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• 101 Ways to Participate...and make the future Java

  - by heathervc

   In case you missed it earlier today, and as promised in BOF6283, here are the 101 Ways to Improve (and Make the Future) Java...thanks to Bruno Souza of SouJava and Martijn Verburg of the London Java Community for their contributions! Join or create a JUG Come to the meetings Help promoting your JUG: twitter, facebook, etc Find someone that can give a talk Get your company to sponsor (a meeting, an event) Organize an activity (meetings, hackathons, dojos, etc) Answer questions on a mailing list (or simply join!) Volunteer for a small, one time tasks (creating a web page, helping with an activity) Come early to an event, and help to carry the piano Moderate a list or add things to the wiki Participate in the organization meetings or mailing lists Take pictures of an event or meeting and publish them online Write a blog about an event or meeting, to help promote the group Help record and post a session online Present your JavaOne experience when you get back Repeat the best talk you saw at JavaOne at a JUG meeting Send this list of ideas to other Java developers in your area so they can help out too! Present a step-by-step tutorial Present GreenFoot and Alice to school students Present BlueJ and Alice to university students Teach those tools to teachers and professors Write a step-by-step tutorial on your blog or to a magazine Create a page that lists resources Give a talk about your favorite Java feature or technology Learn a new Java API and present to your co-workers Then, present in a JUG meeting, and then, present it in an event in your area, and submit it to JavaOne! Create a study group to get certified or to learn some new Java technology Teach a non-Java developer how to download the basic tools and where to find more information Download and use an open source project Improve the documentation Write an article or a blog post about the project Write an FAQ Join and participate on the mailing list Describe a bug in detail and submit a bug report Fix a bug and submit it to the project Give a talk about it at a JUG meeting Teach your co-workers how to use the project Sign up to Adopt a JSR Test regular builds of the Reference Implementation (RI) Report bugs in the RI Submit Feature Requests to the spec Triage issues on the issue tracker Run a hack day to discuss the API Moderate mailing lists and forums Create an FAQ or Wiki Evangelize a specification on Twitter, G+, Hacker News, etc Give a lightning talk Help build the RI Help build the Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK) Create a Podcast Learn Latin - e.g. legal language, translate to English Sign up to Adopt OpenJDK Run a Bugathon Fix javac compiler warnings Build virtual images Add tests to Java Submit Javadoc patches Give a webbing Teach someone to build OpenJDK Hold a brown bag session at work Fix the oldest known bug Overhaul Javadoc to use HTML Load the OpenJDK into different IDEs Run a build farm node Test your code on a nightly build Learn how to read Java byte code Visit JCP.org Follow jcp_org on Twitter Friend JCP on Facebook Read JCP Blog Register for JCP.org site Create a JSR Watch List Review JSRs in progress Comment on JSRs in progress, write and track bug reports, use cases, etc Review JSRs in Maintenance Comment on JSRs in Maintenance Implement Final JSRs Review the Transparency of JSRs in progress and provide feedback to the PMO and Spec Lead/community Become a JCP Member or associate with a current JCP member Nominate to serve on an Expert Group (EG) Serve on an EG Submit a JSR proposal and become Spec Lead Take a Spec Lead role in an Inactive or Dormant JSR Nominate for an Executive Committee (EC) seat Vote in the EC elections Vote in EC Special Elections Review EC Meeting Summaries Attend Spec Lead calls Write blogs, articles on your experiences Join the EC project on java.net Join JCP.Next on java.net/JSR 358 Participate on the JCP forums and join JSR projects on java.net Suggest agenda items for open EC meetings Attend public EC teleconference (2x per year) Attend open EC meetings at JavaOne Nominate for JCP Annual Awards Attend annual JavaOne and JCP Annual Awards Ceremony Attend JCP related BOF sessions and give your feedback to Program Office Invite JCP program office members to your JUG  or meetup Invite JSR Spec Leads to your JUG or meetup And always - hold a party!

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• Library order is important

  - by Darryl Gove

  I've written quite extensively about link ordering issues, but I've not discussed the interaction between archive libraries and shared libraries. So let's take a simple program that calls a maths library function: #include <math.h int main() { for (int i=0; i<10000000; i++) { sin(i); } } We compile and run it to get the following performance: bash-3.2$ cc -g -O fp.c -lm bash-3.2$ timex ./a.out real 6.06 user 6.04 sys 0.01 Now most people will have heard of the optimised maths library which is added by the flag -xlibmopt. This contains optimised versions of key mathematical functions, in this instance, using the library doubles performance: bash-3.2$ cc -g -O -xlibmopt fp.c -lm bash-3.2$ timex ./a.out real 2.70 user 2.69 sys 0.00 The optimised maths library is provided as an archive library (libmopt.a), and the driver adds it to the link line just before the maths library - this causes the linker to pick the definitions provided by the static library in preference to those provided by libm. We can see the processing by asking the compiler to print out the link line: bash-3.2$ cc -### -g -O -xlibmopt fp.c -lm /usr/ccs/bin/ld ... fp.o -lmopt -lm -o a.out... The flag to the linker is -lmopt, and this is placed before the -lm flag. So what happens when the -lm flag is in the wrong place on the command line: bash-3.2$ cc -g -O -xlibmopt -lm fp.c bash-3.2$ timex ./a.out real 6.02 user 6.01 sys 0.01 If the -lm flag is before the source file (or object file for that matter), we get the slower performance from the system maths library. Why's that? If we look at the link line we can see the following ordering: /usr/ccs/bin/ld ... -lmopt -lm fp.o -o a.out So the optimised maths library is still placed before the system maths library, but the object file is placed afterwards. This would be ok if the optimised maths library were a shared library, but it is not - instead it's an archive library, and archive library processing is different - as described in the linker and library guide: "The link-editor searches an archive only to resolve undefined or tentative external references that have previously been encountered." An archive library can only be used resolve symbols that are outstanding at that point in the link processing. When fp.o is placed before the libmopt.a archive library, then the linker has an unresolved symbol defined in fp.o, and it will search the archive library to resolve that symbol. If the archive library is placed before fp.o then there are no unresolved symbols at that point, and so the linker doesn't need to use the archive library. This is why libmopt needs to be placed after the object files on the link line. On the other hand if the linker has observed any shared libraries, then at any point these are checked for any unresolved symbols. The consequence of this is that once the linker "sees" libm it will resolve any symbols it can to that library, and it will not check the archive library to resolve them. This is why libmopt needs to be placed before libm on the link line. This leads to the following order for placing files on the link line: Object files Archive libraries Shared libraries If you use this order, then things will consistently get resolved to the archive libraries rather than to the shared libaries.

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• Animation Trouble with Java Swing Timer - Also, JFrame Will Not Exit_On_Close

  - by forgotton_semicolon

  So, I am using a Java Swing Timer because putting the animation code in a run() method of a Thread subclass caused an insane amount of flickering that is really a terrible experience for any video game player. Can anyone give me any tips on: Why there is no animation... Why the JFrame will not close when it is coded to Exit_On_Close 2 times My code is here: import java.awt.; import java.awt.event.; import javax.swing.*; import java.net.URL; //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// TFQ public class TFQ extends JFrame { DrawingsInSpace dis; //========================================================== constructor public TFQ() { dis = new DrawingsInSpace(); JPanel content = new JPanel(); content.setLayout(new FlowLayout()); this.setContentPane(dis); this.setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE); this.setTitle("Plasma_Orbs_Off_Orion"); this.setSize(500,500); this.pack(); //... Create timer which calls action listener every second.. // Use full package qualification for javax.swing.Timer // to avoid potential conflicts with java.util.Timer. javax.swing.Timer t = new javax.swing.Timer(500, new TimePhaseListener()); t.start(); } /////////////////////////////////////////////// inner class Listener thing class TimePhaseListener implements ActionListener, KeyListener { // counter int total; // loop control boolean Its_a_go = true; //position of our matrix int tf = -400; //sprite directions int Sprite_Direction; final int RIGHT = 1; final int LEFT = 2; //for obstacle Rectangle mega_obstacle = new Rectangle(200, 0, 20, HEIGHT); public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { //... Whenever this is called, repaint the screen dis.repaint(); addKeyListener(this); while (Its_a_go) { try { dis.repaint(); if(Sprite_Direction == RIGHT) { dis.matrix.x += 2; } // end if i think if(Sprite_Direction == LEFT) { dis.matrix.x -= 2; } } catch(Exception ex) { System.out.println(ex); } } // end while i think } // end actionPerformed @Override public void keyPressed(KeyEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } @Override public void keyReleased(KeyEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } @Override public void keyTyped(KeyEvent event) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub if (event.getKeyChar()=='f'){ Sprite_Direction = RIGHT; System.out.println("matrix should be animating now "); System.out.println("current matrix position = " + dis.matrix.x); } if (event.getKeyChar()=='d') { Sprite_Direction = LEFT; System.out.println("matrix should be going in reverse"); System.out.println("current matrix position = " + dis.matrix.x); } } } //================================================================= main public static void main(String[] args) { JFrame SafetyPins = new TFQ(); SafetyPins.setVisible(true); SafetyPins.setSize(500,500); SafetyPins.setResizable(true); SafetyPins.setLocationRelativeTo(null); SafetyPins.setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE); } } class DrawingsInSpace extends JPanel { URL url1_plasma_orbs; URL url2_matrix; Image img1_plasma_orbs; Image img2_matrix; // for the plasma_orbs Rectangle bbb = new Rectangle(0,0, 0, 0); // for the matrix Rectangle matrix = new Rectangle(-400, 60, 430, 200); public DrawingsInSpace() { //load URLs try { url1_plasma_orbs = this.getClass().getResource("plasma_orbs.png"); url2_matrix = this.getClass().getResource("matrix.png"); } catch(Exception e) { System.out.println(e); } // attach the URLs to the images img1_plasma_orbs = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(url1_plasma_orbs); img2_matrix = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(url2_matrix); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { super.paintComponent(g); // draw the plasma_orbs g.drawImage(img1_plasma_orbs, bbb.x, bbb.y,this); //draw the matrix g.drawImage(img2_matrix, matrix.x, matrix.y, this); } } // end class enter code here

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• Converting .docx to pdf (or .doc to pdf, or .doc to odt, etc.) with libreoffice on a webserver on the fly using php

  - by robertphyatt

  Ok, so I needed to convert .docx files to .pdf files on the fly, but none of the free php libraries that were available let me do it on my server (a webservice was not good enough). Basically either I needed to pay for a library (and have it maybe suck) or just deal with the free ones that didn't convert the formatting well enough. Not good enough! I found that LibreOffice (OpenOffice's successor) allows command line conversion using the LibreOffice conversion engine (which DID preserve the formatting like I wanted and generally worked great). I loaded the latest version of Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download) onto my Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) on my computer and found that I was able to easily convert files using the commandline like this: libreoffice --headless -convert-to pdf fileToConvert.docx -outdir output/path/for/pdf I thought: sweet...but I don't have admin rights on my host's web server. I tried to use a "portable" version of LibreOffice that I obtained from http://portablelinuxapps.org/ but I was unable to get it to work on my host's webserver, because my host's webserver didn't have all the dependencies (Dependency Hell! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell) I was at a loss of how to make it work, until I ran across a cool project made by a Ph.D. student (Philip J. Guo) at Stanford called CDE: http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/cde.html I will let you look at his explanations of how it works (I followed what he did in http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6XdwHo1BWwY, starting at about 32:00 as well as the directions on his site), but in short, it allows one to avoid dependency hell by copying all the files used when you run certain commands, recreating the linux environment where the command worked. I was able to use this to run LibreOffice without having to resort to someone's portable version of it, and it worked just like it did when I did it on Ubuntu with the command above, with a tweak: I needed to run the wrapper of LibreOffice the CDE generated. So, below is my PHP code that calls it. In this code snippet, the filename to be copied is passed in as $_POST["filename"]. I copy the file to the same spot where I originally converted the file, convert it, copy it back and then delete all the files (so that it doesn't start growing exponentially). I did it this way because I wasn't able to make it work otherwise on the webserver. If there is a linux + webserver ninja out there that can figure out how to make it work without doing this, I would be interested to know what you did. Please post a comment or something if you did that. <?php //first copy the file to the magic place where we can convert it to a pdf on the fly copy($time.$_POST["filename"], "../LibreOffice/cde-package/cde-root/home/robert/Desktop/".$_POST["filename"]); //change to that directory chdir('../LibreOffice/cde-package/cde-root/home/robert'); //the magic command that does the conversion $myCommand = "./libreoffice.cde --headless -convert-to pdf Desktop/".$_POST["filename"]." -outdir Desktop/"; exec ($myCommand); //copy the file back copy("Desktop/".str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"]), "../../../../../documents/".str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"])); //delete all the files out of the magic place where we can convert it to a pdf on the fly $files1 = scandir('Desktop'); //my files that I generated all happened to start with a number. $pattern = '/^[0-9]/'; foreach ($files1 as $value) { preg_match($pattern, $value, $matches); if(count($matches) ?> 0) { unlink("Desktop/".$value); } } //changing the header to the location of the file makes it work well on androids header( 'Location: '.str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"]) ); ?> And here is the tar.gz file I generated I generated with CDE. To duplicate what I did exactly, put the tar.gz file in a folder somewhere. I will call that folder the "root". Make a new folder called "documents" in the "root" folder. Unpack the tar.gz and run the php script above from the "documents" folder. Success! I made a truly portable version of LibreOffice that can convert files on the fly on a webserver using 100% free, open source software!

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• Four Easy Ways to Save a Rocky CRM Relationship

  - by Divya Malik

   Today, I am pleased to introduce our guest blogger Luke Christianson. Luke is  an Application Sales rep based out of Minneapolis, MN.  You can find him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter. In any relationship, sooner or later, the excitement fades away.  The honeymoon period gives way to the old routines you had, before you committed to each other and you eventually begin doing things apart from one another.  I’m not talking about a marriage…  Well, I guess I am.Commitment to a CRM tool and building a deep and lasting relationship is not much different than the basics of a traditional love story.  After your controlled CRM pilot program, and maybe the National Sales Meeting where you couldn’t escape those three wonderful letters, CRM, you will soon find that if you haven’t designed an environment where it’s going to enable your reps to make more money, the relationship is doomed.   . If you’re currently in a dysfunctional CRM relationship, here are 4 simple tips to re-engaging users and getting that spark back. Shadow a Sales Rep:   Chances are you can find out exactly what is preventing your sales reps from using the application by simply watching how they go about their day.  Sales reps are driven by money, not by additional administrative duties.  Your system needs to be setup so that they can get the information they need quickly, facilitate making key updates and run their business out of one easy-to-use application.  Increase your sales team’s productivity by 5% automatically:    Cancel the weekly forecast calls with your reps and require them update their opportunities in CRM.  Something else that I’ve seen work extremely well, is when you do Monthly or Quarterly reviews, do not let your sales reps bring anything into the room with them; no spreadsheets, notebooks, or computers.  Everything they need to tell you should be able to be put into CRM and fully accessible by the Sales Manager at any time.  Tool time:      Make sure the tools that you have selected meet both your short-term goals and your long term goals.   You need tools that can adapt like your business does.  You probably can’t wait two months for an update to a picklist value or for the addition of a simple workflow rule.  Do you feel the tools that are in place can create the experience you want for your users? and finally, if all else fails... Keep It Simple, Stupid:     Do you really need to require 15 fields to create an Opportunity?  Do you need to clutter the interface with different reports that don’t add daily value?  Most CRM systems on the market today are flexible enough today that your admin could clean up most of the unnecessary interface ‘noise’ in a few hours.  If they're not, see #3. Every strong relationship can be tedious at times, you’ll fight and eventually make amends, you may even threaten to upgrade to a newer model…  But be patient and think about what you want to achieve and you’ll find a partner for life.

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• C#, Delegates and LINQ

  - by JustinGreenwood

  One of the topics many junior programmers struggle with is delegates. And today, anonymous delegates and lambda expressions are profuse in .net APIs.  To help some VB programmers adapt to C# and the many equivalent flavors of delegates, I walked through some simple samples to show them the different flavors of delegates. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; namespace DelegateExample { class Program { public delegate string ProcessStringDelegate(string data); public static string ReverseStringStaticMethod(string data) { return new String(data.Reverse().ToArray()); } static void Main(string[] args) { var stringDelegates = new List<ProcessStringDelegate> { //========================================================== // Declare a new delegate instance and pass the name of the method in new ProcessStringDelegate(ReverseStringStaticMethod), //========================================================== // A shortcut is to just and pass the name of the method in ReverseStringStaticMethod, //========================================================== // You can create an anonymous delegate also delegate (string inputString) //Scramble { var outString = inputString; if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(inputString)) { var rand = new Random(); var chs = inputString.ToCharArray(); for (int i = 0; i < inputString.Length * 3; i++) { int x = rand.Next(chs.Length), y = rand.Next(chs.Length); char c = chs[x]; chs[x] = chs[y]; chs[y] = c; } outString = new string(chs); } return outString; }, //========================================================== // yet another syntax would be the lambda expression syntax inputString => { // ROT13 var array = inputString.ToCharArray(); for (int i = 0; i < array.Length; i++) { int n = (int)array[i]; n += (n >= 'a' && n <= 'z') ? ((n > 'm') ? 13 : -13) : ((n >= 'A' && n <= 'Z') ? ((n > 'M') ? 13 : -13) : 0); array[i] = (char)n; } return new string(array); } //========================================================== }; // Display the results of the delegate calls var stringToTransform = "Welcome to the jungle!"; System.Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Cyan; System.Console.Write("String to Process: "); System.Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Yellow; System.Console.WriteLine(stringToTransform); stringDelegates.ForEach(delegatePointer => { System.Console.WriteLine(); System.Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Cyan; System.Console.Write("Delegate Method Name: "); System.Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Magenta; System.Console.WriteLine(delegatePointer.Method.Name); System.Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Cyan; System.Console.Write("Delegate Result: "); System.Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.White; System.Console.WriteLine(delegatePointer(stringToTransform)); }); System.Console.ReadKey(); } } } The output of the program is below: String to Process: Welcome to the jungle! Delegate Method Name: ReverseStringStaticMethod Delegate Result: !elgnuj eht ot emocleW Delegate Method Name: ReverseStringStaticMethod Delegate Result: !elgnuj eht ot emocleW Delegate Method Name: b__1 Delegate Result: cg ljotWotem!le une eh Delegate Method Name: b__2 Delegate Result: dX_V|`X ?| ?[X ]?{Z_X!

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• PHP code works on Chrome, but not on Firefox or IE (send email via HTML form) [on hold]

  - by Cachirro

  My brother has this form: <form id="lista" action="lista2.php" method="post"> <input name="cf_name" type="text" size="50" hidden="yes" class="obscure"> <input name="cf_email" type="text" size="50" hidden="yes" class="obscure"> <textarea name="cf_message" cols="45" rows="10" hidden="yes" class="obscure"> </textarea> <input type="image" name="submit" value="Enviar Lista por Email" src="imagens/lista_email.png" width="40" height="40" onclick="this.form.elements['cf_message'].value = lista_mail;this.form.elements['cf_name'].value = prompt('Escreva o seu nome:', '');this.form.elements['cf_email'].value = prompt('Escreva o seu email:', '');"> <input name="submit2" type="submit" value="Enviar" hidden="yes" class="obscure"> </form> That calls this PHP file: <?php if ( isset($_POST['submit']) ) { // Dados de autenticacao SMTP $smtpinfo['host'] = 'localhost'; $smtpinfo['port'] = '25'; $smtpinfo['auth'] = true; $smtpinfo['username'] = 'xxx'; $smtpinfo['password'] = 'xxx'; // Dados recebidos do formulario $nome = $_POST['cf_name']; $email = $_POST['cf_email']; $mensagem = $_POST['cf_message']; // Inclusão de ficheiro PEAR. Certifique-se que o PEAR está activado no seu alojamento require_once "Mail.php"; // Corpo da mensagem $body = "Nome: ".$nome; $body.= "\n\n"; $body.= nl2br($mensagem); $headers = array ('From' => $email, 'To' => $smtpinfo["username"], 'Subject' => 'Encomenda Website'); $mail_object = Mail::factory('smtp', $smtpinfo); $mail = $mail_object->send($smtpinfo["username"], $headers, $body); if ( PEAR::isError($mail) ) { echo ("<p>" . $mail->getMessage() . "</p>"); } else { echo ('<b><font color="FFFF00">Mensagem enviada com sucesso.<br><br></b>Seu email: ' . $email . '<br><br></font>'); }} ?> This basically sends an email with some selected products, name and email. The problem is that it works perfectly on Chrome, but not on FF or IE. When the submit image is pressed, the URL changes to the PHP file, but it displays a blank page. After display errors activated: ini_set('display_errors',1); ini_set('display_startup_errors',1); error_reporting(-1) FF/IE display blank page and email isn't sent, Chrome sends the email and displays this: Strict Standards: Non-static method Mail::factory() should not be called statically in /var/www/vhosts/[site url]/httpdocs/lista2.php on line 33 Strict Standards: Non-static method PEAR::isError() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context in /usr/share/php/Mail/smtp.php , dont know if it helps So, what is causing the email to be sent on chrome and not on FF or IE? Thank you.

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• Proving What You are Worth

  - by Ted Henson

  Here is a challenge for everyone. Just about everyone has been asked to provide or calculate the Return on Investment (ROI), so I will assume everyone has a method they use. The problem with stopping once you have an ROI is that those in the C-Suite probably do not care about the ROI as much as Return on Equity (ROE). Shareholders are mostly concerned with their return on the money the invested. Warren Buffett looks at ROE when deciding whether to make a deal or not. This article will outline how you can add more meaning to your ROI and show how you can potentially enhance the ROE of the company.   First I want to start with a base definition I am using for ROI and ROE. Return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE) are ways to measure management effectiveness, parts of a system of measures that also includes profit margins for profitability, price-to-earnings ratio for valuation, and various debt-to-equity ratios for financial strength. Without a set of evaluation metrics, a company's financial performance cannot be fully examined by investors. ROI and ROE calculate the rate of return on a specific investment and the equity capital respectively, assessing how efficient financial resources have been used. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, so that will be the focus. Now that the challenge has been made and items have been defined, let’s go deeper. Most research about implementation stops short at system start-up and seldom addresses post-implementation issues. However, we know implementation is a continuous improvement effort, and continued efforts after system start-up will influence the ultimate success of a system.   Most UPK ROI’s I have seen only include the cost savings in developing the training material. Some will also include savings based on reduced Help Desk calls. Using just those values you get a good ROI. To get an ROE you need to go a little deeper. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, which is the purpose of implementing/upgrading an enterprise application. Let’s assume the new system is up and running and all users have been properly trained and are comfortable using the system. You provide senior management with your ROI that justifies the original cost. What you want to do now is develop a good base value to a measure the current efficiency. Using usage tracking you can look for various patterns. For example, you may find that users that are accessing UPK assistance are processing a procedure, such as entering an order, 5 minutes faster than those that don’t.  You do some research and discover each minute saved in processing a claim saves the company one dollar. That translates to the company saving five dollars on every transaction. Assuming 100,000 transactions are performed a year, and all users improve their performance, the company will be saving $500,000 a year. That $500,000 can be re-invested, used to reduce debt or paid to the shareholders.   With continued refinement during the life cycle, you should be able to find ways to reduce cost. These are the type of numbers and productivity gains that senior management and shareholders want to see. Being able to quantify savings and increase productivity may also help when seeking a raise or promotion.

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• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

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• Is this Hybrid of Interface / Composition kosher?

  - by paul

  I'm working on a project in which I'm considering using a hybrid of interfaces and composition as a single thing. What I mean by this is having a contain*ee* class be used as a front for functionality implemented in a contain*er* class, where the container exposes the containee as a public property. Example (pseudocode): class Visibility(lambda doShow, lambda doHide, lambda isVisible) public method Show() {...} public method Hide() {...} public property IsVisible public event Shown public event Hidden class SomeClassWithVisibility private member visibility = new Visibility(doShow, doHide, isVisible) public property Visibility with get() = visibility private method doShow() {...} private method doHide() {...} private method isVisible() {...} There are three reasons I'm considering this: The language in which I'm working (F#) has some annoyances w.r.t. implementing interfaces the way I need to (unless I'm missing something) and this will help avoid a lot of boilerplate code. The containee classes could really be considered properties of the container class(es); i.e. there seems to be a fairly strong has-a relationship. The containee classes will likely implement code which would have been pretty much the same when implemented in all the container classes, so why not do it once in one place? In the above example, this would include managing and emitting the Shown/Hidden events. Does anyone see any isseus with this Composiface/Intersition method, or know of a better way? EDIT 2012.07.26 - It seems a little background information is warranted: Where I work, we have a bunch of application front-ends that have limited access to system resources -- they need access to these resources to fully function. To remedy this we have a back-end application that can access the needed resources, with which the front-ends can communicate. (There is an API written for the front-ends for accessing back-end functionality as though it were part of the front-end.) The back-end program is out of date and its functionality is incomplete. It has made the transition from company to company a couple of times and we can't even compile it anymore. So I'm trying to rewrite it in my spare time. I'm trying to update things to make a nice(r) interface/API for the front-ends (while allowing for backwards compatibility with older front-ends), hopefully something full of OOPy goodness. The thing is, I don't want to write the front-end API after I've written pretty much the same code in F# for implementing the back-end; so, what I'm planning on doing is applying attributes to classes/methods/properties that I would like to have code for in the API then generate this code from the F# assembly using reflection. The method outlined in this question is a possible alternative I'm considering instead of implementing straight interfaces on the classes in F# because they're kind of a bear: In order to access something of an interface that has been implemented in a class, you have to explicitly cast an instance of that class to the interface type. This would make things painful when getting calls from the front-ends. If you don't want to have to do this, you have to call out all of the interface's methods/properties again in the class, outside of the interface implementation (which is separate from regular class members), and call the implementation's members. This is basically repeating the same code, which is what I'm trying to avoid!

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• MVC Communication Pattern

  - by Kedu

  This is kind of a follow up question to this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23743285/model-view-controller-and-callbacks, but I wanted to post it separately, because its kind of a different topic. I'm working on a multiplayer cardgame for the Android platform. I split the project into MVC which fits the needs pretty good, but I'm currently stuck because I can't figure out a good way to communicate between the different parts. I have everything setup and working with the controller being a big state machine, which is called over and over from the gameloop, and calls getter methods from the GUI and the android/network part to get the input. The input itself in the GUI and network is set by inputlisteners that set a local variable which I read in the getter method. So far so good, this is working. But my problem is, the controller has to check every input separately,so if I want to add an input I have to check in which states its valid and call the getter method from all these states. This is not good, and lets the code look pretty ugly, makes additions uncomfortable and adds redundance. So what I've got from the question I mentioned above is that some kind of command or event pattern will fit my needs. What I want to do is to create a shared and threadsafe queue in the controller and instead of calling all these getter methods, I just check the queue for new input and proceed it. On the other side, the GUI and network don't have all these getters, but instead create an event or command and send it to the controller through, for example, observer/observable. Now my problem: I can't figure out a way, for these commands/events to fit a common interface (which the queue can store) and still transport different kind of data (button clicks, cards that are played, the player id the command comes from, synchronization data etc.). If I design the communication as command pattern, I have to stick all the information that is needed to execute the command into it when its created, that's impossible because the GUI or network has no knowledge of all the things the controller needs to execute stuff that needs to be done when for example a card is played. I thought about getting this stuff into the command when executing it. But over all the different commands I have, I would need all the information the controller has, and thus give the command a reference to the controller which would make everything in it public, which is real bad design I guess. So, I could try some kind of event pattern. I have to transport data in the event. So, like the command, I would have an interface, which all events have in common, and can be stored in the shared queue. I could create a big enum with all the different events that a are possible, save one of these enums in the actual event, and build a big switch case for the events, to proceed different stuff for different events. The problem here: I have different data for all the events. But I need a common interface, to store the events in a queue. How do I get the specific data, if I can only access the event through the interface? Even if that wouldn't be a problem, I'm creating another big switch case, which looks ugly, and when i want to add a new event, I have to create the event itself, the case, the enum, and the method that's called with the data. I could of course check the event with the enum and cast it to its type, so I can call event type specific methods that give me the data I need, but that looks like bad design too.

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• How Does a 724% Return on Your Salesforce Automation Investment Sound?

  - by Brian Dayton

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oracle Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud customer Apex IT gained just that, a 724% return on investment (ROI) when they implemented these Oracle Cloud solutions in their fast-moving, rapidly-growing business. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Congratulations Apex IT! Apex IT was just announced as a winner of the Nucleus Research 11th annual Technology ROI Awards. The award, given by the analyst firm highlights organizations that have successfully leveraged IT deployments to maximize value per dollar spent. Fast Facts: Return on Investment - 724% Payback - 2 months Average annual benefit - $91,534 Cost: Benefit Ratio – 1:48 Business Benefits In addition to the ROI and cost metrics the award calls out improvements in Apex IT’s business operations—across both Sales and Marketing teams: Improved ability to identify new opportunities and focus sales resources on higher-probability deals Reduced administration and manual lead tracking—resulting in more time selling and a net new client increase of 46% Increased campaign productivity for both Marketing and Sales, including Oracle Marketing Cloud’s automation of campaign tracking and nurture programs Improved margins with more structured and disciplined sales processes—resulting in more effective deal negotiations Please join us in congratulating Apex IT on this award and their business achievements. Want More Details? Don’t take our word for it. Read the full Apex IT ROI Case Study and learn more about Apex IT’s business—including their work with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud on behalf of their clients in leading Sales organizations. Learn More About Oracle Sales Cloud www.oracle.com/salescloud www.facebook.com/oraclesalescloud www.youtube.com/oraclesalescloud Oracle Customer Experience and Complementary Sales Solutions Oracle Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Cloud Oracle Marketing Cloud Oracle Customer Experience /* 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-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Can you/should you develop components for ASP.NET MVC?

  - by Vilx-

  Following from the previous question I've started to wonder - is it possible to implement "Components" in ASP.NET MVC (latest version)? And should you? Let's clarify what I mean with a "component". With that I mean a "control" (aka "widget"), similar to those that ASP.NET webforms is built upon. A gridview might be a good example. In webforms I can place on my form a datasource component (one line of code), a gridview component (another line of code) and bind them together (specify an attribute on the gridview). In the codebehind file I fill the datasource with data (a few lines of DB-querying code), and I'm all set. At this point the gridview is a fully functional standalone component. I can open the form, and I'll see all the data. I can sort it by clicking on the column headers; it is split into several pages; I can drag the column headers around and rearrange columns; I can turn on "grouping" mode; etc. And I don't need to write another line of code for any of it. The gridview, as a component, already has all the code tucked away in its classes and assemblies. I just place it on the form, initialize it, and it Just Works. At some times (like sorting or navigation to a different page) it will also perform ajax callbacks to the server, but those too will be handled internally, with my code having no knowledge at all about it. And then there are also events that I can attach if I want to get notified when something happens. In MVC I cannot see a way of doing this cleanly. Sure, there are the partial views, but those only handle half of the problem - they render the initial HTML. Some more can be achieved with client-side Javascript (like column re-arranging), but when the grid needs to do an ajax callback (say, to fetch the next page of data), my code will have to get involved and process that request. At best I guess I can provide some helper methods to process it, but I'll have to write the code that calls them, and also provide a controller method with signature matching the arguments of that callback. I guess that I could make some hacks with global events or special routes or something, but that just seems... hackish. Unelegant. Perhaps this is not the MVC way? Although I've completed one project in it, I'm still far from being an MVC expert. But then what is? In the intranet application that we're building there are dozens upon dozens of such grids. Naturally I want them all to have a unified look & behavior, and I don't want to repeat the same code all over the place. So what's the "MVC" approach to this problem?

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• How'd they do it: Millions of tiles in Terraria

  - by William 'MindWorX' Mariager

  I've been working up a game engine similar to Terraria, mostly as a challenge, and while I've figured out most of it, I can't really seem to wrap my head around how they handle the millions of interactable/harvestable tiles the game has at one time. Creating around 500.000 tiles, that is 1/20th of what's possible in Terraria, in my engine causes the frame-rate to drop from 60 to around 20, even tho I'm still only rendering the tiles in view. Mind you, I'm not doing anything with the tiles, only keeping them in memory. Update: Code added to show how I do things. This is part of a class, which handles the tiles and draws them. I'm guessing the culprit is the "foreach" part, which iterates everything, even empty indexes. ... public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { foreach (Tile tile in this.Tiles) { if (tile != null) { if (tile.Position.X < -this.Offset.X + 32) continue; if (tile.Position.X > -this.Offset.X + 1024 - 48) continue; if (tile.Position.Y < -this.Offset.Y + 32) continue; if (tile.Position.Y > -this.Offset.Y + 768 - 48) continue; tile.Draw(spriteBatch, gameTime); } } } ... Also here is the Tile.Draw method, which could also do with an update, as each Tile uses four calls to the SpriteBatch.Draw method. This is part of my autotiling system, which means drawing each corner depending on neighboring tiles. texture_* are Rectangles, are set once at level creation, not each update. ... public virtual void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { if (this.type == TileType.TileSet) { spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position, texture_tl, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(8, 0), texture_tr, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(0, 8), texture_bl, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(8, 8), texture_br, this.BlendColor); } } ... Any critique or suggestions to my code is welcome. Update: Solution added. Here's the final Level.Draw method. The Level.TileAt method simply checks the inputted values, to avoid OutOfRange exceptions. ... public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { Int32 startx = (Int32)Math.Floor((-this.Offset.X - 32) / 16); Int32 endx = (Int32)Math.Ceiling((-this.Offset.X + 1024 + 32) / 16); Int32 starty = (Int32)Math.Floor((-this.Offset.Y - 32) / 16); Int32 endy = (Int32)Math.Ceiling((-this.Offset.Y + 768 + 32) / 16); for (Int32 x = startx; x < endx; x += 1) { for (Int32 y = starty; y < endy; y += 1) { Tile tile = this.TileAt(x, y); if (tile != null) tile.Draw(spriteBatch, gameTime); } } } ...

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• Optimal Data Structure for our own API

  - by vermiculus

  I'm in the early stages of writing an Emacs major mode for the Stack Exchange network; if you use Emacs regularly, this will benefit you in the end. In order to minimize the number of calls made to Stack Exchange's API (capped at 10000 per IP per day) and to just be a generally responsible citizen, I want to cache the information I receive from the network and store it in memory, waiting to be accessed again. I'm really stuck as to what data structure to store this information in. Obviously, it is going to be a list. However, as with any data structure, the choice must be determined by what data is being stored and what how it will be accessed. What, I would like to be able to store all of this information in a single symbol such as stack-api/cache. So, without further ado, stack-api/cache is a list of conses keyed by last update: `(<csite> <csite> <csite>) where <csite> would be (1362501715 . <site>) At this point, all we've done is define a simple association list. Of course, we must go deeper. Each <site> is a list of the API parameter (unique) followed by a list questions: `("codereview" <cquestion> <cquestion> <cquestion>) Each <cquestion> is, you guessed it, a cons of questions with their last update time: `(1362501715 <question>) (1362501720 . <question>) <question> is a cons of a question structure and a list of answers (again, consed with their last update time): `(<question-structure> <canswer> <canswer> <canswer> and ` `(1362501715 . <answer-structure>) This data structure is likely most accurately described as a tree, but I don't know if there's a better way to do this considering the language, Emacs Lisp (which isn't all that different from the Lisp you know and love at all). The explicit conses are likely unnecessary, but it helps my brain wrap around it better. I'm pretty sure a <csite>, for example, would just turn into (<epoch-time> <api-param> <cquestion> <cquestion> ...) Concerns: Does storing data in a potentially huge structure like this have any performance trade-offs for the system? I would like to avoid storing extraneous data, but I've done what I could and I don't think the dataset is that large in the first place (for normal use) since it's all just human-readable text in reasonable proportion. (I'm planning on culling old data using the times at the head of the list; each inherits its last-update time from its children and so-on down the tree. To what extent this cull should take place: I'm not sure.) Does storing data like this have any performance trade-offs for that which must use it? That is, will set and retrieve operations suffer from the size of the list? Do you have any other suggestions as to what a better structure might look like?

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• OpenGL Fast-Object Instancing Error

  - by HJ Media Studios

  I have some code that loops through a set of objects and renders instances of those objects. The list of objects that needs to be rendered is stored as a std::map, where an object of class MeshResource contains the vertices and indices with the actual data, and an object of classMeshRenderer defines the point in space the mesh is to be rendered at. My rendering code is as follows: glDisable(GL_BLEND); glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); for (std::map<MeshResource*, std::vector<MeshRenderer*> >::iterator it = renderables.begin(); it != renderables.end(); it++) { it->first->setupBeforeRendering(); cout << "<"; for (unsigned long i =0; i < it->second.size(); i++) { //Pass in an identity matrix to the vertex shader- used here only for debugging purposes; the real code correctly inputs any matrix. uniformizeModelMatrix(Matrix4::IDENTITY); /** * StartHere fix rendering problem. * Ruled out: * Vertex buffers correctly. * Index buffers correctly. * Matrices correct? */ it->first->render(); } it->first->cleanupAfterRendering(); } geometryPassShader->disable(); glDepthMask(GL_FALSE); glDisable(GL_CULL_FACE); glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); The function in MeshResource that handles setting up the uniforms is as follows: void MeshResource::setupBeforeRendering() { glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glEnableVertexAttribArray(2); glEnableVertexAttribArray(3); glEnableVertexAttribArray(4); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, iboID); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vboID); glVertexAttribPointer(0, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), 0); // Vertex position glVertexAttribPointer(1, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), (const GLvoid*) 12); // Vertex normal glVertexAttribPointer(2, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), (const GLvoid*) 24); // UV layer 0 glVertexAttribPointer(3, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), (const GLvoid*) 32); // Vertex color glVertexAttribPointer(4, 1, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), (const GLvoid*) 44); //Material index } The code that renders the object is this: void MeshResource::render() { glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, geometry->numIndices, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, 0); } And the code that cleans up is this: void MeshResource::cleanupAfterRendering() { glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); glDisableVertexAttribArray(2); glDisableVertexAttribArray(3); glDisableVertexAttribArray(4); } The end result of this is that I get a black screen, although the end of my rendering pipeline after the rendering code (essentially just drawing axes and lines on the screen) works properly, so I'm fairly sure it's not an issue with the passing of uniforms. If, however, I change the code slightly so that the rendering code calls the setup immediately before rendering, like so: void MeshResource::render() { setupBeforeRendering(); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, geometry->numIndices, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, 0); } The program works as desired. I don't want to have to do this, though, as my aim is to set up vertex, material, etc. data once per object type and then render each instance updating only the transformation information. The uniformizeModelMatrix works as follows: void RenderManager::uniformizeModelMatrix(Matrix4 matrix) { glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, globalMatrixUBOID); glBufferSubData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, 0, sizeof(Matrix4), matrix.ptr()); glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, 0); }

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• Memory is full with vertex buffer

  - by Christian Frantz

  I'm having a pretty strange problem that I didn't think I'd run into. I was able to store a 50x50 grid in one vertex buffer finally, in hopes of better performance. Before I had each cube have an individual vertex buffer and with 4 50x50 grids, this slowed down my game tremendously. But it still ran. With 4 50x50 grids with my new code, that's only 4 vertex buffers. With the 4 vertex buffers, I get a memory error. When I load the game with 1 grid, it takes forever to load and with my previous version, it started up right away. So I don't know if I'm storing chunks wrong or what but it stumped me -.- for (int x = 0; x < 50; x++) { for (int z = 0; z < 50; z++) { for (int y = 0; y <= map[x, z]; y++) { SetUpVertices(); SetUpIndices(); cubes.Add(new Cube(device, new Vector3(x, map[x, z] - y, z), grass)); } } } vertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(device, typeof(VertexPositionTexture), vertices.Count(), BufferUsage.WriteOnly); vertexBuffer.SetData<VertexPositionTexture>(vertices.ToArray()); indexBuffer = new IndexBuffer(device, typeof(short), indices.Count(), BufferUsage.WriteOnly); indexBuffer.SetData(indices.ToArray()); Thats how theyre stored. The array I'm reading from is a byte array which defines the coordinates of my map. Now with my old version, I used the same loading from an array so that hasn't changed. The only difference is the one vertex buffer instead of 2500 for a 50x50 grid. cubes is just a normal list that holds all my cubes for the vertex buffer. Another thing that just came to mind would be my draw calls. If I'm setting an effect for each cube in my cube list, that's probably going to take a lot of memory. How can I avoid doing this? I need the foreach method to set my cubes to the right position foreach (Cube block in cube.cubes) { effect.VertexColorEnabled = false; effect.TextureEnabled = true; Matrix center = Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-0.5f, -0.5f, -0.5f)); Matrix scale = Matrix.CreateScale(1f); Matrix translate = Matrix.CreateTranslation(block.cubePosition); effect.World = center * scale * translate; effect.View = cam.view; effect.Projection = cam.proj; effect.FogEnabled = false; effect.FogColor = Color.CornflowerBlue.ToVector3(); effect.FogStart = 1.0f; effect.FogEnd = 50.0f; cube.Draw(effect); noc++; }

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• F# Objects &ndash; Integration with the other .Net Languages &ndash; Part 2

  - by MarkPearl

  So in part one of my posting I covered the real basics of object creation. Today I will hopefully dig a little deeper… My expert F# book brings up an interesting point – properties in F# are just syntactic sugar for method calls. This makes sense… for instance assume I had the following object with the property exposed called Firstname. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Firstname I could extend the Firstname property with the following code and everything would be hunky dory… type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Console.WriteLine("Side Effect") Firstname   All that this would do is each time I use the property Firstname, I would see the side effect printed to the screen saying “Side Effect”. Member methods have a very similar look & feel to properties, in fact the only difference really is that you declare that parameters are being passed in. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.FullName(middleName) = Firstname + " " + middleName + " " + Lastname   In the code above, FullName requires the parameter middleName, and if viewed from another project in C# would show as a method and not a property. Precomputation Optimizations Okay, so something that is obvious once you think of it but that poses an interesting side effect of mutable value holders is pre-computation of results. All it is, is a slight difference in code but can result in quite a huge saving in performance. Basically pre-computation means you would not need to compute a value every time a method is called – but could perform the computation at the creation of the object (I hope I have got it right). In a way I battle to differentiate this from lazy evaluation but I will show an example to explain the principle. Let me try and show an example to illustrate the principle… assume the following F# module namespace myNamespace open System module myMod = let Add val1 val2 = Console.WriteLine("Compute") val1 + val2 type MathPrecompute(val1 : int, val2 : int) = let precomputedsum = Add val1 val2 member v.Sum = precomputedsum type MathNormalCompute(val1 : int, val2 : int) = member v.Sum = Add val1 val2 Now assume you have a C# console app that makes use of the objects with code similar to the following… using System; using myNamespace; namespace CSharpTest { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Constructing Objects"); var myObj1 = new myMod.MathNormalCompute(10, 11); var myObj2 = new myMod.MathPrecompute(10, 11); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Normal Compute Sum..."); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Pre Compute Sum..."); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.ReadKey(); } } } The output when running the console application would be as follows…. You will notice with the normal compute object that the system would call the Add function every time the method was called. With the Precompute object it only called the compute method when the object was created. Subtle, but something that could lead to major performance benefits. So… this post has gone off in a slight tangent but still related to F# objects.

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• When should I use a Process Model versus a Use Case?

  - by Dave Burke

  This Blog entry is a follow on to https://blogs.oracle.com/oum/entry/oum_is_business_process_and and addresses a question I sometimes get asked…..i.e. “when I am gathering requirements on a Project, should I use a Process Modeling approach, or should I use a Use Case approach?” Not surprisingly, the short answer is “it depends”! Let’s take a scenario where you are working on a Sales Force Automation project. We’ll call the process that is being implemented “Lead-to-Order”. I would typically think of this type of project as being “Process Centric”. In other words, the focus will be on orchestrating a series of human and system related tasks that ultimately deliver value to the business in a cost effective way. Put in even simpler terms……implement an automated pre-sales system. For this type of (Process Centric) project, requirements would typically be gathered through a series of Workshops where the focal point will be on creating, or confirming, the Future-State (To-Be) business process. If pre-defined “best-practice” business process models exist, then of course they could and should be used during the Workshops, but even in their absence, the focus of the Workshops will be to define the optimum series of Tasks, their connections, sequence, and dependencies that will ultimately reflect a business process that meets the needs of the business. Now let’s take another scenario. Assume you are working on a Content Management project that involves automating the creation and management of content for User Manuals, Web Sites, Social Media publications etc. Would you call this type of project “Process Centric”?.......well you could, but it might also fall into the category of complex configuration, plus some custom extensions to a standard software application (COTS). For this type of project it would certainly be worth considering using a Use Case approach in order to 1) understand the requirements, and 2) to capture the functional requirements of the custom extensions. At this point you might be asking “why couldn’t I use a Process Modeling approach for my Content Management project?” Well, of course you could, but you just need to think about which approach is the most effective. Start by analyzing the types of Tasks that will eventually be automated by the system, for example: Best Suited To? Task Name Process Model Use Case Notes Manage outbound calls Ö A series of linked human and system tasks for calling and following up with prospects Manage content revision Ö Updating the content on a website Update User Preferences Ö Updating a users display preferences Assign Lead Ö Reviewing a lead, then assigning it to a sales person Convert Lead to Quote Ö Updating the status of a lead, and then converting it to a sales order As you can see, it’s not an exact science, and either approach is viable for the Tasks listed above. However, where you have a series of interconnected Tasks or Activities, than when combined, deliver value to the business, then that would be a good indicator to lead with a Process Modeling approach. On the other hand, when the Tasks or Activities in question are more isolated and/or do not cross traditional departmental boundaries, then a Use Case approach might be worth considering. Now let’s take one final scenario….. As you captured the To-Be Process flows for the Sales Force automation project, you discover a “Gap” in terms of what the client requires, and what the standard COTS application can provide. Let’s assume that the only way forward is to develop a Custom Extension. This would now be a perfect opportunity to document the functional requirements (behind the Gap) using a Use Case approach. After all, we will be developing some new software, and one of the most effective ways to begin the Software Development Lifecycle is to follow a Use Case approach. As always, your comments are most welcome.

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• Using 3rd Party JavaScript Plugins Hardwired With &lsquo;document.write&rsquo;

  - by ToStringTheory

  Introduction Have you ever had the need to implement a 3rd party JavaScript plugin, but your needs didn’t fit the model and usage defined by the API or documentation of the plugin?  Recently I ran into this issue when I was trying to implement a web snapshot plugin into our site.  To use their plugin, you had to include a script tag to the plugin on their server with an API key.  The second part of the usage was to include a <script> tag around a function call wherever you wanted a snapshot to appear. The Problem When trying to use the service, the images did not display.  I checked a couple of things and didn’t find anything wrong at first..  It wasn’t until I looked at the function that was called by the inline script did I find the issue – a call to the webservice, followed by a call to ‘document.write’ in its callback.  The solution in which I was trying to implement the plugin happened to be in response to an AJAX call after the document had completely loaded.  After the page has loaded, document.write does nothing. My first thought for a solution was to just cache the script from the service, and edit it do something like a return function or callback that I could use to edit the document from.  However, I quickly discovered that there is no way to cache the script from the service, as it had a hash in the function where it would call the server.  The hash was updated every few seconds/minutes, expiring old hashes.  This meant that I wouldn’t be able to edit the script and upload a new version to my server, as the script would not work after a few minutes from originally getting the script from the service. Solution The solution eluded me until I realized that this was JavaScript I was dealing with.  A language designed so that you could do just about anything to any library, function, or object…  At this point, the solution was simple – take control of the document.write function.  Using a buffer variable, and a simple function call, it is eerily simple to perform: //what would have been output to the document var buffer = ""; //store a reference to the real document.write var dw = document.write; //redefine document.write to store to our buffer document.write = function (str) {buffer += str;} //execute the function containing calls to document.write eval('{function encapsulated in <script></script> tags}'); //restore the original document.write function (just in case) document.write = dw; That’s it.  Instead of using the script tags where I wanted to include a snapshot, I called a function passing in the URL to the page I wanted a snapshot of.  After that last line of code, what would have been output to the document (or not in the case of the ajax call) was instead stored in buffer. Conclusion While the solution itself is simple, coming from a background much more footed in the .Net platform, I believe that this is a prime example of always keeping the language that you are working in in mind.  While this may seem obvious at first, as I KNEW I was in JavaScript, I never thought of taking control of the document.write function because I am more accustomed to the .Net world.  I can’t simply replace the functionality of Console.WriteLine.

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• Javascript Inheritance Part 2

  - by PhubarBaz

  A while back I wrote about Javascript inheritance, trying to figure out the best and easiest way to do it (http://geekswithblogs.net/PhubarBaz/archive/2010/07/08/javascript-inheritance.aspx). That was 2 years ago and I've learned a lot since then. But only recently have I decided to just leave classical inheritance behind and embrace prototypal inheritance. For most of us, we were trained in classical inheritance, using class hierarchies in a typed language. Unfortunately Javascript doesn't follow that model. It is both classless and typeless, which is hard to fathom for someone who's been using classes the last 20 years. For the last two or three years since I've got into Javascript I've been trying to find the best way to force it into the class model without much success. It's clunky and verbose and hard to understand. I think my biggest problem was that it felt so wrong to add or change object members at run time. Every time I did it I felt like I needed a shower. That's the 20 years of classical inheritance in me. Finally I decided to embrace change and do something different. I decided to use the factory pattern to build objects instead of trying to use inheritance. Javascript was made for the factory pattern because of the way you can construct objects at runtime. In the factory pattern you have a factory function that you call and tell it to give you a certain type of object back. The factory function takes care of constructing the object to your specification. Here's an example. Say we want to have some shape objects and they have common attributes like id and area that we want to depend on in other parts of your application. So first thing to do is create a factory object and give it a factory method to create an abstract shape object. The factory method builds the object then returns it. var shapeFactory = { getShape: function(id){ var shape = { id: id, area: function() { throw "Not implemented"; } }; return shape; }}; Now we can add another factory method to get a rectangle. It calls the getShape() method first and then adds an implementation to it. getRectangle: function(id, width, height){ var rect = this.getShape(id); rect.width = width; rect.height = height; rect.area = function() { return this.width * this.height; }; return rect;} That's pretty simple right? No worrying about hooking up prototypes and calling base constructors or any of that crap I used to do. Now let's create a factory method to get a cuboid (rectangular cube). The cuboid object will extend the rectangle object. To get the area we will call into the base object's area method and then multiply that by the depth. getCuboid: function(id, width, height, depth){ var cuboid = this.getRectangle(id, width, height); cuboid.depth = depth; var baseArea = cuboid.area; cuboid.area = function() { var a = baseArea.call(this); return a * this.depth; } return cuboid;} See how we called the area method in the base object? First we save it off in a variable then we implement our own area method and use call() to call the base function. For me this is a lot cleaner and easier than trying to emulate class hierarchies in Javascript.

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• Is changing my job now a wise decision? [closed]

  - by FlaminPhoenix

  First a little background about myself. I am a javascript programmer with 3.8 years of experience. I joined my current company a year and 3 months ago, and I was recruited as a javascript programmer. I was under the impression I was a programmer in a programming team but this was not the case. No one else except me and my manager knows anything about programming in my team. The other two teammates, copy paste stuff from websites into excel sheets. I was told I was being recruited for a new project, and it was true. The only problem was that the server side language they were using was PHP. They were using a popular library with PHP, and I had never worked with PHP before. Nevertheless, I learnt it well enough to get things working, and received high praise from my boss's boss on whichever project I worked on. Words like "wow" , "This looks great, the clients gonna be impressed with this." were sprinkled every now and then on reviewing my work. They even managed to sell my work to a couple of clients and as I understand, both of my projects are going to fetch them a pretty buck. The problem: I was asked to move into a project which my manager was handling. I asked them for training on the project which never came, and sure enough I couldnt complete my first task on the new project without shortcomings. I told my manager there were things I didnt know how to get done in the new project due to lack of training. His project had 0 documentation. I was told he would "take care" of everything relating to those shortcomings. In the meantime, I was asked to switch to another project. My manager made the necessary changes and later told me that the build had "broken" on the production server and that I needed to "test" my changes before saying things were done. I never deployed it on the production server. He did. I never saw / had the opportunity to see the final build before it went to production. He called me for a separate meeting and started pointing fingers at me, but I took full responsibility even if I didnt have to. He later on got on a call with his boss, in my presence, and gave him the impression that it was all my fault. I did not confront him about this so far. I have worked late / done overtime without them asking a lot, but last week, I just got home from work, and I got calls asking me to solve an issue which till then they had kept quiet about even though they were informed about it. I asked my manager why I hadnt been tasked with this when I was in office. He started telling me which statements to put where, as if to mock me, and that this "is hardly an overtime issue" and this pissed me off. Also, during the previous meeting, he was constantly talking highly about his work, at the same time trying to demean mine. In the meantime, I have attended an interview with another MNC, and the interviewers there were fully respectful of my decision to leave my current company. Its a software company, so I can expect my colleagues to know a lot more than me. Im told I can expect their offer anytime this week. My questions: Is my anger towards my manager justified? While leaving, do I tell him that its because of his actions that Im leaving? Do I erupt in anger and tell him that he shouldnt have put the blame on me since he was the one doing the deployment? This is going to be my second resignation to this company. The first time I wanted to resign, I was asked to stay back and my manager promised a lot of changes, a couple of which were made. How do I keep myself from getting into such situations with my employers in the future?

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• PostgreSQL service doesn't start on Windows 7

  - by Mehrdad

  (Not sure if this should be on Stack Overflow or Super User... please move if needed.) When I start the PostgreSQL service on Windows 7 x64, it immediately stops. When I check my log folder (C:\PostgreSQL\9.1\data\pg_log\), I see new but empty log files. The Event Viewer doesn't tell me anything other than the fact that the server did not respond. I've even tried turning off my firewall (I don't have any antivirus or anything else), but nothing helps. The setup works fine when I'm on Windows XP (32-bit) (same computer, different partition). I can't figure out what's wrong, even though I've tried tracing the system calls. Is PostgreSQL compatible with Windows 7 x64 at all? Any ideas what the issue might be? More info: This problem also happens at the end of installation -- the service starts, then stops immediately, before the installer can do anything. Installation log: Starting the database server... Executing cscript //NoLogo "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1\installer\server\startserver.vbs" postgresql-x64-9.1 Script exit code: 0 Script output: Starting postgresql-x64-9.1 Service postgresql-x64-9.1 started successfully // <==== NOT REALLY!! It stops! startserver.vbs ran to completion Script stderr: Loading additional SQL modules... Executing cscript //NoLogo "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1\installer\server\loadmodules.vbs" "postgres" "****" "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1" "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1\data" 5432 Script exit code: 2 Script output: Installing the adminpack module in the postgres database... Executing 'C:\Users\HOMEUS~1\AppData\Local\Temp\rad6C20D.bat'... psql: could not connect to server: Connection refused (0x0000274D/10061) Is the server running on host "localhost" (::1) and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432? could not connect to server: Connection refused (0x0000274D/10061) Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432? Failed to install the 'adminpack' module in the 'postgres' database loadmodules.vbs ran to completion Script stderr: Program ended with an error exit code Error running cscript //NoLogo "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1\installer\server\loadmodules.vbs" "postgres" "****" "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1" "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1\data" 5432 : Program ended with an error exit code

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• Unable to delete a file using bash script

  - by user3719091

  I'm having problems removing a file in a bash script. I saw the other post with the same problem but none of those solutions solved my problem. The bash script is an OP5 surveillance check and it calls an Expect process that saves a temporary file to the local drive which the bash script reads from. Once it has read the file and checked its status I would like to remove the temporary file. I'm pretty new to scripting so my script may not be as optimal as it can be. Either way it does the job except removing the file once it's done. I will post the entire code below: #!/bin/bash #GET FLAGS while getopts H:c:w: option do case "${option}" in H) HOSTADDRESS=${OPTARG};; c) CRITICAL=${OPTARG};; w) WARNING=${OPTARG};; esac done ./expect.vpn.check.sh $HOSTADDRESS #VARIABLES VPNCount=$(grep -o '[0-9]\+' $HOSTADDRESS.op5.vpn.results) # Check if the temporary results file exists if [ -f $HOSTADDRESS.op5.vpn.results ] then # If the file exist, Print "File Found" message echo Temporary results file exist. Analyze results. else # If the file does NOT exist, print "File NOT Found" message and send message to OP5 echo Temporary results file does NOT exist. Unable to analyze. # Exit with status Critical (exit code 2) exit 2 fi if [[ "$VPNCount" > $CRITICAL ]] then # If the amount of tunnels exceeds the critical threshold, echo out a warning message and current threshold and send warning to OP5 echo "The amount of VPN tunnels exceeds the critical threshold - ($VPNCount)" # Exit with status Critical (exit code 2) exit 2 elif [[ "$VPNCount" > $WARNING ]] then # If the amount of tunnels exceeds the warning threshold, echo out a warning message and current threshold and send warning to OP5 echo "The amount of VPN tunnels exceeds the warning threshold - ($VPNCount)" # Exit with status Warning (exit code 1) exit 1 else # The amount of tunnels do not exceed the warning threshold. # Print an OK message echo OK - $VPNCount # Exit with status OK exit 0 fi #Clean up temporary files. rm -f $HOSTADDRESS.op5.vpn.results I have tried the following solutions: Create a separate variable called TempFile that specifies the file. And specify that in the rm command. I tried creating another if statement similar to the one I use to verify that file exist and then rm the filename. I tried adding the complete name of the file (no variables, just plain text of the file) I can: Remove the file using the full name in both a separate script and directly in the CLI. Is there something in my script that locks the file that prevents me from removing it? I'm not sure what to try next. Thanks in advance!

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• Cannot exclude a path from basic auth when using a front controller script

  - by Adam Monsen

  I have a small PHP/Apache2 web application wherein I'd like to do two seemingly incompatible operations: Route all requests through a single PHP script (a "front controller", if you will) Secure everything except API calls with HTTP basic authentication I can satisfy either requirement just fine in isolation, it's when I try to do both at once that I am blocked. For no good reason I'm trying to accomplish these requirements solely with Apache configuration. Here are the requirements stated as an example. A GET request for this URL: http://basic/api/listcars?max=10 should be sent through front.php without requiring basic auth. front.php will get /api/listcars?max=10 and do whatever it needs to with that. Here's what I think should work. In my /etc/hosts I added 127.0.0.1 basic and I am using this Apache config: <Location /> AuthType Basic AuthName "Home Secure" AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/passwords require valid-user </Location> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName basic DocumentRoot /var/www/basic <Directory /var/www/basic> <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /front.php/$1 [QSA,L] </IfModule> </Directory> <Location /api> Order deny,allow Allow from all Satisfy any </Location> </VirtualHost> But I still always get a HTTP 401: Authorization Required response. I can make it work by changing <Location /api> into <Location ~ /api> but this allows more than I want to past basic auth. I also tried changing the <Directory /var/www/basic> section into <Location />, but this doesn't work either (and it results in some strange values for PATH_TRANSLATED being passed to the script). I searched around and found many examples of selective exclusion of basic auth, but none that also incorporated a front controller. I could certainly do something like handle basic auth in the front controller, but if I can have Apache do that instead I'll be able to keep all authentication logic out of my PHP code. A friend suggested splitting this into two vhosts, which I know also works. This used to be two separate vhosts, actually. I'm using Apache 2.2.22 / PHP 5.3.10 on Ubuntu 12.04.

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