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  • How to fork my android app?

    - by eidylon
    So I've written my first Android app, ... and want to be able to provide both free and paid versions. I wrote and compiled it in Eclipse on Windows. I'm wondering if it is possible, and how I would go about doing so, to have separate compile jobs somehow, so that I can maintain my free and paid versions from one set of source code, and just leave out certain bits for the paid version, but keep the main source the same. What are the recommended ways/best practices for devving a paid and free version of the same app from one set of source? Is it even possible?

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  • Dev Environment Tests Not 100% Compatible with Staging/Production in Rails

    - by aronchick
    We use a bunch of specific apps/APIs that (unfortunately) differ quite a bit from dev to staging/production. We use tests and continuous integration at each stage, but in dev, the tests fail annoyingly (throwing dialogs, etc - thanks Windows for the 64-bit notification!). I hate to write custom code, but are there some best practices for how to allow a subset of testing in ruby/rails - or for patching out specific tests when you're running on Windows? Some specific situations that: Identify.exe does not support 64-bit Windows and throws a dialog. Sethostname is not supported, and throws an error (at least it's command line).

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  • How to turn one server into many servers? (Virtualization/VMWare)

    - by user1229962
    I'm hoping for a high level discussion of this problem I know is quickly approaching my application. I have a server that binds on a specific port and manages TCP Sockets from my clients. I know that it is common practice to use VMWare to virtualize servers and run multiple servers at once. How can a single server design be changed to support multiple servers? Multiple servers can't bind to the same port. If I had to guess I would say a proxy server binds to the port and then sends connections off to the other servers to be handled as if it was still a single server application. I'm wondering what options there are and what are the common practices for solving this problem? Thanks in advance!

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  • Unix sort keys cause performance problems

    - by KenFar
    My data: It's a 71 MB file with 1.5 million rows. It has 6 fields All six fields combine to form a unique key - so that's what I need to sort on. Sort statement: sort -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -k4,4 -k5,5 -k6,6 -o output.csv input.csv The problem: If I sort without keys, it takes 30 seconds. If I sort with keys, it takes 660 seconds. I need to sort with keys to keep this generic and useful for other files that have non-key fields as well. The 30 second timing is fine, but the 660 is a killer. More details using unix time: sort input.csv -o output.csv = 28 seconds sort -t ',' -k1 input.csv -o output.csv = 28 seconds sort -t ',' -k1,1 input.csv -o output.csv = 64 seconds sort -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 input.csv -o output.csv = 194 seconds sort -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 input.csv -o output.csv = 328 seconds sort -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -k4,4 input.csv -o output.csv = 483 seconds sort -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -k4,4 -k5,5 input.csv -o output.csv = 561 seconds sort -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -k4,4 -k5,5 -k6,6 input.csv -o output.csv = 660 seconds I could theoretically move the temp directory to SSD, and/or split the file into 4 parts, sort them separately (in parallel) then merge the results, etc. But I'm hoping for something simpler since looks like sort is just picking a bad algorithm. Any suggestions? Testing Improvements using buffer-size: With 2 keys I got a 5% improvement with 8, 20, 24 MB and best performance of 8% improvement with 16MB, but 6% worse with 128MB With 6 keys I got a 5% improvement with 8, 20, 24 MB and best performance of 9% improvement with 16MB. Testing improvements using dictionary order (just 1 run each): sort -d --buffer-size=8M -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 input.csv -o output.csv = 235 seconds (21% worse) sort -d --buffer-size=8M -t ',' -k1,1 -k2,2 input.csv -o ouput.csv = 232 seconds (21% worse) conclusion: it makes sense that this would slow the process down, not useful Testing with different file system on SSD - I can't do this on this server now. Testing with code to consolidate adjacent keys: def consolidate_keys(key_fields, key_types): """ Inputs: - key_fields - a list of numbers in quotes: ['1','2','3'] - key_types - a list of types of the key_fields: ['integer','string','integer'] Outputs: - key_fields - a consolidated list: ['1,2','3'] - key_types - a list of types of the consolidated list: ['string','integer'] """ assert(len(key_fields) == len(key_types)) def get_min(val): vals = val.split(',') assert(len(vals) <= 2) return vals[0] def get_max(val): vals = val.split(',') assert(len(vals) <= 2) return vals[len(vals)-1] i = 0 while True: try: if ( (int(get_max(key_fields[i])) + 1) == int(key_fields[i+1]) and key_types[i] == key_types[i+1]): key_fields[i] = '%s,%s' % (get_min(key_fields[i]), key_fields[i+1]) key_types[i] = key_types[i] key_fields.pop(i+1) key_types.pop(i+1) continue i = i+1 except IndexError: break # last entry return key_fields, key_types While this code is just a work-around that'll only apply to cases in which I've got a contiguous set of keys - it speeds up the code by 95% in my worst case scenario.

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  • OS X: Finder error -36 when using SMB shares on a Samba server bound to AD

    - by Frenchie
    We're looking at deploying SMB homes on Debian (5.0.3) for our mac clients rather than purchasing four new Xserves. We've got our test servers built and functioning properly. Windows clients behave perfectly, but we've run into an issue with OS X (10.6.x and 10.5.x). We're going this route instead of Windows file servers due to a whole bunch of other issues that arise when going that way. Specifically, when mounting a SMB share with unix extensions switched on and the remote server bound to AD, the finder cannot save files on the share, instead touching the file and then bombing out with a -36 IO error, folder creation is fine. Copying files in the terminal behaves fine and the problem seems to be limited to the finder. The issue arises (I think) as the remote UID/GID is passed across when using unix extensions. OS X uses its own winbind idmap (odsam) to work out the effective UID/GID from AD users and groups whilst we're using a rid map on the server. Consequently, there is a mismatch in ownership which the finder chooses to honour. How OS X appears to handle this is to use the remote uid and gid at the file permission level (see below) and then set an OS X acl granting the local uid/gid to have the appropriate permissions on the file. I think the finder touches the file (which the kernel allows because of the ACL) and then checks the filesystem perms and drops out with the IO error. On a Client fc-003353-d:homes2 root# ls -led test/ drwx------+ 2 135978 100513 16384 Feb 3 15:14 test/ 0: user:jfrench allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit 1: group:ARTS\domain users allow 2: group:everyone allow 3: group:owner allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit 4: group:group allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit 5: group:everyone allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit We've tried the following without any luck: Setting the Linux side file owner to match the OS X GID/UID Adding ACLs on the linux filesystem which grant the OS X GID/UID perms Disabling extended attributes Setting steams=no in /etc/nsmb.conf on the client We're currently running a workaround which is to just turn off unix extensions which forces the macs to just mount the share as the local user with u=rwx perms. This works for most things but is causing a few apps that expect certain perms to break in subtle ways. Worst case scenario is that we'll continue running in this way but we would like to have the unix extensions on. Regards. Relevant SMB config below: [global] workgroup = ARTS realm = *snip* security = ADS password server = *snip* unix extensions = yes panic action = /usr/share/panic-action %d idmap backend = rid:ARTS=100000-10000000 idmap uid = 100000-10000000 idmap gid = 100000-10000000 winbind enum users = Yes winbind enum groups = Yes veto files = /lost+found/aquota.*/ hide files = /desktop.ini/$RECYCLE.BIN/.*/AppData/Library/ ea support = yes store dos attributes = yes map system = no map archive = no map readonly = no

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  • WD1000FYPS harddrive is marked 0 mb in 3ware (and no SMART)

    - by osgx
    After reboot my SATA 1TB WD1000FYPS (previously is was "Drive error") is marked 0 mb in 3ware web gui. Complete message: Available Drives (Controller ID 0) Port 1 WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0 0.00 MB NOT SUPPORTED [Remove Drive] SMART gives me only Device Model and ATA protocol version 1 (not 7-8 as it must be for SATA) What does it mean? Just before reboot, when is was marked only with "Device Error", smart was: Device Model: WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0 Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1130*** Firmware Version: 02.01B01 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Sun Mar 7 18:47:35 2010 MSK SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 188 186 021 Pre-fail Always - 7591 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 229 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 199 199 140 Pre-fail Always - 3 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000e 193 193 000 Old_age Always - 125 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 078 078 000 Old_age Always - 16615 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 77 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 198 198 000 Old_age Always - 1564 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 146 146 000 Old_age Always - 164824 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 117 100 000 Old_age Always - 35 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 199 199 000 Old_age Always - 1 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 What can be wrong with he? Can it be restored? PS new smart is === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0 Serial Number: [No Information Found] Firmware Version: [No Information Found] Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 1 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Mon Mar 8 00:29:44 2010 MSK SMART is only available in ATA Version 3 Revision 3 or greater. We will try to proceed in spite of this. SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 82-83 don't show if SMART supported. Checking for SMART support by trying SMART ENABLE command. Command failed, ata.status=(0x00), ata.command=(0x51), ata.flags=(0x01) Error SMART Enable failed: Input/output error SMART ENABLE failed - this establishes that this device lacks SMART functionality. A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options. PPS There was a rapid grow of " 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count " before dying. The hard was used in raid, with several hards from the same fabric packaging box (close id's). The hard drives were placed identically. Rapid means almost linear grow from 300 to 1700 in 6-7 hours. Maximal temperature was 41C. (thanks to munin's smart monitoring)

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  • Using smartctl to get vendor specific Attributes from ssd drive behind a SmartArray P410 controller

    - by Lairsdragon
    Hi! Recently I have deployed some HP server with SSD's behind a SmartArray P410 controller. While not official supported from HP the server work well sofar. Now I like to get wear level info's, error statistics etc from the drive. While the SA P410 supports a passthru of the SMART Command to a single drive in the array the output I was not able to the the interesting things from the drive. In this case especially the value the Wear level indicator is from interest for me (Attr.ID 233), but this is ony present if the drive is directly attanched to a SATA Controller. smartctl on directly connected ssd: # smartctl -A /dev/sda smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 5 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0000 100 000 000 Old_age Offline In_the_past 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0000 100 000 000 Old_age Offline In_the_past 0 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 8561 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 55 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 29 232 Unknown_Attribute 0x0003 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0 233 Unknown_Attribute 0x0002 088 088 000 Old_age Always - 0 225 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0000 198 198 000 Old_age Offline - 508509 226 Load-in_Time 0x0002 255 000 000 Old_age Always In_the_past 0 227 Torq-amp_Count 0x0002 000 000 000 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 0 228 Power-off_Retract_Count 0x0002 000 000 000 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 0 smartctl on P410 connected ssd: # ./smartctl -A -d cciss,0 /dev/cciss/c1d0 smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net (Right, it is complety empty) smartctl on P410 connected hdd: # ./smartctl -A -d cciss,0 /dev/cciss/c0d0 smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net Current Drive Temperature: 27 C Drive Trip Temperature: 68 C Vendor (Seagate) cache information Blocks sent to initiator = 1871654030 Blocks received from initiator = 1360012929 Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 2178203797 Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 46052239 Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 0 Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information number of hours powered up = 3363.25 number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 12 Do I hunt here a bug, or is this a limitation of the p410 SMART cmd Passthru?

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  • Windows 7 laptop constantly dropping internet connection

    - by Corbin Holbert
    I have scoured the web for an answer and failed to find one. I am using a Toshiba Satellite laptop running Windows 7 64-Bit. I have the computer connected via Wifi. Now, I am no beginner with the Internet, or anything related to computers, as I have grown up teaching everyone around me how to use computers, and went to college for IT. Everything on my network works flawlessly at all times, except for this evil laptop. The worst part is that I fixed this once before a few years back and recently had to replace the hard drive and re-install the OS, but cannot for the life of me remember what I did to make this problem go away. I am in my browser, connected to the Internet. I click a link. Suddenly no internet access. All I do is click down on the WiFi connection in the task bar, disconnect and reconnect immediately. Internet is back the moment I hit "connect." I have read many people had the same issues as I am having, but they all had triggers or other network issues. I have no trigger (this happens literally five to six times per minute no matter what I am doing) and I have no problems with my router, modem, or any other devices or computers on said network. As I am a web designer, and like to test my work live at every turn- this is going to result in this laptop being in pieces if I can't get it fixed soon. If more info is needed, let me know and I will provide. Thanks for any help offered! EDIT: Network Card: Realtek RTL8188CE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC Network state reads as "No Internet Access" when the problem first occurs, then magically I have Internet access for about ten seconds once I disconnect and reconnect. I have turned off IPV6, I have turned off power saving options for the network adapter, no viruses. Any new ideas? Also, I had to disconnect and reconnect four times just to get to this edit screen- and will likely have to do the same just to post it- it's that bad.

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  • Areca 1280ml RAID6 volume set failed

    - by Richard
    Today we hit some kind of worst case scenario and are open to any kind of good ideas. Here is our problem: We are using several dedicated storage servers to host our virtual machines. Before I continue, here are the specs: Dedicated Server Machine Areca 1280ml RAID controller, Firmware 1.49 12x Samsung 1TB HDDs We configured one RAID6-set with 10 discs that contains one logical volume. We have two hot spares in the system. Today one HDD failed. This happens from time to time, so we replaced it. Upon rebuilding a second disc failed. Normally this is no fun. We stopped heavy IO-operations to ensure a stable RAID rebuild. Sadly the hot-spare disc failed while rebuilding and the whole thing stopped. Now we have the following situation: The controller says that the raid set is rebuilding The controller says that the volume failed It is a RAID 6 system and two discs failed, so the data has to be intact, but we cannot bring the volume online again to access the data. While searching we found the following leads. I don't know whether they are good or bad: Mirroring all the discs to a second set of drives. So we would have the possibility to try different things without loosing more than we already have. Trying to rebuild the array in R-Studio. But we have no real experience with the software. Pulling all drives, rebooting the system, changing into the areca controller bios, reinserting the HDDs one-by-one. Some people are saying that the brought the system online by this. Some are saying that the effect is zero. Some say, that they blew the whole thing. Using undocumented areca commands like "rescue" or "LeVel2ReScUe". Contacting a computer forensics service. But whoa... primary estimates by phone exceeded 20.000€. That's why we would kindly ask for help. Maybe we are missing the obvious? And yes of course, we have backups. But some systems lost one week of data, thats why we'd like to get the system up and running again. Any help, suggestions and questions are more than welcome.

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  • Backing Up vs. Redundancy

    - by TK Kocheran
    I'm currently in stage 2 of 3 of building my home workstation. What this means is that my RAID-0 array of solid state disks will be backed up nightly to a RAID-5 or RAID-6 array of traditional spinning hard disks. However, it recently dawned on me that redundancy is not backup. The main reason for setting up a RAID array with redundancy was to protect myself in the event of a drive failure to serve as an effective backup solution. Wait. What if a bolt of lightning finds a way to travel into my house, through my surge-protector, into my power supply and physically destroys all of my hard disks and SSDs? Well, in that case, I guess I'd be fine because I generally keep most important files (music, pictures, videos) stored in multiple places like on my laptop, my wife's laptop, and an encrypted USB hard drive. Wait. What if a giant hedgehog meteor attacks my house from space traveling at mach 3 and all machines and hard disks are blown to smithereens. Well, I guess I could find a way to do ridiculously slow and cumbersome rsyncs or backups to Amazon's Glacier. Wait. What if there's a nuclear apocalypse... and at this point I start laughing hysterically. At what point does backing up become irrelevant? I completely understand situation one (mechanical drive failure), situation two (workstation compromised or destroyed somehow), possibly even situation three (all machines and disks destroyed), but situation four? There's no questioning the need for backups. None. However, there are three questions I'd really like addressed: To what level should one backup? I definitely understand the merits of physical disk redundancy. I also believe in keeping important files on multiple machines and thinning out the possibility of losing all of my files. Online backups make sense, but they beg the following question. What should I be backing up remotely and how often? It's no problem storage-wise to back up important files (music, pictures, videos) and even configuration and temporal data for all of the machines in my network (all Linux based)... albeit locally. Transferring to the cloud is another story. Worst-case scenario, if I lost all of my configuration for my individual computers, the reality is that I probably lost the machines too. The cloud is a long way away from here; I can run backups over CAT-6 here and see 100MB/s easily, but I'm afraid that I'm only going to see 2MB/s at best when transferring up to the cloud.

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  • Effecient organization of spare cables and hardware

    - by Jake Wharton
    As many of you also likely do, I have a growing collection of cables, hardware, and spare parts (screws, connectors, etc.). I'm looking to find a good system of organization so that everything isn't a tangled mess, mismatched, and potentially able to be damaged. Since the the three things listed above are all have varying sizes and degrees of delicacy this poises an interesting problem. Presently I have those cheap plastic storage bins you find at Wal-mart for everything. Cables that were once wrapped neatly have become tangled due to numerous "I know I have a cable for this" moments. Hardware is mixed in other bins with odds and ends with no protection from each other. NICs, CPUs, and HDDs are all interacting and likely causing damage. Finally there are stray parts sprinkled amongst these two both in plastic bags and loose. I'm looking to unify this storage into a controlled chaos. Here are my thoughts: Odds and ends are the easiest. Screws, connectors, and small electronic parts lend themselves perfectly to tackle boxes and jewelry boxes. Since these are usually dynamically compartmentalized I can adjust for the contents and label them on the outside or inside of the lid. Cables are easily wrangled with short velcro strips but that doesn't stop them from being all mixed in together. Hardware is the worst offender. Size, shape, and degree of delicacy changes with nearly every piece. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of organization for a somewhat efficient manner. What are all your thoughts? What is the best type of tackle or jewelry box to use? Most of them are cheap and flimsy. Is there a better alternative? How can I organize cables to know exactly (within reason) where one is? What about associating cables with hardware (Wall adapter to router, etc.)? What kind of storage unit lends itself to all shapes of hardware? Do I need to separate by size or degree of delicacy for better organization?

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  • System Requirements of a write-heavy applications serving hundreds of requests per second

    - by Rolando Cruz
    NOTE: I am a self-taught PHP developer who has little to none experience managing web and database servers. I am about to write a web-based attendance system for a very large userbase. I expect around 1000 to 1500 users logged-in at the same time making at least 1 request every 10 seconds or so for a span of 30 minutes a day, 3 times a week. So it's more or less 100 requests per second, or at the very worst 1000 requests in a second (average of 16 concurrent requests? But it could be higher given the short timeframe that users will make these requests. crosses fingers to avoid 100 concurrent requests). I expect two types of transactions, a local (not referring to a local network) and a foreign transaction. local transactions basically download userdata in their locality and cache it for 1 - 2 weeks. Attendance equests will probably be two numeric strings only: userid and eventid. foreign transactions are for attendance of those do not belong in the current locality. This will pass in the following data instead: (numeric) locality_id, (string) full_name. Both requests are done in Ajax so no HTML data included, only JSON. Both type of requests expect at the very least a single numeric response from the server. I think there will be a 50-50 split on the frequency of local and foreign transactions, but there's only a few bytes of difference anyways in the sizes of these transactions. As of this moment the userid may only reach 6 digits and eventid are 4 to 5-digit integers too. I expect my users table to have at least 400k rows, and the event table to have as many as 10k rows, a locality table with at least 1500 rows, and my main attendance table to increase by 400k rows (based on the number of users in the users table) a day for 3 days a week (1.2M rows a week). For me, this sounds big. But is this really that big? Or can this be handled by a single server (not sure about the server specs yet since I'll probably avail of a VPS from ServInt or others)? I tried to read on multiple server setups Heatbeat, DRBD, master-slave setups. But I wonder if they're really necessary. the users table will add around 500 1k rows a week. If this can't be handled by a single server, then if I am to choose a MySQL replication topology, what would be the best setup for this case? Sorry, if I sound vague or the question is too wide. I just don't know what to ask or what do you want to know at this point.

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  • Radeon HD4850 serious issues when using DirectX 10

    - by ricsmania
    Hello, I have a problem with my video card. Whenever I run a DirectX 10 game, it works for a few seconds (10 or so) and then starts displaying nothing but big polygons. I have tested this with Crysis and Resident Evil 5, both have the same problems. The same games running under DirectX 9 work fine, except for some small black squares once in a while. I have the following specs: Asus P7P55D LE Intel Core i5 750 Sapphire Radeon HD4850 1GB 2x2GB Patriot Viper II Sector 5, DDR3 1600 MHz OCZ Stealth X Stream 500SXS 500W At first I thought it could be the video card overheating (it has stock cooling), but the game crashes even when it's running at 50 degrees C, and it's never been higher than 70. I also thought it could be the PSU, but as far as I know 500W is enough for this computer, especially because I haven't overclocked anything. My OS is Windows 7 X64 and I am using Catalyst 10.10, but I have also tried many older versions with no success. I don't think there is a problem with the card itself, or else it wouldn't run DirectX 9 games I believe. I have spent many hours searching for a solution but I couldn't, so any help is appreciated. Thank you. EDIT: I did some further investigation about the problem, and it seems taspeotis was right, it might be related to memory. I slightly underclocked the memory from 993 to 965 MHz and the problem went away completely. Both the black squares using DirectX 9 and the weird polygons using DirectX 10. I was using RE DirectX 10 Benchmark, as it consistently crashed around the same point, and now I can play the full benchmark with no artifacts at all. Unfortunately, the underclock has an obvious hit in performance. Although it's not critical, it's definitely noticeable. So, if the video memory test software showed no erros, but the card needs an underclock to work, what might be the problem? Temperature? Voltage? By the way, I couldn't find what the default voltage for this card is. And what is a good software to try and increase it? I tried Ati Tray Tools but it has a bug that increases the clock speed dramatically whenever I change something in the Overclock tab, so I'm afraid it might fry my card. Worst case scenario, if I don't find I solution I will try to slightly increase the GPU clock to compensate for the memory clock. Thank you again.

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  • Echo 404 directly from nginx to improve performance

    - by user64204
    I am in charge of production servers serving static content for a website. Those servers are constantly being crawled by bots looking for potential exploits (which isn't that much of a problem security-wise because no application can be reached behind the web server) but generates thousands of 404 per day, sometimes per hour. I am looking into ways of blocking those requests but it's tricky (you want to make sure you don't block legitimate traffic and these bots are becoming more and more clever at looking like they're legit) and is going to take me a while to find an acceptable solution. In the meantime I would like to reduce the performance impact of serving those 404 pages. Indeed we're using nginx which by default is configured to serve it's 404 page from the disk (This can be changed using the error_page directive but in the end the 404 will either have to be served from disk or from another external source (e.g. upstream application which would be worst)) which isn't ideal. I ran a test with ab on my local machine with a basic configuration: in one case I echo a message directly from nginx so the disk isn't touched at all, in the other case I hit a missing page and nginx serves its 404 from disk. server { # [...] the default nginx stuff location / { } location /this_page_exists { echo "this page was found"; } } Here are the test results (my laptop has Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM + SSD in case you're wondering why they are so high): $ ab -n 500000 -c 1000 http://localhost/this_page_exists Requests per second: 25609.16 [#/sec] (mean) $ ab -n 500000 -c 1000 http://localhost/this_page_doesnt_exists Requests per second: 22905.72 [#/sec] (mean) As you can see, returning a value with echo is 11% ((25609-22905)÷22905×100) faster than serving the 404 page from disk. Accordingly I would like to echo a simple 404 Page not Found string from nginx. I tried many things so far but they all failed, essentially the idea was this: location / { try_files $uri @not_found; } location @not_found { echo "404 - Page not found"; } The problem is that as soon as the echo directive is used, the http response code is set to 200. I tried changing that by doing error_page 200 = 400 but that breaks the configuration. How can I serve a 404 page directly from nginx? (without hacking the source which may be might next step)

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  • cd Command Linux and Mystery Flags

    - by Jason R. Mick
    Platform: CentOS 6.2 Shell:tcsh I'm playing around with cd for a BASH script, and noticed the wondrous cd - option, but was left with many questions... Why the cd -? Isn't this redundant with cd ..? EDIT [As FatalError points out, these two commands don't do the same things... so the answer is "no"] Can you delve farther back into your history with - flag, a la in a browser? e.g. When I type cd -, it takes me to my previous directory, but then if I enter that command again, it takes me to the directory I just came from, creating a sort of loop. Is a shorthand for going back multiple levels supported?EDITI realize I can go back with cd .., but was hoping this could be a gateway to a less verbose deep back, e.g. cd -3 vs. cd ../../../ ... hopefully that clarifies what I'm asking....EDIT2As to the current feedback, while .. is a special directory, I don't see a reason why the built-in cd to the terminal couldn't use a shorthand for ../../ ... ../ e.g. cd ..5 or why the built-in also couldn't have a history (a la auto pushd/popd) that could be turned on and used like cd -3. I get that this could be somewhat of security/privacy risk, but I don't see how it's any worst than storing a command history, which most shells/terminals do. The manpage for cd, accessible via man cd and help cd (it's the same for either command), only lists -L and -P flags. However when I type in cd --help it outputs Usage: cd [-plvn][-|<dir>].. Am I right in assuming the other flags and the - (back) option are nonstandard? What are the -n and -v flags for? Both seem to take me back to my home directory, that's all I've been able to figure out via experimentation. A quick read on web resources [1][2] offered just the same sort of info that the man page did and didn't answer my questions. Note: The second Linux-centric resource above claimed cd only had two options (obviously not true in current CentOS) hence my assumption that this functionality could be non-standard.

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  • Why is my concurrency capacity so low for my web app on a LAMP EC2 instance?

    - by AMF
    I come from a web developer background and have been humming along building my PHP app, using the CakePHP framework. The problem arose when I began the ab (Apache Bench) testing on the Amazon EC2 instance in which the app resides. I'm getting pretty horrendous average page load times, even though I'm running a c1.medium instance (2 cores, 2GB RAM), and I think I'm doing everything right. I would run: ab -n 200 -c 20 http://localhost/heavy-but-view-cached-page.php Here are the results: Concurrency Level: 20 Time taken for tests: 48.197 seconds Complete requests: 200 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 392111200 bytes HTML transferred: 392047600 bytes Requests per second: 4.15 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 4819.723 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 240.986 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 7944.88 [Kbytes/sec] received While the ab test is running, I run VMStat, which shows that Swap stays at 0, CPU is constantly at 80-100% (although I'm not sure I can trust this on a VM), RAM utilization ramps up to about 1.6G (leaving 400M free). Load goes up to about 8 and site slows to a crawl. Here's what I think I'm doing right on the code side: In Chrome browser uncached pages typically load in 800-1000ms, and cached pages load in 300-500ms. Not stunning, but not terrible either. Thanks to view caching, there might be at most one DB query per page-load to write session data. So we can rule out a DB bottleneck. I have APC on. I am using Memcached to serve the view cache and other site caches. xhprof code profiler shows that cached pages take up 10MB-40MB in memory and 100ms - 1000ms in wall time. Pages that would be the worst offenders would look something like this in xhprof: Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 330,143 microsecs Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 320,019 microsecs Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 36,786,192 bytes Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 46,667,008 bytes Number of Function Calls: 5,195 My Apache config: KeepAlive On MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 3 <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 5 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 10 MaxClients 120 MaxRequestsPerChild 1000 </IfModule> Is there something wrong with the server? Some gotcha with the EC2? Or is it my code? Some obvious setting I should look into? Too many DNS lookups? What am I missing? I really want to get to 1,000 concurrency capacity, but at this rate, it ain't gonna happen.

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  • Need help troubleshooting highly variable ping times

    - by Elliot.Bradshaw
    I'm at work using Citrix (think Remote Desktop) to connect to client sites. With my job I have to write a fair bit of code while I'm connected remotely via Citrix, so the latency of my internet connection is important. If I'm getting ping times above 250ms, then it becomes almost impossible to scroll, click or type with accuracy. Recently my Comcast business internet has been exhibiting highly variable ping times. If I ping google.com, I'll get pings that range from 9ms all the way up to 1300ms. The problem seems to be at its worst during the hours of 1PM to 4:30PM. Outside of those hours and the variance in pings settles down, mostly between 9ms and 50ms. The signal to noise ratio and upstream power are both fine on my modem--the values are here: http://pastebin.com/D4hWGPXf I ran a trace route from my computer to google.com (the results of which are here: http://pastebin.com/GcdjYvMh) and did another test ping to the IP of the first hop outside of our local network (73.98.44.1)--the variance in ping times existed in exactly the same manner as if I were pinging Google. Connecting directly to the cable modem by CAT5 makes no difference. Here is a screenshot demonstrating the variance of the ping times: http://postimage.org/image/haocdeauv/full/ -- as you can see it can get pretty bad. Three Comcast techs have been out (two of them were here when the problem wasn't happening) and they as well as the regional tier 2 Comcast support were unable to diagnose the problem. I now have a ticket open with tier 3 support, but have yet to hear back from them. Does anyone know what could cause these sorts of problems or have any idea from the traceroute above where it could be originating? The regional tier 2 guy tried to tell me that what I'm seeing is normal--are highly variable ping times like that ever acceptable? Anything I should ask Comcast to do or look at to get this problem fixed? Any tips/advice much appreciated! Edit: This is Comcast cable internet at a small start-up, we've ruled out congestion in our private LAN as a cause (i.e., no one's watching YouTube when the pings become variable). Update: Tier 3 Comcast support advised swapping out the modem, a tech came here today and did that--same problem persists.

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  • Xml failing to deserialise

    - by Carnotaurus
    I call a method to get my pages [see GetPages(String xmlFullFilePath)]. The FromXElement method is supposed to deserialise the LitePropertyData elements to strongly type LitePropertyData objects. Instead it fails on the following line: return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream); and gives the following error: <LitePropertyData xmlns=''> was not expected. What am I doing wrong? I have included the methods that I call and the xml data: public static T FromXElement<T>(this XElement xElement) { using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(xElement.ToString()))) { var xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)); return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream); } } public static List<LitePageData> GetPages(String xmlFullFilePath) { XDocument document = XDocument.Load(xmlFullFilePath); List<LitePageData> results = (from record in document.Descendants("row") select new LitePageData { Guid = IsValid(record, "Guid") ? record.Element("Guid").Value : null, ParentID = IsValid(record, "ParentID") ? Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ParentID").Value) : (Int32?)null, Created = Convert.ToDateTime(record.Element("Created").Value), Changed = Convert.ToDateTime(record.Element("Changed").Value), Name = record.Element("Name").Value, ID = Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ID").Value), LitePageTypeID = IsValid(record, "ParentID") ? Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ParentID").Value) : (Int32?)null, Html = record.Element("Html").Value, FriendlyName = record.Element("FriendlyName").Value, Properties = record.Element("Properties") != null ? record.Element("Properties").Element("LitePropertyData").FromXElement<List<LitePropertyData>>() : new List<LitePropertyData>() }).ToList(); return results; } Here is the xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <root> <rows> <row> <ID>1</ID> <ImageUrl></ImageUrl> <Html>Home page</Html> <Created>01-01-2012</Created> <Changed>01-01-2012</Changed> <Name>Home page</Name> <FriendlyName>home-page</FriendlyName> </row> <row xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Guid>edeaf468-f490-4271-bf4d-be145bc6a1fd</Guid> <ID>8</ID> <Name>Unused</Name> <ParentID>1</ParentID> <Created>2006-03-25T10:57:17</Created> <Changed>2012-07-17T12:24:30.0984747+01:00</Changed> <ChangedBy /> <LitePageTypeID xsi:nil="true" /> <Html> What is the purpose of this option? This option checks the current document for accessibility issues. It uses Bobby to provide details of whether the current web page conforms to W3C's WCAG criteria for web content accessibility. Issues with Bobby and Cynthia Bobby and Cynthia are free services that supposedly allow a user to expose web page accessibility barriers. It is something of a guide but perhaps a blunt instrument. I tested a few of the webpages that I have designed. Sure enough, my pages fall short and for good reason. I am not about to claim that Bobby and Cynthia are useless. Although it is useful and commendable tool, it project appears to be overly ambitious. Nevertheless, let me explain my issues with Bobby and Cynthia: First, certain W3C standards for designing web documents are often too strict and unworkable. For instance, in some versions W3C standards for HTML, certain tags should not include a particular attribute, whereas in others they are requisite if the document is to be ???well-formed???. The standard that a designer chooses is determined usually by the requirements specification document. This specifies which browsers and versions of those browsers that the web page is expected to correctly display. Forcing a hypertext document to conform strictly to a specific W3C standard for HTML is often no simple task. In the worst case, it cannot conform without losing some aesthetics or accessibility functionality. Second, the case of HTML documents is not an isolated case. Standards for XML, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, are analogous. Therefore, you might imagine the problems when you begin to combine these languages and formats in an HTML document. Third, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Bobby and Cynthia may flag those IMG tags that do not contain a TITLE attribute. There might be good reason that a web developer chooses not to include the title attribute. The title attribute has a limited numbers of characters and does not support carriage returns. This is a major defect in the design of this tag. In fact, before the TITLE attribute was supported, there was the ALT attribute. Most browsers support both, yet they both perform a similar function. However, both attributes share the same deficiencies. In practice, there are instances where neither attribute would be used. Instead, for example, the developer would write some JavaScript or VBScript to circumvent these deficiencies. The concern is that Bobby and Cynthia would not notice this because it does not ???understand??? what the JavaScript does. </Html> <FriendlyName>unused</FriendlyName> <IsDeleted>false</IsDeleted> <Properties> <LitePropertyData> <Description>Image for the page</Description> <DisplayEditUI>true</DisplayEditUI> <OwnerTab>1</OwnerTab> <DisplayName>Image Url</DisplayName> <FieldOrder>1</FieldOrder> <IsRequired>false</IsRequired> <Name>ImageUrl</Name> <IsModified>false</IsModified> <ParentPageID>3</ParentPageID> <Type>String</Type> <Value xsi:type="xsd:string">smarter.jpg</Value> </LitePropertyData> <LitePropertyData> <Description>WebItemApplicationEnum</Description> <DisplayEditUI>true</DisplayEditUI> <OwnerTab>1</OwnerTab> <DisplayName>WebItemApplicationEnum</DisplayName> <FieldOrder>1</FieldOrder> <IsRequired>false</IsRequired> <Name>WebItemApplicationEnum</Name> <IsModified>false</IsModified> <ParentPageID>3</ParentPageID> <Type>Number</Type> <Value xsi:type="xsd:string">1</Value> </LitePropertyData> </Properties> <Seo> <Author>Phil Carney</Author> <Classification /> <Copyright>Carnotaurus</Copyright> <Description> What is the purpose of this option? This option checks the current document for accessibility issues. It uses Bobby to provide details of whether the current web page conforms to W3C's WCAG criteria for web content accessibility. Issues with Bobby and Cynthia Bobby and Cynthia are free services that supposedly allow a user to expose web page accessibility barriers. It is something of a guide but perhaps a blunt instrument. I tested a few of the webpages that I have designed. Sure enough, my pages fall short and for good reason. I am not about to claim that Bobby and Cynthia are useless. Although it is useful and commendable tool, it project appears to be overly ambitious. Nevertheless, let me explain my issues with Bobby and Cynthia: First, certain W3C standards for designing web documents are often too strict and unworkable. For instance, in some versions W3C standards for HTML, certain tags should not include a particular attribute, whereas in others they are requisite if the document is to be ???well-formed???. The standard that a designer chooses is determined usually by the requirements specification document. This specifies which browsers and versions of those browsers that the web page is expected to correctly display. Forcing a hypertext document to conform strictly to a specific W3C standard for HTML is often no simple task. In the worst case, it cannot conform without losing some aesthetics or accessibility functionality. Second, the case of HTML documents is not an isolated case. Standards for XML, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, are analogous. Therefore, you might imagine the problems when you begin to combine these languages and formats in an HTML document. Third, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Bobby and Cynthia may flag those IMG tags that do not contain a TITLE attribute. There might be good reason that a web developer chooses not to include the title attribute. The title attribute has a limited numbers of characters and does not support carriage returns. This is a major defect in the design of this tag. In fact, before the TITLE attribute was supported, there was the ALT attribute. Most browsers support both, yet they both perform a similar function. However, both attributes share the same deficiencies. In practice, there are instances where neither attribute would be used. Instead, for example, the developer would write some JavaScript or VBScript to circumvent these deficiencies. The concern is that Bobby and Cynthia would not notice this because it does not ???understand??? what the JavaScript does. </Description> <Keywords>unused</Keywords> <Title>unused</Title> </Seo> </row> </rows> </root> EDIT Here are my entities: public class LitePropertyData { public virtual string Description { get; set; } public virtual bool DisplayEditUI { get; set; } public int OwnerTab { get; set; } public virtual string DisplayName { get; set; } public int FieldOrder { get; set; } public bool IsRequired { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public virtual bool IsModified { get; set; } public virtual int ParentPageID { get; set; } public LiteDataType Type { get; set; } public object Value { get; set; } } [Serializable] public class LitePageData { public String Guid { get; set; } public Int32 ID { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Int32? ParentID { get; set; } public DateTime Created { get; set; } public String CreatedBy { get; set; } public DateTime Changed { get; set; } public String ChangedBy { get; set; } public Int32? LitePageTypeID { get; set; } public String Html { get; set; } public String FriendlyName { get; set; } public Boolean IsDeleted { get; set; } public List<LitePropertyData> Properties { get; set; } public LiteSeoPageData Seo { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Saves the specified XML full file path. /// </summary> /// <param name="xmlFullFilePath">The XML full file path.</param> public void Save(String xmlFullFilePath) { XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(xmlFullFilePath); XElement demoNode = this.ToXElement<LitePageData>(); demoNode.Name = "row"; doc.Descendants("rows").Single().Add(demoNode); doc.Save(xmlFullFilePath); } }

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  • Google Rules for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.  Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers.  It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent.  Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other.  Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear.  Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day.  Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce.  The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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  • SQL SERVER – Fix : Error 3623 – An invalid floating point operation occurred

    - by pinaldave
    Going back in time, I always had a problem with mathematics. It was a great subject and I loved it a lot but I only mastered it after practices a lot. I learned that mathematics problems should be addressed systematically and being verbose is not a trick, I learned to solve any problem. Recently one of reader sent me an email with the title “Mathematics problem – please help!” and I was a bit scared. I was good at mathematics but not the best. When I opened the email I was relieved as it was Mathematics problem with SQL Server. My friend received following error while working with SQL Server. Msg 3623, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 An invalid floating point operation occurred. The reasons for the error is simply that invalid usage of the mathematical function is attempted. Let me give you a few examples of the same. SELECT SQRT(-5); SELECT ACOS(-3); SELECT LOG(-9); If you run any of the above functions they will give you an error related to invalid floating point. Honestly there is no workaround except passing the function appropriate values. SQRT of a negative number will give you result in real numbers which is not supported at this point of time as well LOG of a negative number is not possible (because logarithm is the inverse function of an exponential function and the exponential function is NEVER negative). When I send above reply to my friend he did understand that he was passing incorrect value to the function. As mentioned earlier the only way to fix this issue is finding incorrect value and avoid passing it to the function. Every mathematics function is different and there is not a single solution to identify erroneous value passed. If you are facing this error and not able to figure out the solution. Post a comment and I will do my best to figure out the solution. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

    - by Matthew Guay
    Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7.  Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running on Windows 7 x64.  For fun, we ran the 95 upgrade on the 3.1 virtual machine we built last week. Windows 95 So let’s get started.  Here’s the first setup screen.  For the record, Windows 95 installed in about 15 minutes or less in VMware in our test. Strangely, Windows 95 offered several installation choices.  They actually let you choose what extra parts of Windows to install if you wished.  Oh, and who wants to run Windows 95 on your “Portable Computer”?  Most smartphones today are more powerful than the “portable computers” of 95. Your productivity may vastly increase if you run Windows 95.  Anyone want to switch? No, I don’t want to restart … I want to use my computer! Welcome to Windows 95!  Hey, did you know you can launch programs from the Start button? Our quick spin around Windows 95 reminded us why Windows got such a bad reputation in the ‘90’s for being unstable.  We didn’t even get our test copy fully booted after installation before we saw our first error screen.  Windows in space … was that the most popular screensaver in Windows 95, or was it just me? Hello Windows 3.1!  The UI was still outdated in some spots.   Ah, yes, Media Player before it got 101 features to compete with iTunes. But, you couldn’t even play CDs in Media Player.  Actually, CD player was one program I used almost daily in Windows 95 back in the day. Want some new programs?  This help file about new programs designed for Windows 95 lists a lot of outdated names in tech.    And, you really may want some programs.  The first edition of Windows 95 didn’t even ship with Internet Explorer.   We’ve still got Minesweeper, though! My Computer had really limited functionality, and by default opened everything in a new window.  Double click on C:, and it opens in a new window.  Ugh. But Explorer is a bit more like more modern versions. Hey, look, Start menu search!  If only it found the files you were looking for… Now I’m feeling old … this shutdown screen brought back so many memories … of shutdowns that wouldn’t shut down! But, you still have to turn off your computer.  I wonder how many old monitors had these words burned into them? So there’s yet another trip down Windows memory lane.  Most of us can remember using Windows 95, so let us know your favorite (or worst) memory of it!  At least we can all be thankful for our modern computers and operating systems today, right?  Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11Stupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7Stupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarHow to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or Vista 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

    - by Matthew Guay
    Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7.  Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running on Windows 7 x64.  For fun, we ran the 95 upgrade on the 3.1 virtual machine we built last week. Windows 95 So let’s get started.  Here’s the first setup screen.  For the record, Windows 95 installed in about 15 minutes or less in VMware in our test. Strangely, Windows 95 offered several installation choices.  They actually let you choose what extra parts of Windows to install if you wished.  Oh, and who wants to run Windows 95 on your “Portable Computer”?  Most smartphones today are more powerful than the “portable computers” of 95. Your productivity may vastly increase if you run Windows 95.  Anyone want to switch? No, I don’t want to restart … I want to use my computer! Welcome to Windows 95!  Hey, did you know you can launch programs from the Start button? Our quick spin around Windows 95 reminded us why Windows got such a bad reputation in the ‘90’s for being unstable.  We didn’t even get our test copy fully booted after installation before we saw our first error screen.  Windows in space … was that the most popular screensaver in Windows 95, or was it just me? Hello Windows 3.1!  The UI was still outdated in some spots.   Ah, yes, Media Player before it got 101 features to compete with iTunes. But, you couldn’t even play CDs in Media Player.  Actually, CD player was one program I used almost daily in Windows 95 back in the day. Want some new programs?  This help file about new programs designed for Windows 95 lists a lot of outdated names in tech.    And, you really may want some programs.  The first edition of Windows 95 didn’t even ship with Internet Explorer.   We’ve still got Minesweeper, though! My Computer had really limited functionality, and by default opened everything in a new window.  Double click on C:, and it opens in a new window.  Ugh. But Explorer is a bit more like more modern versions. Hey, look, Start menu search!  If only it found the files you were looking for… Now I’m feeling old … this shutdown screen brought back so many memories … of shutdowns that wouldn’t shut down! But, you still have to turn off your computer.  I wonder how many old monitors had these words burned into them? So there’s yet another trip down Windows memory lane.  Most of us can remember using Windows 95, so let us know your favorite (or worst) memory of it!  At least we can all be thankful for our modern computers and operating systems today, right?  Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11Stupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7Stupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarHow to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or Vista 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Ask How-To Geek: Learning the Office Ribbon, Booting to USB with an Old BIOS, and Snapping Windows

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. Today we highlight how to master the new Office interface, USB boot a computer with outdated BIOS, and snap windows to preset locations. Learning the New Office Ribbon Dear How-To Geek, I feel silly asking this (in light of how long the new Office interface has been out) but my company finally got around to upgrading from Windows XP and Office 2000 so the new interface it totally new to me. Can you recommend any resources for quickly learning the Office ribbon and the new changes? I feel completely lost after two decades of the old Office interface. Help! Sincerely, Where the Hell is Everything? Dear Where the Hell, We think most people were with you at some point in the last few years. “Where the hell is…” could possibly be the slogan for the new ribbon interface. You could browse through some of the dry tutorials online or even get a weighty book on the topic but the best way to learn something new is to get hands on. Ribbon Hero turns learning the new Office features and ribbon layout into a game. It’s no vigorous round of Team Fortress mind you, but it’s significantly more fun than reading a training document. Check out how to install and configure Ribbon Hero here. You’ll be teaching your coworkers new tricks in no time. Boot via USB with an Old BIOS Dear How-To Geek, I’m trying to repurpose some old computers by updating them with lightweight Linux distros but the BIOS on most of the machines is ancient and creaky. How ancient? It doesn’t even support booting from a USB device! I have a large flash drive that I’ve turned into a master installation tool for jobs like this but I can’t use it. The computers in question have USB ports; they just aren’t recognized during the boot process. What can I do? USB Bootin’ in Boise Dear USB Bootin’, It’s great you’re working to breathe life into old hardware! You’ve run into one of the limitations of older BIOSes, USB was around but nobody was thinking about booting off of it. Fortunately if you have a computer old enough to have that kind of BIOS it’s likely to also has a floppy drive or a CDROM drive. While you could make a bootable CDROM for your application we understand that you want to keep using the master USB installer you’ve made. In light of that we recommend PLoP Boot Manager. Think of it like a boot manager for your boot manager. Using it you can create a bootable floppy or CDROM that will enable USB booting of your master USB drive. Make a CD and a floppy version and you’ll have everything in your toolkit you need for future computer refurbishing projects. Read up on creating bootable media with PLoP Boot Manager here. Snapping Windows to Preset Coordinates Dear How-To Geek, Once upon a time I had a company laptop that came with a little utility that snapped windows to preset areas of the screen. This was long before the snap-to-side features in Windows 7. You could essentially configure your screen into a grid pattern of your choosing and then windows would neatly snap into those grids. I have no idea what it was called or if was anymore than a gimmick from the computer manufacturer, but I’d really like to have it on my new computer! Bend and Snap in San Francisco, Dear Bend and Snap, If we had to guess, we’d guess your company must have had a set of laptops from Acer as the program you’re describing sounds exactly like Acer GridVista. Fortunately for you the application was extremely popular and Acer released it independently of their hardware. If, by chance, you’ve since upgraded to a multiple monitor setup the app even supports multiple monitors—many of the configurations are handy for arranging IM windows and other auxiliary communication tools. Check out our guide to installing and configuring Acer GridVista here for more information. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Download the New Year in Japan Windows 7 Theme from Microsoft Once More Unto the Breach – Facebook Apps Can Now Access Your Address and Phone Number Dial Zero Speeds You Through Annoying Customer Service Menus Complete Dropquest 2011 and Receive Free Dropbox Storage Desktop Computer versus Laptop Wallpaper The Kids Have No Idea What Old Tech Is [Video]

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  • Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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  • Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application

    - by dwahlin
    There's rarely a boring day working in the world of software development. Part of the fun associated with being a developer is that change is guaranteed and the more you learn about a particular technology the more you realize there's always a different or better way to perform a task. I've had the opportunity to work on several different real-world Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) applications over the past few years and wanted to put together a list of some of the key things I've learned as well as key problems I've encountered and resolved. There are several different topics I could cover related to "lessons learned" (some of them were more painful than others) but I'll keep it to 5 items for this post and cover additional lessons learned in the future. The topics discussed were put together for a TechEd talk: Pick a Pattern and Stick To It Data Binding and Nested Controls Notify Users of Successes (and failures) Get an Agent – A Service Agent Extend Existing Controls The first topic covered relates to architecture best practices and how the MVVM pattern can save you time in the long run. When I was first introduced to MVVM I thought it was a lot of work for very little payoff. I've since learned (the hard way in some cases) that my initial impressions were dead wrong and that my criticisms of the pattern were generally caused by doing things the wrong way. In addition to MVVM pros the slides and sample app below also jump into data binding tricks in nested control scenarios and discuss how animations and media can be used to enhance LOB applications in subtle ways. Finally, a discussion of creating a re-usable service agent to interact with backend services is discussed as well as how existing controls make good candidates for customization. I tried to keep the samples simple while still covering the topics as much as possible so if you’re new to Silverlight you should definitely be able to follow along with a little study and practice. I’d recommend starting with the SilverlightDemos.View project, moving to the SilverlightDemos.ViewModels project and then going to the SilverlightDemos.ServiceAgents project. All of the backend “Model” code can be found in the SilverlightDemos.Web project. Custom controls used in the app can be found in the SivlerlightDemos.Controls project.   Sample Code and Slides

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