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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 2 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 2 @ Bangalore Today is the day 2 @ Microsoft TechEd 2010. We had lot of technical sessions as usual there were many tracks going on side by side and I was attending the Web simplified track, Which comprised of the following sessions :   Developing a scalable Media Application using ASP.NET MVC - This was a kind of little advanced stuff. Anyways I couldn't understand much because this was not my piece of cake and I havent worked on this before ASP.Net MVC Unplugged - This was really great because this session covered from the basics of MVC showing what is Model,View and Controller and how it worked and the speaker went into the details of the same. Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol - There were some concepts explained about this from the basics on how to build RESTful Services and it went on till some advanced configurations of the same. Developing Scalable Web Applications with AppFabric Caching - This session showed about the integration of AppFabric with the .Net Web Applications. Instead of using Inproc Sessions, we can use this AppFabric as a substitute for Caching and outofProc Session Storage without writing code and doing a little bit of configurations which brings in High Scalability, performance to our applications. (But unfortunately there were no demos for this session ) Deep Dive : WCF RIA Services - This session was also an interactive one, in this the speaker presented from the basics of WCF and took a Book Store Application as a sample and explained all details concepts on linking with RIA Services   Apart from these sessions, in between there happened some small events in the breaks like Some discussions about Technology, Innovations Music Jokes Mimicry, etc. And on doing all these things, the developers were given some kool gifts / goodies like USBs, T-Shirts, etc. And today I got a chance to do the following certification : (70-562) Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in .NET 3.5 Web Applications Since I already have an MCTS in .NET 2.0, I wanted to do an MCPD and for doing the same I was required to do an update to my MCTS with the .NET 3.5 framework and I did the same I cleared it and now am an MCTS in .NET 3.5 Web Apps And on doing this I got a T-Shirt and they gave something called Learning $ of worth 30$. And in various stalls for attending each quiz or some game or some referrals we got some Learning $ which we can redeem later based on our Total Learning $. I got 105 $ which i was able to redeem and got a Microsoft Learning BagPack, 1 free Microsoft certification offer, a laptop light and an e-learning content activated. And after all these sessions and small events, we had something called Demo Extravaganza like I mentioned yesterday. This was a great funfilled event with lot of goodies for the attendees. There were some lucky draw which enabled 2 attendees to get Netbooks (Sponsored by Intel) and 1 attendee to get X-box (Sponsored by Citrix). After Choosing the raffle in the lucky draw they kept it on a device called Microsoft Surface which is a kind of big touch screen device and on putting the raffle on that it detected the code of the attendee and said intelligently how many sessions that person has attended and if he has attended more than 5 he got a Netbook and this was coded by a guy called Imran. Apart from they showed demos on : Research by 2 Tamilnadu students from Krishna Arts and Science college, taken 1200 photographs of their college from different angles and put that up in Bing maps using silverlight and linked with Photosynth, which showed a 3d view of their college based on the photos they uploaded Reasearch by Microsoft on Panaramic HD views of the images. One young guy from Microsoft Research showed a demo of this on Srivilliputhur Andal Temple, in Tamil Nadu and its history with a panoramic view of the temple and the near by places with narration of the historical information on the same and with the videos embedded in it with high definition images which we can zoom to a very detailed level. Some Demo on a business app with Silverlight, Business Intelligence (BI) and maps integrated. It showed the sales of a particular product across locations. Some kool demos by 2 geeks who used Robots to show their development talents. 2 Robots fought with each other 2 Robots danced in sync for the A.R. Rehman song Humma Humma... A dream home project by Raman. He is currently using the same in his home too. Robots are controlling his home currently. They showed a video on this. Here are the list of activities that Robot does for him When he reads a book, robot automatically scans that and shows that image of that person in the screen (TV or comp) in front of him. It shows a wikipedia about that person. It says that person is not in linked in. do you want to add him If he sees an IPL Match news in the book and smiles it understands he is interested in that and opens a website related to that and shows the current game and the scorecard. It cooks for him It cleans the room for him whenever he leaves the house when he is doing something if some intruder comes inside his house his computer automatically switches his screen showing the video of the person coming inside. When he wakes up it automatically opens up the system, loads his mails and the news by the side, etc. Some Demos on Microsoft Pivot. This was there in livelabs but it is now available in getpivot.com its a pivoting of the pictorial data based on some categories and filters on the searches that we do. And finally on filling up some feedback forms we got T-Shirts and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit CDs. Whats more on TechEd??? Stay tuned!!! Will update you soon on the other happenings!! PS : I typed a lot of content for more than a hour but I pressed a backspace and it went to the previous page and all my content were lost and I was not able to retrieve the same and I typed everything again.

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• Amanda Todd&ndash;What Parents Can Learn From Her Story

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Amanda Todd was a bullied teenager who committed suicide this week. Her story has become headline news due in part to her You Tube video she posted telling her story:   The story is heartbreaking for so many reasons, but I wanted to talk about what we as parents can learn from this. Being the dad to two girls, one that’s 10, I’m very aware of the dangers that the internet holds. When I saw her story, one thing jumped out at me – unmonitored internet access at an early age. My daughter (then 9) came home from a friends place once and asked if she could be in a YouTube video with her friend. Apparently this friend was allowed to do whatever she wanted on the internet, including posting goofy videos. This set off warning bells and we ensured our daughter realized the dangers and that she was not to ever post videos of herself. In looking at Amanda’s story, the access to unmonitored internet time along with just being a young girl and being flattered by an online predator were the key events that ultimately led to her suicide. Yes, the reaction of her classmates and “friends” was horrible as well, I’m not diluting that. But our youth don’t fully understand yet that what they do on the internet today will follow them potentially forever. And the people they meet online aren’t necessarily who they claim to be. So what can we as parents learn from Amanda’s story? Parents Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Being Internet Police Our job as parents is in part to protect our kids and keep them safe, even if they don’t like our measures. This includes monitoring, supervising, and restricting their internet activities. In our house we have a family computer in the living room that the kids can watch videos and surf the web. It’s in plain view of everyone, so you can’t hide what you’re looking at. If our daughter goes to a friend’s place, we ask about what they did and what they played. If the computer comes up, we ask about what they did on it. Luckily our daughter is very up front and honest in telling us things, so we have very open discussions. Parents Need to Be Honest About the Dangers of the Internet I’m sure every generation says that “kids grow up so fast these days”, but in our case the internet really does push our kids to be exposed to things they otherwise wouldn’t experience. One wrong word in a Google search, a click of a link in a spam email, or just general curiosity can expose a child to things they aren’t ready for or should never be exposed to (and I’m not just talking about adult material – have you seen some of the graphic pictures from war zones posted on news sites recently?). Our stance as parents has been to be open about discussing the dangers with our kids before they encounter any content – be proactive instead of reactionary. Part of this is alerting them to the monsters that lurk on the internet as well. As kids explore the world wide web, they’re eventually going to encounter some chat room or some Facebook friend invite or other personal connection with someone. More than ever kids need to be educated on the dangers of engaging with people online and sharing personal information. You can think of it as an evolved discussion that our parents had with us about using the phone: “Don’t say ‘I’m home alone’, don’t say when mom or dad get home, don’t tell them any information, etc.” Parents Need to Talk Self Worth at Home Katie makes the point better than I ever could (one bad word towards the end): Our children need to understand their value beyond what the latest issue of TigerBeat says, or the media who continues flaunting physical attributes over intelligence and character, or a society that puts focus on status and wealth. They also have to realize that just because someone pays you a compliment, that doesn’t mean you should ignore personal boundaries and limits. What does this have to do with the internet? Well, in days past if you wanted to be social you had to go out somewhere. Now you can video chat with any number of people from the comfort of wherever your laptop happens to be – and not just text but full HD video with sound! While innocent children head online in the hopes of meeting cool people, predators with bad intentions are heading online too. As much as we try to monitor their online activity and be honest about the dangers of the internet, the human side of our kids isn’t something we can control. But we can try to influence them to see themselves as not needing to search out the acceptance of complete strangers online. Way easier said than done, but ensuring self-worth is something discussed, encouraged, and celebrated is a step in the right direction. Parental Wake Up Call This post is not a critique of Amanda’s parents. The reality is that cyber bullying/abuse is happening every day, and there are millions of parents that have no clue its happening to their children. Amanda’s story is a wake up call that our children’s online activities may be putting them in danger. My heart goes out to the parents of this girl. As a father of daughters, I can’t imagine what I would do if I found my daughter having to hide in a ditch to avoid a mob or call 911 to report my daughter had attempted suicide by drinking bleach or deal with a child turning to drugs/alcohol/cutting to cope. It would be horrendous if we as parents didn’t re-evaluate our family internet policies in light of this event. And in the end, Amanda’s video was meant to bring attention to her plight and encourage others going through the same thing. We may not be kids, but we can still honour her memory by helping safeguard our children.

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• Java2Days 2012 Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  Java2Days 2012 was held in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria on October 25-26. For those of you not familiar with it, this is the third installment of the premier Java conference for the Balkan region. It is an excellent effort by admirable husband and wife team Emo Abadjiev and Iva Abadjieva as well as the rest of the Java2Days team including Yoana Ivanova and Nadia Kostova. Thanks to their hard work, the conference continues to grow vigorously with almost a thousand enthusiastic, bright young people attending this year and no less than three tracks on Java, the Cloud and Mobile. The conference is a true gem in this region of the world and I am very proud to have been a part of it again, along with the other world class speakers the event rightfully attracts. It was my honor to present the first talk of the conference. It was a full-house session on Java EE 7 and 8 titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". The talk was primarily along the same lines as Arun Gupta's JavaOne 2012 technical keynote. I covered the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JCache, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1 and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possible contents of Java EE 8. My stretch goal was to gather some feedback on some open issues in the Java EE EG (more on that soon) but I ran out of time in the short format forty-five minute session. The talk was received well and I had some pretty good discussions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from reza_rahman To my delight, the Java2Days folks were very interested in my domain-driven design/Java EE 6 talk (titled "Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6"). I've had this talk in my inventory for a long time now but it always gets overridden by less theoretical talks on APIs, tools, etc. The talk has three parts -- a brief overview of DDD theory, mapping DDD to Java EE and actual running DDD code in Java EE 6/GlassFish. For the demo, I converted the well-known DDD sample application (http://dddsample.sourceforge.net/) written mostly in Spring 2 and Hibernate 2 to Java EE 6. My eventual plan is to make the code available via a top level java.net project. Even despite the broad topic and time constraints, the talk went very well. It was a full house, the Q & A was excellent and one of the other speakers even told me they thought this was the best talk of the conference! The slides for the talk are here: Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6 from Reza Rahman The code examples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/reza/resource/dddsample.zip for now, as a simple zip file. Give me a shout if you would like to get it up and running. It was also a great honor to present the last session of the conference. It was a talk on the Java API for WebSocket/JSR 356 titled "Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 and GlassFish". The talk is based on Danny Coward's JavaOne 2012 talk. The talk covers the basic of WebSocket, the JSR 356 API and a simple demo using Tyrus/GlassFish. The talk went very well and there were some very good questions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with GlassFish and JSR 356 from Reza Rahman The code samples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/resource/totd183-HelloWebSocket.zip. You'll need the latest promoted GlassFish 4 build to run the code. Give me a shout if you need help. Besides presenting my talks, I got to attend some great sessions on OSGi, HTML5, cloud, agile and Java 8. I got an invite to speak at the Macedonia JUG when possible. Victor Grazi of InfoQ wrote about my sessions and Java2Days here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/Java2DaysConference. Stoyan Rachev was very kind to blog about my sessions here: http://www.stoyanr.com/2012/11/java2days-2012-java-ee.html. I definitely enjoyed Java2Days 2012 and hope to be part of the conference next year!

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• Whoosh: PASS Board Year 1, Q4

  - by Denise McInerney

  "Whoosh". That's the sound the last quarter of 2012 made as it rushed by. My first year on the PASS Board is complete, and the last three months of it were probably the busiest. PASS Summit 2012 Much of October was devoted to preparing for Summit. Every Board  member, HQ staffer and dozens of volunteers were busy in the run-up to our flagship event. It takes a lot of work to put on the Summit. The community meetings,  first-timers program, keynotes, sessions and that fabulous Community Appreciation party are the result of many hours of preparation. Virtual Chapters at the Summit With a lot of help from Karla Landrum, Michelle Nalliah, Lana Montgomery and others at HQ the VCs had a good presence at Summit. We started the week with a VC leaders meeting. I shared some information about the activities and growth during the first part of the year.   From January - September 2012: The number of VCs increased from 14 to 20 VC membership  grew from 55,200 to 80,100 Total attendance at VC meetings increased from 1,480 to 2,198 Been part of PASS Global Growth with language-based VC- including Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. We also heard from some VC leaders and volunteers. Ryan Adams (Performance VC) shared his tips for successful marketing of VC events. Amy Lewis (Business Intelligence VC) described how the BI chapter has expanded to support PASS' global growth by finding volunteers to organize events at times that are convenient for people in Europe and Australia. Felipe Ferreira (Portuguese language VC) described the experience of building a user group first in Brazil, then expanding to work with Portuguese-speaking data professionals around the world. Virtual Chapter leaders and volunteers were in evidence throughout Summit, beginning with the Welcome Reception. For the past several years VCs have had an organized presence at this event, signing up new members and advertising their meetings. Many VC leaders also spent time at the Community Zone. This new addition to the Summit proved to be a vibrant spot were new members and volunteers could network with others and find out how to start a chapter or host a SQL Saturday. Women In Technology 2012 was the 10th WIT Luncheon to be held at Summit. I was honored to be asked to be on the panel to discuss the topic "Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?" The PASS community has come a long way in our understanding of issues facing women in tech and our support of women in the organization. It was great to hear from panelists Stefanie Higgins and Kevin Kline who were there at the beginning as well as Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup who are part of the progress being made by women in our community today. Bylaw Changes The Board spent a good deal of time in 2012 discussing how to move our global growth initiatives forward. An important component of this is a proposed change to how the Board is elected with some seats representing geographic regions. At the end of December we voted on these proposed bylaw changes which have been published for review. The member review and feedback is open until February 8. I encourage all members to review these changes and send any feedback to [email protected]  In addition to reading the bylaws, I recommend reading Bill Graziano's blog post on the subject. Business Analytics Conference At Summit we announced a new event: the PASS Business Analytics Conference. The inaugural event will be April 10-12, 2013 in Chicago. The world of data is changing rapidly. More and more businesses want to extract value and insight from their data. Data professionals who provide these insights or enable others to do so are in demand. The BA Conference offers expert content on predictive analytics, data exploration and visualization, content delivery strategies and more. By holding this new event PASS is participating in important discussions happening in our industry, offering our members more educational value and reaching out to data professionals who are not currently part of our organization. New Year, New Portfolio In addition to my work with the Virtual Chapters I am also now responsible for the 24 Hours of PASS portfolio. Since the first 24HOP of 2013 is scheduled for January 30 we started the transition of the portfolio work from Rob Farley to me right after Summit. Work immediately started to secure speakers for the January event. We have also been evaluating webinar platforms that can be used for 24HOP as well as the Virtual Chapters. Next Up 24 Hours of PASS: Business Analytics Edition will be held on January 30. I'll be there and will moderate one or two sessions. The 24HOP topics are a sneak peek into the type of content that will be offered at the Business Analytics Conference. I hope to see some of you there. The Virtual Chapters have hit the ground running in 2013; many of them have events scheduled. The Application Development VC is getting restarted  and a new Business Analytics VC will be starting soon. Check out the lineup and join the VCs that interest you. And watch the Events page and Connector for announcements of upcoming meetings. At the end of January I will be attending a Board meeting in Seattle, and February 23 I will be at SQL Saturday #177 in Silicon Valley.

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• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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• How to build a great relationship with your colleagues

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When you start new job, you worry about your performance, about being able to do what the manager asks you to do, but you also worry about the relations with your colleagues. How will you get along with them? What if they don’t like you? Have you ever felt you’re „the new guy” and your colleagues have already their own way of talking one to each other, their own jokes? It’s a common feeling and can actually become stressful. I am Norbert, Middleware Presales Intern in Hungary and I’ve been working within Oracle for only 1 month. Joining such a big company has been a challenge from many perspectives. One of them was adapting with the environment and getting to know all my colleagues. You know it’s quite difficult to introduce yourself, to try to liaise with them and find some common topics, so I felt very lucky and comfortable when my manager introduced me to all of my colleagues. It was easier to accommodate and we basically we had a starting point for our discussions. We started to talk about what my position means, for how many years they’ve been within Oracle, other Oracle related topics, but also more personal stuff like what they do after work. Having this opportunity of talking with all of them helped me introduce myself in a proper way and actually I told them many things about myself. Networking wasn’t my best skill, but these first days were really helpful from a network point of view. What else can you do to get along with your colleagues? One second thing I consider as being really helpful in networking is asking work-related questions. For instance, when you don’t know how to do something or don’t understand it, asking one of your colleagues will also help you to make a connection with him and you could easily continue the discussion with some other topics which are more personal. It’s a very effective strategy and in a company like Oracle people are very willing to help you with your tasks and perform at a high level. If you see your colleagues going to lunch, you should join them. It will help you become part of their community, finding out what’s new in their lives, you’ll, step-by-step, take part in their conversations and be up to date with the hot topics they talk about. One other opportunity of becoming part of your colleagues’ community are the internal events. Subscribing to the local free time activities mailing list is very useful for finding out information about when they’re going out and have a drink or attending all sorts of events. For instance, this is how I’ve found out about a party within Oracle that most of the employees here attend. It’s a wonderful opportunity for chatting and make a stronger connection to some of them. How important is attending these events? Think about how much time you spend at work. You’d like to enjoy your work and the environment, so getting along with your colleagues is a nice thing to have. I recently attended a corporate party whose purpose was to facilitate the interaction and communication between employees. It was a real success and we had a lot of fun, especially because it was a costume party.  All the fancy dresses and funny clothes we wore made the atmosphere really enjoyable. It was easy to liaise with colleague with whom I had never interacted with before. There was a friendly spirit among us, chatting about personal stuff and about various pleasant things. Working in an international company is not an easy thing because you interact with many people and they have different styles, but all these opportunities of informal interaction are a good way to adapt to the new working environment.

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• "Yes, but that's niche."

  - by Geertjan

  JavaOne 2012 has come to an end though it feels like it hasn't even started yet! What happened, time is a weird thing. Too many things to report on. James Gosling's appearance at the JavaOne community keynote was seen, by everyone (which is quite a lot) of people I talked to, as the highlight of the conference. It was interesting that the software for the Duke's Choice Award winning Liquid Robotics that James Gosling is now part of and came to talk about is a Swing application that uses the WorldWind libraries. It was also interesting that James Gosling pointed out to the conference: "There are things you can't do using HTML." That brings me to the wonderful counter argument to the above, which I spend my time running into a lot: "Yes, but that's niche." It's a killer argument, i.e., it kills all discussions completely in one fell swoop. Kind of when you're talking about someone and then this sentence drops into the conversation: "Yes, but she's got cancer now." Here's one implementation of "Yes, but that's niche": Person A: All applications are moving to the web, tablet, and mobile phone. That's especially true now with HTML5, which is going to wipe away everything everywhere and all applications are going to be browser based. Person B: What about air traffic control applications? Will they run on mobile phones too? And do you see defence applications running in a browser? Don't you agree that there are multiple scenarios imaginable where the Java desktop is the optimal platform for running applications? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. Here's another implementation, though it contradicts the above [despite often being used by the same people], since JavaFX is a Java desktop technology: Person A: Swing is dead. Everyone is going to be using purely JavaFX and nothing else. Person B: Does JavaFX have a docking framework and a module system? Does it have a plugin system?  These are some of the absolutely basic requirements of Java desktop software once you get to high end systems, e.g., banks, defence force, oil/gas services. Those kinds of applications need a web browser and so they love the JavaFX WebView component and they also love the animated JavaFX charting components. But they need so much more than that, i.e., an application framework. Aren't there requirements that JavaFX isn't meeting since it is a UI toolkit, just like Swing is a UI toolkit, and what they have in common is their lack, i.e., natively, of any kind of application framework? Don't people need more than a single window and a monolithic application structure? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. In other words, anything that doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy is "niche", for no other reason than that it doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy... regardless of the actual needs of real developers. Saying "Yes, but that's niche", kills the discussion completely, because it relegates one side of the conversation to the arcane and irrelevant corners of the universe. You're kind of like Cobol now, as soon as "Yes, but that's niche" is said. What's worst about "Yes, but that's niche" is that it doesn't enter into any discussion about user requirements, i.e., there's so few that need this particular solution that we don't even need to talk about them anymore. Note, of course, that I'm not referring specifically or generically to anyone or anything in particular. Just picking up from conversations I've picked up on as I was scurrying around the Hilton's corridors while looking for the location of my next presentation over the past few days. It does, however, mean that there were people thinking "Yes, but that's niche" while listening to James Gosling pointing out that HTML is not the be-all and end-all of absolutely everything. And so this all leaves me wondering: How many applications must be part of a niche for the niche to no longer be a niche? And what if there are multiple small niches that have the same requirements? Don't all those small niches together form a larger whole, one that should be taken seriously, i.e., a whole that is not a niche?

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• Invitation to the Oracle EDGE Applications Partner Roadshow

  - by Hartmut Wiese

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is a unique opportunity for any Oracle Alliance & Channel Managers & their Partners to connect with the Oracle Edge Sales and Management Team to understand the relevance and value of the entire Oracle Edge Portfolio of Applications in solving complex customer issues and supporting a variety of evolving Partner Go-To-Market business models. Oracle Edge Applications (PLM, VCE, VCP, MDM, GRC, OPA) With strong participation from the key Oracle Edge Applications Sales business leaders, attendees will get the opportunity to hear about the benefits of the Oracle Edge Solutions within three different value-added contexts: Value 1: Oracle Edge Application Strategy Value 2: Oracle Value Chain Transformation Vision Value 3: Individual Application Business Line Differentiators Following on from the morning presentations, Oracle Partners will also get the opportunity in the afternoon to challenge and discuss the value of Oracle Edge Applications in the context of their own Go-To-Market business models. These sensitive discussions will be managed via focused 1-2-1 breakout meetings with the relevant Oracle Edge Applications Sales Business Leaders. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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;} When Where To Register Tuesday, July 09th 2013 09 am to 04 pm Utrecht Register now Tuesday, July 16th 2013 09 am to 04 pm London Register now Wednesday, August 28th 2013 09 am to 04 pm Paris Register now IIMPORTANT NOTE: ONLY 60 ATTENDEE PLACES AVAILABLE PER LOCATION - BOOK NOW TO AVOID MISSING OUT. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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;} There is a strict limit to the number of people who can attend this event based on site logistics for the day. Please note that Partners will be given priority over Oracle personnel registrations. Partners however may only register a maximum of 2 personnel from their company plus the supporting local Oracle Alliance & Channel Manager /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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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• Gamification = -10#/3mo

  - by erikanollwebb

  One of the purposes of gamification of anything is to see if you can modify the behavior of the user. In the enterprise, that might mean getting sales people to enter more information into a CRM system, encouraging employees to update their HR records, motivating people to participate in forums and discussions, or process invoices more quickly.  Wikipedia defines behavior modification as "the traditional term for the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior through its extinction, punishment and/or satiation."  Gamification is just a way to modify someone's behavior using game mechanics. And the magic question is always whether it works. So I thought I would present my own little experiment from the last few months.  This spring, I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy 4.  It's a pretty sweet phone in many ways, but one of the little extras I discovered was a built in app called S Health. S Health is an app that you can use to track calories, weight, exercise and it has a built in pedometer. I looked at it when I got the phone, but assumed you had to turn it on to use it so I didn't look at it much.  But sometime in July, I realized that in fact, it just ran in the background and was quietly tracking my steps, with a goal of 10,000 per day.  10,000 steps per day is this magic number recommended by the Surgeon General and the American Heart Association.  Dr. Oz pushes it as the goal for daily exercise.  It's about 5 miles of walking. I'm generally not the kind of person who always has my phone with me.  I leave it in my purse and pull it out when I need it.  But then I realized that meant I wasn't getting a good measure of my steps.  I decided to do a little experiment, and carry it with me as much as possible for a week.  That's when I discovered the gamification that changed my life over the last 3 months.  When I hit 10,000 steps, the app jingled out a little "success!" tune and I got a badge.  I was hooked.  I started carrying my phone.  I started making sure I had shoes I could walk in with me.  I started walking at lunch time, because I realized how often I sat at my desk for 8-10 hours every day without moving.  I started pestering my husband to walk with me after work because I hadn't hit my 10,000 yet, leading him at one point to say "I'm not as much a slave to that badge as you are!"  I started looking at parking lots differently.  Can't get a space up close?  No worries, just that many steps toward my 10,000.  I even tried to see if there was a second power user level at 15,000 or 20,000 (*sadly, no).  If I was close at the end of the day, I have done laps around my house until I got my badge.  I have walked around the block one more time to get my badge.  I have mentally chastised myself when I forgot to put my phone in my pocket because I don't know how many steps I got.  The badge below I got when my boss and I were in New York City and we walked around the block of our hotel just to watch the badge pop up. There are a bunch of tools out on the market now that have similar ideas for helping you to track your exercise, make it social.  There are apps (my favorite is still Zombies, Run!).  You could buy a FitBit or UP by Jawbone.   Interactive fitness makes the Expresso stationary bike with built in video games.  All designed to help you be more aware of your activity and keep you engaged and motivated.  And the idea is to help you change your behavior. I know someone who would spend extra time and work hard on the Expresso because he had built up strategies for how to kill the most dragons while he was riding to get more points.  When the machine broke down, he didn't ride a different bike because it just wasn't that interesting. But for me, just the simple jingle and badge have been all I needed.  I admit, I still giggle gleefully when I hear the tune sing out from my pocket. After a few weeks, I noticed I had dropped a few pounds.  Not a lot, just 2-3.  But then I was really hooked.  I started making a point both to eat a little less and hit 10,000 steps as much as I could.  I bemoaned that during the floods in Boulder, I wasn't hitting my 10,000 steps.  And now, a few months later, I'm almost 10 lbs lighter. All for 1 badge a day. So yes, simple gamification can increase motivation and engagement.  And that can lead to changes in behavior.  Now the job is to apply that to the enterprise space in a meaningful and engaging way. 

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• Impressions and Reactions from Alliance 2012

  - by user739873

  Alliance 2012 has come to a conclusion.  What strikes me about every Alliance conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions).  In addition to the vibrant U.S. organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K.  Their first meeting is planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount of interest and attendance. In my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to explain why I believe this to be true. First let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing. The second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case today. This is also perceived as lack of investment. Let me address these two points.  First the UI.  More is being done here than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca acquisition (see some cool examples here) there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue.  There are also some amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they had an impressive setup at Alliance.  Hopefully many of you that attended found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington in June. In the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also an area of focus for the company and my team.  We're making this a priority especially in the areas of identity management and security, leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging, and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic Suite as our platform for SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP), and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on OBI applications. But at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.  It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe. And I can't avoid mentioning that this kind of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional excellence (which starts with IT) and student success.  It's not (in my opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.  While I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review article (Information Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the opposite of long-term stability...."  Sure there has been healthy, creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of, in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and develop integrated solutions. Cole

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• YouTube SEO: Video Optimization

  - by Mike Stiles

  SEO optimization is still regarded as one of the primary tools in the digital marketing kit. However and wherever a potential customer is conducting a search, brands want their content to surface in the top results. Makes sense. But without a regular flow of good, relevant content, your SEO opportunities run shallow. We know from several studies video is one of the most engaging forms of content, so why not make sure that in addition to being cool, your videos are helping you win the SEO game? Keywords:-Decide what search phrases make the most sense for your video. Don’t dare use phrases that have nothing to do with the content. You’ll make people mad.-Research those keywords to see how competitive they are. Adjust them so there are still lots of people searching for it, but there are not as many links showing up for it.-Search your potential keywords and phrases to see what comes up. It’s amazing how many people forget to do that. Video Title: -Try to start and/or end with your keyword.-When you search on YouTube, visual action words tend to come up as suggested searches. So try to use action words. Video Description: -Lead with a link to your site (include http://). -Don’t stuff this with your keyword. It leads to bad writing and it won’t work anyway. This is where you convince people to watch, so write for humans. Use some showmanship. -At the end, do a call to action (subscribe, see the whole playlist, visit our social channels, etc.) Video Tags:-Don’t over-tag. 5-10 tags per video is plenty. -If you’re compelled to have more than 10, that means you should probably make more videos specifically targeting all those keywords. Find Linking Pals:-45% of videos are discovered on video sites. But 44% are found through links on blogs and sites.-Write a blog about your video’s content, then link to the video in it. -A good site for finding places to guest blog is myblogguest.com-Once you find good linking partners, they’ll link to your future videos (as long as they’re good and you’re returning the favor). Tap the Power of Similar Videos:-Use Video Reply to associate your video with other topic-related videos. That’s when you make a video responding to or referencing a video made by someone else. Content:-Again, build up a portfolio of videos, not just one that goes after 30 keywords.-Create shorter, sequential videos that pull them deeper into the content and closer to a desired final action.-Organize your video topics separately using Playlists. Playlists show up as a whole in search results like individual videos, so optimize playlists the same as you would for a video. Meta Data:-Too much importance is placed on it. It accounts for only 15% of search success.-YouTube reads Captions or Transcripts to determine what a video is about. If you’re not using them, you’re missing out.-You get the SEO benefit of captions and transcripts whether the viewers has them toggled on or not. Promotion:-This accounts for 25% of search success.-Promote the daylights out of your videos using your social channels and digital assets. Don’t assume it’s going to magically get discovered. -You can pay to promote your video. This could surface it on the YouTube home page, YouTube search results, YouTube related videos, and across the Google content network. Community:-Accounts for 10% of search success.-Make sure your YouTube home page is a fun place to spend time. Carefully pick your featured video, and make sure your Playlists are featured. -Participate in discussions so users will see you’re present. The volume of ratings/comments is as important as the number of views when it comes to where you surface on search. Video Sitemaps:-As with a web site, a video sitemap helps Google quickly index your video.-Google wants to know title, description, play page URL, the URL of the thumbnail image you want, and raw video file location.-Sitemaps are xml files you host or dynamically generate on your site. Once you’ve made your sitemap, sign in and submit it using Google webmaster tools. Just as with the broadcast and cable TV channels, putting a video out there is only step one. You also have to make sure everybody knows it’s there so the largest audience possible can see it. Here’s hoping you get great ratings. @mikestiles

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• Qt vs .NET - plz no n00bs who don't know wtf they're talking about [closed]

  - by Pirate for Profit

  Man in all these Qt vs. .NET discussions 90% these people don't know WTF they're talking about. Trying to get a real comparison chart going before we embark on a major fucking project. And yes I'm drunk, and yes I use cocaine. Event Handling In Qt the event handling system you just emit signals when something cool happens and then catch them in slots, for instance emit valueChanged(int percent, bool something); and void MyCatcherObj::valueChanged(int p, bool ok){} blocking them and disconnecting them when needed, doing it across threads... once you get the hang of it, it just seems a lot more natural and intuitive than the way the .NET event handling is set up (you know, object sender, CustomEventArgs e). And I'm not just talking about syntax, because in the end the .NET delegate crap is the bomb. I'm also talking about in more than just reflection (because, yes, .NET obviously has much stronger reflection capabilities). I'm talking about in the way the system feels to a human being. Qt wins hands down i m o. Basically, the footprints make more sense and you can visualize the project easier without the clunky event handling system. I wish I could it explain it better. The only thing is, I do love some of the ease of C# compared to C++ and .NET's assembly architecture. That is a big bonus for modular projects, which are a PITA to do in C++. Database Ease of Doing Crap Also what about datasets and database manipulations. I think .net wins here but I'm not sure. Threading/Conccurency How do you guys think of the threading? In .NET, all I've ever done is make like a list of master worker threads with locks. I like QConcurrentFramework, you don't worry about locks or anything, and with the ease of the signal slot system across threads it's nice to get notified about the progress of things. Memory Usage Also what do you think of the overall memory usage comparison. Is the .NET garbage collector pretty on the ball and quick compared to the instantaneous nature of native memory management? Or does it just let programs leak up a storm and lag the computer then clean it up when it's about to really lag? However, I am a n00b who doesn't know what I'm talking about, please school me on the subject.

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• NSString drawAtPoint Crash on the iPhone (NSString drawAtPoint)

  - by Kyle

  Hey. I have a very simple text output to buffer system which will crash randomly. It will be fine for DAYS, then sometimes it'll crash a few times in a few minutes. The callstack is almost exactly the same for other guys who use higher level controls: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7949746 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978997/iphone-app-crashed-assertion-failed-function-evictglyphentryfromstrike-file It crashes at the line (below as well in drawTextToBuffer()): [nsString drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(0, 0) withFont:clFont]; I have the same call of "evict_glyph_entry_from_cache" with the abort calls immediately following it. Apparently it happens to other people. I can say that my NSString* is perfectly fine at the time of the crash. I can read the text from the debugger just fine. static CGColorSpaceRef curColorSpace; static CGContextRef myContext; static float w, h; static int iFontSize; static NSString* sFontName; static UIFont* clFont; static int iLineHeight; unsigned long* txb; /* 256x256x4 Buffer */ void selectFont(int iSize, NSString* sFont) { iFontSize = iSize; clFont = [UIFont fontWithName:sFont size:iFontSize]; iLineHeight = (int)(ceil([clFont capHeight])); } void initText() { w = 256; h = 256; txb = (unsigned long*)malloc_(w * h * 4); curColorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); myContext = CGBitmapContextCreate(txb, w, h, 8, w * 4, curColorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast); selectFont(12, @"Helvetica"); } void drawTextToBuffer(NSString* nsString) { CGContextSaveGState(myContext); CGContextSetRGBFillColor(myContext, 1, 1, 1, 1); UIGraphicsPushContext(myContext); /* This line will crash. It crashes even with constant Strings.. At the time of the crash, the pointer to nsString is perfectly fine. The data looks fine! */ [nsString drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(0, 0) withFont:clFont]; UIGraphicsPopContext(); CGContextRestoreGState(myContext); } It will happen with other non-unicode supporting methods as well such as CGContextShowTextAtPoint(); the callstack is similar with that as well. Is this any kind of known issue with the iPhone? Or, perhaps, can something outside of this cause be causing an exception in this particular call (drawAtPoint)?

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• General advice and guidelines on how to properly override object.GetHashCode()

  - by Svish

  According to MSDN, a hash function must have the following properties: If two objects compare as equal, the GetHashCode method for each object must return the same value. However, if two objects do not compare as equal, the GetHashCode methods for the two object do not have to return different values. The GetHashCode method for an object must consistently return the same hash code as long as there is no modification to the object state that determines the return value of the object's Equals method. Note that this is true only for the current execution of an application, and that a different hash code can be returned if the application is run again. For the best performance, a hash function must generate a random distribution for all input. I keep finding myself in the following scenario: I have created a class, implemented IEquatable<T> and overridden object.Equals(object). MSDN states that: Types that override Equals must also override GetHashCode ; otherwise, Hashtable might not work correctly. And then it usually stops up a bit for me. Because, how do you properly override object.GetHashCode()? Never really know where to start, and it seems to be a lot of pitfalls. Here at StackOverflow, there are quite a few questions related to GetHashCode overriding, but most of them seems to be on quite particular cases and specific issues. So, therefore I would like to get a good compilation here. An overview with general advice and guidelines. What to do, what not to do, common pitfalls, where to start, etc. I would like it to be especially directed at C#, but I would think it will work kind of the same way for other .NET languages as well(?). I think maybe the best way is to create one answer per topic with a quick and short answer first (close to one-liner if at all possible), then maybe some more information and end with related questions, discussions, blog posts, etc., if there are any. I can then create one post as the accepted answer (to get it on top) with just a "table of contents". Try to keep it short and concise. And don't just link to other questions and blog posts. Try to take the essence of them and then rather link to source (especially since the source could disappear. Also, please try to edit and improve answers instead of created lots of very similar ones. I am not a very good technical writer, but I will at least try to format answers so they look alike, create the table of contents, etc. I will also try to search up some of the related questions here at SO that answers parts of these and maybe pull out the essence of the ones I can manage. But since I am not very stable on this topic, I will try to stay away for the most part :p

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• Fixed point math in c#?

  - by x4000

  Hi there, I was wondering if anyone here knows of any good resources for fixed point math in c#? I've seen things like this (http://2ddev.72dpiarmy.com/viewtopic.php?id=156) and this (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/79677/whats-the-best-way-to-do-fixed-point-math), and a number of discussions about whether decimal is really fixed point or actually floating point (update: responders have confirmed that it's definitely floating point), but I haven't seen a solid C# library for things like calculating cosine and sine. My needs are simple -- I need the basic operators, plus cosine, sine, arctan2, PI... I think that's about it. Maybe sqrt. I'm programming a 2D RTS game, which I have largely working, but the unit movement when using floating-point math (doubles) has very small inaccuracies over time (10-30 minutes) across multiple machines, leading to desyncs. This is presently only between a 32 bit OS and a 64 bit OS, all the 32 bit machines seem to stay in sync without issue, which is what makes me think this is a floating point issue. I was aware from this as a possible issue from the outset, and so have limited my use of non-integer position math as much as possible, but for smooth diagonal movement at varying speeds I'm calculating the angle between points in radians, then getting the x and y components of movement with sin and cos. That's the main issue. I'm also doing some calculations for line segment intersections, line-circle intersections, circle-rect intersections, etc, that also probably need to move from floating-point to fixed-point to avoid cross-machine issues. If there's something open source in Java or VB or another comparable language, I could probably convert the code for my uses. The main priority for me is accuracy, although I'd like as little speed loss over present performance as possible. This whole fixed point math thing is very new to me, and I'm surprised by how little practical information on it there is on google -- most stuff seems to be either theory or dense C++ header files. Anything you could do to point me in the right direction is much appreciated; if I can get this working, I plan to open-source the math functions I put together so that there will be a resource for other C# programmers out there. UPDATE: I could definitely make a cosine/sine lookup table work for my purposes, but I don't think that would work for arctan2, since I'd need to generate a table with about 64,000x64,000 entries (yikes). If you know any programmatic explanations of efficient ways to calculate things like arctan2, that would be awesome. My math background is all right, but the advanced formulas and traditional math notation are very difficult for me to translate into code.

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• PHP - static DB class vs DB singleton object

  - by Marco Demaio

  I don't want to create a discussion about singleton better than static or better than global, etc. I read dozens of questions about it on SO, but I couldn't come up with an answer to this SPECIFIC question, so I hope someone could now illuminate me buy answering this question with one (or more) real simple EXAMPLES, and not theoretical discussions. In my app I have the typical DB class needed to perform tasks on DB without having to write everywhere in code mysql_connect/mysql_select_db/mysql... (moreover in future I might decide to use another type of DB engine in place of mySQL so obviously I need a class of abstration). I could write the class either as a static class: class DB { private static $connection = FALSE; //connection to be opened //DB connection values private static $server = NULL; private static $usr = NULL; private static $psw = NULL; private static $name = NULL; public static function init($db_server, $db_usr, $db_psw, $db_name) { //simply stores connections values, withour opening connection } public static function query($query_string) { //performs query over alerady opened connection, if not open, it opens connection 1st } ... } or as a Singletonm class: class DBSingleton { private $inst = NULL; private $connection = FALSE; //connection to be opened //DB connection values private $server = NULL; private $usr = NULL; private $psw = NULL; private $name = NULL; public static function getInstance($db_server, $db_usr, $db_psw, $db_name) { //simply stores connections values, withour opening connection if($inst === NULL) $this->inst = new DBSingleton(); return $this->inst; } private __construct()... public function query($query_string) { //performs query over already opened connection, if connection is not open, it opens connection 1st } ... } Then after in my app if I wanto to query the DB i could do //Performing query using static DB object DB:init(HOST, USR, PSW, DB_NAME); DB::query("SELECT..."); //Performing query using DB singleton $temp = DBSingleton::getInstance(HOST, USR, PSW, DB_NAME); $temp->query("SELECT..."); My simple brain sees Singleton has got the only advantage to avoid declaring as 'static' each method of the class. I'm sure some of you could give me an EXAMPLE of real advantage of singleton in this specific case. Thanks in advance.

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• QT vs. Net - REAL comparisons for R.A.D. projects

  - by Pirate for Profit

  Man in all these Qt vs. .NET discussions 90% these people argue about the dumbest crap. Trying to get a real comparison chart here, because I know a little about both frameworks but I don't know everything. I believe Qt and .NET both have strengths and weaknesses. This is to make a comparison that highlights these so people can make more informed decisions before embarking on a project, in the spirit of R.A.D. Event Handling In Qt the event handling system is very simple. You just emit signals when something cool happens and then catch them in slots. ie. // run some calculations, then emit valueChanged(30, false, 20.2); and then catching it, any object can make a slot to recieve that message easily void MyObj::valueChanged(int percent, bool ok, float timeRemaining). It's easy to "block" an event or "disconnect" when needed, and works seamlessly across threads... once you get the hang of it, it just seems a lot more natural and intuitive than the way the .NET event handling is set up (you know, void valueChanged(object sender, CustomEventArgs e). And I'm not just talking about syntax, because in the end the .NET anonymous delegates are the bomb. I'm also talking about in more than just reflection (because, yes, .NET obviously has much stronger reflection capabilities). I'm talking about in the way the system feels to a human being. Qt wins hands down for the simplest yet still flexible event handling system ever i m o. Plugins and such I do love some of the ease of C# compared to C++, as well as .NET's assembly architecture, even though it leads to a bunch of .dll's (there's ways to combine everything into a single exe though). That is a big bonus for modular projects, which are a PITA to import stuff in C++ as far as RAD is concerned. Database Ease of Doing Crap Also what about datasets and database manipulations. I think .net wins here but I'm not sure. Threading/Conccurency How do you guys think of the threading? In .NET, all I've ever done is make like a list of master worker threads with locks. I like QConcurrentFramework, you don't worry about locks or anything, and with the ease of the signal slot system across threads it's nice to get notified about the progress of things. QConcurrent is the simplest threading mechanism I've ever played with. Memory Usage Also what do you think of the overall memory usage comparison. Is the .NET garbage collector pretty on the ball and quick compared to the instantaneous nature of native memory management? Or does it just let programs leak up a storm and lag the computer then clean it up when it's about to really lag? Doesn't the just-in-time compiler make native code that is pretty good, like and that only happens the first time the program is run? However, I am a n00b who doesn't know what I'm talking about, please school me on the subject.

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• Rendering javascript at the server side level. A good or bad idea?

  - by davidhong

  I want to make it clear first: This isn't a question in relation to server-side Javascript or running Javascript server side. This is a question regarding rendering of Javascript code (which will be executed on the client-side) from server-side code. Having said that, take a look at below ASP.net code for example: hlRemoveCategory.Attributes.Add("onclick", "return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete this?');") This is prescribing the client-side onclick event on the server-side. As oppose to: $('a[rel=remove]').bind('click', function(event) { return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete this?'); } Now the question I want to ask is: What is the benefit of rendering javascript from the server-side code? Or the vice-versa? I personally prefer the second way of hooking up client-side UI/behaviour to HTML elements for the following reasons: Server-side does what ever it needs to already, including data-validation, event delegation and etc; and What server-side sees as an event is not necessarily the same process on the client-side. i.e., there are plenty more events on client-side (just look at custom events); and What happens on client-side and on server-side, during an event, could be completely irrelevant and decoupled; and What ever happens on client-side happens on client-side, there is no need for the server to know. Server should process and run what is given to them, how the process comes to life is not really up to them to decide in the event of the client-side events; and so and so forth. These are my thoughts obviously. I want to know what others think and if there has been any discussions on this topic. Topics branching from this argument can reach: Code management: is it easier to render everything from server-side? Separation of concern: is it easier if client-side logic is separated to server-side logic? Efficiency: which is more efficient both in terms of coding and running? At the end of the day, I am trying to move my team to go towards the second approach. There are lot of old guys in this team who are afraid of this change. I just wish to convince them with the right facts and stats. Let me know your thoughts.

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• How to build Lucene / Solr from source code in windows environment in order to add patches

  - by Simon

  I have successfully implemented Apache’s Solr for free text searching a database driven web site build for windows platforms using Visual Studio in c#. I am trying to get a version Solr working with field collapsing (which is not in the release version). There are patches available from apache and discussions on the web of people successfully doing this for the version I am using but my problem is cannot get the build to work. I am a c# coder on windows platforms so java development is new to me. I understand I need to get the correct source code (and revision) from SVN, add the appropriate patches, then build the war file to deploy to my system. I cannot seem to get the source to build and produce the deployment code including jar (and subsequent war) files. My system is: Windows 7 Ultimate for development Visual Studio 2010 for c# / javascript development MyEclipse 8.6 / Eclipse 3.5 for the java build from source Subecplise 1.6x SVN plugin to get the source from apache’s SVN Apache Solr 1.4.1 So far I have: Found the right patches for the function I need: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-236 Specifically I need to patch: field_collapsing_1.1.0.patch HTTPS //issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12357681/field_collapsing_1.1.0.patch and SOLR-236-1_4_1.patch HTTPS //issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12448216/SOLR-236-1_4_1.patch I downloaded the Lucene trunk version from the day before the patch was released (revision 958303 from 28/6/10) via subeclipse into a java package in myeclipse from: HTTPS //svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/dev/trunk (Solr is the web implementation of Lucene and is in the subfolder solr/) I can apply patches to the solr directory once it has downloaded but the parent Lucene project doesn’t build the war files, copy the jar or other files into the bin folder (it stays empty). The build process starts, but doesn’t do anything apart from creating the folders bin and src. I am building the whole Lucene project, which contains Solr. I have tried building the source without patching and the same happens. If I copy out the Solr directory into a new project, it runs the build and copies all the related files, tests, etc but fails with 4,500 errors and does not produce the jar files or war file, which I assume is because it can’t find the Lucene trunk files which it depends on. I have two interrelated problems 1) I can't get the Lucene downloaded trunk to build 2) The jar, war and associated files are not created Can anyone help with what I am missing to build the war file? I have spent 2 days to get this far as the help online is extremely patchy and I can’t find a walk though tutorial on building a java war file from source in a windows environment. Any help will be much appreciated. Simon

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• Buy or Build for web deployment?

  - by Cannonade

  I have been evaluating the wide range of installation and web deployment solutions available for Windows applications. I will just clarify here (without too much detail, these tools have been covered in other questions) my understanding of the options: NSIS - Free tool that generates setup executables. Small binary. Specialized, sometimes obtuse, scripting language. Inno Setup - Free tools for setup executables. Various binary compression schemes. Pascal scripting engine. WIX - Free toolset to generate MSI binaries. XML definitions language. WIX ClickThrough - Additional tools for packaging, web download and auto update detection (now part of WIX core). InstallShield - Commercial development environment for installation packaging. Generates MSI binaries. C-like InstallScript language. Wise - Commercial development environment for installation packaging. Generates MSI binaries. ClickOnce - Visual Studio supported framework for publishing applications to a webserver, with automatic detection of updates. No support for custom installation requirements (INI files, registry etc ...). Packages setup as an MSI binary. Install Aware - Commercial development environment for installation. Generates MSI binaries. Automatic Update framwork (Web Update). If I have missed any, please let me know. And found some useful discussions of these technologies on StackOverflow: Best Simple Install System Best choice for Windows installers Alternatives to ClickOnce I have worked with a few of these solutions, as well as a handful of proprietary internal installation solutions. They are mostly concerned with packing installations and providing a framework for developers to access the run time environment. With the growing requirement for web deployment and automatic software updates, I expected to find more of a consensus among developers on a framework for web delivery of software and subsequent updates, I haven't really found that consensus. There are certainly solutions available (ClickOnce, ClickThrough, InstallShield Update Service), but they each have considerable limitations (please correct me if I mis-represent any of these). I would be interested in a framework that provided some of the following: Third party hosting/management of updates. Access to client environment (INI files, registry, etc..). User registration/activation. Feedback/Error reporting This is leaving me with the strong impression that the best way to approach the web deployment problem is through a custom built proprietary solution (possibly leveraging existing installer packaging). I have seen this sort of solution work well for a number of successful applications: FileZilla - HTTP request to update.filezilla-project.org to check for updates, downloads an NSIS binary (I think) and then shuts down to run the install.

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• usercontrol hosted in IE renders as a textbox

  - by coxymla

  On my ongoing saga to mirror the hosting of a legacy app on a clean box, I've hit my next snag. One page relies on a big .NET UserControl that on the new machine renders only as a big, greyed out textarea (greyed out vertical scrollbar on the right hand edge. Inspecting the source shows the expected object tag.) This is particularly tricky because nobody seems to know much about hosted UserControls and all the discussions data back to 2002-2004. The page is quite simple: <%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="DataExport.aspx.cs" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="yyyyy.Web.DataExport" %> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" > <html> <head> <title>DataExport</title> <link rel="Configuration" href="/xxxxx/yyyyy/DataExport.config"> </head> <body style="margin:0px;padding:0px;overflow:hidden"> <OBJECT id="DataExport" style="WIDTH: 100%; HEIGHT: 100%; position:absolute; left: 0px; top:0px" classid="yyyyy.Common.dll#yyyyy.Controls.DataExport" VIEWASTEXT> </OBJECT> </body> </html> The config file referenced: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="yyyyy"> <section name="dataExport" type="yyyyy.Controls.DataExportSectionHandler,yyyyy.Common" /> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <yyyyy> <dataExport> <layoutFile>http://vm2/xxxxx/yyyyy/layout.xml</layoutFile> <webServiceUrl>http://vm2/xxxxx/yyyyy/services/yyyyy.asmx</webServiceUrl> </dataExport> </yyyyy> </configuration> What I've checked: Security permissions should be OK, the site is trusted and adding a URL exception to grant FullTrust doesn't change anything. Config file is acessible over the web, layout.xml is accessible, ASMX shows the expected command list Machine.config grants GET permission for the usercontrol.config file. What perhaps looks fishy to me: The DataExport UserControl references Aspose.Excel to generate the spreadsheets it exports. When I navigate to the page and get a blank textbox, then run gacutil /ldl, nothing is in the local download cache. On the working machine, running the same command after viewing the page shows a laundry list of DLLs including the control DLL and the Aspose DLL.

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• how Can we get the output format to CSV instead of HTML in Alfresco using webscripts?

  - by pavan123

  how Can we change the output format to CSV instead of HTML in Alfresco using webscripts? below are the my corresponding FTL and Webscript files recursive.get.html.ftl <#macro recurse_macro node depth> <#if node.isContainer> <tr> <td> ${node.properties.name} </td> <td></td> </tr> <#list node.children as child> <#if child.isContainer> <@recurse_macro node=child depth=depth+1/> <#list child.children as child2> <#if child2.isDocument> <tr><td></td><td>${child2.properties.name}</td></tr> </#if> </#list> </#if> </#list> </#if> </#macro> Recursive Listing of Spaces & Documents: Space Document recursive.get.desc.xml <webscript> <shortname>recurcive</shortname> <description>Recursive</description> <url>/sample/recursive/{recursive}</url> <format default="html">extension</format> <authentication>guest</authentication> </webscript> and html output is Recursive Listing of Spaces & Documents: Space Document Company Home Data Dictionary Space Templates Software Engineering Project Documentation Drafts Pending Approval Published Samples system-overview.html Discussions UI Design Presentations Quality Assurance Presentation Templates doc_info.ftl localizable.ftl my_docs.ftl my_spaces.ftl my_summary.ftl translatable.ftl recent_docs.ftl general_example.ftl my_docs_inline.ftl show_audit.ftl readme.ftl Email Templates notify_user_email.ftl invite_user_email.ftl RSS Templates RSS_2.0_recent_docs.ftl Saved Searches admin Scripts backup.js example test script.js backup and log.js append copyright.js alfresco docs.js test return value.js Web Scripts org alfresco sample blogsearch.get.js blogsearch.get.atom.ftl blogsearch.get.desc.xml blogsearch.get.html.ftl blogsearch.get.html.400.ftl blogsearch.get.atom.400.ftl categorysearch.get.js categorysearch.get.atom.ftl categorysearch.get.desc.xml categorysearch.get.html.ftl categorysearch.get.html.404.ftl categorysearch.get.atom.404.ftl folder.get.js folder.get.atom.ftl folder.get.desc.xml folder.get.html.ftl avmstores.get.desc.xml avmstores.get.html.ftl avmbrowse.get.js avmbrowse.get.desc.xml avmbrowse.get.html.ftl recursive.get.desc.xml recursive.get.html.ftl sgs.get.desc.xml sgs.get.csv.ftl sample1.get.desc.xml sample1.get.csv.ftl first.get.desc.xml first.get.text.ftl rag.get.html.ftl rag.get.desc.xml new1.get.desc.xml new1.get.html.ftl excel.get.html.ftl excel.get.desc.xml sgs1.get.desc.xml one.get.html.ftl one.get.desc.xml one.get.js readme.html Web Scripts Extensions readme.html Guest Home Alfresco-Tutorial.pdf User Homes isabel Users Home

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• How do you combine "Revision Control" with "WorkFlow" for R?

  - by Tal Galili

  Hello all, I remember coming across R users writing that they use "Revision control" (e.g: "Source control"), and I am curious to know: How do you combine "Revision control" with your statistical analysis WorkFlow? Two (very) interesting discussions talk about how to deal with the WorkFlow. But neither of them refer to the revision control element: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1266279/how-to-organize-large-r-programs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1429907/workflow-for-statistical-analysis-and-report-writing A Long Update To The Question: Following some of the people's answers, and Dirk's question in the comment, I would like to direct my question a bit more. After reading the Wiki article about "revision control" (which I was previously not familiar with), it was clear to me that when using revision control, what one does is to build a development structure of his code. This structure either leads to a "final product" or to several branches. When building something like, let's say, a website. There is usually one end product you work towards (the website), with some prototypes along the way. But when doing a statistical analysis, the work (to my view) is different. Sometimes you know where you want to get to. But more often, you explore. Explore cleaning the dataset. Explore different methods for statistical analysis, and ask various questions of your data (and I am writing this, knowing how Frank Harrell, and other experience statisticians feels about Data dredging). That is way the WorkFlow question with statistical programming is (in my view) a serious and deep question, raising many issues, The simpler ones are technical: Which revision control software do you use (and why) ? Which IDE do you use(and why) ? The more interesting question are about work process: How do you structure your files? What do you keep as a separate file and what as a revision? or asking in a different way - What should be a "branch" and what should be a "sub project" in your code? For example: When starting to explore your data, should a plot be creating and then erased because it didn't lead any where (but kept as a revision) or should there be a backup file of that path? How you solve this tension was my initial curiosity. The second question is "what might I be missing?". What rules (of thumb) should one follow so to avoid common pitfalls doing statistical programming with version control? In my intuition, I feel that statistical programming is inherently different then software development (I am writing this without being a real expert in statistical programming, and even less so in software development). That's way I am unsure which of the lessons I have read here about version control would be applicable. Thanks a lot, Tal

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• Design patterns and interview question

  - by user160758

  When I was learning to code, I read up on the design patterns like a good boy. Long after this, I started to actually understand them. Design discussions such as those on this site constantly try to make the rules more and more general, which is good. But there is a line, over which it becomes over-analysis starts to feed off itself and as such I think begins to obfuscate the original point - for example the "What's Alternative to Singleton" post and the links contained therein. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1300655/whats-alternative-to-singleton I say this having been asked in both interviews I’ve had over the last 2 weeks what a singleton is and what criticisms I have of it. I have used it a few times for items such as user data (simple key-value eg. last file opened by this user) and logging (very common i'm sure). I've never ever used it just to have what is essentially global application data, as this is clearly stupid. In the first interview, I reply that I have no criticisms of it. He seemed disappointed by this but as the job wasn’t really for me, I forgot about it. In the next one, I was asked again and, as I wanted this job, I thought about it on the spot and made some objections, similar to those contained in the post linked to above (I suggested use of a factory or dependency injection instead). He seemed happy with this. But my problem is that I have used the singleton without ever using it in this kind of stupid way, which I had to describe on the spot. Using it for global data and the like isn’t something I did then realised was stupid, or read was stupid so didn’t do, it was just something I knew was stupid from the start. Essentially I’m supposed to be able to think of ways of how to misuse a pattern in the interview? Which class of programmers can best answer this question? The best ones? The medium ones? I'm not sure.... And these were both bright guys. I read more than enough to get better at my job but had never actually bothered to seek out criticisms of the most simple of the design patterns like this one. Do people think such questions are valid and that I ought to know the objections off by heart? Or that it is reasonable to be able to work out what other people who are missing the point would do on the fly? Or do you think I’m at least partially right that the question is too unsubtle and that the questions ought to be better thought out in order to make sure only good candidates can answer. PS. Please don’t think I’m saying that I’m just so clever that I know everything automatically - I’ve learnt the hard way like everyone else. But avoiding global data is hardly revolutionary.

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