Search Results

Search found 672 results on 27 pages for 'prove'.

Page 24/27 | < Previous Page | 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27  | Next Page >

• Managing Your First SharePoint Project or Team

  - by Mark Rackley

  (*editor’s note* If you have proper SharePoint Training, know the difference between a site and a site collection, and have the utmost respect for the knowledge of your SharePoint team skip this blog and go directly to meetdux.com, do not pass go, do not collect $200… otherwise, please proceed) Dear Mr. or Mrs. I-know-nothing-about-SharePoint-but-hey,-I-have-manager-in-my-title-so-I’ll-tell-you-how-to-your-job, Thank you so much for joining the Acme corporation. We appreciate your eagerness and willingness to jump in and help us accomplish all of our goals here at acme (these roadrunner rockets don’t make themselves). You may have noticed that we have this thing called SharePoint lying around and we have invested some time in money to make it not a complete piece of garbage. So, I thought I’d give you some pointers to help make your stay here enjoyable and productive. Yeah… you don’t really know SharePoint Just because you had a mysite at your last organization or had a SharePoint 2003 team site does NOT mean you comprehend the vastness that is SharePoint. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know what should and should not be done. No, we CAN’T just query the SQL database directly. Yes, it really does take that long. No, we can’t do that out-of-the-box. Your experience doesn’t mean as much as you think it means… Yes, I’m aware that you co-created the internet with Al Gore and have been managing projects since I was blowing up GI Joe figures with firecrackers, however SharePoint is not like anything you have worked with before from a management perspective. Please don’t tell us the proper way to do our job or tell us how “you” would do it, and PLEASE don’t utter the words “I used to do some .NET development so let me know if you get stuck and need some guidance.” It MAY be possible for a incredible project manager to manage a SharePoint project and not understand the technology, but if you force your ideas on us or treat us like we don’t really know what we’re doing then you will prove yourself to NOT be one of those types. Oh no you didn’t… Please don’t tell us how you can bring in a group of guys of Kazakhstan to do the project for $20/hr. There are many companies out there who can do some really crappy SharePoint work and we don’t want to be stuck maintaining their junk. Do you know what it means to deploy a solution? Neither do some of those companies out there. However, there are are few AWESOME consulting firms out there but $150/hr is cheap for these guys. Believe me, it’s worth it though. You get what you pay for! Show us some respect We truly do appreciate and value your opinion and experience, but when we tell you something is different in SharePoint don’t be condescending and dismiss OUR experience and opinions. We have spent a lot of time and energy learning a very complicated technology that can open up a world of possibilities when used properly. We just want to make sure it is used properly. It’s not the same as .NET development. It’s not like a regular web application. There’s more going on behind the scenes than you can possibly fathom. Have a little faith in us please and listen when we talk. You may actually learn a thing or two. Take some time to learn the technology There is hope… you don’t have to be totally worthless. Take some time to learn SharePoint. Learn what it is and what it can do. Invest some time in learning our SharePoint environment. What’s our logical architecture and taxonomy? What governance do we have in place? If you just thought “huh?” then yes, I’m talking to you. Sincerely, Your SharePoint Team (This rant is not pointed at any particular organization or person. If you think it’s about you, you are wrong. This is just a general rant based upon things people have told me and things I’ve seen. If you don’t think it applies to you, please move on. If you think you might be guilty of handling your SharePoint team the wrong way, then just please listen, learn, and have a little faith in your team. You all have the same goal in mind. Also, take the time to learn something about SharePoint, you will all be less frustrated with each other.)

  Read the article

• Easiest, most fun way to program 2D games? Flash? XNA? Some other engine?

  - by Maxi

  Hi, this is a post detailing my search for the most enjoyable way for a hobbyist game programmer to sweeten his free time with making a game. My requirements: I looked at Flash first, I made a couple of small games but I'm doubtful of the performance. I would like to make a fairly large strategy game, with several hundred units fighting simultaneously, explosions and animations included. Also zoomable maps. I saw that Adobe has a new 3D API for Flash, but I don't know if that improves 2D performance aswell, I couldn't find anything related to that question on their MAX10 sessions. Would you say that Flash is a good technology for making large 2D games easily? I really like Actionscript, and I love how easy everything is in Flash. There are several engines available which make it even easier. I just do this for fun, and it would be even better if there were proper animation/particle editors available and if the engine I were to use, would be available for multiple platforms. (so more people can play my game once finished). I'd like to have it available on many mobile platforms aswell. (because I love touch input for some reason) I do know the XNA framework pretty well, but there are no good engines available for it, and it will only run on Windows, which is a huge turn off. Even bigger is, that you need to install the XNA redistributable each time you want to give the game to someone. If I use XNA, I would have to make all the tools myself, and I'd probably have to make them with WPF. (I'd love to make tools with Adobe AIR, but unfortunately the API's for image manipulation etc. are far worse in Flash, than they are in XNA/WPF.) Now, I'm aware that I could make my own engine that supports each of those platforms, but quite frankly, that would be too much work plowing through APIs. After all, I want to make a game, not an engine. So the question becomes: Is there maybe a cross platform (free or free to develop?) engine available that I could use for 2D development? I prefer: C#, Actionscript. I don't mind using c++ if the toolset is above average, but I highly doubt that there is something out there like that. Please prove me wrong :) So summary: I'd like to use Flash, but I don't know if it scales well enough. I'm not a scripter, I want some real APIs that I can work with inside a proper IDE. Just for information, I looked at several alternatives, I'm actually looking for a long time already. You'd help me a lot to make a decision finally. Feature-wise the Flatredball engine would be ideal. But I tried their tools, and quite frankly, they are horrible. Absolutely unusable, I'd need to make my own for sure. I didn't look at their API, but if their tools are so bad, I'm not inclined to look further. Unity3D. This one is quite nice, but I really don't need 3D, and it is quite ...a lot of work to learn. I also don't like that it is so expensive to use for different platforms and that I can only code for it through scripting. You have to buy each platform separately. The editor usability is average, the product overall is good enough for most purposes, but learning it myself would be overkill. Shiva 3D. It looks good enough, but again: I don't really need 3D. The editor usability is a little worse than Unity3D in my opinion and it wasn't clear to me how to start programming. I think it requires C++ for coding, so that's a negative too. I want to have fun, and c# is fun ;) SDL. Quite frankly, I'd still need to port to all those different SDL implementations. And I don't like OpenGL style programming, it's just plain ugly. And it needs c++, I know that there might be some wrappers available, but I don't like to use wrappers, because... Irrlicht. A lot of features, but support seems to be low and it is aimed at enthusiasts. C# bindings get dropped repeatedly. I'm not an engine enthusiast, I just want to make a game. I don't see this happening with Irrlicht. Ogre3D. Way too much work, it's just a graphics engine. Also no multiple platform support and c++. Torque2D. Costs something to use, and I didn't hear a lot of good things about support and documentation. Also costs extra for each platform.

  Read the article

• Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

  - by charlie.mott

  I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined.  But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose?  Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type.  Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance.  Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works.  Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged.  But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there?  What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

  Read the article

• Coherence Data Guarantees for Data Reads - Basic Terminology

  - by jpurdy

  When integrating Coherence into applications, each application has its own set of requirements with respect to data integrity guarantees. Developers often describe these requirements using expressions like "avoiding dirty reads" or "making sure that updates are transactional", but we often find that even in a small group of people, there may be a wide range of opinions as to what these terms mean. This may simply be due to a lack of familiarity, but given that Coherence sits at an intersection of several (mostly) unrelated fields, it may be a matter of conflicting vocabularies (e.g. "consistency" is similar but different in transaction processing versus multi-threaded programming). Since almost all data read consistency issues are related to the concept of concurrency, it is helpful to start with a definition of that, or rather what it means for two operations to be concurrent. Rather than implying that they occur "at the same time", concurrency is a slightly weaker statement -- it simply means that it can't be proven that one event precedes (or follows) the other. As an example, in a Coherence application, if two client members mutate two different cache entries sitting on two different cache servers at roughly the same time, it is likely that one update will precede the other by a significant amount of time (say 0.1ms). However, since there is no guarantee that all four members have their clocks perfectly synchronized, and there is no way to precisely measure the time it takes to send a given message between any two members (that have differing clocks), we consider these to be concurrent operations since we can not (easily) prove otherwise. So this leads to a question that we hear quite frequently: "Are the contents of the near cache always synchronized with the underlying distributed cache?". It's easy to see that if an update on a cache server results in a message being sent to each near cache, and then that near cache being updated that there is a window where the contents are different. However, this is irrelevant, since even if the application reads directly from the distributed cache, another thread update the cache before the read is returned to the application. Even if no other member modifies a cache entry prior to the local near cache entry being updated (and subsequently read), the purpose of reading a cache entry is to do something with the result, usually either displaying for consumption by a human, or by updating the entry based on the current state of the entry. In the former case, it's clear that if the data is updated faster than a human can perceive, then there is no problem (and in many cases this can be relaxed even further). For the latter case, the application must assume that the value might potentially be updated before it has a chance to update it. This almost aways the case with read-only caches, and the solution is the traditional optimistic transaction pattern, which requires the application to explicitly state what assumptions it made about the old value of the cache entry. If the application doesn't want to bother stating those assumptions, it is free to lock the cache entry prior to reading it, ensuring that no other threads will mutate the entry, a pessimistic approach. The optimistic approach relies on what is sometimes called a "fuzzy read". In other words, the application assumes that the read should be correct, but it also acknowledges that it might not be. (I use the qualifier "sometimes" because in some writings, "fuzzy read" indicates the situation where the application actually sees an original value and then later sees an updated value within the same transaction -- however, both definitions are roughly equivalent from an application design perspective). If the read is not correct it is called a "stale read". Going back to the definition of concurrency, it may seem difficult to precisely define a stale read, but the practical way of detecting a stale read is that is will cause the encompassing transaction to roll back if it tries to update that value. The pessimistic approach relies on a "coherent read", a guarantee that the value returned is not only the same as the primary copy of that value, but also that it will remain that way. In most cases this can be used interchangeably with "repeatable read" (though that term has additional implications when used in the context of a database system). In none of cases above is it possible for the application to perform a "dirty read". A dirty read occurs when the application reads a piece of data that was never committed. In practice the only way this can occur is with multi-phase updates such as transactions, where a value may be temporarily update but then withdrawn when a transaction is rolled back. If another thread sees that value prior to the rollback, it is a dirty read. If an application uses optimistic transactions, dirty reads will merely result in a lack of forward progress (this is actually one of the main risks of dirty reads -- they can be chained and potentially cause cascading rollbacks). The concepts of dirty reads, fuzzy reads, stale reads and coherent reads are able to describe the vast majority of requirements that we see in the field. However, the important thing is to define the terms used to define requirements. A quick web search for each of the terms in this article will show multiple meanings, so I've selected what are generally the most common variations, but it never hurts to state each definition explicitly if they are critical to the success of a project (many applications have sufficiently loose requirements that precise terminology can be avoided).

  Read the article

• Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

  - by jpurdy

  A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

  Read the article

• SSRS Report from Oracle DB - Use stored procedure

  - by Emtucifor

  I am developing a report in Sql Server Reporting Services 2005, connecting to an Oracle 11g database. As you post replies perhaps it will help to know that I'm skilled in MSSQL Server and inexperienced in Oracle. I have multiple nested subreports and need to use summary data in outer reports and the same data but in detail in the inner reports. In order to spare the DB server from multiple executions, I thought to populate some temp tables at the beginning and then query just them the multiple times in the report and the subreports. In SSRS, Datasets are evidently executed in the order they appear in the RDL file. And you can have a dataset that doesn't return a rowset. So I created a stored procedure to populate my four temp tables and made this the first Dataset in my report. This SP works when I run it from SQLDeveloper and I can query the data from the temp tables. However, this didn't appear to work out because SSRS was apparently not reusing the same session, so even though the global temporary tables were created with ON COMMIT PRESERVE ROWS my Datasets were empty. I switched to using "real" tables and am now passing in an additional parameter, a GUID in string form, uniquely generated on each new execution, that is part of the primary key of each table, so I can get back just the rows for this execution. Running this from Sql Developer works fine, example: DECLARE ActivityCode varchar2(15) := '1208-0916 '; ExecutionID varchar2(32) := SYS_GUID(); BEGIN CIPProjectBudget (ActivityCode, ExecutionID); END; Never mind that in this example I don't know the GUID, this simply proves it works because rows are inserted to my four tables. But in the SSRS report, I'm still getting no rows in my Datasets and SQL Developer confirms no rows are being inserted. So I'm thinking along the lines of: Oracle uses implicit transactions and my changes aren't getting committed? Even though I can prove that the non-rowset returning SP is executing (because if I leave out the parameter mapping it complains at report rendering time about not having enough parameters) perhaps it's not really executing. Somehow. Wrong execution order isn't the problem or rows would appear in the tables, and they aren't. I'm interested in any ideas about how to accomplish this (especially the part about not running the main queries multiple times). I'll redesign my whole report. I'll stop using a stored procedure. Suggest anything you like! I just need help getting this working and I am stuck. If you want more details, in my SSRS report I have a List object (it's a container that repeats once for each row in a Dataset) that has some header values and then contains a subreport. Eventually, there will be four total reports: one main report, with three nested subreports. Each subreport will be in a List on the parent report.

  Read the article

• Can I query DOM Document with xpath expression from multiple threads safely?

  - by Dan

  I plan to use dom4j DOM Document as a static cache in an application where multiples threads can query the document. Taking into the account that the document itself will never change, is it safe to query it from multiple threads? I wrote the following code to test it, but I am not sure that it actually does prove that operation is safe? package test.concurrent_dom; import org.dom4j.Document; import org.dom4j.DocumentException; import org.dom4j.DocumentHelper; import org.dom4j.Element; import org.dom4j.Node; /** * Hello world! * */ public class App extends Thread { private static final String xml = "<Session>" + "<child1 attribute1=\"attribute1value\" attribute2=\"attribute2value\">" + "ChildText1</child1>" + "<child2 attribute1=\"attribute1value\" attribute2=\"attribute2value\">" + "ChildText2</child2>" + "<child3 attribute1=\"attribute1value\" attribute2=\"attribute2value\">" + "ChildText3</child3>" + "</Session>"; private static Document document; private static Element root; public static void main( String[] args ) throws DocumentException { document = DocumentHelper.parseText(xml); root = document.getRootElement(); Thread t1 = new Thread(){ public void run(){ while(true){ try { sleep(3); } catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } Node n1 = root.selectSingleNode("/Session/child1"); if(!n1.getText().equals("ChildText1")){ System.out.println("WRONG!"); } } } }; Thread t2 = new Thread(){ public void run(){ while(true){ try { sleep(3); } catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } Node n1 = root.selectSingleNode("/Session/child2"); if(!n1.getText().equals("ChildText2")){ System.out.println("WRONG!"); } } } }; Thread t3 = new Thread(){ public void run(){ while(true){ try { sleep(3); } catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } Node n1 = root.selectSingleNode("/Session/child3"); if(!n1.getText().equals("ChildText3")){ System.out.println("WRONG!"); } } } }; t1.start(); t2.start(); t3.start(); System.out.println( "Hello World!" ); } }

  Read the article

• How does mysql define DISTINCT() in reference documentation

  - by goran

  EDIT: This question is about finding definitive reference to MySQL syntax on SELECT modifying keywords and functions. /EDIT AFAIK SQL defines two uses of DISTINCT keywords - SELECT DISTINCT field... and SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT field) ... However in one of web applications that I administer I've noticed performance issues on queries like SELECT DISTINCT(field1), field2, field3 ... DISTINCT() on a single column makes no sense and I am almost sure it is interpreted as SELECT DISTINCT field1, field2, field3 ... but how can I prove this? I've searched mysql site for a reference on this particular syntax, but could not find any. Does anyone have a link to definition of DISTINCT() in mysql or knows about other authoritative source on this? Best EDIT After asking the same question on mysql forums I learned that while parsing the SQL mysql does not care about whitespace between functions and column names (but I am still missing a reference). As it seems you can have whitespace between functions and the parenthesis SELECT LEFT (field1,1), field2... and get mysql to understand it as SELECT LEFT(field,1) Similarly SELECT DISTINCT(field1), field2... seems to get decomposed to SELECT DISTINCT (field1), field2... and then DISTINCT is taken not as some undefined (or undocumented) function, but as SELECT modifying keyword and the parenthesis around field1 are evaluated as if they were part of field expression. It would be great if someone would have a pointer to documentation where it is stated that the whitespace between functions and parenthesis is not significant or to provide links to apropriate MySQL forums, mailing lists where I could raise a question to put this into reference. EDIT I have found a reference to server option IGNORE SPACE. It states that "The IGNORE SPACE SQL mode can be used to modify how the parser treats function names that are whitespace-sensitive", later on it states that recent versions of mysql have reduced this number from 200 to 30. One of the remaining 30 is COUNT for example. With IGNORE SPACE enabled both SELECT COUNT(*) FROM mytable; SELECT COUNT (*) FROM mytable; are legal. So if this is an exception, I am left to conclude that normally functions ignore space by default. If functions ignore space by default then if the context is ambiguous, such as for the first function on a first item of the select expression, then they are not distinguishable from keywords and the error can not be thrown and MySQL must accept them as keywords. Still, my conclusions feel like they have lot of assumptions, I would still be grateful and accept any pointers to see where to follow up on this.

  Read the article

• Code Golf - Banner Generation

  - by Claudiu

  When thanking someone, you don't want to just send them an e-mail saying "Thanks!", you want to have something FLASHY: Input: THANKS!! Output: TTT H H AAA N N K K SSS !!! !!! T H H A A NNN K K S !!! !!! T HHH AAA NNN KK SSS !!! !!! T H H A A N N K K S T H H A A N N K K SSS !!! !!! Write a program to generate a banner. You only have to generate upper-case A-Z along with spaces and exclamation points (what is a banner without an exclamation point?). All characters are made up of a 3x5 grid of the same character (so the S is a 3x5 grid made of S). All output should be on one row (so no newlines). Here are all the letters you need: Input: ABCDEFGHIJKL Output: AAA BBB CCC DD EEE FFF GGG H H III JJJ K K L A A B B C D D E F G H H I J K K L AAA BBB C D D EE FF G G HHH I J KK L A A B B C D D E F G G H H I J J K K L A A BBB CCC DD EEE F GGG H H III JJJ K K LLL Input: MNOPQRSTUVWX Output: M M N N OOO PPP QQQ RR SSS TTT U U V V W W X X MMM NNN O O P P Q Q R R S T U U V V W W X M M NNN O O PPP Q Q RR SSS T U U V V WWW X M M N N O O P QQQ R R S T U U V V WWW X M M N N OOO P QQQ R R SSS T UUU V WWW X X Input: YZ! Output: Y Y ZZZ !!! Y Y Z !!! YYY Z !!! Y Z YYY ZZZ !!! The winner is the shortest source code. Source code should read input from stdin, output to stdout. You can assume input will only contain [A-Z! ]. If you insult the user on incorrect input, you get a 10 character discount =P. I was going to require these exact 27 characters, but to make it more interesting, you can choose how you want them to look - whatever makes your code shorter! To prove that your letters do look like normal letters, show the output of the last three runs.

  Read the article

• iPhone JSON Object

  - by Cosizzle

  Hello, I'm trying to create a application that will retrieve JSON data from an HTTP request, send it to a the application main controller as a JSON object then from there do further processing with it. Where I'm stick is actually creating a class that will serve as a JSON class in which will take a URL, grab the data, and return that object. Alone, im able to make this class work, however I can not get the class to store the object for my main controller to retrieve it. Because im fairly new to Objective-C itself, my thoughts are that im messing up within my init call: -initWithURL:(NSString *) value { responseData = [[NSMutableData data] retain]; NSString *theURL = value; NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:theURL]]; [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self]; return self; } The processing of the JSON object takes place here: - (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection { [connection release]; NSString *responseString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:responseData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; [responseData release]; NSError *jsonError; SBJSON *json = [[SBJSON new] autorelease]; NSDictionary *parsedJSON = [json objectWithString:responseString error:&jsonError]; // NSArray object. listings = [parsedJSON objectForKey:@"posts"]; NSEnumerator *enumerator = [listings objectEnumerator]; NSDictionary* item; // to prove that it does work. while (item = (NSDictionary*)[enumerator nextObject]) { NSLog(@"posts:id = %@", [item objectForKey:@"id"]); NSLog(@"posts:address = %@", [item objectForKey:@"address"]); NSLog(@"posts:lat = %@", [item objectForKey:@"lat"]); NSLog(@"posts:lng = %@", [item objectForKey:@"lng"]); } [responseString release]; } Now when calling the object within the main controller I have this bit of code in the viewDidLoad method call: - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; JSON_model *jsonObj = [[JSON_model alloc] initWithURL:@"http://localhost/json/faith_json.php?user=1&format=json"]; NSEnumerator *enumerator = [[jsonObj listings] objectEnumerator]; NSDictionary* item; // while (item = (NSDictionary*)[enumerator nextObject]) { NSLog(@"posts:id = %@", [item objectForKey:@"id"]); NSLog(@"posts:address = %@", [item objectForKey:@"address"]); NSLog(@"posts:lat = %@", [item objectForKey:@"lat"]); NSLog(@"posts:lng = %@", [item objectForKey:@"lng"]); } }

  Read the article

• Really "wow" them in the interview

  - by Juliet

  Let me put it to you this way: I'm a top-notch programmer, but a notoriously bad interviewee. I've flunked 3 interviews consecutively because I get so nervous that my voice tightens at least 2 octaves higher and I start visibly shaking -- mind you, I can handle whatever technical questions the interviewer throws at me in that state, but I think it looks bad to come off as a quivering, squeaky-voiced young woman during a job interview. I've just got the personality type of a shy computer programmer. No matter how technical I am, I'm going to get passed up in favor of a smooth talker. I have another interview coming up shortly, and I want to really impress the company. Here are my trouble spots: What can I do to be less nervous during my interview? I always get really excited when I hear I have a face-to-face interview, but get more and more anxious as D-Day the interview approaches. My employers wants me to explain what I used to do at my prior employment. I'm a very chatty person and tend to talk/squeak for 10 minutes at a time. How long or short should I time my answers? On that note, when I'm explaining what I did at prior jobs, what exactly is my interviewer looking for? At some point, my interviewer will ask "do you have any questions for me while you're here?" I should, but what kinds of questions should I ask to show that I'm interested in being employed? My interviewer always asks why I'm looking for a new job. The real reason is that my present salary is $27K/yr [Edit to add: and I've yet to get a raise since I started], and I want to make more money -- otherwise the work environment is fine. How do I sugarcoat "I want to make more money" into something that sounds nicer? I have only one prior programmer job, and I've worked there for 18 months, but I have the skill of someone with 4 to 6 years of experience. What can I say to compete against applicants with more work experience? I took a low-paying $27K/yr programming job just to get my foot in IT, and I've been trying to leverage that job as a stepping stone to better opportunities. I get interviews because I consistently out-score senior-level developers in aptitude tests, and my desired salary range is right in the ballpark of what most companies want to offer. Unfortunately, while I've been a programming as a hobby for 10 years and I'm geared to graduate with my BA in Comp Sci in May '09, employers see me as a junior-level programmer with no degree. I want to prove them wrong and get a job that matches my skill level. I'd appreciate any advice anyone has to offer, especially if they can help me get a better job in the process.

  Read the article

• launching mapview from main activity (button)

  - by arc

  Hi all. Going round in circles here i think. I have an activity called Locate; public class Locate extends Activity { public static String lat; public static String lon; public static String number; public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.locate); final Button buttonMaps = (Button) findViewById(R.id.ButtonMaps); buttonMaps.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "Button Pressed", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); try { Intent i = new Intent(getBaseContext(), displayMap.class); i.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK); startActivity(i); } catch (ActivityNotFoundException e) { Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "Activity Not Found", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); } }}); // Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "lat: " + lat + " long: " + lon + " from: " + testname, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show(); } If I make the displayMap class into a normal Activity, and just have display a toast message confirming it has loaded - then it works fine. If i do this though; public class displayMap extends MapActivity { /** Called when the activity is first created. */ public void onCreate() { setContentView(R.layout.displaymap); Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "Display Map", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); } @Override protected boolean isRouteDisplayed() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } } Then as soon as I click the Button, I get a force close. I have the correct 'uses-library' tag in my manifest; <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"> <uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" /> I don't get what it just force closes everytime i try and load it. If I make this my onClick handler then it will fire up a working googlemaps/default mapview public void onClick(View v) { Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "Button Pressed", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); Uri uri=Uri.parse("geo:"+Locate.lat+","+Locate.lon); StartActivity(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, uri)); } But that is not what I am trying to do, I want my own - so that I can add overlays etc to it. But it does prove that the permission are set correctly and that the lib is there. The logcat error when the app FCs is a Unexpected DEX error. Can anyone point in the right direction here?

  Read the article

• Most efficient method to query a Young Tableau

  - by Matthieu M.

  A Young Tableau is a 2D matrix A of dimensions M*N such that: i,j in [0,M)x[0,N): for each p in (i,M), A[i,j] <= A[p,j] for each q in (j,N), A[i,j] <= A[i,q] That is, it's sorted row-wise and column-wise. Since it may contain less than M*N numbers, the bottom-right values might be represented either as missing or using (in algorithm theory) infinity to denote their absence. Now the (elementary) question: how to check if a given number is contained in the Young Tableau ? Well, it's trivial to produce an algorithm in O(M*N) time of course, but what's interesting is that it is very easy to provide an algorithm in O(M+N) time: Bottom-Left search: Let x be the number we look for, initialize i,j as M-1, 0 (bottom left corner) If x == A[i,j], return true If x < A[i,j], then if i is 0, return false else decrement i and go to 2. Else, if j is N-1, return false else increment j This algorithm does not make more than M+N moves. The correctness is left as an exercise. It is possible though to obtain a better asymptotic runtime. Pivot Search: Let x be the number we look for, initialize i,j as floor(M/2), floor(N/2) If x == A[i,j], return true If x < A[i,j], search (recursively) in A[0:i-1, 0:j-1], A[i:M-1, 0:j-1] and A[0:i-1, j:N-1] Else search (recursively) in A[i+1:M-1, 0:j], A[i+1:M-1, j+1:N-1] and A[0:i, j+1:N-1] This algorithm proceed by discarding one of the 4 quadrants at each iteration and running recursively on the 3 left (divide and conquer), the master theorem yields a complexity of O((N+M)**(log 3 / log 4)) which is better asymptotically. However, this is only a big-O estimation... So, here are the questions: Do you know (or can think of) an algorithm with a better asymptotical runtime ? Like introsort prove, sometimes it's worth switching algorithms depending on the input size or input topology... do you think it would be possible here ? For 2., I am notably thinking that for small size inputs, the bottom-left search should be faster because of its O(1) space requirement / lower constant term.

  Read the article

• How to break a Hibernate session?

  - by Péter Török

  In the Hibernate reference, it is stated several times that All exceptions thrown by Hibernate are fatal. This means you have to roll back the database transaction and close the current Session. You aren’t allowed to continue working with a Session that threw an exception. One of our legacy apps uses a single session to update/insert many records from files into a DB table. Each recourd update/insert is done in a separate transaction, which is then duly committed (or rolled back in case an error occurred). Then for the next record a new transaction is opened etc. But the same session is used throughout the whole process, even if a HibernateException was caught in the middle. We are using Oracle 9i btw with Hibernate 3.24.sp1 on JBoss 4.2. Reading the above in the book, I realized that this design may fail. So I refactored the app to use a separate session for each record update. In a unit test with a mock session factory, I could prove that it is now requesting a new session for each record update. So far, so good. However, we found no way to reproduce the session failure while testing the whole app (would this be a stress test btw, or ...?). We thought of shutting down the listener of the DB but we realized that the app is keeping a bunch of connections open to the DB, and the listener would not affect those connections. (This is a web app, activated once every night by a scheduler, but it can also be activated via the browser.) Then we tried to kill some of those connections in the DB while the app was processing updates - this resulted in some failed updates, but then the app happily continued. Apparently Hibernate is clever enough to reopen broken connections under the hood without breaking the whole session. So this might not be a critical issue, as our app seems to be robust enough even in its original form. However, the issue keeps bugging me. I would like to know: Under what circumstances does the Hibernate session really become unusable after a HibernateException was thrown? How to reproduce this in a test? (What's the proper term for such a test?)

  Read the article

• RESTful issue with data access when using HTTP DELETE method ...

  - by Wilhelm Murdoch

  I'm having an issue accessing raw request information from PHP when accessing a script using the HTTP DELETE directive. I'm using a JS front end which is accessing a script using Ajax. This script is actually part of a RESTful API which I am developing. The endpoint in this example is: http://api.site.com/session This endpoint is used to generate an authentication token which can be used for subsequent API requests. Using the GET method on this URL along with a modified version of HTTP Basic Authentication will provide an access token for the client. This token must then be included in all other interactions with the service until it expires. Once a token is generated, it is passed back to the client in a format specified by an 'Accept' header which the client sends the service; in this case 'application/json'. Upon success it responds with an HTTP 200 Ok status code. Upon failure, it throws an exception using the HTTP 401 Authorization Required code. Now, when you want to delete a session, or 'log out', you hit the same URL, but with the HTTP DELETE directive. To verify access to this endpoint, the client must prove they were previously authenticated by providing the token they want to terminate. If they are 'logged in', the token and session are terminated and the service should respond with the HTTP 204 No Content status code, otherwise, they are greeted with the 401 exception again. Now, the problem I'm having is with removing sessions. With the DELETE directive, using Ajax, I can't seem to access any parameters I've set once the request hits the service. In this case, I'm looking for the parameter entitled 'token'. I look at the raw request headers using Firebug and I notice the 'Content-Length' header changes with the size of the token being sent. This is telling me that this data is indeed being sent to the server. The question is, using PHP, how the hell to I access parameter information? It's not a POST or GET request, so I can't access it as you normally would in PHP. The parameters are within the content portion of the request. I've tried looking in $_SERVER, but that shows me limited amount of headers. I tried 'apache_request_headers()', which gives me more detailed information, but still, only for headers. I even tried 'file_get_contents('php://stdin');' and I get nothing. How can I access the content portion of a raw HTTP request? Sorry for the lengthy post, but I figured too much information is better than too little. :)

  Read the article

• reCaptcha issue with Spring MVC

  - by skip

  Hi I've been trying to integrate reCaptcha with my application built on Spring framework, but I am getting this error: org.springframework.web.bind.MissingServletRequestParameterException: Required String parameter 'recaptcha_challenge_field' is not present Could someone help me understand that why am I getting this error. I've got both recaptcha_challenge_field and recaptcha_response_field parameters bound to the User domain object. Could anybody help me understand what am I missing? Thanks Here is the code of the controller I am using, all I am trying to do is register a user with reCaptcha functionality but what I am getting is a http status 400 with the error org.springframework.web.bind.MissingServletRequestParameterException: Required String parameter 'recaptcha_challenge_field' is not present: UserManagementController.java @Controller public class UserManagementController { private static final String RECAPTCHA_HTML = "reCaptchaHtml"; @Autowired private UserService userService; @Autowired private ReCaptcha reCaptcha; @RequestMapping(method=RequestMethod.GET, value="/addNewUser.do") public ModelAndView addNewUser() { User user = new User(); String html = reCaptcha.createRecaptchaHtml(null, null); ModelMap modelMap = new ModelMap(); modelMap.put("user", user); modelMap.put(RECAPTCHA_HTML, html); return new ModelAndView("/addNewUser", modelMap); } @RequestMapping(method=RequestMethod.POST, value="/addNewUser.do") public String addNewUser(@Valid User user, BindingResult result, @RequestParam("recaptcha_challenge_field") String challenge, @RequestParam("recaptcha_response_field") String response, HttpServletRequest request, Model model) { verifyBinding(result); String remoteAddr = request.getRemoteAddr(); ReCaptchaResponse reCaptchaResponse = reCaptcha.checkAnswer(remoteAddr, challenge, response); if (!reCaptchaResponse.isValid()) { result.rejectValue("captcha", "errors.badCaptcha"); } model.addAttribute("user", user); if (result.hasErrors()) { result.reject("form.problems"); return "addNewUser"; } return "redirect:showContent.do"; } @InitBinder public void initBinder(WebDataBinder binder) { binder.setAllowedFields(new String[] { "firstName", "lastName", "email", "username", "password", "recaptcha_challenge_field", "recaptcha_response_field" }); } private void verifyBinding(BindingResult result) { String[] suppressedFields = result.getSuppressedFields(); if (suppressedFields.length > 0) { throw new RuntimeException("You've attempted to bind fields that haven't been allowed in initBinder(): " + StringUtils.join(suppressedFields, ", ")); } } } Here is the addNewUser.jsp element on the form page for the above controller: <tr> <td>Please prove you're a person</td> <td>${reCaptchaHtml}</td> <td><form:errors path="captcha" cssStyle="color:red"></form:errors></td> </tr> Could you help me understand what am I missing here? Thanks for reply.

  Read the article

• How do I make a SignalR client something when it receives a message?

  - by Ben

  I want to do something when a client receives a message via a SignalR hub. I've put together a basic chat app, but want people to be able to "like" a chat comment. I'm thinking the way to do this is to find the chat message on the client's page and update it using javascript. In the meantime to "prove the concept" I just want to make an alert popup on the client machine to say another user likes the comment. Trouble is, I'm not sure where to put it. (Am struggling to find SignalR documentation to be honest.) can't get my head round what is calling what here. My ChatHub class is as follows: public class ChatHub : Hub { public void Send(string name, string message) { // Call the broadcastMessage method to update clients. Clients.All.broadcastMessage(name, message); } } And my JavaScript is: $(function () { // Declare a proxy to reference the hub. var chat = $.connection.chatHub; // Create a function that the hub can call to broadcast messages. chat.client.broadcastMessage = function (name, message) { // Html encode display name and message. var encodedName = $('<div />').text(name).html(); var encodedMsg = $('<div />').text(message).html(); // Add the message to the page. var divContent = $('#discussion').html(); $('#discussion').html('<div class="container">' + '<div class="content">' + '<p class="username">' + encodedName + '</p>' + '<p class="message">' + encodedMsg + '</p>' + '</div>' + '<div class="slideout">' + '<div class="clickme" onclick="slideMenu(this)"></div>' + '<div class="slidebutton"><img id="imgid" onclick="likeButtonClick(this)" src="Images/like.png" /></div>' + '<div class="slidebutton"><img onclick="commentButtonClick(this)" src="Images/comment.png" /></div>' + '<div class="slidebutton" style="margin-right:0px"><img onclick="redcardButtonClick(this)" src="Images/redcard.png" /></div>' + '</div>' + '</div>' + divContent); }; // Set initial focus to message input box. $('#message').focus(); // Start the connection. $.connection.hub.start().done(function () { $('#sendmessage').click(function () { // Call the Send method on the hub. chat.server.send($('#lblUser').html(), $('#message').val()); // Clear text box and reset focus for next comment. $('#message').val('').focus(); }); });

  Read the article

• Available Coroutine Libraries in Java

  - by JUST MY correct OPINION

  I would like to do some stuff in Java that would be clearer if written using concurrent routines, but for which full-on threads are serious overkill. The answer, of course, is the use of coroutines, but there doesn't appear to be any coroutine support in the standard Java libraries and a quick Google on it brings up tantalising hints here or there, but nothing substantial. Here's what I've found so far: JSIM has a coroutine class, but it looks pretty heavyweight and conflates, seemingly, with threads at points. The point of this is to reduce the complexity of full-on threading, not to add to it. Further I'm not sure that the class can be extracted from the library and used independently. Xalan has a coroutine set class that does coroutine-like stuff, but again it's dubious if this can be meaningfully extracted from the overall library. It also looks like it's implemented as a tightly-controlled form of thread pool, not as actual coroutines. There's a Google Code project which looks like what I'm after, but if anything it looks more heavyweight than using threads would be. I'm basically nervous of something that requires software to dynamically change the JVM bytecode at runtime to do its work. This looks like overkill and like something that will cause more problems than coroutines would solve. Further it looks like it doesn't implement the whole coroutine concept. By my glance-over it gives a yield feature that just returns to the invoker. Proper coroutines allow yields to transfer control to any known coroutine directly. Basically this library, heavyweight and scary as it is, only gives you support for iterators, not fully-general coroutines. The promisingly-named Coroutine for Java fails because it's a platform-specific (obviously using JNI) solution. And that's about all I've found. I know about the native JVM support for coroutines in the Da Vinci Machine and I also know about the JNI continuations trick for doing this. These are not really good solutions for me, however, as I would not necessarily have control over which VM or platform my code would run on. (Indeed any bytecode manipulation system would suffer similar problems -- it would be best were this pure Java if possible. Runtime bytecode manipulation would restrict me from using this on Android, for example.) So does anybody have any pointers? Is this even possible? If not, will it be possible in Java 7? Edited to add: Just to ensure that confusion is contained, this is a related question to my other one, but not the same. This one is looking for an existing implementation in a bid to avoid reinventing the wheel unnecessarily. The other one is a question relating to how one would go about implementing coroutines in Java should this question prove unanswerable. The intent is to keep different questions on different threads.

  Read the article

• How does this Singleton-like web class persists session data, even though session is not updated in

  - by Micah Burnett

  Ok, I've got this singleton-like web class which uses session to maintain state. I initially thought I was going to have to manipulate the session variables on each "set" so that the new values were updated in the session. However I tried using it as-is, and somehow, it remembers state. For example, if run this code on one page: UserContext.Current.User.FirstName = "Micah"; And run this code in a different browser tab, FirstName is displayed correctly: Response.Write(UserContext.Current.User.FirstName); Can someone tell me (prove) how this data is getting persisted in the session? Here is the class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; public class UserContext { private UserContext() { } public static UserContext Current { get { if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["UserContext"] == null) { UserContext uc = new UserContext(); uc.User = new User(); System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["UserContext"] = uc; } return (UserContext)System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["UserContext"]; } } private string HospitalField; public string Hospital { get { return HospitalField; } set { HospitalField = value; ContractField = null; ModelType = null; } } private string ContractField; public string Contract { get { return ContractField; } set { ContractField = value; ModelType = string.Empty; } } private string ModelTypeField; public string ModelType { get { return ModelTypeField; } set { ModelTypeField = value; } } private User UserField; public User User { get { return UserField; } set { UserField = value; } } public void DoSomething() { } } public class User { public int UserId { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } } I added this to a watch, and can see that the session variable is definitely being set somewhere: (UserContext)System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["UserContext"]; As soon as a setter is called the Session var is immediately updated: set { HospitalField = value; //<--- here ContractField = null; ModelType = null; }

  Read the article

• Speeding up templates in GAE-Py by aggregating RPC calls

  - by Sudhir Jonathan

  Here's my problem: class City(Model): name = StringProperty() class Author(Model): name = StringProperty() city = ReferenceProperty(City) class Post(Model): author = ReferenceProperty(Author) content = StringProperty() The code isn't important... its this django template: {% for post in posts %} <div>{{post.content}}</div> <div>by {{post.author.name}} from {{post.author.city.name}}</div> {% endfor %} Now lets say I get the first 100 posts using Post.all().fetch(limit=100), and pass this list to the template - what happens? It makes 200 more datastore gets - 100 to get each author, 100 to get each author's city. This is perfectly understandable, actually, since the post only has a reference to the author, and the author only has a reference to the city. The __get__ accessor on the post.author and author.city objects transparently do a get and pull the data back (See this question). Some ways around this are Use Post.author.get_value_for_datastore(post) to collect the author keys (see the link above), and then do a batch get to get them all - the trouble here is that we need to re-construct a template data object... something which needs extra code and maintenance for each model and handler. Write an accessor, say cached_author, that checks memcache for the author first and returns that - the problem here is that post.cached_author is going to be called 100 times, which could probably mean 100 memcache calls. Hold a static key to object map (and refresh it maybe once in five minutes) if the data doesn't have to be very up to date. The cached_author accessor can then just refer to this map. All these ideas need extra code and maintenance, and they're not very transparent. What if we could do @prefetch def render_template(path, data) template.render(path, data) Turns out we can... hooks and Guido's instrumentation module both prove it. If the @prefetch method wraps a template render by capturing which keys are requested we can (atleast to one level of depth) capture which keys are being requested, return mock objects, and do a batch get on them. This could be repeated for all depth levels, till no new keys are being requested. The final render could intercept the gets and return the objects from a map. This would change a total of 200 gets into 3, transparently and without any extra code. Not to mention greatly cut down the need for memcache and help in situations where memcache can't be used. Trouble is I don't know how to do it (yet). Before I start trying, has anyone else done this? Or does anyone want to help? Or do you see a massive flaw in the plan?

  Read the article

• Code golf - hex to (raw) binary conversion

  - by Alnitak

  In response to this question asking about hex to (raw) binary conversion, a comment suggested that it could be solved in "5-10 lines of C, or any other language." I'm sure that for (some) scripting languages that could be achieved, and would like to see how. Can we prove that comment true, for C, too? NB: this doesn't mean hex to ASCII binary - specifically the output should be a raw octet stream corresponding to the input ASCII hex. Also, the input parser should skip/ignore white space. edit (by Brian Campbell) May I propose the following rules, for consistency? Feel free to edit or delete these if you don't think these are helpful, but I think that since there has been some discussion of how certain cases should work, some clarification would be helpful. The program must read from stdin and write to stdout (we could also allow reading from and writing to files passed in on the command line, but I can't imagine that would be shorter in any language than stdin and stdout) The program must use only packages included with your base, standard language distribution. In the case of C/C++, this means their respective standard libraries, and not POSIX. The program must compile or run without any special options passed to the compiler or interpreter (so, 'gcc myprog.c' or 'python myprog.py' or 'ruby myprog.rb' are OK, while 'ruby -rscanf myprog.rb' is not allowed; requiring/importing modules counts against your character count). The program should read integer bytes represented by pairs of adjacent hexadecimal digits (upper, lower, or mixed case), optionally separated by whitespace, and write the corresponding bytes to output. Each pair of hexadecimal digits is written with most significant nibble first. The behavior of the program on invalid input (characters besides [a-fA-F \t\r\n], spaces separating the two characters in an individual byte, an odd number of hex digits in the input) is undefined; any behavior (other than actively damaging the user's computer or something) on bad input is acceptable (throwing an error, stopping output, ignoring bad characters, treating a single character as the value of one byte, are all OK) The program may write no additional bytes to output. Code is scored by fewest total bytes in the source file. (Or, if we wanted to be more true to the original challenge, the score would be based on lowest number of lines of code; I would impose an 80 character limit per line in that case, since otherwise you'd get a bunch of ties for 1 line).

  Read the article

• Is this BlockingQueue susceptible to deadlock?

  - by unforgiven3

  I've been using this code as a queue that blocks on Dequeue() until an element is enqueued. I've used this code for a few years now in several projects, all with no issues... until now. I'm seeing a deadlock in some code I'm writing now, and in investigating the problem, my 'eye of suspicion' has settled on this BlockingQueue<T>. I can't prove it, so I figured I'd ask some people smarter than me to review it for potential issues. Can you guys see anything that might cause a deadlock in this code? public class BlockingQueue<T> { private readonly Queue<T> _queue; private readonly ManualResetEvent _event; /// <summary> /// Constructor /// </summary> public BlockingQueue() { _queue = new Queue<T>(); _event = new ManualResetEvent(false); } /// <summary> /// Read-only property to get the size of the queue /// </summary> public int Size { get { int count; lock (_queue) { count = _queue.Count; } return count; } } /// <summary> /// Enqueues element on the queue /// </summary> /// <param name="element">Element to enqueue</param> public void Enqueue(T element) { lock (_queue) { _queue.Enqueue(element); _event.Set(); } } /// <summary> /// Dequeues an element from the queue /// </summary> /// <returns>Dequeued element</returns> public T Dequeue() { T element; while (true) { if (Size == 0) { _event.Reset(); _event.WaitOne(); } lock (_queue) { if (_queue.Count == 0) continue; element = _queue.Dequeue(); break; } } return element; } /// <summary> /// Clears the queue /// </summary> public void Clear() { lock (_queue) { _queue.Clear(); } } }

  Read the article

• dynamic module creation

  - by intuited

  I'd like to dynamically create a module from a dictionary, and I'm wondering if adding an element to sys.modules is really the best way to do this. EG context = { a: 1, b: 2 } import types test_context_module = types.ModuleType('TestContext', 'Module created to provide a context for tests') test_context_module.__dict__.update(context) import sys sys.modules['TestContext'] = test_context_module My immediate goal in this regard is to be able to provide a context for timing test execution: import timeit timeit.Timer('a + b', 'from TestContext import *') It seems that there are other ways to do this, since the Timer constructor takes objects as well as strings. I'm still interested in learning how to do this though, since a) it has other potential applications; and b) I'm not sure exactly how to use objects with the Timer constructor; doing so may prove to be less appropriate than this approach in some circumstances. EDITS/REVELATIONS/PHOOEYS/EUREKAE: I've realized that the example code relating to running timing tests won't actually work, because import * only works at the module level, and the context in which that statement is executed is that of a function in the testit module. In other words, the globals dictionary used when executing that code is that of main, since that's where I was when I wrote the code in the interactive shell. So that rationale for figuring this out is a bit botched, but it's still a valid question. I've discovered that the code run in the first set of examples has the undesirable effect that the namespace in which the newly created module's code executes is that of the module in which it was declared, not its own module. This is like way weird, and could lead to all sorts of unexpected rattlesnakeic sketchiness. So I'm pretty sure that this is not how this sort of thing is meant to be done, if it is in fact something that the Guido doth shine upon. The similar-but-subtly-different case of dynamically loading a module from a file that is not in python's include path is quite easily accomplished using imp.load_source('NewModuleName', 'path/to/module/module_to_load.py'). This does load the module into sys.modules. However this doesn't really answer my question, because really, what if you're running python on an embedded platform with no filesystem? I'm battling a considerable case of information overload at the moment, so I could be mistaken, but there doesn't seem to be anything in the imp module that's capable of this. But the question, essentially, at this point is how to set the global (ie module) context for an object. Maybe I should ask that more specifically? And at a larger scope, how to get Python to do this while shoehorning objects into a given module?

  Read the article

• SSL Authentication with Certificates: Should the Certificates have a hostname?

  - by sixtyfootersdude

  Summary JBoss allows clients and servers to authenticate using certificates and ssl. One thing that seems strange is that you are not required to give your hostname on the certificate. I think that this means if Server B is in your truststore, Sever B can pretend to be any server that they want. (And likewise: if Client B is in your truststore...) Am I missing something here? Authentication Steps (Summary of Wikipeida Page) Client Server ================================================================================================= 1) Client sends Client Hello ENCRIPTION: None - highest TLS protocol supported - random number - list of cipher suites - compression methods 2) Sever Hello ENCRIPTION: None - highest TLS protocol supported - random number - choosen cipher suite - choosen compression method 3) Certificate Message ENCRIPTION: None - 4) ServerHelloDone ENCRIPTION: None 5) Certificate Message ENCRIPTION: None 6) ClientKeyExchange Message ENCRIPTION: server's public key => only server can read => if sever can read this he must own the certificate - may contain a PreMasterSecerate, public key or nothing (depends on cipher) 7) CertificateVerify Message ENCRIPTION: clients private key - purpose is to prove to the server that client owns the cert 8) BOTH CLIENT AND SERVER: - use random numbers and PreMasterSecret to compute a common secerate 9) Finished message - contains a has and MAC over previous handshakes (to ensure that those unincripted messages did not get broken) 10) Finished message - samething Sever Knows The client has the public key for the sent certificate (step 7) The client's certificate is valid because either: it has been signed by a CA (verisign) it has been self-signed BUT it is in the server's truststore It is not a replay attack because presumably the random number (step 1 or 2) is sent with each message Client Knows The server has the public key for the sent certificate (step 6 with step 8) The server's certificate is valid because either: it has been signed by a CA (verisign) it has been self-signed BUT it is in the client's truststore It is not a replay attack because presumably the random number (step 1 or 2) is sent with each message Potential Problem Suppose the client's truststore has certs in it: Server A Server B (malicous) Server A has hostname www.A.com Server B has hostname www.B.com Suppose: The client tries to connect to Server A but Server B launches a man in the middle attack. Since server B: has a public key for the certificate that will be sent to the client has a "valid certificate" (a cert in the truststore) And since: certificates do not have a hostname feild in them It seems like Server B can pretend to be Server A easily. Is there something that I am missing?

  Read the article

• Generics vs Object performance

  - by Risho

  I'm doing practice problems from MCTS Exam 70-536 Microsft .Net Framework Application Dev Foundation, and one of the problems is to create two classes, one generic, one object type that both perform the same thing; in which a loop uses the class and iterated over thousand times. And using the timer, time the performance of both. There was another post at C# generics question that seeks the same questoion but nonone replied. Basically if in my code I run the generic class first it takes loger to process. If I run the object class first than the object class takes longer to process. The whole idea was to prove that generics perform faster. I used the original users code to save me some time. I didn't particularly see anything wrong with the code and was puzzled by the outcome. Can some one explain why the unusual results? Thanks, Risho Here is the code: class Program { class Object_Sample { public Object_Sample() { Console.WriteLine("Object_Sample Class"); } public long getTicks() { return DateTime.Now.Ticks; } public void display(Object a) { Console.WriteLine("{0}", a); } } class Generics_Samle<T> { public Generics_Samle() { Console.WriteLine("Generics_Sample Class"); } public long getTicks() { return DateTime.Now.Ticks; } public void display(T a) { Console.WriteLine("{0}", a); } } static void Main(string[] args) { long ticks_initial, ticks_final, diff_generics, diff_object; Object_Sample OS = new Object_Sample(); Generics_Samle<int> GS = new Generics_Samle<int>(); //Generic Sample ticks_initial = 0; ticks_final = 0; ticks_initial = GS.getTicks(); for (int i = 0; i < 50000; i++) { GS.display(i); } ticks_final = GS.getTicks(); diff_generics = ticks_final - ticks_initial; //Object Sample ticks_initial = 0; ticks_final = 0; ticks_initial = OS.getTicks(); for (int j = 0; j < 50000; j++) { OS.display(j); } ticks_final = OS.getTicks(); diff_object = ticks_final - ticks_initial; Console.WriteLine("\nPerformance of Generics {0}", diff_generics); Console.WriteLine("Performance of Object {0}", diff_object); Console.ReadKey(); } }

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27  | Next Page >