address. When he got back to me, he made up some story about how after "countering their offer several times", they were implying that I was declining their offer and my the offer letter was now voided! This [more than] shocked me. I've never run into this situation before. Further, they had already presented me with a signed offer letter which stated the details of the offer, including that it was valid until date X (in the future). I immediately explained I was not countering their offer, but simply trying to evaluate all my options for the summer. I asked kindly for them to allow me the original two weeks we had agreed upon. As expected, they rejected and declined to speak with me regarding the.. misunderstanding. Is this legal? Has anyone encountered this before? Did I do something wrong? What can I do to avoid this in the future?

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• Best Practices for serializing/persisting String Object Dictionary entities

  - by Mark Heath

  I'm noticing a trend towards using a dictionary of string to object (or sometimes string to string), instead of strongly typed objects. For example, the new Katana project makes heavy use of IDictionary<string,object>. This approach avoids the need to continually update your entity classes/DTOs and the database tables that persist them with new properties. It also avoids the need to create new derived entity types to support new types of entity, since the Dictionary is flexible enough to store any arbitrary properties. Here's a contrived example: class StorageDevice { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } class NetworkShare : StorageDevice { public string Path { get; set; } public string LoginName { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } } class CloudStorage : StorageDevice { public string ServerUri { get; set } public string ContainerName { get; set; } public int PortNumber { get; set; } public Guid ApiKey { get; set; } } versus: class StorageDevice { public IDictionary<string, object> Properties { get; set; } } Basically I'm on the lookout for any talks, books or articles on this approach, so I can pick up on any best practices / difficulties to avoid. Here's my main questions: Does this approach have a name? (only thing I've heard used so far is "self-describing objects") What are the best practices for persisting these dictionaries into a relational database? Especially the challenges of deserializing them successfully with strongly typed languages like C#. Does it change anything if some of the objects in the dictionary are themselves lists of strongly typed entities? Should a second dictionary be used if you want to temporarily store objects that are not to be persisted/serialized across a network, or should you use some kind of namespacing on the keys to indicate this?

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• Travelling at Magenic

  - by Chris G. Williams

  I occasionally get asked if we travel "a lot" at Magenic. Sometimes the question comes from job candidates. Other times it's clients, recruiters or friends. To give a simple yes or no answer would be a disservice to the person asking the question. So here is my standard answer:It depends.(That was the short version.  Here's the long version...)We do have some guys that are more "national" in focus, and they can travel a fair amount. They also receive a little extra in compensation for doing so. It's a balancing act, and not necessarily a one-size-fits-all situation. Not everyone is well suited to constant travel. Some folks enjoy it and some folks hate it.With our local guys, our general policy is to TRY and keep them close to home whenever possible, but sometimes the needs of the client will dictate otherwise. (As Spock would say... the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.)In most cases though, we really do try to avoid sending our guys on extended travel gigs (i.e. every week for 6 months) when a simple kickoff trip and occasional visit will do. This depends on the nature of the gig, of course. Some types of work lend themselves to this model better than others. Additionally, this can and does vary by office. If one office is having trouble staffing a gig (not enough available bodies) and another office has a few too many folks on the bench, well... you can connect the dots. But again, we try to keep that to a minimum.Lastly, we all have our own thresholds for what we consider "a lot" of travel. There are two parts to this threshold:Half of it is whatever you're accustomed to already. The other half is being honest with yourself about how much you [like/hate] dealing with airports, car rentals, taxis, hotels, disruptions to your workout schedule, time away from friends/family, etc.Knowing a bit about yourself will definitely help you decide how much travel is too much for you.

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• To make or not to make...python-nautilus a dependency?

  - by George Edison

  That is the question! Okay, all silliness aside, I really am forced to make a difficult decision here. My application is written in C++ and allows other scripts to invoke methods via XML-RPC. One of these scripts is a Nautilus extension written in Python. The extension is packaged with the rest of the application and copied to the appropriate place when installed (/usr/share/nautilus-python/extensions). Now the problem is that the Nautilus extension requires the python-nautilus package to be installed to be operational. So therefore I have three options: Make the python-nautilus package a dependency. This option will ensure that anyone who installs my package will be able to use the Nautilus extension. However, this option will not be attractive to XFCE or KDE users - a ton of python-nautilus's dependencies will be installed on their machines and take up a lot of space - even if they never use Nautilus. Put the python-nautilus package in the suggests: or recommends: field. This option provides the end-user with a way to avoid installing the python-nautilus package (by providing the --no-install-suggests or --no-install-recommends argument to apt-get). However, this won't work when the user installs the package in the Software Center. (I always get mixed up as to which of those two fields are installed by default.) Prompt the user when the application is installed or first launched. This option is more complicated than the others but offers the best compromise between making it easy for the user to install python-nautilus (without going into a technical explanation) and not installing it when the user doesn't need it (or want it). I guess the best way to implement this is a simple prompt that invokes apt-get if the user would like the package installed. Don't install the package at all. This option ensures that nobody has python-nautilus installed on their machine unless they want it. However, this also means that my Nautilus extension will simply not run on the end-user's machine unless they manually install the package. Which of these options seems the best choice? Have I missed any pros and cons for each of the options?

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• Second Monitor stays black/in power save mode

  - by Rob

  I'm using two Monitors, a Belinea o.display 1 (Recognized as a Rogen Tech Distribution Inc 20" by Ubuntu, but working fine) on the DVI-Output (connected via DVI-to-VGA-adapter) as my primary Monitor and a Dell 19" (Recognized correctly) on the HDMI-output (via HDMI-to-DVI adapter) as secondary monitor. The graphics controller is a GeForce 9500 GS. I'm running a fully updated Ubuntu 13.04 with nouveau 1:1.0.7-0ubuntu1. The problem is that the second monitor (Dell) never seems to come out of standby during boot: the screen stays black and the status led on the monitor stays orange (it's green when it's on). It is correctly recognized an the size of the desktop is set accordingly, it just stays black. Changing any setting via xrandr/arandr/etc. does nothing. The on-screen-menu of the monitor reports it to be in power save mode. When using the proprietary NVIDIA-Drivers, the second monitor works just find. But these drivers cause a lot of other problems on my system, so i would really like to avoid them. On Ubuntu 12.10 i had found a workaround: When moving the relative position of the second monitor slightly down and the up again, it would turn on and function normally: xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --mode 1680x1050 --pos 1280x0 --rotate normal --output HDMI-1 --mode 1280x1024 --pos 0x88 --rotate normal sleep 2 xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --mode 1680x1050 --pos 1280x0 --rotate normal --output HDMI-1 --mode 1280x1024 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal This workaround stop working after the update to 13.04, and now i'm looking for a new solution. Has anyone experienced something similarity? xrandr output: Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2960 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192 DVI-I-1 connected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 433mm x 270mm 1680x1050 60.0*+ 1280x1024 75.0 60.0 1280x960 60.0 1152x864 75.0 1024x768 75.1 72.0 70.1 60.0 832x624 74.6 800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2 640x480 72.8 75.0 66.7 60.0 720x400 70.1 HDMI-1 connected 1280x1024+1680+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 376mm x 301mm 1280x1024 60.0*+ 75.0 1152x864 75.0 1024x768 75.1 60.0 800x600 75.0 60.3 640x480 75.0 60.0 720x400 70.1 lshw -c video: *-display Beschreibung: VGA compatible controller Produkt: G96 [GeForce 9500 GS] Hersteller: NVIDIA Corporation Physische ID: 0 Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:01:00.0 Version: a1 Breite: 64 bits Takt: 33MHz Fähigkeiten: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom Konfiguration: driver=nouveau latency=0 Ressourcen: irq:16 memory:fa000000-faffffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:f8000000-f9ffffff ioport:df00(Größe=128) memory:fb000000-fb07ffff Thanks for your help!

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• Cone of Uncertainty in classic and agile projects

  - by DigiMortal

  David Starr from Scrum.org made interesting session in TechEd Europe 2012 - Implementing Scrum Using Team Foundation Server 2012. One of interesting things for me was how Cone of Uncertainty looks like in agile projects (or how agile methodologies distort the cone we know from waterfall projects). This posting illustrates two cones – one for waterfall and one for agile world. Cone of Uncertainty Cone of Uncertainty was introduced to software development community by Steve McConnell and it visualizes how accurate are our estimates over project timeline. Here is the Cone of Uncertainty when we deal with waterfall and Big Design Up-Front (BDUF). Cone of Uncertainty. Taken from MSDN Library page Estimating. The closer we are to project end the more accurate are our estimates. When project ends we know exactly how much every task took time. As we can see then cone is wide when we usually have to give our estimates – it happens somewhere between Initial Project Concept and Requirements Complete. Don’t ask me why Initial Project Concept is the stage where some companies give their best estimates – they just do it every time and doesn’t learn a thing later. This cone is inevitable for software development and agile methodologies that try to make software world better are also able to change the cone. Cone of Uncertainty in agile projects Agile methodologies usually try to avoid BDUF, waterfalls and other things that make all our mistakes highly expensive. Of course, we are not the only ones who make mistakes – don’t also forget our dear customers. Agile methodologies take development as creational work and focus on making it better. One main trick is to focus on small and short iterations. What it means? We are estimating functionalities that are easier for us to understand and implement. Therefore our estimates are more accurate. As we move from few big iterations to many small iterations we also distort and slice Cone of Uncertainty. This is how cone looks when agile methodologies are used. Cone of Uncertainty in agile projects. We have more cones to live with but they are way smaller. I don’t have any numbers to put here because I found any but still this “chart” should give you the point: more smaller iterations cause more but way smaller cones of uncertainty. We can handle these small uncertainties because steps we take to complete small tasks are more predictable and doesn’t grow very often above our heads. One more note. Consider that both of charts given in this posting describe exactly the same phase of same project – just uncertainties are different.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 10-24-2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company's position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as "TEN." My score? Never mind. Book: DevOps for Developers | The Java Source The subject of DevOps has come up in a couple of recent OTN ArchBeat Podcasts, so it's somewhat serendipitous that Tori Weildt's recent blog post offers an overview of Java Champion Michael Hutterman's new book, DevOps for Developers, now available from Apress. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) : Context is everything… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog BOYD is a factor in the evolution of IT, but in what context? "The real IT work in companies is still being done on PCs," says Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall. "Yes, you can use a cloud service on your phone, but look around the office and you will see those cloud services are actually being used by people on PCs." Oracle in the Cloud: Oracle EBusiness Suite sizing | Tom Laszewski Cloud expert Tom Laszewski shares several technical resources that will be helpful for sizing of Oracle EBusiness Suite. Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Author and expert Yuli Vasiliev shows you how take advantage of multiple Oracle WebLogic Server instances grouped into a cluster to maximize scalability and availability. Webcast: Reduce Costs with Oracle's Database Storage Management Watch this! Join Oracle experts Kevin Jernigan and Margaret Hamburger for an interactive webcast in which you'll learn how Oracle's Database Storage Management can reduce storage costs and management complexity while improving query performance to meet service-level agreements and compliance requirements. Event Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 Event Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Thought for the Day "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." — Alan Kay Source: softwarequotes.com

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• In Technology, Ignorance is NOT Bliss

  - by Tanu Sood

  Author: Debra Lilley, ACE Director, UK Proof I’m not technical -  I’ve just finished a Latin America tour with OTN and a funny thing happened that I want to share with you; because it is quite a good analogy for how many of us use technology today and you know how I love analogies. In Costa Rica we had a really long journey up through the mountains to where our conference was to be. The road was windy and narrow and once it got dark there was no scenery to see, boredom set in. At one stage I looked at my watch to see the time, but in the dark I couldn’t make it out, so I thought I would be clever and use the torch in my smartphone! Even though as soon as I switched on the phone it showed the time, I ignored it and used the torch to read my watch. That’s us when we pay maintenance on software, ask for enhancements, and either chose not to upgrade or as I have seen so many times, upgrade but don’t use the new features. I know there are always other factors not least the upgrade costs themselves but in the later releases of all the Oracle family of applications Oracle have done a lot to make the interoperability of them with Oracle Fusion Middleware more successful and in many cases for the first time. My heritage is Oracle E Business Suite (EBS) and the availability of Oracle Weblogic for EBS is fantastic for an Oracle powered organisation that can move away from supporting multiple flavours of application server. The same release made available  - the no downtime patching that Oracle Database 11g introduced with Edition Based Redefinition. I am not saying you must use these features but you must be aware of what each release of your application brings and make a business based decision as to whether it is for you or not. I like to have a simple spreadsheet of features with no-value, nice-to-have, must-have ratings, but make the spreadsheet cumulative so that when you do upgrade you have all the features listed you previously didn’t take up. That way you can avoid the ‘using your phone to read your watch’ scenario. About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Lilley has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Lead and Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts  

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• Java @Contented annotation to help reduce false sharing

  - by Dave

  See this posting by Aleksey Shipilev for details -- @Contended is something we've wanted for a long time. The JVM provides automatic layout and placement of fields. Usually it'll (a) sort fields by descending size to improve footprint, and (b) pack reference fields so the garbage collector can process a contiguous run of reference fields when tracing. @Contended gives the program a way to provide more explicit guidance with respect to concurrency and false sharing. Using this facility we can sequester hot frequently written shared fields away from other mostly read-only or cold fields. The simple rule is that read-sharing is cheap, and write-sharing is very expensive. We can also pack fields together that tend to be written together by the same thread at about the same time. More generally, we're trying to influence relative field placement to minimize coherency misses. Fields that are accessed closely together in time should be placed proximally in space to promote cache locality. That is, temporal locality should condition spatial locality. Fields accessed together in time should be nearby in space. That having been said, we have to be careful to avoid false sharing and excessive invalidation from coherence traffic. As such, we try to cluster or otherwise sequester fields that tend to written at approximately the same time by the same thread onto the same cache line. Note that there's a tension at play: if we try too hard to minimize single-threaded capacity misses then we can end up with excessive coherency misses running in a parallel environment. Theres no single optimal layout for both single-thread and multithreaded environments. And the ideal layout problem itself is NP-hard. Ideally, a JVM would employ hardware monitoring facilities to detect sharing behavior and change the layout on the fly. That's a bit difficult as we don't yet have the right plumbing to provide efficient and expedient information to the JVM. Hint: we need to disintermediate the OS and hypervisor. Another challenge is that raw field offsets are used in the unsafe facility, so we'd need to address that issue, possibly with an extra level of indirection. Finally, I'd like to be able to pack final fields together as well, as those are known to be read-only.

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• Understanding exceptional cases

  - by Justin

  I've been studying the use of exceptions in various php projects (such as Doctrine and Zend Framework). Exceptions seem to be thrown when unordinary input/state occurs. A perfect example is Doctrine throwing an exception when you try to use a invalid query string. I think the creators of the doctrine api understood that first, you can't query data by using an invalid DQL statement, and a developer should immediately be warned that an error has occurred, rather then letting execution continue with the possibility of an error code going un-checked. I also bet that this simplifies reading the code. I can't think of a situation where you would want to use an invalid DQL statement, except unit testing. Since this is true, it's better to avoid plaguing a bunch of code with null/error checks and use exceptions. I've read in books that exceptions shouldn't be thrown when validating dating user input. I've seen examples where of where the guideline is broken. One example is the Zend framework. If supplying an invalid controller or action name, an exception is thrown. Unlike doctrine, the user has more direct control over this sort of input. I know you can configure an error controller and set up a 404 message or what have you, but I'm curious why they have used an exception in this scenario? I guess you can argue the Zend Framework does not know how to continue processing the quest. One last example Is I wrote a function to return some html based on a given resource type. This resource type is hard-coded and sent when a user interacts with a web site (such as clicking a button to display the form to input data). I don't expect users to be mucking around with the request type. Under normal operating conditions, the resource type should be valid. To clean up some logic, I was going to throw an exception if a particular form wasn't found. This is mainly to find the correct form associated with a resource type so proper validation can occur. Does this sound like a valid use case for an exception? Right now it's pretty trivial, but I do plan to implement a restful consumer and re-using a function to map resources to their validation services would be very useful. I can then catch the exception and based on the consumer, return an error message suitable for the request type...

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric (2D) game with moderate-scale multiplayer - 20-30 players. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Right now, clients are authoritative for their own position. The server performs validation and broad-scale cheat detection, and I fully realize that the system will never be fully robust against cheating. However, the performance and implementation tradeoffs work well for me right now. Given that I'm dealing with sprite graphics, the game has 8 defined directions rather than free movement. Whenever the player changes their direction or speed (walk, run, stop), a "true" 3D velocity is set on the entity and a packet it sent to the server with the new movement state. In addition, every 250ms additional packets are transmitted with the player's current position for state updates on the server as well as for client prediction. After the server validates the packet, it gets automatically distributed to all of the other "nearby" players. Client-side, all entities with non-zero velocity (ie/ moving entities) are tracked and updated by a rudimentary "physics" system - basically nothing more than changing the position by the velocity according to the elapsed time slice (40ms or so). What I'm struggling with is how to implement clean movement prediction. I have the nagging suspicion that I've made a design mistake somewhere. I've been over the Unreal, Half-life, and all other movement prediction/lag compensation articles I could find, but they all seam geared toward shooters: "Don't send each control change, send updates every 120ms, server is authoritative, client predicts, etc". Unfortunately, that style of design won't work well for me - there's no 3D environment so each individual state change is important. 1) Most of the samples I saw tightly couple movement prediction right into the entities themselves. For example, storing the previous state along with the current state. I'd like to avoid that and keep entities with their "current state" only. Is there a better way to handle this? 2) What should happen when the player stops? I can't interpolate to the correct position, since they might need to walk backwards or another strange direction if their position is too far ahead. 3) What should happen when entities collide? If the current player collides with something, the answer is simple - just stop the player from moving. But what happens if two entities take up the same space on the server? What if the local prediction causes a remote entity to collide with the player or another entity - do I stop them as well? If the prediction had the misfortune of sticking them in front of a wall that the player has gone around, the prediction will never be able to compensate and once the error gets to high the entity will snap to the new position.

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• Strategy for avoiding duplicate object ids for data shared across devices using iCloud

  - by rmaddy

  I have a data intensive iOS app that is not using CoreData nor does it support iCloud synching (yet). All of my objects are created with unique keys. I use a simple long long initialized with the current time. Then as I need a new key I increment the value by 1. This has all worked well for a few years with the app running isolated on a single device. Now I want to add support for automatic data sync across devices using iCloud. As my app is written, there is the possibility that two objects created on two different devices could end up with the same key. I need to avoid this possibility. I'm looking for ideas for solving this issue. I have a few requirements that the solution must meet: 1) The key needs to remain a single integral data type. Converting all existing keys to a compound key or to a string or other type would affect the entire code base and likely result in more bugs than it's worth. 2) The solution can't depend on an Internet connection. A user must be able to run the app and add data even with no Internet connection. The data should still resolve properly later when the data syncs through iCloud once a connection is available. I'll accept one exception to this rule. If no other option is available, I may be open to requiring an Internet connection the first time the app's data is initialized. One idea I have been toying around with in my head is logically splitting the integer key into two parts. The high 4 or 5 bits could be used as some sort of device id while the rest represents the actual key. The fuzzy part is figuring out how to come up with non-conflicting device ids that fit in a few bits. This should be viable since I don't need to deal will millions of devices. I just need to deal with the few devices that would be shared by a given iCloud account. I'm open to suggestions. Thanks.

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