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• Cannot compute equation, always gives zero

  - by user1738391

  Did i miss something? The variable percentage_ always equals 0. I've checked nTimes and winnings, they give the correct values as what is being input. Even when I test out a simple equation like, percentage_=1+1, percentage_ will give 0. Can someone help? #pragma once #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <cstdlib> #include <iomanip> using namespace std; class GuessMachine { private: int nTimes; int winnings; string nM[6]; public: GuessMachine(); void displayPrizes(); void displayMenu(); int getInput(); void checkNumber(); void checkPrize(); }; void GuessMachine::checkPrize() { MagicNumber mn; int prize_=mn.generateNumber(); float percentage_; percentage_ = float (winnings/nTimes*100); //<--On this line percentage is always 0 no matter what winnings and nTimes are cout<<"Percentage is "<<percentage_<<endl; if(percentage_ >= 50) { cout<<"You have scored "<<percentage_<<"% and won "<<nM[prize_]; } else { cout<<"You have scored "<<percentage_<<"%. You lose!!"; } cin.ignore(); cin.ignore(); }

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• How can show data from another form

  - by Michael Quiles

  This is basically a tic tac toe game, and I have another form called Winner.cs when a player wins I want it to call the form (this part works) and then I want it to say xWinner.label =b1.text"" + has won the game!. the part I cant get to work is displaying the text in the winners form label. There's an example of a message box that commented out for reference instead of b1.text using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace MyGame { public class Result1 { static private int[,] Winners = new int[,] { {0,1,2}, {3,4,5}, {6,7,8}, {0,3,6}, {1,4,7}, {2,5,8}, {0,4,8}, {2,4,6}, }; static public bool CheckWinner(Button[] myControls) { bool gameOver = false; for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) { int a = Winners[i, 0], b = Winners[i, 1], c = Winners[i, 2]; Button b1 = myControls[a], b2 = myControls[b], b3 = myControls[c]; if (b1.Text == "" || b2.Text == "" || b3.Text == "") continue; if (b1.Text == b2.Text && b2.Text == b3.Text) { b1.BackColor = b2.BackColor = b3.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.LightCoral; b1.Font = b2.Font = b3.Font = new System.Drawing.Font("Microsoft Sans Serif", 32F, System.Drawing.FontStyle.Italic & System.Drawing.FontStyle.Bold, System.Drawing.GraphicsUnit.Point, ((System.Byte)(0))); gameOver = true; Form xWinnerForm = new xWinnerForm(); xWinnerForm.Show(); //MessageBox.Show(b1.Text + " .... Wins the game!", "Game End", MessageBoxButtons.OK); //break; } } return gameOver; } } }

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• Add New Features to WMP with Windows Media Player Plus

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Do you use Windows Media Player 11 or 12 as your default media player? Today, we’re going to show you how to add some handy new features and enhancements with the Windows Media Player Plus third party plug-in. Installation and Setup Download and install Media Player Plus! (link below). You’ll need to close out of Windows Media Player before you begin or you’ll receive the message below. The next time you open Media Player you’ll be presented with the Media Player Plus settings window. Some of the settings will be enabled by default, such as the Find as you type feature. Using Media Player Plus! Find as you type allows you to start typing a search term from anywhere in Media Player without having to be in the Search box. The search term will automatically fill in the search box and display the results.   You’ll also see Disable group headers in the Library Pane.   This setting will display library items in a continuous list similar to the functionality of Windows Media Player 10. Under User Interface you can enable displaying the currently playing artist and title in the title bar. This is enabled by default.   The Context Menu page allows you to enable context menu enhancements. The File menu enhancement allows you to add the Windows Context menu to Media Player on the library pane, list pane, or both. Right click on a Title, select File, and you’ll see the Windows Context Menu. Right-click on a title and select Tag Editor Plus. Tag Editor Plus allows you to quickly edit media tags.   The Advanced tab displays a number of tags that Media Player usually doesn’t show. Only the tags with the notepad and pencil icon are editable.   The Restore Plug-ins page allows you to configure which plug-ins should be automatically restored after a Media Player crash. The Restore Media at Startup page allows you to configure Media Player to resume playing the last playlist, track, and even whether it was playing or paused at the time the application was closed. So, if you close out in the middle of a song, it will begin playing from that point the next time you open Media Player. You can also set Media Player to rewind a certain number of seconds from where you left off. This is especially useful if you are in the middle of watching a movie. There’s also the option to have your currently playing song sent to Windows Live Messenger. You can access the settings at any time by going to Tools, Plug-in properties, and selecting Windows Media Player Plus. Windows Media Plus is a nice little free plug-in for WMP 11 and 12 that brings a lot of additional functionality to Windows Media Player. If you use Media Player 11 or WMP 12 in Windows 7 as your main player, you might want to give this a try. Download Windows Media Player Plus! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Install and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesMake VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Make Windows Media Player Automatically Open in Mini Player Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7

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• This Week in Geek History: Gmail Goes Public, Deep Blue Wins at Chess, and the Birth of Thomas Edison

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Every week we bring you a snapshot of the week in Geek History. This week we’re taking a peek at the public release of Gmail, the first time a computer won against a chess champion, and the birth of prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Gmail Goes Public It’s hard to believe that Gmail has only been around for seven years and that for the first three years of its life it was invite only. In 2007 Gmail dropped the invite only requirement (although they would hold onto the “beta” tag for another two years) and opened its doors for anyone to grab a username @gmail. For what seemed like an entire epoch in internet history Gmail had the slickest web-based email around with constant innovations and features rolling out from Gmail Labs. Only in the last year or so have major overhauls at competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail brought other services up to speed. Can’t stand reading a Week in Geek History entry without a random fact? Here you go: gmail.com was originally owned by the Garfield franchise and ran a service that delivered Garfield comics to your email inbox. No, we’re not kidding. Deep Blue Proves Itself a Chess Master Deep Blue was a super computer constructed by IBM with the sole purpose of winning chess matches. In 2011 with the all seeing eye of Google and the amazing computational abilities of engines like Wolfram Alpha we simply take powerful computers immersed in our daily lives for granted. The 1996 match against reigning world chest champion Garry Kasparov where in Deep Blue held its own, but ultimately lost, in a  4-2 match shook a lot of people up. What did it mean if something that was considered such an elegant and quintessentially human endeavor such as chess was so easy for a machine? A series of upgrades helped Deep Blue outright win a match against Kasparov in 1997 (seen in the photo above). After the win Deep Blue was retired and disassembled. Parts of Deep Blue are housed in the National Museum of History and the Computer History Museum. Birth of Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history and holds an astounding 1,093 US Patents. He is responsible for outright inventing or greatly refining major innovations in the history of world culture including the phonograph, the movie camera, the carbon microphone used in nearly every telephone well into the 1980s, batteries for electric cars (a notion we’d take over a century to take seriously), voting machines, and of course his enormous contribution to electric distribution systems. Despite the role of scientist and inventor being largely unglamorous, Thomas Edison and his tumultuous relationship with fellow inventor Nikola Tesla have been fodder for everything from books, to comics, to movies, and video games. Other Notable Moments from This Week in Geek History Although we only shine the spotlight on three interesting facts a week in our Geek History column, that doesn’t mean we don’t have space to highlight a few more in passing. This week in Geek History: 1971 – Apollo 14 returns to Earth after third Lunar mission. 1974 – Birth of Robot Chicken creator Seth Green. 1986 – Death of Dune creator Frank Herbert. Goodnight Dune. 1997 – Simpsons becomes longest running animated show on television. Have an interesting bit of geek trivia to share? Shoot us an email to [email protected] with “history” in the subject line and we’ll be sure to add it to our list of trivia. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines RGB? CMYK? Alpha? What Are Image Channels and What Do They Mean? Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO] The Lingering Glow of Sunset over a Winter Landscape Wallpaper

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• Update Metadata and Cover Art in Windows Media Player 12

  - by DigitalGeekery

  If you use Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7, you may notice some of your media is missing information when displayed in the library. Today we look at how to edit and update metadata and cover art in WMP 12. By default, Windows Media Player will pull metadata, such as the title, artist, album, and cover art from the Internet. If you did not accept that default option during setup, we’ll need to turn the feature on first. Select Tools > Options from the top Menu bar. On the Library tab, ensure that Retrieve additional information form the Internet is checked. Click OK. Editing Metadata Now we’re ready to update some files. Find a media file with incorrect details or cover art. Right-click on the title and select Find album info. This will bring up the Find album information window. Here you’ll see the existing information that Windows Media Player interpreted as correct on the left side. The results of  WMP’s search for the media information are on the right. Click on Artists,  Albums , or Tracks to scroll through the search results and try to find a match. You can also type in new keywords in the Search box and hit enter (or click the Search button) to perform a new search.   If you find a correct match for your media file, click to select it and click Next. You’ll be prompted to confirm your selection, then click Finish. You should now see your media file displayed properly in Windows Media Player. Manually Entering Metadata If your search for the correct media information comes up empty, you can always manually enter the information yourself. On the Find album information window, click Edit under Existing Information. You can edit the existing information in the text boxes or the Genre dropdown box. There are a couple hidden text boxes below. Click next to Contributing Artist or Composer to enter that information.   Choosing Your Own Cover Art If your media file doesn’t pull the proper cover art, or if you simply wish to find a different image, you can add your own. Search online for a suitable image. An ideal size would be around 300 x 300 pixels, give or take. Right-click on the image copy the image. You’ll need to switch to Expanded title (if you haven’t already) to paste the image.   Paste your new image by right-clicking on the current image and select Paste album art. Note: If the image is not suitable size or type, the Paste album art option will not be available. Your new cover art will appear in Windows Media Player.   Even though it is pulled from the Internet, cover art is cached on your computer and will still be available when you are disconnected from the Internet. Are you new to Windows Media Player? If so, check out our article on how to Manage your music with Windows Media Player. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesMake VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Add Images and Metadata to Windows 7 Media Center Movie LibraryMake VLC Player Look like Winamp 5 (Kinda) TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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• Apply Skins to Add Some Flair to Windows Media Player 12

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Tired of the same look and feel of Windows Media Player in Windows 7? We’ll show you how to inject new life into your media experience by applying skins in WMP 12. Adding Skins In Library view, click on View from the Menu and select Skin Chooser. By default, WMP 12 comes with only a couple of modest skins. When you select a skin from the left pane, a preview will be displayed to the right. To apply one of the skins, simply select it from the pane on the left and click Apply Skin.   You can also switch to the currently selected skin in the Skin chooser by selecting Skin from the View menu, or by pressing Crtl + 2. Media Player will open in Now Playing mode. Click on the Switch to Library button at the top left to return to Library view.     Ok, so the included skins are a little boring. You can find additional skins by selecting Tools > Download > Skins.   Or, by clicking on More Skins from within the Skin chooser.   You will be taken the the Microsoft website where you can choose from dozens of skins to download and install. Select a skin you’d like to try and click the link to download.   If prompted with a warning message about files containing scripts that access your library, click Yes. Note: These warning boxes may look a bit different depending on your browser. We are using Chrome for this example.   Click on View Now.   Your new skin will be on display. To get back to the Library mode, find and click the Return to Full Mode button.    Some skins may launch video in a separate window.   If you want to delete one of the skins, select it from the list within the Skin chooser and click the red “X.” You can also press the delete key on your keyboard.   Then click Yes to confirm.   Conclusion Using skins is a quick and easy way to add some style to Windows Media Player and switching back and forth between skins is a breeze. Regardless of your interests, you are sure to find a skin that fits your tastes. You may find WMP skins on other sites, but sticking with Microsoft’s website will ensure maximum compatibility. Skins for Windows Media Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Make VLC Player Look like Winamp 5 (Kinda)Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu Linux TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative

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• Stream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media Player

  - by DigitalGeekery

  So you’ve got yourself a new computer with Windows 7 and you’re itching to take advantage of it’s ability to stream media across your home network. But, the rest of the family is still on Windows XP and you’re not quite ready to shell out the cash for the upgrades. Well, today we’ll show you how to easily stream media from Windows 7 to Windows XP with VLC Media Player. On the host computer running Windows 7, you’ll need to have an account set up with both a username and password. A blank password will not work. The media files will need to be located in a shared folder. Note: If the media files are located within the Public directory, or within the profile of the user account you use to log into the Windows 7 computer, they will be shared automatically. Sharing your Media Folders On your Windows 7 computer, right-click on the folder containing the files you’d like to stream and choose Properties.     On the Sharing Tab of the folder properties, click the Share button. Click OK.   Type or select from the drop down the user account you’ll use to log in, or select “Everyone” to share with all users. Then click Add. You may change the permission level, but only Read permission is required to play the media. Repeat this process for any additional folders you wish to share.    The Windows XP Client Computer Now that we’ve shared our media folders from the Windows 7 computer, we’re ready to play our files on the Windows XP computer. Download and install the VLC Media Player. (See link below) Then open VLC. Click on Media from the and select Open File… Browse your network for the shared folder that contains your media.   You’ll be prompted to log in to the host computer. Provide the credentials for a user on the Windows 7 computer. Click OK.   Select your media file and click Open.    Your media playback will begin momentarily.   This is a nice and easy way to stream media across your home network without upgrading multiple computers to Windows 7.  Plus, VLC is certainly no slouch as a Media Player. It’ll play virtually any video or audio file you can throw at it. Have you already upgraded all your home PCs to Windows 7? Check out our previous article on streaming media between Windows 7 computers on your home network. Download VLC Media Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesShare Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Need Help with Your Home Network? Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images

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• Create Music Playlists in Windows 7 Media Center

  - by DigitalGeekery

  One of the new features in Windows 7 Media Center is the ability to easily create music playlists without using Media Player. Today we’ll take a closer look at how to create them directly in Media Center. Create Manual Playlists Open Windows Media Center and select the Music Library. From within the Music Library, choose playlists from the top menu.   Then select Create Playlist. Give your new playlist a name, and select Next. Choose Music Library and select Next.    Select “songs” from the top menu, choose the songs for your playlist from your library, and select Next when finished. You can also click Select All to add all songs to your playlist, or clear all to remove them. Note: you can also sort by artist, album, genre, etc. from the top menu.   Now you can review and edit your playlist. Click the up and down pointers to move songs up and down in the playlist, or “X” to remove them. You can also go back and add additional songs by selecting Add More. Click Create when you are finished.   Auto Playlists Windows Media Center also allows you to create six different auto playlists. These are dynamic playlists based on pre-defined criteria. Auto Playlists include All Music, Music added in the last month, Music auto rated at 5 stars, Music played in the last month, Music played the most, and Music rated 4 or 5 stars. These Auto Playlists will change dynamically as your library and listening habits change. Your new music playlists can be found under playlists in the music library. Select play playlist to start the music. Now kick back and enjoy the music from your playlist. Conclusion While earlier versions of WMC allowed you to create playlists, you had to do it through Windows Media Player. This is a nice new feature for music lovers who use WMC and prefer to do everything with a remote. Do you already have playlists that you’ve created in Windows Media Player? Windows Media Center can play those too. If your playlists are in the default Music folder, Media Center will detect them automatically and add them to your Music Library. Plus, any playlists you create in Media Center are also available for Media Player. For more on creating Playlists in Media Player, check out our previous articles on how to create a custom playlist in Windows Media Player 12, and how to create auto playlists in WMP 12. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Rip a Music CD in Windows 7 Media CenterCreate Custom Playlists in Windows Media Player 12Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)How to Create Auto Playlists in Windows Media Player 12Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium

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• SWFObject and IE6 causing hair-pulling agony

  - by Piet

  I recently used SWFObject to display a flash header on a website. I chose SWFObject because: Instead of displaying an annoying ‘Install flash now’ message, it claims to be able to show alternate content. In this case: the original header image. It claims to be compatible with more or less every browser out there. Implementation went fine, until someone tested it on IE6 and got the following error: Internet explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www….. Operation aborted Which basically means that the site just can’t be visited with IE6 (still used a lot in business environments), it even seems as if there’s something wrong with your internet connection. Now, since about 10% of visitors to this site are still using IE6 (why does everyone still use Internet Explorer ???? Do YOU know that these days most people do NOT use Internet Explorer anymore ?) Now after some googling, I found the suggestion to defer loading of the SWFObject.js as follows: <script type="text/javascript" defer=”defer” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.2/swfobject.js” </script> <script type=”text/javascript” defer=”defer” swfobject.registerObject(”myId”, “9″, “”); </script> What this does according to W3C: When set, this boolean attribute provides a hint to the user agent that the script is not going to generate any document content (e.g., no “document.write” in javascript) and thus, the user agent can continue parsing and rendering. I don’t know exactly why, but: HURRAY! It works now!!! Only… IE6 and IE7 (didn’t try IE8) now gave the following error: Line: 19 Char: 1 Error: ’swfobject’ is undefined Code: 0 URL: http://www… But the flash was still running fine. Still, such an error isn’t clean, especially since almost half of the site’s visitors are using one of these Internet Explorer versions. Now, wanting a quick fix I decided to do the following: <script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" if (typeof(swfobject) != "undefined") swfobject.registerObject("myId", "9", ""); </script> I admit this is a bit of a weird ‘fix’. You’d suspect the flash to stop working on IE6/IE7, which it doesn’t. Not planning on diving into it’s inner bowels, I regard this a ‘mission accomplished’ until someone somewhere posts a better solution (for which I setup some Google alerts). Do you have a better solution? What would be the impact on the webdev economy (or your life) if all browsers were compatible? Addendum Because the above turned out not to work with the new Firefox 3.5.3 (strangely, was OK with 3.5.2 when I tested it) I decided to cut the crap and use the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way. Ok, so it won’t work for people who have javascript disabled, but who on earth would have flash installed AND javascript disabled? To avoid the IE6 error with the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way, I call swfobject.embedSWF right after the div that will be replaced with the flash content. Calling swfobject.embedSWF in the <head> would otherwise give me the above error in IE6 again.

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• Regular Expressions Cookbook Is in The Money—Win a Copy

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  %COOKBOOKFRAME%You may have heard some people say that most book authors never get any royalties. That’s not true because most authors get an advance royalty that is paid before the book is published. That’s the author’s main incentive for writing the book, at least as far as money is concerned. (If money is your main concern, don’t write books.) What is true is that most authors never see any money beyond the advance royalty. Royalty rates are very low. A 10% royalty of the publisher’s price is considered normal. The publisher’s price is usually 45% of the retail price. So if you pay full price in a bookstore, the author gets 4.5% of your money. If there’s more than one author, they split the royalty. It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that a book needs to sell quite a few copies for the royalty to add up to a meaningful amount of money. But Steven and I must have done something right. Regular Expressions Cookbook is in the money. My royalty statement for the 3rd quartier of 2009, which is the 2nd quarter that the book was on the market, came with a check. I actually received it last month but didn’t get around to blogging about. The amount of the check is insignificant. The point is that the balance is no longer negative. I’m taking this opportunity to pat myself and my co-author on the back. To celebrate the occassion O’Reilly has offered to sponsor a give-away of five (5) copies of Regular Expressions Cookbook. These are the rules of the game: You must post a comment to this blog article including your actual name and actual email address. Names are published, email addresses are not. Comments are moderated by myself (Jan Goyvaerts). If I consider a comment to be offensive or spam it will not be published and not be eligible for any prize. If you don’t know what to say in the comment, just wish me a happy 100000nd birthday, so I don’t have to feel so bad about entering the 6-bit era. Each person commenting has only one chance to win, regardless of the number of comments posted. O’Reilly will be provided with the names and email addresses of the winners (and those email addresses only) in order to arrange delivery. Each winner can choose to receive a printed copy or ebook (DRM-free PDF). If you choose the printed book, O’Reilly pays for shipping to anywhere in the world but not for any duties or taxes your country may impose on books imported from the USA. If you choose the ebook, you’ll need to create an O’Reilly account that is then granted access to the PDF download. You can make your choice after you’ve won, so it doesn’t influence your chance of winning. Contest ends 28 February 2010, GMT+7 (Thai time). Chosen by five calls to Random(78)+1 in Delphi 2010, the winners are: 48: Xiaozu 45: David Chisholm 19: Miquel Burns 33: Aaron Rice 17: David Laing Thanks to everybody who participated. The winners have been notified by email on how to collect their prize.

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• From the Tips Box: Pre-installation Prep Work Makes Service Pack Upgrades Smoother

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and, like many SP releases, quite a few people are hanging back to see what happens. If you want to update but still error on the side of caution, reader Ron Troy  offers a step-by-step guide. Ron’s cautious approach does an excellent job minimizing the number of issues that could crop up in a Service Pack upgrade by doing a thorough job updating your driver sets and clearing out old junk before you roll out the update. Read on to see how he does it: Just wanted to pass on a suggestion for people worried about installing Service Packs.  I came up with a ‘method’ a couple years back that seems to work well. Run Windows / Microsoft Update to get all updates EXCEPT the Service Pack. Use Secunia PSI to find any other updates you need. Use CCleaner or the Windows disk cleanup tools to get rid of all the old garbage out there.  Make sure that you include old system updates. Obviously, back up anything you really care about.  An image backup can be real nice to have if things go wrong. Download the correct SP version from Microsoft.com; do not use Windows / Microsoft Update to get it.  Make sure you have the 64 bit version if that’s what you have installed on your PC. Make sure that EVERYTHING that affects the OS is up to date.  That includes all sorts of drivers, starting with video and audio.  And if you have an Intel chipset, use the Intel Driver Utility to update those drivers.  It’s very quick and easy.  For the video and audio drivers, some can be updated by Intel, some by utilities on the vendor web sites, and some you just have to figure out yourself.  But don’t be lazy here; old drivers and Windows Service Packs are a poor mix. If you have 3rd party software, check to see if they have any updates for you.  They might not say that they are for the Service Pack but you cut your risk of things not working if you do this. Shut off the Antivirus software (especially if 3rd party). Reboot, hitting F8 to get the SafeMode menu.  Choose SafeMode with Networking. Log into the Administrator account to ensure that you have the right to install the SP. Run the SP.  It won’t be very fancy this way.  Maybe 45 minutes later it will reboot and then finish configuring itself, finally letting you log in. Total installation time on most of my PC’s was about 1 hour but that followed hours of preparation on each. On a separate note, I recently got on the Nvidia web site and their utility told me I had a new driver available for my GeForce 8600M GS.  This laptop had come with Vista, now has Win 7 SP1.  I had a big surprise from this driver update; the Windows Experience Score on the graphics side went way up.  Kudo’s to Nvidia for doing a driver update that actually helps day to day usage.  And unlike ATI’s updates (which I need for my AGP based system), this update was fairly quick and very easy.  Also, Nvidia drivers have never, as I can recall, given me BSOD’s, many of which I’ve gotten from ATI (TDR errors).How to Enable Google Chrome’s Secret Gold IconHTG Explains: What’s the Difference Between the Windows 7 HomeGroups and XP-style Networking?Internet Explorer 9 Released: Here’s What You Need To Know

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• Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

  - by Divya Malik

  A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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• Managing User & Role Security with Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  With the advent of SQL Developer v3.0, users have had access to some powerful database administration features. Version 3.1 introduced more powerful features such as an interface to Data Pump and RMAN. Today I want to talk about some very simple but frequently ran tasks that SQL Developer can assist with, like: identifying privs granted to users managing role privs assigning new roles and privs to users & roles Before getting started, you’ll need a connection to the database with the proper privileges. The common ROLE used to accomplish this is the ‘DBA‘ role. Curious as to what the DBA role is actually comprised of? Let’s find out! Open the DBA Console First make sure you’re connected to the database you want to manage security on with a privileged administrator account. Then open the View menu and select ‘DBA.’ Accessing the DBA panel ‘Create’ a Connection Click on the green ‘+’ button in the DBA panel. It will ask you to choose a previously defined SQL Developer connection. Defining a DBA connection in Oracle SQL Developer Once connected you will see a tree list of DBA features you can start interacting with. Expand the ‘Security’ Tree Node As you click on an object in the DBA panel, the ‘viewer’ will open on the right-hand-side, just like you are accustomed to seeing when clicking on a table or stored procedure. Accessing the DBA role If I’m a newly hired Oracle DBA, the first thing I might want to do is become very familiar with the DBA role. People will be asking you to grant them this role or a subset of its privileges. Once you see what the role can do, you will become VERY protective of it. My favorite 3-letter 4-letter word is ‘ANY’ and the DBA role is littered with privileges like this: ANY TABLE privs granted to DBA role So if this doesn’t freak you out, then maybe you should re-consider your career path. Or in other words, don’t be granting this role to ANYONE you don’t completely trust to take care of your database. If I’m just assigned a new database to manage, the first thing I might want to look at is just WHO has been assigned the DBA role. SQL Developer makes this easy to ascertain, just click on the ‘User Grantees’ panel. Who has the keys to your car? Making Changes to Roles and Users If you mouse-right-click on a user in the Tree, you can do individual tasks like grant a sys priv or expire an account. But, you can also use the ‘Edit User’ dialog to do a lot of work in one pass. As you click through options in these dialogs, it will build the ‘ALTER USER’ script in the SQL panel, which can then be executed or copied to the worksheet or to your .SQL file to be ran at your discretion. A Few Clicks vs a Lot of Typing These dialogs won’t make you a DBA, but if you’re pressed for time and you’re already in SQL Developer, they can sure help you make up for lost time in just a few clicks!

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• Big Data: Size isn’t everything

  - by Simon Elliston Ball

  Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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• Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

  - by Divya Malik

  A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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• From NaN to Infinity...and Beyond!

  - by Tony Davis

  It is hard to believe that it was once possible to corrupt a SQL Server Database by storing perfectly normal data values into a table; but it is true. In SQL Server 2000 and before, one could inadvertently load invalid data values into certain data types via RPC calls or bulk insert methods rather than DML. In the particular case of the FLOAT data type, this meant that common 'special values' for this type, namely NaN (not-a-number) and +/- infinity, could be quite happily plugged into the database from an application and stored as 'out-of-range' values. This was like a time-bomb. When one then tried to query this data; the values were unsupported and so data pages containing them were flagged as being corrupt. Any query that needed to read a column containing the special value could fail or return unpredictable results. Microsoft even had to issue a hotfix to deal with failures in the automatic recovery process, caused by the presence of these NaN values, which rendered the whole database inaccessible! This problem is history for those of us on more current versions of SQL Server, but its ghost still haunts us. Recently, for example, a developer on Red Gate’s SQL Response team reported a strange problem when attempting to load historical monitoring data into a SQL Server 2005 database via the C# ADO.NET provider. The ratios used in some of their reporting calculations occasionally threw out NaN or infinity values, and the subsequent attempts to load these values resulted in a nasty error. It turns out to be a different manifestation of the same problem. SQL Server 2005 still does not fully support the IEEE 754 standard for floating point numbers, in that the FLOAT data type still cannot handle NaN or infinity values. Instead, they just added validation checks that prevent the 'invalid' values from being loaded in the first place. For people migrating from SQL Server 2000 databases that contained out-of-range FLOAT (or DATETIME etc.) data, to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft have added to the latter's version of the DBCC CHECKDB (or CHECKTABLE) command a DATA_PURITY clause. When enabled, this will seek out the corrupt data, but won’t fix it. You have to do this yourself in what can often be a slow, painful manual process. Our development team, after a quizzical shrug of the shoulders, simply decided to represent NaN and infinity values as NULL, and move on, accepting the minor inconvenience of not being able to tell them apart. However, what of scientific, engineering and other applications that really would like the luxury of being able to both store and access these perfectly-reasonable floating point data values? The sticking point seems to be the stipulation in the IEEE 754 standard that, when NaN is compared to any other value including itself, the answer is "unequal" (i.e. FALSE). This is clearly different from normal number comparisons and has repercussions for such things as indexing operations. Even so, this hardly applies to infinity values, which are single definite values. In fact, there is some encouraging talk in the Connect note on this issue that they might be supported 'in the SQL Server 2008 timeframe'. If didn't happen; SQL 2008 doesn't support NaN or infinity values, though one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, based on the MSDN documentation for the FLOAT type, which states that "The behavior of float and real follows the IEEE 754 specification on approximate numeric data types". However, the truth is revealed in the XPath documentation, which states that "…float (53) is not exactly IEEE 754. For example, neither NaN (Not-a-Number) nor infinity is used…". Is it really so hard to fix this problem the right way, and properly support in SQL Server the IEEE 754 standard for the floating point data type, NaNs, infinities and all? Oracle seems to have managed it quite nicely with its BINARY_FLOAT and BINARY_DOUBLE types, so it is technically possible. We have an enterprise-class database that is marketed as being part of an 'integrated' Windows platform. Absurdly, we have .NET and XPath libraries that fully support the standard for floating point numbers, and we can't even properly store these values, let alone query them, in the SQL Server database! Cheers, Tony.

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• Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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• Java Developer Days India Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  You are probably aware of Oracle's decision to discontinue the relatively resource intensive regional JavaOnes in favor of more Java Developer Days, virtual events and deeper involvement with independent conferences. In comparison to the regional JavaOnes, Java Developer Days are smaller, shorter (typically one full day), more focused (mostly Oracle speakers/topics) and more local (targeting cities). For those who have been around the Java ecosystem for a few years, they are basically the current incarnation of the highly popular and developer centric Sun Tech Days. October 21st through October 25th I spoke at Java Developer Days India. This was basically three separate but identical events in the cities of Pune (October 21st), Chennai (October 24th) and Bangalore (October 25th). For those with some familiarity with India, other than Hyderabad these cities are India's IT powerhouses. The events were basically focused on Java EE. I delivered five of the sessions (yes, you read that right), while my friend NetBeans Group Product Manager Ashwin Rao delivered three talks. Jagadish Ramu from the GlassFish team India helped me out in Bangalore by delivering two sessions. It was also a pleasure to introduce my co-contributor to the Cargo Tracker Java EE Blue Prints project Vijay Nair at Bangalore during the opening talk. I thought it was a great dynamic between Ashwin and I flipping between talking about the new features and demoing live code in NetBeans. The following were my sessions (source PDF and abstracts posted as usual on my SlideShare account): JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 What’s New in Java Message Service 2 JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API Using NoSQL with JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE The event went well and was packed in all three cities. The Q&A was great and Indian developers were particularly generous with kind words :-). It seemed the event and our presence was appreciated in the truest sense which I must say is a rarity. The events were exhausting but very rewarding at the same time. As hectic as the three city trip was I tried to see at least some of the major sights (mostly at night) since this was my very first time to India. I think the slideshow below is a good representation of the riddle wrapped up in an enigma that is India (and the rest of the Indian sub-continent for that matter): Ironically enough what struck me the most during this trip is the woman pictured below - Shushma. My chauffeur, tour guide and friend for a day, she fluidly navigated the madness that is Mumbai traffic with skills that would make Evel Knievel blush while simultaneously pointing out sights and prompting me to take pictures (Mumbai was my stopover and gateway to/from India). In some ways she is probably the most potent symbol of the new India. When we parted ways I told her she should take solace in the fact she has won mostly without a fight a potentially hazardous battle her sisters across the Arabian sea are still fighting. I'm not sure she entirely understood the significance of what I told her. I hope that she did. I also had occasion to take a pretty cool local bus ride from Chennai to Bangalore instead of yet another boring flight. All in all I really enjoyed the trip to India and hope to return again soon. Jai Hind :-)!

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• The Oscar of Java Programming

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Why bother nominating a peer, yourself or your company for a Duke's Choice Award? I asked Duke's Choice Award winner Fabiane Nardon, whose team won in 2005 for the Healthcare Information System they created for the Brazilian government, what it was like winning the award and if it had any impact on her career. Here's what she told me: 1) What was it like to win a Duke's Choice Award? For me it was like winning an Oscar or a Grammy :-) I think that for a Java developer, a Duke's Choice Award is probably the highest award you can get, so it was really an honor. We had an amazing team working on that project and the team really deserved it. We were all very happy when we got that email with the announcement. That moment was one of the most important moments of my career. 2) What benefits have you gotten from being a "Duke's Choice Award Winner?" I think the most important benefit you get from winning a Duke is the fact that you become known by your peers. This opens many doors, since you are approached by more people, get invitations to speak in more conferences, you meet people with the same technical interests you have and so on. I certainly benefited a lot from it. We were lucky that in 2005, when we got our award, the winners were featured in the JavaOne keynote, with short documentaries produced about each one. So, we could be on the stage and talk a little about the project. We got lots of press at the time. We see  today's winners benefiting a lot from the press coverage. 3) How is the the Brazilian Healthcare Information System project doing today? Still running and getting new features every year. I'm not involved on the project anymore, but there are good people taking care of it. We opened the code since the beginning, so different cities could use and add features to it. There are many new developers working on that code base right now and I hope they can take the whole system to a new level. 4) What are you up to these days? I worked in the healthcare field for many years and a few years ago I decided that it was time to move on and take the experience I got designing large scale and mission critical systems to other fields. Since then I have been working with high access internet applications. I also co-founded ToolsCloud, a company that provides a development environment with open source tools in the cloud. We just launched ToolsCloud in USA, so other companies can get the same bundle of tools, hassle free, that several companies are successfully using in Brazil. Besides that, right now I'm personally working on the coolest project I ever worked on. It combines several technical challenges with a good dose of social impact. We should launch it in the second semester and I should keep it as a secret for now. Hopefully it will be useful to many people and disruptive enough to maybe get us a new Duke's Choice Award. Who knows? Read more about Fabiane in the "Heroes of Java" series by Markus Eisele. Her Twitter handle is @FabianeNardon. The Duke's Choice Awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Nominate an individual, a group or company who show the best in Java innovation. Nominate via the easy online form at www.Java.net/dukeschoice. Nominations are open until June 15, 2012.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (9 of 25): Gary Johnson&ndash;Libertarian Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Johnson served as the 29th Governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, as a member of the Republican Party, and is known for his low-tax libertarian views and his strong emphasis on personal health and fitness. While a student at the University of New Mexico in 1974, Johnson sustained himself financially by working as a door-to-door handyman. In 1976 he founded Big J Enterprises, which grew from this one-person venture to become one of New Mexico's largest construction companies. He entered politics for the first time by running for Governor of New Mexico in 1994 on a fiscally conservative, low-tax, anti-crime platform. Johnson won the Republican Party of New Mexico's gubernatorial nomination, and defeated incumbent Democratic governor Bruce King by 50% to 40%. He cut the 10% annual growth in the budget: in part, due to his use of the gubernatorial veto 200 times during his first six months in office, which gained him the nickname "Governor Veto". Johnson sought re-election in 1998, winning by 55% to 45%. In his second term, he concentrated on the issue of school voucher reforms, as well as campaigning for marijuana decriminalization and opposition to the War on Drugs. During his tenure as governor, Johnson adhered to a stringent anti-tax and anti-bureaucracy policy driven by a cost–benefit analysis rationale, setting state and national records for his use of veto powers: more than the other 49 contemporary governors put together. Term-limited, Johnson could not run for re-election at the end of his second term. As a fitness enthusiast, Johnson has taken part in several Ironman Triathlons, and he climbed Mount Everest in May 2003. After leaving office, Johnson founded the non-profit Our America Initiative in 2009, a political advocacy committee seeking to promote policies such as free enterprise, foreign non-interventionism, limited government and privatization. The Libertarian Party is the third largest political party in the United States. It is also identified by many as the fastest growing political party in the United States. The political platform of the Libertarian Party reflects the ideas of libertarianism, favoring minimally regulated markets, a less powerful state, strong civil liberties (including support for Same-sex marriage and other LGBT rights), cannabis legalization and regulation, separation of church and state, open immigration, non-interventionism and neutrality in diplomatic relations (i.e., avoiding foreign military or economic entanglements with other nations), freedom of trade and travel to all foreign countries, and a more responsive and direct democracy. Members of the Libertarian Party have also supported the repeal of NAFTA, CAFTA, and similar trade agreements, as well as the United States' exit from the United Nations, WTO, and NATO. Although there is not an officially labeled political position of the party, it is considered by many to be more right-wing than the Democratic Party but more left-wing than the Republican Party when comparing the parties' positions to each other, placing it at or above the center. In the 30 states where voters can register by party, there are over 282,000 voters registered as Libertarians. Hundreds of Libertarian candidates have been elected or appointed to public office, and thousands have run for office under the Libertarian banner. The Libertarian Party has many firsts in its credit, such as being the first party to get an electoral vote for a woman in a United States presidential election. Learn more about Gary Johnson and Libertarian Party on Wikipedia.

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• Application Performance Episode 2: Announcing the Judges!

  - by Michaela Murray

  The story so far… We’re writing a new book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it! If you work with ASP.NET applications, and have top tips, hard-won lessons, or sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing performance problems, we want to hear from you! And if your app uses SQL Server, even better – interaction with the database is critical to application performance, so we’re looking for database top tips too. There’s a Microsoft Surface apiece for the person who comes up with the best tip for SQL Server and the best tip for .NET. Of course, if your suggestion is selected for the book, you’ll get full credit, by name, Twitter handle, GitHub repository, or whatever you like. To get involved, just email your nuggets of performance wisdom to [email protected] – there are examples of what we’re looking for and full competition details at Application Performance: The Best of the Web. Enter the judges… As mentioned in my last blogpost, we have a mystery panel of celebrity judges lined up to select the prize-winning performance pointers. We’re now ready to reveal their secret identities! Judging your ASP.NET  tips will be: Jean-Phillippe Gouigoux, MCTS/MCPD Enterprise Architect and MVP Connected System Developer. He’s a board member at French software company MGDIS, and teaches algorithms, security, software tests, and ALM at the Université de Bretagne Sud. Jean-Philippe also lectures at IT conferences and writes articles for programming magazines. His book Practical Performance Profiling is published by Simple-Talk. Nik Molnar,  a New Yorker, ASP Insider, and co-founder of Glimpse, an open source ASP.NET diagnostics and debugging tool. Originally from Florida, Nik specializes in web development, building scalable, client-centric solutions. In his spare time, Nik can be found cooking up a storm in the kitchen, hanging with his wife, speaking at conferences, and working on other open source projects. Mitchel Sellers, Microsoft C# and DotNetNuke MVP. Mitchel is an experienced software architect, business leader, public speaker, and educator. He works with companies across the globe, as CEO of IowaComputerGurus Inc. Mitchel writes technical articles for online and print publications and is the author of Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming. He frequently answers questions on StackOverflow and MSDN and is an active participant in the .NET and DotNetNuke communities. Clive Tong, Software Engineer at Red Gate. In previous roles, Clive spent a lot of time working with Common LISP and enthusing about functional languages, and he’s worked with managed languages since before his first real job (which was a long time ago). Long convinced of the productivity benefits of managed languages, Clive is very interested in getting good runtime performance to keep managed languages practical for real-world development. And our trio of SQL Server specialists, ready to select your top suggestion, are (drumroll): Rodney Landrum, a SQL Server MVP who writes regularly about Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. He’s authored SQL Server Tacklebox, three Reporting Services books, and contributes regularly to SQLServerCentral, SQL Server Magazine, and Simple–Talk. His day job involves overseeing a large SQL Server infrastructure in Orlando. Grant Fritchey, Product Evangelist at Red Gate and SQL Server MVP. In an IT career spanning more than 20 years, Grant has written VB, VB.NET, C#, and Java. He’s been working with SQL Server since version 6.0. Grant volunteers with the Editorial Committee at PASS and has written books for Apress and Simple-Talk. Jonathan Allen, leader and founder of the PASS SQL South West user group. He’s been working with SQL Server since 1999 and enjoys performance tuning, development, and using SQL Server for business solutions. He’s spoken at SQLBits and SQL in the City, as well as local user groups across the UK. He’s also a moderator at ask.sqlservercentral.com.

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• Combining template method with strategy

  - by Mekswoll

  An assignment in my software engineering class is to design an application which can play different forms a particular game. The game in question is Mancala, some of these games are called Wari or Kalah. These games differ in some aspects but for my question it's only important to know that the games could differ in the following: The way in which the result of a move is handled The way in which the end of the game is determined The way in which the winner is determined The first thing that came to my mind to design this was to use the strategy pattern, I have a variation in algorithms (the actual rules of the game). The design could look like this: I then thought to myself that in the game of Mancala and Wari the way the winner is determined is exactly the same and the code would be duplicated. I don't think this is by definition a violation of the 'one rule, one place' or DRY principle seeing as a change in rules for Mancala wouldn't automatically mean that rule should be changed in Wari as well. Nevertheless from the feedback I got from my professor I got the impression to find a different design. I then came up with this: Each game (Mancala, Wari, Kalah, ...) would just have attribute of the type of each rule's interface, i.e. WinnerDeterminer and if there's a Mancala 2.0 version which is the same as Mancala 1.0 except for how the winner is determined it can just use the Mancala versions. I think the implementation of these rules as a strategy pattern is certainly valid. But the real problem comes when I want to design it further. In reading about the template method pattern I immediately thought it could be applied to this problem. The actions that are done when a user makes a move are always the same, and in the same order, namely: deposit stones in holes (this is the same for all games, so would be implemented in the template method itself) determine the result of the move determine if the game has finished because of the previous move if the game has finished, determine who has won Those three last steps are all in my strategy pattern described above. I'm having a lot of trouble combining these two. One possible solution I found would be to abandon the strategy pattern and do the following: I don't really see the design difference between the strategy pattern and this? But I am certain I need to use a template method (although I was just as sure about having to use a strategy pattern). I also can't determine who would be responsible for creating the TurnTemplate object, whereas with the strategy pattern I feel I have families of objects (the three rules) which I could easily create using an abstract factory pattern. I would then have a MancalaRuleFactory, WariRuleFactory, etc. and they would create the correct instances of the rules and hand me back a RuleSet object. Let's say that I use the strategy + abstract factory pattern and I have a RuleSet object which has algorithms for the three rules in it. The only way I feel I can still use the template method pattern with this is to pass this RuleSet object to my TurnTemplate. The 'problem' that then surfaces is that I would never need my concrete implementations of the TurnTemplate, these classes would become obsolete. In my protected methods in the TurnTemplate I could just call ruleSet.determineWinner(). As a consequence, the TurnTemplate class would no longer be abstract but would have to become concrete, is it then still a template method pattern? To summarize, am I thinking in the right way or am I missing something easy? If I'm on the right track, how do I combine a strategy pattern and a template method pattern? This is part of a homework assignment but I'm not looking to be gifted the answer, I have deliberately been very verbose in my question to show that I have thought about it before coming here to ask a question

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• Application Performance: The Best of the Web

  - by Michaela Murray

  Wisdom A deep understanding and realization […] resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions. It is also the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action. - Wikipedia We’re writing a book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it. We know that there’s a huge amount of web developer wisdom that never gets shared, and we want to find those golden nuggets of knowledge and experience, and make sure everyone can learn from them. Right now, we want to find out about your top tips, hard-won lessons, and sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing application performance problems. If you work with .NET and SQL, even better – a lot of application performance relies on the interaction with the database, so we want to hear from you! “How Do You Want Me To Be Involved?” Right! Details! We want you, our most excellent readers, to email us with the Best Advice you would give to other developers for getting the best performance out of their applications. It doesn’t matter if your advice is for newbies or veterans, .NET or SQL – so long as it’s about application performance, we want to hear from you. (And if you think that there’s developer wisdom out there that “everyone knows”, a) I’m willing to bet you could find someone who doesn’t know about it, and b) it probably bears repeating anyway!) “I’m Interested. What Can You Do For Me?” Excellent question. For starters, there’s a chance to win a Microsoft Surface (the tablet, not the table-top). Once all the ASP.NET Wisdom has been collected, tallied, and labelled, it will then be weighed and measured by a team of expert judges (whose identities are still a closely-guarded secret).  The top tip in both SQL & .NET categories will each win their author their very own MS Surface. But that’s not all! We can also give you… immortality! More details? Ok. We’ll be collecting all of the tips sent in by our readers (and we can’t wait to learn from you all,) and with the help of our Simple-Talk editors, we will publish and distribute your combined and documented knowledge as a free, community-created, professionally typeset eBook. You will naturally be credited by name / pseudonym / twitter handle / GitHub username / StackOverflow profile / Whatever, as the clearly ingenious author of hot performance tips. The Not-Very-Fine Print Here’s the breakdown: We want to bring together the best application performance knowledge from ASP.NET developers. Closing date for submissions will be 9am GMT, December 4th. Submissions should be made by email – [email protected] Submissions will be judged by a panel of expert judges (who will be revealed soon). The top submission in both the SQL & .NET categories will each win a Microsoft Surface. ALL the tips which make it through the judging process will be polished by Simple-Talk editors, and turned into a professionally typeset eBook, which will be freely available, and promoted alongside the ANTS Performance Profiler tool. Anyone whose entry makes it into the book will be clearly and profusely credited in the method of their choice (or can remain anonymous.) The really REALLY short version Share what you know about ASP.NET application performance for a chance to win a Microsoft Surface, and then get your name credited in a slick eBook with top-notch production values. For more details, see above. We can’t wait to learn from you!

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• Windows Azure Emulators On Your Desktop

  - by BuckWoody

  Many people feel they have to set up a full Azure subscription online to try out and develop on Windows Azure. But you don’t have to do that right away. In fact, you can download the Windows Azure Compute Emulator – a “cloud development environment” – right on your desktop. No, it’s not for production use, and no, you won’t have other people using your system as a cloud provider, and yes, there are some differences with Production Windows Azure, but you’ll be able code, run, test, diagnose, watch, change and configure code without having any connection to the Internet at all. The best thing about this approach is that when you are ready to deploy the code you’ve been testing, a few clicks deploys it to your subscription when you make one.   So what deep-magic does it take to run such a thing right on your laptop or even a Virtual PC? Well, it’s actually not all that difficult. You simply download and install the Windows Azure SDK (you can even get a free version of Visual Studio for it to run on – you’re welcome) from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx   This SDK will also install the Windows Azure Compute Emulator and the Windows Azure Storage Emulator – and then you’re all set. Right-click the icon for Visual Studio and select “Run as Administrator”:    Now open a new “Cloud” type of project:   Add your Web and Worker Roles that you want to code:   And when you’re done with your design, press F5 to start the desktop version of Azure:   Want to learn more about what’s happening underneath? Right-click the tray icon with the Azure logo, and select the two emulators to see what they are doing:          In the configuration files, you’ll see a “Use Development Storage” setting. You can call the BLOB, Table or Queue storage and it will all run on your desktop. When you’re ready to deploy everything to Windows Azure, you simply change the configuration settings and add the storage keys and so on that you need.   Want to learn more about all this?   Overview of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432968.aspx Overview of the Windows Azure Storage Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432983.aspx January 2011 Training Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en      

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• Access Denied

  - by Tony Davis

  When Microsoft executives wake up in the night screaming, I suspect they are having a nightmare about their own version of Frankenstein's monster. Created with the best of intentions, without thinking too hard of the long-term strategy, and having long outlived its usefulness, the monster still lives on, occasionally wreaking vengeance on the innocent. Its name is Access; a living synthesis of disparate body parts that is resistant to all attempts at a mercy-killing. In 1986, Microsoft had no database products, and needed one for their new OS/2 operating system, the successor to MSDOS. In 1986, they bought exclusive rights to Sybase DataServer, and were also intent on developing a desktop database to capture Ashton-Tate's dominance of that market, with dbase. This project, first called 'Omega' and later 'Cirrus', eventually spawned two products: Visual Basic in 1991 and Access in late 1992. Whereas Visual Basic battled with PowerBuilder for dominance in the client-server market, Access easily won the desktop database battle, with Dbase III and DataEase falling away. Access did an excellent job of abstracting and simplifying the task of building small database applications in a short amount of time, for a small number of departmental users, and often for a transient requirement. There is an excellent front end and forms generator. We not only see it in Access but parts of it also reappear in SSMS. It's good. A business user can pull together useful reports, without relying on extensive technical support. A skilled Access programmer can deliver a fairly sophisticated application, whilst the traditional client-server programmer is still sharpening his pencil. Even for the SQL Server programmer, the forms generator of Access is useful for sketching out application designs. So far, so good, but here's where the problems start; Access ties together two different products and the backend of Access is the bugbear. The limitations of Jet/ACE are well-known and documented. They range from MDB files that are prone to corruption, especially as they grow in size, pathetic security, and "copy and paste" Backups. The biggest problem though, was an infamous lack of scalability. Because Microsoft never realized how long the product would last, they put little energy into improving the beast. Microsoft 'ate their own dog food' by using Access for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. They choked on it. For years, scalability and performance problems with Exchange Server have been laid at the door of the Jet Blue engine on which it relies. Substantial development work in Exchange 2010 was required, just in order to improve the engine and storage schema so that it more efficiently handled the reading and writing of mails. The alternative of using SQL Server just never panned out. The Jet engine was designed to limit concurrent users to a small number (10-20). When Access applications outgrew this, bitter experience proved that there really is no easy upgrade path from Access to SQL Server, beyond rewriting the whole lot from scratch. The various initiatives to do this never quite bridged the cultural gulf between Access and a true relational database So, what are the obvious alternatives for small, strategic database applications? I know many users who, for simple 'list maintenance' requirements are very happy using Excel databases. Surely, now that PowerPivot has led the way, it is time for Microsoft to offer a new RAD package for database application development; namely an Excel-based front end for SQL Server Express. In that way, we'll have a powerful and familiar front end, to a scalable database, and a clear upgrade path when an app takes off and needs to go enterprise. Cheers, Tony.

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