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  • Should I use Python or Assembly for a super fast copy program

    - by PyNEwbie
    As a maintenance issue I need to routinely (3-5 times per year) copy a repository that is now has over 20 million files and exceeds 1.5 terabytes in total disk space. I am currently using RICHCOPY, but have tried others. RICHCOPY seems the fastest but I do not believe I am getting close to the limits of the capabilities of my XP machine. I am toying around with using what I have read in The Art of Assembly Language to write a program to copy my files. My other thought is to start learning how to multi-thread in Python to do the copies. I am toying around with the idea of doing this in Assembly because it seems interesting, but while my time is not incredibly precious it is precious enough that I am trying to get a sense of whether or not I will see significant enough gains in copy speed. I am assuming that I would but I only started really learning to program 18 months and it is still more or less a hobby. Thus I may be missing some fundamental concept of what happens with interpreted languages. Any observations or experiences would be appreciated. Note, I am not looking for any code. I have already written a basic copy program in Python 2.6 that is no slower than RICHCOPY. I am looking for some observations on which will give me more speed. Right now it takes me over 50 hours to make a copy from a disk to a Drobo and then back from the Drobo to a disk. I have a LogicCube for when I am simply duplicating a disk but sometimes I need to go from a disk to Drobo or the reverse. I am thinking that given that I can sector copy a 3/4 full 2 terabyte drive using the LogicCube in under seven hours I should be able to get close to that using Assembly, but I don't know enough to know if this is valid. (Yes, sometimes ignorance is bliss) The reason I need to speed it up is I have had two or three cycles where something has happened during copy (fifty hours is a long time to expect the world to hold still) that has caused me to have to trash the copy and start over. For example, last week the water main broke under our building and shorted out the power.

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  • Python Expand Tabs Length Calculation

    - by Mithrill
    I'm confused by how the length of a string is calculated when expandtabs is used. I thought expandtabs replaces tabs with the appropriate number of spaces (with the default number of spaces per tab being 8). However, when I ran the commands using strings of varying lengths and varying numbers of tabs, the length calculation was different than I thought it would be (i.e., each tab didn't always result in the string length being increased by 8 for each instance of "/t"). Below is a detailed script output with comments explaining what I thought should be the result of the command executed above. Would someone please explain the how the length is calculated when expand tabs is used? IDLE 2.6.5 >>> s = '\t' >>> print len(s) 1 >>> #the length of the string without expandtabs was one (1 tab counted as a single space), as expected. >>> print len(s.expandtabs()) 8 >>> #the length of the string with expandtabs was eight (1 tab counted as eight spaces). >>> s = '\t\t' >>> print len(s) 2 >>> #the length of the string without expandtabs was 2 (2 tabs, each counted as a single space). >>> print len(s.expandtabs()) 16 >>> #the length of the string with expandtabs was 16 (2 tabs counted as 8 spaces each). >>> s = 'abc\tabc' >>> print len(s) 7 >>> #the length of the string without expandtabs was seven (6 characters and 1 tab counted as a single space). >>> print len(s.expandtabs()) 11 >>> #the length of the string with expandtabs was NOT 14 (6 characters and one 8 space tabs). >>> s = 'abc\tabc\tabc' >>> print len(s) 11 >>> #the length of the string without expandtabs was 11 (9 characters and 2 tabs counted as a single space). >>> print len(s.expandtabs()) 19 >>> #the length of the string with expandtabs was NOT 25 (9 characters and two 8 space tabs). >>>

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  • Is it too early to start designing for Task Parallel Library?

    - by Joe Erickson
    I have been following the development of the .NET Task Parallel Library (TPL) with great interest since Microsoft first announced it. There is no doubt in my mind that we will eventually take advantage of TPL. What I am questioning is whether it makes sense to start taking advantage of TPL when Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are released, or whether it makes sense to wait a while longer. Why Start Now? The .NET 4.0 Task Parallel Library appears to be well designed and some relatively simple tests demonstrate that it works well on today's multi-core CPUs. I have been very interested in the potential advantages of using multiple lightweight threads to speed up our software since buying my first quad processor Dell Poweredge 6400 about seven years ago. Experiments at that time indicated that it was not worth the effort, which I attributed largely to the overhead of moving data between each CPU's cache (there was no shared cache back then) and RAM. Competitive advantage - some of our customers can never get enough performance and there is no doubt that we can build a faster product using TPL today. It sounds fun. Yes, I realize that some developers would rather poke themselves in the eye with a sharp stick, but we really enjoy maximizing performance. Why Wait? Are today's Intel Nehalem CPUs representative of where we are going as multi-core support matures? You can purchase a Nehalem CPU with 4 cores which share a single level 3 cache today, and most likely a 6 core CPU sharing a single level 3 cache by the time Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0 are released. Obviously, the number of cores will go up over time, but what about the architecture? As the number of cores goes up, will they still share a cache? One issue with Nehalem is the fact that, even though there is a very fast interconnect between the cores, they have non-uniform memory access (NUMA) which can lead to lower performance and less predictable results. Will future multi-core architectures be able to do away with NUMA? Similarly, will the .NET Task Parallel Library change as it matures, requiring modifications to code to fully take advantage of it? Limitations Our core engine is 100% C# and has to run without full trust, so we are limited to using .NET APIs.

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  • Help with Arrays in Objective C.

    - by NJTechie
    Problem : Take an integer as input and print out number equivalents of each number from input. I hacked my thoughts to work in this case but I know it is not an efficient solution. For instance : 110 Should give the following o/p : one one zero Could someone throw light on effective usage of Arrays for this problem? #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; int input, i=0, j,k, checkit; int temp[i]; NSLog(@"Enter an integer :"); scanf("%d", &input); checkit = input; while(input > 0) { temp[i] = input%10; input = input/10; i++; } if(checkit != 0) { for(j=i-1;j>=0;j--) { //NSLog(@" %d", temp[j]); k = temp[j]; //NSLog(@" %d", k); switch (k) { case 0: NSLog(@"zero"); break; case 1: NSLog(@"one"); break; case 2: NSLog(@"two"); break; case 3: NSLog(@"three"); break; case 4: NSLog(@"four"); break; case 5: NSLog(@"five"); break; case 6: NSLog(@"six"); break; case 7: NSLog(@"seven"); break; case 8: NSLog(@"eight"); break; case 9: NSLog(@"nine"); break; default: break; } } } else NSLog(@"zero"); [pool drain]; return 0; }

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  • is it possible to extract certain strings based off a predefined white-space count?

    - by s2xi
    So after several Advil's I think I need help I am trying to make a script that lets the user upload a .txt file, the file will look like this as an example EXT. DUNKIN' DONUTS - DAY Police vehicles remain in the parking lot. The determined female reporter from the courthouse steps, MELINDA FUENTES (32), interviews Comandante Chitt, who holds a napkin to his jaw, like he cut himself shaving. MELINDA < Comandante Chitt, how does it feel to get shot in the face? > COMANDANTE CHITT < Not too different than getting shot in the arm or leg. > MELINDA < Tell us what happened. > COMANDANTE CHITT < I parked my car. (indicates assault vehicle in donut shop) He aimed his weapon at my head. I fired seven shots. He stopped aiming his weapon at my head. > Melinda waits for more, but Chitt turns and walks away into the roped-off crime scene. Melinda is confused for a second, then resumes smiling. MELINDA < And there you have it... A man of few words. > Ok, so based off of this what I want to do is this: The PHP script looks at the file and counts 35 white spaces, since all files will have the same layout and never differ in white spaces I chose this as the best way to go. for every 35 white spaces extract character 36 until the end of line. Then tally up $character++ so in the end the output would look like ----------------------------------- It looks like you have 2 characters in your script Melinda Commandante Chitt ----------------------------------- using PHP to select distinct names, and use the strtolower() to lower case the strings and ucfirst() to make the first letter upper-case thats my project, I'm at the stage where I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to count white-spaces and everything after that white space until the first white-space after the word IS a character name

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  • compiling a program to run in DOS mode

    - by dygi
    I write a simple program, to run in DOS mode. Everything works under emulated console in Win XP / Vista / Seven, but not in DOS. The error says: this program caonnot be run in DOS mode. I wonder is that a problem with compiler flags or something bigger. For programming i use Code::Blocks v 8.02 with such settings for compilation: -Wall -W -pedantic -pedantic-errors in Project \ Build options \ Compiler settings I've tried a clean DOS mode, booting from cd, and also setting up DOS in Virtual Machine. The same error appears. Should i turn on some more compiler flags ? Some specific 386 / 486 optimizations ? UPDATE Ok, i've downloaded, installed and configured DJGPP. Even resolved some problems with libs and includes. Still have two questions. 1) i can't compile a code, which calls _strdate and _strtime, i've double checked the includes, as MSDN says it needs time.h, but still error says: _strdate was not declared in this scope, i even tried to add std::_strdate, but then i have 4, not 2 errors sazing the same 2) the 2nd code is about gotoxy, it looks like that: #include <windows.h> void gotoxy(int x, int y) { COORD position; position.X = x; position.Y = y; SetConsoleCursorPosition(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), position); } error says there is no windows.h, so i've put it in place, but then there are many more errors saying some is missing from windows.h, I SUPPOSE it won't work because this functions is strictly for windows right ? is there any way to write similar gotoxy for DOS ? UPDATE2 1) solved using time(); instead of _strdate(); and _strtime(); here's the code time_t rawtime; struct tm * timeinfo; char buffer [20]; time ( &rawtime ); timeinfo = localtime ( &rawtime ); strftime (buffer,80,"%Y.%m.%d %H:%M:%S\0",timeinfo); string myTime(buffer); It now compiles under DJGPP. UPDATE3 Still need to solve a code using gotoxy - replaced it with some other code that compiles (under DJGPP). Thank You all for help. Just learnt some new things about compiling (flags, old IDE's like DJGPP, OpenWatcom) and refreshed memories setting DOS to work :--)

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  • Merging multiple Google calendar feeds into one JSON object in javascript

    - by Jeramy
    I am trying to bring in the JSON feeds from multiple Google calendars so that I can sort the upcoming events and display the next X number in an "Upcoming Events" list. I have this working with Yahoo! pipes but I want to get away from using a 3rd party to aggregate. I think I am close, but I cannot get the JSON objects created correctly. I am getting the data into the array but not in JSON format, so I can't manipulate it. I have tried var myJsonString = JSON.stringify(JSONData); using https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js but that just threw errors. I suspect because my variable is in the wrong starting format. I have tried just calling the feed like: $.getJSON(url); and creating a function concant1() to do the JSONData=JSONData.concat(data);, but it doesn't fire and I think it would produce the same end result anyway. I have also tried several other methods of getting the end result I want with varying degrees of doom. Here is the closest I have come so far: var JSONData = new Array(); var urllist = ["https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/dg61asqgqg4pust2l20obgdl64%40group.calendar.google.com/public/full?orderby=starttime&max-results=3&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&ctz=America/New_York&singleevents=true&alt=json&callback=concant1","https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/5oc3kvp7lnu5rd4krg2skcu2ng%40group.calendar.google.com/public/full?orderby=starttime&max-results=3&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&ctz=America/New_York&singleevents=true&alt=json&callback=concant1","http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/rine4umu96kl6t46v4fartnho8%40group.calendar.google.com/public/full?orderby=starttime&max-results=3&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&ctz=America/New_York&singleevents=true&alt=json&callback=concant1"]; urllist.forEach(function addFeed(url){ alert("The URL being used: "+ url); if (void 0 != JSONData){JSONData=JSONData.concat($.getJSON(url));} else{JSONData = $.getJSON(url);} alert("The count from concantonated JSONData: "+JSONData.length); }); document.write("The final count from JSONData: "+JSONData.length+"<p>"); console.log(JSONData) UPDATE: Now with full working source!! :) If anyone would like to make suggestions on how to improve the code's efficiency it would be gratefully accepted. I hope others find this useful.: // GCal MFA - Google Calendar Multiple Feed Aggregator // Useage: GCalMFA(CIDs,n); // Where 'CIDs' is a list of comma seperated Google calendar IDs in the format: [email protected], and 'n' is the number of results to display. // While the contained console.log(); outputs are really handy for testing, you will probably waant to remove them for regular usage // Author: Jeramy Kruser - http://jeramy.kruser.me //onerror=function (d, f, g){alert (d+ "\n"+ f+ "\n");} if (!window.console) {console = {log: function() {}};} document.body.className += ' js-enabled'; // Global variables var urllist = []; var maxResults = 3; // The default is 3 results unless a value is sent var JSONData = {}; var eventCount = 0; var errorLog = ""; JSONData = { count: 0, value : { description: "Aggregates multiple Google calendar feeds into a single sorted list", generator: "StackOverflow communal coding - Thanks for the assist Patrick M", website: "http://jeramy.kruser.me", author: "Jeramy & Kasey Kruser", items: [] }}; // For putting dates from feed into a format that can be read by the Date function for calculating event length. function parse (str) { // validate year as 4 digits, month as 01-12, and day as 01-31 str = str.match (/^(\d{4})(0[1-9]|1[0-2])(0[1-9]|[12]\d|3[01])$/); if (str) { // make a date str[0] = new Date ( + str[1], + str[2] - 1, + str[3]); // check if month stayed the same (ie that day number is valid) if (str[0].getMonth () === + str[2] - 1) { return str[0]; } } return undefined; } //For outputting to HTML function output() { var months, day_in_ms, summary, i, item, eventlink, title, calendar, where,dtstart, dtend, endyear, endmonth, endday, startyear, startmonth, startday, endmonthdayyear, eventlinktitle, startmonthday, length, curtextval, k; // Array of month names from numbers for page display. months = {'0':'January', '1':'February', '2':'March', '3':'April', '4':'May', '5':'June', '6':'July', '7':'August', '8':'September', '9':'October', '10':'November', '11':'December'}; // For use in calculating event length. day_in_ms = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000; // Instantiate HTML Arrays. summary = []; for (i = 0; i < maxResults; i+=1 ) { //console.log("i: "+i+" < "+"maxResults: "+ maxResults); if (!(JSONData.value.items[i] === undefined)) { item = JSONData.value.items[i]; // Grabbing data for each event in the feed. eventlink = item.link[0]; title = item.title.$t; // Only display the calendar title if there is more than one calendar = ""; if (urllist.length > 1) { calendar = '<br />Calendar: <a href="https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=' + item.gd$who[0].email + '&ctz=America/New_York">' + item.author[0].name.$t + '<\/a> (<a href="https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/' + item.gd$who[0].email + '/public/basic.ics">iCal<\/a>)'; } // Grabbing event location, if entered. if ( item.gd$where[0].valueString !== "" ) { where = '<br />' + (item.gd$where[0].valueString); } else { where = (""); } // Grabbing start date and putting in form YYYYmmdd. Subtracting one day from dtend to fix Google's habit of ending an all-day event at midnight on the following day. dtstart = new Date(parse(((item.gd$when[0].startTime).substring(0,10)).replace(/-/g,""))); dtend = new Date(parse(((item.gd$when[0].endTime).substring(0,10)).replace(/-/g,"")) - day_in_ms); // Put dates in pretty form for display. endyear = dtend.getFullYear(); endmonth = months[dtend.getMonth()]; endday = dtend.getDate(); startyear = dtstart.getFullYear(); startmonth = months[dtstart.getMonth()]; startday = dtstart.getDate(); //consolidate some much-used variables for HTML output. endmonthdayyear = endmonth + ' ' + endday + ', ' + endyear; eventlinktitle = '<a href="' + eventlink + '">' + title + '<\/a>'; startmonthday = startmonth + ' ' + startday; // Calculates the number of days between each event's start and end dates. length = ((dtend - dtstart) / day_in_ms); // HTML for each event, depending on which div is available on the page (different HTML applies). Only one div can exist on any one page. if (document.getElementById("homeCalendar") !== null ) { // If the length of the event is greater than 0 days, show start and end dates. if ( length > 0 && startmonth !== endmonth && startday === endday ) { summary[i] = ('<h3>' + eventlink + '">' + startmonthday + ', ' + startyear + ' - ' + endmonthdayyear + '<\/a><\/h3><p>' + title + '<\/p>'); } // If the length of the event is greater than 0 and begins and ends within the same month, shorten the date display. else if ( length > 0 && startmonth === endmonth && startyear === endyear ) { summary[i] = ('<h3><a href="' + eventlink + '">' + startmonthday + '-' + endday + ', ' + endyear + '<\/a><\/h3><p>' + title + '<\/p>'); } // If the length of the event is greater than 0 and begins and ends within different months of the same year, shorten the date display. else if ( length > 0 && startmonth !== endmonth && startyear === endyear ) { summary[i] = ('<h3><a href="' + eventlink + '">' + startmonthday + ' - ' + endmonthdayyear + '<\/a><\/h3><p>' + title + '<\/p>'); } // If the length of the event is less than one day (length < = 0), show only the start date. else { summary[i] = ('<h3><a href="' + eventlink + '">' + startmonthday + ', ' + startyear + '<\/a><\/h3><p>' + title + '<\/p>'); } } else if (document.getElementById("allCalendar") !== null ) { // If the length of the event is greater than 0 days, show start and end dates. if ( length > 0 && startmonth !== endmonth && startday === endday ) { summary[i] = ('<li>' + eventlinktitle + '<br />' + startmonthday + ', ' + startyear + ' - ' + endmonthdayyear + where + calendar + '<br />&#160;<\/li>'); } // If the length of the event is greater than 0 and begins and ends within the same month, shorten the date display. else if ( length > 0 && startmonth === endmonth && startyear === endyear ) { summary[i] = ('<li>' + eventlinktitle + '<br />' + startmonthday + '-' + endday + ', ' + endyear + where + calendar + '<br />&#160;<\/li>'); } // If the length of the event is greater than 0 and begins and ends within different months of the same year, shorten the date display. else if ( length > 0 && startmonth !== endmonth && startyear === endyear ) { summary[i] = ('<li>' + eventlinktitle + '<br />' + startmonthday + ' - ' + endmonthdayyear + where + calendar + '<br />&#160;<\/li>'); } // If the length of the event is less than one day (length < = 0), show only the start date. else { summary[i] = ('<li>' + eventlinktitle + '<br />' + startmonthday + ', ' + startyear + where + calendar + '<br />&#160;<\/li>'); } } } if (summary[i] === undefined) { summary[i] = "";} //console.log(summary[i]); } console.log(JSONData); // Puts the HTML into the div with the appropriate id. Each page can have only one. if (document.getElementById("homeCalendar") !== null ) { curtextval = document.getElementById("homeCalendar"); console.log("homeCalendar: "+curtextval); } else if (document.getElementById("oneCalendar") !== null ) { curtextval = document.getElementById("oneCalendar"); console.log("oneCalendar: "+curtextval); } else if (document.getElementById("allCalendar") !== null ) { curtextval = document.getElementById("allCalendar"); console.log("allCalendar: "+curtextval); } if (curtextval.innerHTML.length < 100) { errorLog += '<div id="noEvents">No events found.</div>'; } for (k = 0; k<maxResults; k+=1 ) { curtextval.innerHTML = curtextval.innerHTML + summary[k]; } if (eventCount === 0) { errorLog += '<div id="noEvents">No events found.</div>'; } if (document.getElementById("homeCalendar") === null ) { curtextval.innerHTML = '<ul>' + curtextval.innerHTML + '<\/ul>'; } if (errorLog !== "") { curtextval.innerHTML += errorLog; } } // For taking in each feed, breaking out the events and sorting them into the object by date function sortFeed(event) { var tempEntry, i; tempEntry = event; i = 0; console.log("*** New incoming event object #"+eventCount+" ***"); console.log(event.title.$t); console.log(event); //console.log("i = " + i + " and maxResults " + maxResults); while(i<maxResults) { console.log("i = " + i + " < maxResults " + maxResults); console.log("Sorting event = " + event.title.$t + " by date of " + event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")); if (JSONData.value.items[i]) { console.log("JSONData.value.items[" + i + "] exists and has a startTime of " + JSONData.value.items[i].gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")); if (event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")<JSONData.value.items[i].gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")) { console.log("The incoming event value of " + event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"") + " is < " + JSONData.value.items[i].gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")); tempEntry = JSONData.value.items[i]; console.log("Existing JSONData.value.items[" + i + "] value " + JSONData.value.items[i].gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"") + " stored in tempEntry"); JSONData.value.items[i] = event; console.log("Position JSONData.value.items[" + i + "] set to new value: " + event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")); event = tempEntry; console.log("Now sorting event = " + event.title.$t + " by date of " + event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")); } else { console.log("The incoming event value of " + event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"") + " is > " + JSONData.value.items[i].gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"") + " moving on..."); } } else { JSONData.value.items[i] = event; console.log("JSONData.value.items[" + i + "] does not exist so it was set to the Incoming value of " + event.gd$when[0].startTime.substring(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")); i = maxResults; } i += 1; } } // For completing the aggregation function complete(result) { var str, j, item; // Track the number of calls completed back, we're not done until all URLs have processed if( complete.count === undefined ){ complete.count = urllist.length; } console.log("complete.count = "+complete.count); console.log(result.feed); if(result.feed.entry){ JSONData.count = maxResults; // Check each incoming item against JSONData.value.items console.log("*** Begin Sorting " + result.feed.entry.length + " Events ***"); //console.log(result.feed.entry); result.feed.entry.forEach( function(event){ eventCount += 1; sortFeed(event); } ); } if( (complete.count-=1)<1 ) { console.log("*** Done Sorting ***"); output(); } } // This is the main function. It takes in the list of Calendar IDs and the number of results to display function GCalMFA(list,results){ var i, calPreProperties, calPostProperties1, calPostProperties2; calPreProperties = "https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/"; calPostProperties1 = "/public/full?max-results="; calPostProperties2 = "&orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&ctz=America/New_York&singleevents=true&alt=json&callback=?"; if (list) { if (results) { maxResults = results; } urllist = list.split(','); for (i = 0; i < urllist.length; i+=1 ){ if (urllist[i] === 0){ urllist.splice(i,1);} else{ urllist[i] = calPreProperties + urllist[i] + calPostProperties1+maxResults+calPostProperties2;} } console.log("There are " + urllist.length + " URLs"); urllist.forEach(function addFeed(url){ $.getJSON(url, complete); }); } else { errorLog += '<div id="noURLs">No calendars have been selected.</div>'; output(); } }

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  • gcc, strict-aliasing, and casting through a union

    - by Joseph Quinsey
    About a year ago the following paragraph was added to the GCC Manual, version 4.3.4, regarding -fstrict-aliasing: Similarly, access by taking the address, casting the resulting pointer and dereferencing the result has undefined behavior [emphasis added], even if the cast uses a union type, e.g.: union a_union { int i; double d; }; int f() { double d = 3.0; return ((union a_union *)&d)->i; } Does anyone have an example to illustrate this undefined behavior? Note this question is not about what the C99 standard says, or does not say. It is about the actual functioning of gcc, and other existing compilers, today. My simple, naive, attempt fails. For example: #include <stdio.h> union a_union { int i; double d; }; int f1(void) { union a_union t; t.d = 3333333.0; return t.i; // gcc manual: 'type-punning is allowed, provided ...' } int f2(void) { double d = 3333333.0; return ((union a_union *)&d)->i; // gcc manual: 'undefined behavior' } int main(void) { printf("%d\n", f1()); printf("%d\n", f2()); return 0; } works fine, giving on CYGWIN: -2147483648 -2147483648 Also note that taking addresses is obviously wrong (or right, if you are trying to illustrate undefined behavior). For example, just as we know this is wrong: extern void foo(int *, double *); union a_union t; t.d = 3.0; foo(&t.i, &t.d); // UD behavior so is this wrong: extern void foo(int *, double *); double d = 3.0; foo(&((union a_union *)&d)->i, &d); // UD behavior For background discussion about this, see for example: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1422.pdf http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-01/msg00013.html http://davmac.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/c99-revisited/ http://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2006/06/understanding-strict-aliasing.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/98650/what-is-the-strict-aliasing-rule http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2771023/c99-strict-aliasing-rules-in-c-gcc/2771041#2771041 The first link, draft minutes of an ISO meeting seven months ago, notes in section 4.16: Is there anybody that thinks the rules are clear enough? No one is really able to interpret tham.

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  • jquery code not working in chrome

    - by Paul
    This code works is FF and IE but not in Chrome. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You! here is the html Item One Item Two Item Three Item Four Item Five Item Six Item Seven Item Eight Item Nine Item ten here is the css popularsearches { border-bottom: 1px solid #D4D4D4; border-left: 1px solid #D4D4D4; border-right: 1px solid #D4D4D4; overflow:hidden; height: 130px; width:248px; margin-bottom:20px; } popularsearches ul { padding:0 5px 0 0; margin:0; } popularsearches ul li { list-style-type:none; list-style-position:inside; border-bottom: solid 1px #D4D4D4; font-size:14px; padding:3px 0 3px 0; margin:0 0 0 10px; text-align:left; } popularsearches ul li a { text-decoration:none; } popularsearches ul li a:hover, a:link, a:visited { text-decoration:none; } popularsearches-inside { width: 500px; } popularsearches-left { float:left; width:250px; height:100px; } popularsearches-right { float:left; width:250px; height:100px; } here is the jQuery var closeinterval = 0; function scrollContent() { //Toggle left between 250 and 0 var top = jQuery("#popularsearches").scrollLeft() == 0 ? 250 : 0; jQuery("#popularsearches").animate({ scrollLeft: top }, "slow"); } // Call scrollContent function every 6 secs closeinterval = setInterval("scrollContent()", 6000); jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery("#popular-button-left").bind("click", function() { if (closeinterval) { window.clearInterval(closeinterval); closeinterval = null; } jQuery("#popularsearches").animate({ scrollLeft: 0 }, 1000); }); jQuery("#popular-button-right").bind("click", function() { if (closeinterval) { window.clearInterval(closeinterval) closeinterval = null; } jQuery("#popularsearches").animate({ scrollLeft: 250 }, 1000); }); });

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  • PHP readdir(): 3 is not a valid Directory resource

    - by Jordan
    <?php function convert(){ //enable error reporting for debugging error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT); //convert pdf's to html using payroll.sh script and //pdftohtml command line tool $program = "payroll.sh"; $toexec="sh /var/www/html/tmp/" . $program . " 2>&1"; $exec=shell_exec($toexec); //display message from payroll.sh //echo $exec; //echo ('<br/>'); } function process(){ $dir = '/var/www/html/tmp/converted'; //echo ('one'); if (is_dir($dir)) { //echo ('two'); if ($dh = opendir($dir)) { //echo ('three'); while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) { //echo ('four'); if ($file != "." && $file != ".."){ echo 'opening file: '; echo $file; echo ("<br/>"); $fp = fopen('/var/www/html/tmp/converted/' . $file, 'r+'); $count = 0; //while file is not at the EOF marker while (!feof($fp)) { $line = fgets($fp); if($count==21) { $employeeID = substr($line,71,4); echo 'employee ID: '; echo $employeeID; echo ('<br/>'); //echo ('six'); $count++; } else if($count==30) { $employeeDate = substr($line,71,10); echo 'employee Date: '; echo $employeeDate; echo ('<br/>'); //echo ('seven'); $count++; } else { //echo ('eight'); //echo ('<br/>'); $count++; } } fclose($fp); closedir($dh); } } } } } convert(); process(); ?> I am setting up a php script that will take a paystub in pdf format, convert it to html, then import it into Drupal after getting the date and employee ID. The code only seems to process the first file in the directory then it gives me this: opening file: dd00000112_28_2010142011-1.html employee ID: 9871 employee Date: 12/31/2010 Warning: readdir(): 3 is not a valid Directory resource in /var/www/html/pay.mistequaygroup.com/payroll.php on line 29 The '3' in the error really confuses me, and google is not helping much. Could it be the 3rd iteration of the loop? The only files in the directory reddir() is scanning are the .html files waiting to be processed. Any ideas? Also, how does my code look? I'm fairly new to doing any real programming and I don't get too much input around work.

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  • Objective C "do - while" question

    - by Rob
    The example for one of the exercises in the book I am reading shows the following code: #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; int input, reverse, numberOfDigits; reverse = 0; numberOfDigits = 0; NSLog (@"Please input a multi-digit number:"); scanf ("%i", &input); if ( input < 0 ) { input = -input; NSLog (@"Minus"); } do { reverse = reverse * 10 + input % 10; numberOfDigits++; } while (input /= 10); do { switch ( reverse % 10 ) { case 0: NSLog (@"Zero"); break; case 1: NSLog (@"One"); break; case 2: NSLog (@"Two"); break; case 3: NSLog (@"Three"); break; case 4: NSLog (@"Four"); break; case 5: NSLog (@"Five"); break; case 6: NSLog (@"Six"); break; case 7: NSLog (@"Seven"); break; case 8: NSLog (@"Eight"); break; case 9: NSLog (@"Nine"); break; } numberOfDigits--; } while (reverse /= 10); while (numberOfDigits--) { NSLog (@"Zero"); } [pool drain]; return 0; } My question is this, the while statement shows (input /= 10) which, if I understand this correctly basically means (input = input / 10). Now, if that is true, why doesn't the loop just run continuously? I mean, even if you were to divide 0 by 10 then that would still extract a number. If the user was to input "50607", it would first cut off the "7", then the "0", and so on and so on, but why does it exit the loop after removing the "5". Wouldn't the response after the "5" be the same as the "0" between the 5 and the 6 to the program?

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  • Should I HttpCombine Google Jquery Hosted File?

    - by chobo2
    Hi I am using something called HttpCombiner: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/HttpCombiner An HTTP handler that combines multiple CSS, Javascript or URL into one response for faster page load. It can combine, compress and cache response which results in faster page load and better scalability of web application It's a good practice to use many small Javascript and CSS files instead of one large Javascript/CSS file for better code maintainability, but bad in terms of website performance. Although you should write your Javascript code in small files and break large CSS files into small chunks but when browser requests those javascript and css files, it makes one Http request per file. Every Http Request results in a network roundtrip form your browser to the server and the delay in reaching the server and coming back to the browser is called latency. So, if you have four javascripts and three css files loaded by a page, you are wasting time in seven network roundtrips. Within USA, latency is average 70ms. So, you waste 7x70 = 490ms, about half a second of delay. Outside USA, average latency is around 200ms. So, that means 1400ms of waiting. Browser cannot show the page properly until Css and Javascripts are fully loaded. So, the more latency you have, the slower page loads. You can reduce the wait time by using a CDN. Read my previous blog post about using CDN. However, a better solution is to deliver multiple files over one request using an HttpHandler that combines several files and delivers as one output. So, instead of putting many or tag, you just put one and one tag, and point them to the HttpHandler. You tell the handler which files to combine and it delivers those files in one response. This saves browser from making many requests and eliminates the latency. This Http Handler reads the file names defined in a configuration and combines all those files and delivers as one response. It delivers the response as gzip compressed to save bandwidth. Moreover, it generates proper cache header to cache the response in browser cache, so that, browser does not request it again on future visit. Now I am wondering since it can handle adding links should I put in it the jquery file? The reason I am not sure is if it gets combined with my other files I think I might close the advantages of it being hosted on googles servers such as caching(my thinking is if it gets combined it will look different so even if a user has it in it's cache I am not sure if it will use the one for the cahce or not). So should I combine it or only the finals that I am using locally?

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  • rake db:create not working for legacy rails app (2.3.5) using MySQL (5.5.28)

    - by ridicter
    I'm a new Rails Developer, and I'm working on a legacy Rails app. Whenever I run the rake db:create command, I get an error that the database couldn't be created. I have found many StackOverflow questions related to this, but in troubleshooting nearly all permutations of solutions, I couldn't resolve the issue. I created the three Dbs (dev, prod, test), created the user with all access privileges to these dbs, and ran rake db:create. I'm running Mac OS X Lion, MySQL 5.5.28, Rails 2.3.5, Ruby 1.8.7. Here are my settings development: adapter: mysql encoding: utf8 database: adva_development username: adva password: **** host: localhost socket: /tmp/mysql.sock Here's the error: Couldn't create database for {"adapter"=>"mysql", "username"=>"adva", "host"=>"localhost", "encoding"=>"utf8", "database"=>"adva_development", "socket"=>"/tmp/mysql.sock", "password"=>"****"}, charset: utf8, collation: utf8_unicode_ci (if you set the charset manually, make sure you have a matching collation) I have done the following troubleshooting: Verified user and password are correct, and the user has access to the DB. (Double checked user access with SELECT * FROM mysql.db WHERE Db = 'adva_development' \G; User has all privileges.) Verify the socket is correct. I don't really understand sockets, but I can plainly see it at /tmp/mysql.sock. Checked collation and character set. I found out I had created the DB in latin charset and collation, so I recreated them. I ran show variables like "collation_database"; and show variables like "character_set_database"; and came back with utf8 and utf8_unicode_ci respectively. I followed the instructions in this question. After uninstalling mysql gem, I ran the following but came up with the same error: gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql-5.5.28-osx10.6-x86_64/bin --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql-5.5.28-osx10.6-x86_64/bin/mysql_config Following Matt's suggestion, here's what a rake --trace db:create reveals: ** Invoke db:create (first_time) ** Invoke db:load_config (first_time) ** Invoke rails_env (first_time) ** Execute rails_env ** Execute db:load_config ** Execute db:create Couldn't create database for {"database"=>"adva_development", "adapter"=>"mysql", "host"=>"127.0.0.1", "password"=>"woof2adva", "username"=>"adva", "encoding"=>"utf8"}, charset: utf8, collation: utf8_unicode_ci (if you set the charset manually, make sure you have a matching collation) After 3 days and six or seven hours, I have pretty much run out of options. I tried various random things, like replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 to no avail. Could there be something wrong related to my specific environment? Mac OS X Lion + MySQL 5.5.28? I plan on trying on setting up everything in a Linux environment. Thanks!

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  • &ldquo;My life at Oracle&rdquo;

    - by cristian.condurache(at)oracle.com
    Hello everybody! My name is Eva and I currently work in Oracle Italy as Sales Programs Manager for the Technology Sales organization. Since 2009, I also proudly represent the Oracle Education Foundation within my country as the Ambassador for Italy. My career path in this amazing company began 5 years ago as a fresh graduate: after various years studying abroad, in Germany and Ireland mainly, I was looking for a valuable and concrete opportunity which could fulfill my energetic spirit. I wanted to develop myself inside a stimulating and “fast” business environment.. and here came Oracle and I really couldn’t ask for anything better!  THE PARTNER EXPERIENCE The first department I had the chance to work into was the Alliances and Channels organization, where I had the opportunity to join a brilliant team of great and visionary guys. I began having the responsibility to analyze and rationalize the portfolio of Oracle business partners and to identify potential cross-area solutions, which had to be highlighted both on the local market and internationally: this ended up with the implementation of the “Partner Community” model, a business environment of selected Oracle partners, specialized on the different technology focus areas. This new concept was then recognized as an EMEA Best Practice and replicated internationally. Having the opportunity to strengthen day after day strategic relationships with several business partners and study the market positioning of their technology solutions, I was given the role to develop the “Oracle Partner Network Innovation Award” in Italy: the EMEA competition encouraging and rewarding proven and successful technology innovations, creating high value for our common customers and generating new business potential. Several Italian partner solutions won different prizes and I decided that it was worth collecting all those valuable projects, winners and short-listed, inside two specific books in order also to provide them an international market visibility: OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2007 and OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2008 Inside the Alliances and Channels department I really had the opportunity to do    amazing things, like for example working side-by-side with one of the most exceptional teams in Oracle I have ever worked with: the EMEA Recruitment Team. Together, in fact, we conceived a brand new business initiative for our partners, called “Oracle Campus Joint Program”. This program was awarded as an EMEA Best Practice and acknowledged by both Italian public institutions and press media. Italy   is currently running its 5th edition.   Briefly, the “Oracle Campus Joint Program” aims at facing the growing issue of lack of  technology competences and skills on the market. By identifying a specific technology area and developing an intensive 4-6 week Oracle University training course and by collaborating with important academic institutes, international “gurus” and professionals, our business partners are able to benefit from a pool of brilliant top talented young consultants and offer them a significant career opportunity. BUSINESS BUT NOT ONLY: THE NO-PROFIT EXPERIENCE OF ORACLE Currently my mission in Oracle is to continue driving the implementation of strategic business development and sales programs for the entire Oracle Technology stack, involving both partners and the end-customers. But as a completely distinguished role from the day-today business, I’m also honored to represent in Italy the charity global organization founded by Oracle - the Oracle Education Foundation - and drive its corporate citizenship and marketing programs. Oracle Education Foundation is an independent charitable organization funded by Oracle and is dedicated to helping students develop 21st century skills through project learning and the use of technology. It provides “ThinkQuest” as a free program to primary and secondary (K12) schools. Just some significant numbers: today 548,000 students/teachers in 47 countries use ThinkQuest and the Oracle Education Foundation partners with 40+ no-profit or government organizations globally. ABOUT MYSELF AND MY INTERESTS About myself…I’m very enthusiastic and positive, trying always to transform difficult issues in challenging opportunities. My day usually begins very early in the morning with running, swimming or when I need to collect some “zen” energies with a yoga session or better with a long walk with my dog. I definitely love animals and generally speaking I’m very keen on environmental issues and try, as much as I can, to carry out a healthy and “planet respectful” lifestyle. My thirst for knowledge pushed me some time ago to begin a new personal challenge: I decided to enroll, dedicating a good part of my free time, for a second university degree: I chose “Neuroeconomics”, an innovative academic path which combines psychology, economics, and neuroscience and studies how people make decisions and the role of the brain when people evaluate these decisions, categorizing risks and rewards and generally interacting with each other. I’ve been very glad to talk about my experience in this article, as working for Oracle is something very stimulating. This company ensures you the opportunity to face new challenges, work with highly talented people and be professionally highlighted also globally. Motivation, good results and innovation is always pursued, recognized and fully supported. Thanks and wish you all an amazing career! If you have any question please contact [email protected]. For our job opportunities, please look at http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: EMEA,Oracle Partners,Oracle Campus,Oracle Education,experience,EMEA Recruitment Team

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  • Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

    - by Chris George
    Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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  • My History with Agile

    - by Robert May
    I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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  • Partition Wise Joins

    - by jean-pierre.dijcks
    Some say they are the holy grail of parallel computing and PWJ is the basis for a shared nothing system and the only join method that is available on a shared nothing system (yes this is oversimplified!). The magic in Oracle is of course that is one of many ways to join data. And yes, this is the old flexibility vs. simplicity discussion all over, so I won't go there... the point is that what you must do in a shared nothing system, you can do in Oracle with the same speed and methods. The Theory A partition wise join is a join between (for simplicity) two tables that are partitioned on the same column with the same partitioning scheme. In shared nothing this is effectively hard partitioning locating data on a specific node / storage combo. In Oracle is is logical partitioning. If you now join the two tables on that partitioned column you can break up the join in smaller joins exactly along the partitions in the data. Since they are partitioned (grouped) into the same buckets, all values required to do the join live in the equivalent bucket on either sides. No need to talk to anyone else, no need to redistribute data to anyone else... in short, the optimal join method for parallel processing of two large data sets. PWJ's in Oracle Since we do not hard partition the data across nodes in Oracle we use the Partitioning option to the database to create the buckets, then set the Degree of Parallelism (or run Auto DOP - see here) and get our PWJs. The main questions always asked are: How many partitions should I create? What should my DOP be? In a shared nothing system the answer is of course, as many partitions as there are nodes which will be your DOP. In Oracle we do want you to look at the workload and concurrency, and once you know that to understand the following rules of thumb. Within Oracle we have more ways of joining of data, so it is important to understand some of the PWJ ideas and what it means if you have an uneven distribution across processes. Assume we have a simple scenario where we partition the data on a hash key resulting in 4 hash partitions (H1 -H4). We have 2 parallel processes that have been tasked with reading these partitions (P1 - P2). The work is evenly divided assuming the partitions are the same size and we can scan this in time t1 as shown below. Now assume that we have changed the system and have a 5th partition but still have our 2 workers P1 and P2. The time it takes is actually 50% more assuming the 5th partition has the same size as the original H1 - H4 partitions. In other words to scan these 5 partitions, the time t2 it takes is not 1/5th more expensive, it is a lot more expensive and some other join plans may now start to look exciting to the optimizer. Just to post the disclaimer, it is not as simple as I state it here, but you get the idea on how much more expensive this plan may now look... Based on this little example there are a few rules of thumb to follow to get the partition wise joins. First, choose a DOP that is a factor of two (2). So always choose something like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on... Second, choose a number of partitions that is larger or equal to 2* DOP. Third, make sure the number of partitions is divisible through 2 without orphans. This is also known as an even number... Fourth, choose a stable partition count strategy, which is typically hash, which can be a sub partitioning strategy rather than the main strategy (range - hash is a popular one). Fifth, make sure you do this on the join key between the two large tables you want to join (and this should be the obvious one...). Translating this into an example: DOP = 8 (determined based on concurrency or by using Auto DOP with a cap due to concurrency) says that the number of partitions >= 16. Number of hash (sub) partitions = 32, which gives each process four partitions to work on. This number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on your data and system. In this case my main reasoning is that if you get more room on the box you can easily move the DOP for the query to 16 without repartitioning... and of course it makes for no leftovers on the table... And yes, we recommend up-to-date statistics. And before you start complaining, do read this post on a cool way to do stats in 11.

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  • Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: The Insurance Industry’s Dream

    - by Jenna Danko
    On June 3rd, I saw the Gaylord Resort Centre in Washington D.C. become the hub of C level executives and managers of insurance carriers for the IASA 2013 Conference.  Insurance Accounting/Regulation and Technology sessions took the focus, but there were plenty of tertiary sessions for career development, which complemented the overall strong networking side of the conference.  As an exhibitor, Oracle, along with several hundred other product providers, welcomed the opportunity to display and demonstrate our solutions and we were encouraged by hustle and bustle of the exhibition floor.  The IASA organizers had pre-arranged fast track tours whereby interested conference delegates could sign up for a series of like-themed presentations from Vendors, giving them a level of 'Speed Dating' introductions to possible solutions and services.  Oracle participated in a number of these, which were very well subscribed.  Clearly, the conference had a strong business focus; however, attendees saw technology as a key enabler to get their processes done smarter, faster and cheaper.  As we navigated through the exhibition, it became clear from the inquiries that came to us that insurance carriers are gravitating to a number of focus areas: Navigating the maze of upcoming regulatory reporting changes. For US carriers with European holdings, Solvency II carries a myriad of rules and reporting requirements. Alignment across the globe of the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) processes brings to the fore the National Insurance of Insurance commissioners' (NAIC) recent guidance manual publication. Doing more with less and to certainly expect more from technology for less dollars. The overall cost of IT, in particular hardware, has dropped in real terms (though the appetite for more has risen: more CPU, more RAM, more storage), but software has seen less change. Clearly, customers expect either to pay less or get a lot more from their software solutions for the same buck. Doing things smarter – A recognition that with the advance of technology to stand still no longer means you are technically going backwards. Technology and, in particular technology interactions with human business processes, has undergone incredible change over the past 5 years. Consumer usage (iPhones, etc.) has been at the forefront, but now at the Enterprise level ever more effective technology exploitation is beginning to take place. That data and, in particular gleaning knowledge from data, is refining and improving business processes.  Organizations are now consuming more data than ever before, and it is set to grow exponentially for some time to come.  Amassing large volumes of data is one thing, but effectively analyzing that data is another.  It is the results of such analysis that leads to improvements both in terms of insurance product offerings and the processes to support them. Regulatory Compliance, damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Clearly, around the globe at lot is changing from a regulatory perspective and it is evident that in terms of regulatory requirements, whilst there is a greater convergence across jurisdictions bringing uniformity, there is also a lot of work to be done in the next 5 years. Just like the big data, hidden behind effective regulatory compliance there often lies golden nuggets that can give competitive advantages. From Oracle's perspective, our Rating Engine, Billing, Document Management and Insurance Analytics solutions on display served to strike up good conversations and, as is always the case at conferences, it was a great opportunity to meet and speak with existing Oracle customers that we might not have otherwise caught up with for a while. Fortunately, I was able to catch up on a few sessions at the close of the Exhibition.  The speaker quality was high and the audience asked challenging, but pertinent, questions.  During Dr. Jackie Freiberg’s keynote “Bye Bye Business as Usual,” the author discussed 8 strategies to help leaders create a culture where teams consistently deliver innovative ideas by disrupting the status quo.  The very first strategy: Get wired for innovation.  Freiberg admitted that folks in the insurance and financial services industry understand and know innovation is important, but oftentimes they are slow adopters.  Today, technology and innovation go hand in hand. In speaking to delegates during and after the conference, a high degree of satisfaction could be measured from their positive comments of speaker sessions and the exhibitors. I suspect many will be back in 2014 with Indianapolis as the conference location. Did you attend the IASA Conference in Washington D.C.?  If so, I would love to hear your comments. Andrew Collins is the Director, Solvency II of Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at andrew.collins AT oracle.com.

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  • SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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  • Simple Excel Export with EPPlus

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/10/30/simple-excel-export-with-epplus.aspxAnyone I’ve ever met who works with an application that sits in front of a lot of data loves it when they can get that data exported to an Excel file for them to mess around with offline. As both developer and end user of a little website project that I’ve been working on, I found myself wanting to be able to get a bunch of the data that the application was collecting into an Excel file. The great thing about being both an end user and a developer on a project is that you can build the features that you really want! While putting this feature together I came across the fantastic EPPlus library. This library is certainly very well known and popular, but I was so impressed with it that I thought it was worth a quick blog post. This library is extremely powerful; it lets you create and manipulate Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets in .NET code with a high degree of flexibility. My only gripe with the project is that they are not touting how insanely easy it is to build a basic Excel workbook from a simple data source. If I were running this project the approach I’m about to demonstrate in this post would be front and center on the landing page for the project because it shows how easy it really is to get started and serves as a good way to ease yourself in to some of the more advanced features. The website in question uses RavenDB, which means that we’re dealing with POCOs to model the data throughout all layers of the application. I love working like this so when it came time to figure out how to export some of this data to an Excel spreadsheet I wanted to find a way to take an IEnumerable<T> and just have it dumped to Excel with each item in the collection being modeled as a single row in the Excel worksheet. Consider the following class: public class Employee { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public decimal HourlyRate { get; set; } public DateTime HireDate { get; set; } } Now let’s say we have a collection of these represented as an IEnumerable<Employee> and we want to be able to output it to an Excel file for offline querying/manipulation. As it turns out, this is dead simple to do with EPPlus. Have a look: public void ExportToExcel(IEnumerable<Employee> employees, FileInfo targetFile) { using (var excelFile = new ExcelPackage(targetFile)) { var worksheet = excelFile.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].LoadFromCollection(Collection: employees, PrintHeaders: true); excelFile.Save(); } } That’s it. Let’s break down what’s going on here: Create a ExcelPackage to model the workbook (Excel file). Note that the ‘targetFile’ value here is a FileInfo object representing the location on disk where I want the file to be saved. Create a worksheet within the workbook. Get a reference to the top-leftmost cell (addressed as A1) and invoke the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, passing it our collection of Employee objects. Behind the scenes this is reflecting over the properties of the type provided and pulling out any public members to become columns in the resulting Excel output. The ‘PrintHeaders’ parameter tells EPPlus to grab the name of the property and put it in the first row. Save the Excel file All of the heavy lifting here is being done by the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, and that’s a good thing. Now, this was really easy to do, but it has some limitations. Using this approach you get a very plain, un-styled Excel worksheet. The column widths are all set to the default. The number format for all cells is ‘General’ (which proves particularly interesting if you have a DateTime property in your data source). I’m a “no frills” guy, so I wasn’t bothered at all by trading off simplicity for style and formatting. That said, EPPlus has tons of samples that you can download that illustrate how to apply styles and formatting to cells and a ton of other advanced features that are way beyond the scope of this post.

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  • SQL SERVER – Powershell – Importing CSV File Into Database – Video

    - by pinaldave
    Laerte Junior is my very dear friend and Powershell Expert. On my request he has agreed to share Powershell knowledge with us. Laerte Junior is a SQL Server MVP and, through his technology blog and simple-talk articles, an active member of the Microsoft community in Brasil. He is a skilled Principal Database Architect, Developer, and Administrator, specializing in SQL Server and Powershell Programming with over 8 years of hands-on experience. He holds a degree in Computer Science, has been awarded a number of certifications (including MCDBA), and is an expert in SQL Server 2000 / SQL Server 2005 / SQL Server 2008 technologies. Let us read the blog post in his own words. I was reading an excellent post from my great friend Pinal about loading data from CSV files, SQL SERVER – Importing CSV File Into Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #018 – Video,   to SQL Server and was honored to write another guest post on SQL Authority about the magic of the PowerShell. The biggest stuff in TechEd NA this year was PowerShell. Fellows, if you still don’t know about it, it is better to run. Remember that The Core Servers to SQL Server are the future and consequently the Shell. You don’t want to be out of this, right? Let’s see some PowerShell Magic now. To start our tour, first we need to download these two functions from Powershell and SQL Server Master Jedi Chad Miller.Out-DataTable and Write-DataTable. Save it in a module and add it in your profile. In my case, the module is called functions.psm1. To have some data to play, I created 10 csv files with the same content. I just put the SQL Server Errorlog into a csv file and created 10 copies of it. #Just create a CSV with data to Import. Using SQLErrorLog [reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo”) $ServerInstance=new-object (“Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server“) $Env:Computername $ServerInstance.ReadErrorLog() | export-csv-path“c:\SQLAuthority\ErrorLog.csv”-NoTypeInformation for($Count=1;$Count-le 10;$count++)  {       Copy-Item“c:\SQLAuthority\Errorlog.csv”“c:\SQLAuthority\ErrorLog$($count).csv” } Now in my path c:\sqlauthority, I have 10 csv files : Now it is time to create a table. In my case, the SQL Server is called R2D2 and the Database is SQLServerRepository and the table is CSV_SQLAuthority. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CSV_SQLAuthority]( [LogDate] [datetime] NULL, [Processinfo] [varchar](20) NULL, [Text] [varchar](MAX) NULL ) Let’s play a little bit. I want to import synchronously all csv files from the path to the table: #Importing synchronously $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path ( Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv”) $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport Write-DataTable-ServerInstanceR2D2-DatabaseSQLServerRepository-TableNameCSV_SQLAuthority-Data$DataTable Very cool, right? Let’s do it asynchronously and in background using PowerShell  Jobs: #If you want to do it to all asynchronously Start-job-Name‘ImportingAsynchronously‘ ` -InitializationScript  {IpmoFunctions-Force-DisableNameChecking} ` -ScriptBlock {    ` $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path ( Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv”) $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport Write-DataTable   -ServerInstance“R2D2″`                   -Database“SQLServerRepository“`                   -TableName“CSV_SQLAuthority“`                   -Data$DataTable             } Oh, but if I have csv files that are large in size and I want to import each one asynchronously. In this case, this is what should be done: Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv” | % { Start-job-Name“$($_)” ` -InitializationScript  {IpmoFunctions-Force-DisableNameChecking} ` -ScriptBlock { $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path$args[0]                $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport                Write-DataTable-ServerInstance“R2D2″`                               -Database“SQLServerRepository“`                               -TableName“CSV_SQLAuthority“`                               -Data$DataTable             } -ArgumentList$_.fullname } How cool is that? Let’s make the funny stuff now. Let’s schedule it on an SQL Server Agent Job. If you are using SQL Server 2012, you can use the PowerShell Job Step. Otherwise you need to use a CMDexec job step calling PowerShell.exe. We will use the second option. First, create a ps1 file called ImportCSV.ps1 with the script above and save it in a path. In my case, it is in c:\temp\automation. Just add the line at the end: Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv” | % { Start-job-Name“$($_)” ` -InitializationScript  {IpmoFunctions-Force-DisableNameChecking} ` -ScriptBlock { $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path$args[0]                $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport                Write-DataTable-ServerInstance“R2D2″`                               -Database“SQLServerRepository“`                               -TableName“CSV_SQLAuthority“`                               -Data$DataTable             } -ArgumentList$_.fullname } Get-Job | Wait-Job | Out-Null Remove-Job -State Completed Why? See my post Dooh PowerShell Trick–Running Scripts That has Posh Jobs on a SQL Agent Job Remember, this trick is for  ALL scripts that will use PowerShell Jobs and any kind of schedule tool (SQL Server agent, Windows Schedule) Create a Job Called ImportCSV and a step called Step_ImportCSV and choose CMDexec. Then you just need to schedule or run it. I did a short video (with matching good background music) and you can see it at: That’s it guys. C’mon, join me in the #PowerShellLifeStyle. You will love it. If you want to check what we can do with PowerShell and SQL Server, don’t miss Laerte Junior LiveMeeting on July 18. You can have more information in : LiveMeeting VC PowerShell PASS–Troubleshooting SQL Server With PowerShell–English Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology, Video Tagged: Powershell

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  • The Case of the Extra Page: Rendering Reporting Services as PDF

    - by smisner
    I had to troubleshoot a problem with a mysterious extra page appearing in a PDF this week. My first thought was that it was likely to caused by one of the most common problems that people encounter when developing reports that eventually get rendered as PDF is getting blank pages inserted into the PDF document. The cause of the blank pages is usually related to sizing. You can learn more at Understanding Pagination in Reporting Services in Books Online. When designing a report, you have to be really careful with the layout of items in the body. As you move items around, the body will expand to accommodate the space you're using and you might eventually tighten everything back up again, but the body doesn't automatically collapse. One of my favorite things to do in Reporting Services 2005 - which I dubbed the "vacu-pack" method - was to just erase the size property of the Body and let it auto-calculate the new size, squeezing out all the extra space. Alas, that method no longer works beginning with Reporting Services 2008. Even when you make sure the body size is as small as possible (with no unnecessary extra space along the top, bottom, left, or right side of the body), it's important to calculate the body size plus header plus footer plus the margins and ensure that the calculated height and width do not exceed the report's height and width (shown as the page in the illustration above). This won't matter if users always render reports online, but they'll get extra pages in a PDF document if the report's height and width are smaller than the calculate space. Beginning the Investigation In the situation that I was troubleshooting, I checked the properties: Item Property Value Body Height 6.25in   Width 10.5in Page Header Height 1in Page Footer Height 0.25in Report Left Margin 0.1in   Right Margin 0.1in   Top Margin 0.05in   Bottom Margin 0.05in   Page Size - Height 8.5in   Page Size - Width 11in So I calculated the total width using Body Width + Left Margin + Right Margin and came up with a value of 10.7 inches. And then I calculated the total height using Body Height + Page Header Height + Page Footer Height + Top Margin + Bottom Margin and got 7.6 inches. Well, page sizing couldn't be the reason for the extra page in my report because 10.7 inches is smaller than the report's width of 11 inches and 7.6 inches is smaller than the report's height of 8.5 inches. I had to look elsewhere to find the culprit. Conducting the Third Degree My next thought was to focus on the rendering size of the items in the report. I've adapted my problem to use the Adventure Works database. At the top of the report are two charts, and then below each chart is a rectangle that contains a table. In the real-life scenario, there were some graphics present as a background for the tables which fit within the rectangles that were about 3 inches high so the visual space of the rectangles matched the visual space of the charts - also about 3 inches high. But there was also a huge amount of white space at the bottom of the page, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a second page which was blank except for the footer that appeared at the bottom. Placing a textbox beneath the rectangles to see if they would appear on the first page resulted the textbox's appearance on the second page. For some reason, the rectangles wanted a buffer zone beneath them. What's going on? Taking the Suspect into Custody My next step was to see what was really going on with the rectangle. The graphic appeared to be correctly sized, but the behavior in the report indicated the rectangle was growing. So I added a border to the rectangle to see what it was doing. When I added borders, I could see that the size of each rectangle was growing to accommodate the table it contains. The rectangle on the right is slightly larger than the one on the left because the table on the right contains an extra row. The rectangle is trying to preserve the whitespace that appears in the layout, as shown below. Closing the Case Now that I knew what the problem was, what could I do about it? Because of the graphic in the rectangle (not shown), I couldn't eliminate the use of the rectangles and just show the tables. But fortunately, there is a report property that comes to the rescue: ConsumeContainerWhitespace (accessible only in the Properties window). I set the value of this property to True. Problem solved. Now the rectangles remain fixed at the configured size and don't grow vertically to preserve the whitespace. Case closed.

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  • College Courses through distance learning

    - by Matt
    I realize this isn't really a programming question, but didn't really know where to post this in the stackexchange and because I am a computer science major i thought id ask here. This is pretty unique to the programmer community since my degree is about 95% programming. I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can. So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for. Class I need: Only need one C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms C SC 445 Algorithms C SC 473 Automata Only need one C SC 452 Operating Systems C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category. Some other classes I can take are: CSC 447 - Green Computing CSC 425 - Computer Networking CSC 460 - Database Design CSC 466 - Computer Security I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need. Thanks! Descriptions Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security. Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast. Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications. Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers. Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers. Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems. Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound). Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages). Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases.

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  • Inside Red Gate - Project teams

    - by Simon Cooper
    Within each division in Red Gate, development effort is structured around one or more project teams; currently, each division contains 2-3 separate teams. These are self contained units responsible for a particular development project. Project team structure The typical size of a development team varies, but is normally around 4-7 people - one project manager, two developers, one or two testers, a technical author (who is responsible for the text within the application, website content, and help documentation) and a user experience designer (who designs and prototypes the UIs) . However, team sizes can vary from 3 up to 12, depending on the division and project. As an rule, all the team sits together in the same area of the office. (Again, this is my experience of what happens. I haven't worked in the DBA division, and SQL Tools might have changed completely since I moved to .NET. As I mentioned in my previous post, each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit.) Depending on the project, and the other needs in the division, the tech author and UX designer may be shared between several projects. Generally, developers and testers work on one project at a time. If the project is a simple point release, then it might not need a UX designer at all. However, if it's a brand new product, then a UX designer and tech author will be involved right from the start. Developers, testers, and the project manager will normally stay together in the same team as they work on different projects, unless there's a good reason to split or merge teams for a particular project. Technical authors and UX designers will normally go wherever they are needed in the division, depending on what each project needs at the time. In my case, I was working with more or less the same people for over 2 years, all the way through SQL Compare 7, 8, and Schema Compare for Oracle. This helped to build a great sense of camaraderie wihin the team, and helped to form and maintain a team identity. This, in turn, meant we worked very well together, and so the final result was that much better (as well as making the work more fun). How is a project started and run? The product manager within each division collates user feedback and ideas, does lots of research, throws in a few ideas from people within the company, and then comes up with a list of what the division should work on in the next few years. This is split up into projects, and after each project is greenlit (I'll be discussing this later on) it is then assigned to a project team, as and when they become available (I'm sure there's lots of discussions and meetings at this point that I'm not aware of!). From that point, it's entirely up to the project team. Just as divisions are autonomous, project teams are also given a high degree of autonomy. All the teams in Red Gate use some sort of vaguely agile methodology; most use some variations on SCRUM, some have experimented with Kanban. Some store the project progress on a whiteboard, some use our bug tracker, others use different methods. It all depends on what the team members think will work best for them to get the best result at the end. From that point, the project proceeds as you would expect; code gets written, tests pass and fail, discussions about how to resolve various problems are had and decided upon, and out pops a new product, new point release, new internal tool, or whatever the project's goal was. The project manager ensures that everyone works together without too much bloodshed and that thrown missiles are constrained to Nerf bullets, the developers write the code, the testers ensure it actually works, and the tech author and UX designer ensure that people will be able to use the final product to solve their problem (after all, developers make lousy UI designers and technical authors). Projects in Red Gate last a relatively short amount of time; most projects are less than 6 months. The longest was 18 months. This has evolved as the company has grown, and I suspect is a side effect of the type of software Red Gate produces. As an ISV, we sell packaged software; we only get revenue when customers purchase the ready-made tools. As a result, we only get a sellable piece of software right at the end of a project. Therefore, the longer the project lasts, the more time and money has to be invested by the company before we get any revenue from it, and the riskier the project becomes. This drives the average project time down. Small project teams are the core of how Red Gate produces software, and are what the whole development effort of the company is built around. In my next post, I'll be looking at the office itself, and how all 200 of us manage to fit on two floors of a small office building.

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  • Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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