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• Autoscaling in a modern world&hellip;. last chapter

  - by Steve Loethen

  As we all know as coders, things like logging are never important.  Our code will work right the first time.  So, you can understand my surprise when the first time I deployed the autoscaling worker role to the actual Azure fabric, it did not scale.  I mean, it worked on my machine.  How dare the datacenter argue with that.  So, how did I track down the problem?  (turns out, it was not so much code as lack of the right certificate)  When I ran it local in the developer fabric, I was able to see a wealth of information.  Lots of periodic status info every time the autoscalar came around to check on my rules and decide to act or not.  But that information was not making it to Azure storage.  The diagnostics were not being transferred to where I could easily see and use them to track down why things were not being cooperative.  After a bit of digging, I discover the problem.  You need to add a bit of extra configuration code to get the correct information stored for you.  I added the following to my app.config: Code Snippet <system.diagnostics>     <sources>         <source name="Autoscaling General"switchName="SourceSwitch"           switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" >         <listeners>           <add name="AzureDiag" />             <remove name="Default"/>         </listeners>       </source>         <source name="Autoscaling Updates"switchName="SourceSwitch"           switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" >         <listeners>           <add name="AzureDiag" />             <remove name="Default"/>         </listeners>       </source>     </sources>     <switches>       <add name="SourceSwitch"           value="Verbose, Information, Warning, Error, Critical" />     </switches>     <sharedListeners>       <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiag"/>     </sharedListeners>     <trace>       <listeners>         <add             type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics">           <filter type="" />         </add>       </listeners>     </trace>   </system.diagnostics> Suddenly all the rich tracing info I needed was filling up my storage account.  After a few cycles of trying to attempting to scale, I identified the cert problem, uploaded a correct certificate, and away it went.  I hope this was helpful.

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• December 3 is Stephanie Choyer Day

  - by rickramsey

  I don't answer Stephanie Choyer's email just so I can enjoy her French accent when she calls. "Reek! Reek! Why do joo not answer my eemails?" Without the French, life on Earth would be so much poorer. No, they don't bring to the party any motorcycles that grow chest on your hair, and the Citroen is such a frightening study in Automobile design that I don't dare climb inside one. But they have French architecture. French sidewalks. French villages. The French Alps. Grenoble. French cheese. French wine. And that glorious French accent. If I were French, I'd spend all my time enjoying being French. Which makes the work that Stephanie does day in and day with our hard-edged technologies and stubborn technologists so admirable. Oracle Solaris 11 Resources for Sysadmins and Developers The page in the link above represents the work of many people, but it was Steph who rounded them up. And it wasn't easy. I know, because I ran and hid from her on many, many occasions. But she was tireless. "Reek. Reek. Why have you not published Glynn's article? Pleeeease, you must!" Remember when tech companies gave you a simple choice? You could either read the 27,000 pages of documentation or a double-sided data sheet. Which will it be, pal? Then they started writing white papers. 74 pages of excellent prose did a beautiful job of explaining why the technology was fantastic, but never told you how to use it. Well, have you taken a look at these? How-To Technical Articles for System Admins and Developers Now you can get wicked excited about a cool technique described in a 74-page white paper, and find a technical article that shows you exactly how to use it. The wicked smart marketing folks on the Oracle Solaris team wrote them, but it was Steph who bribed them with a Cabernet or beat them over the head with a baguette until all that work was finished and posted on OTN. There are songs about French wine, but not about French vintners. There are songs about French cities, but not about French bricklayers. About French sidewalks, but not about the French policemen who keep them safe. As far as I know, there are no songs about OTN, but if there were, they would probably neglect to mention Steph. Which is why today, Dec 3rd, we celebrate Stephanie Choyer Day. We dedicate this day to our relentless, hardworking, tireless, patient and friendly French colleague with the delightful accent. If I knew how to speak French, I'd say "Thanks for all you do" in French. But I don't speak French. And I don't trust online translations. I'd probably wind up saying "My left foot yearns for curdled milk." So here it is in plain old English: Thank you, Stephanie. psssst! about that documentation and those white papers ... In case you haven't noticed, the Oracle Solaris doc team has done some pretty cool things with the Solaris docs. And those white papers are interesting reading, well worth setting aside some time. Because with Solaris, as you know, it's not just about getting by with a rudimentary grasp of the basics. It's about the amazing stuff savvy sysadmins and developers can do when they really understand it. Find them here: White Papers Documentation And don't forget training! - Rick Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Silverlight Cream for November 26, 2011 -- #1175

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Manas Patnaik, Jeff Blankenburg, Doug Mair, Jon Galloway, Richard Bartholomew, Peter Bromberg, Joel Reyes, Zeben Chen, Navneet Gupta, and Cathy Sullivan. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using ASP.NET PageMethods With Silverlight" Peter Bromberg WP7: "Leveraging Background Services and Agents in Windows Phone 7 (Mango)" Jon Galloway Metro/WinRT/Windows8: "Debugging Contracts using Windows Simulator" Cathy Sullivan LightSwitch: "LightSwitch: It Is About The Money (It Is Always About The Money)" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com:LightSwitch: It Is About The Money (It Is Always About The Money)Michael Washington has a very nice post up about LightSwitch apps in general and his opinion about the future use... based on what he and I have been up to, I tend to agree on all counts!Accessing Controls from DataGrid ColumnHeader – SilverlightManas Patnaik's latest post is about using the VisualTreeHelper class to iterate through the visual tree to find the controls you need ... including sample code31 Days of Mango | Day #18: Using Sample DataJeff Blankenburg's Day 18 in his 31-Day Mango quest is on Sample Data using Expression Blend, and he begins with great links to his other Blend posts followed by a nice sample data tutorial and source31 Days of Mango | Day #19: Tilt EffectsDoug Mair returns to the reigns of Jeff's 31-Days series with number 19 which is all about Tilt Effects ... as seen in the Phone application when you select a user... Doug shows how to add this effect to your appLeveraging Background Services and Agents in Windows Phone 7 (Mango)Jon Galloway has a WP7 post up discussing Background Services and how they all fit together... he's got a great diagram of that as an overview then really nice discussion of each followed up by his slides from DevConnections, and codeNetflix on Windows 8This one isn't C#/XAML, but Richard Bartholomew has a Netflix on Windows 8 app running that bears noticeUsing ASP.NET PageMethods With SilverlightPeter Bromberg has a post up demonstrating calling PageMethods from a Silverlight app using the ScriptManager controlAWESOME Windows Phone Power ToolJoel Reyes announced the release of a full-featured tool for side-loading apps to your WP7 device... available at codeplexMicrosoft Windows Simulator Rotation and Resolution EmulationZeben Chen discusses the Windows 8 Simulator a bit deeper with this code-laden post showing how to look at roation and orientation-aware apps and resolution.First look at Windows SimulatorNavneet Gupta has a great into post to using the simulator in VS2011 for Windows 8 apps. Four things you really need this for: Touch Emulation, Rotation, Different target resolutions, and ContractsDebugging Contracts using Windows SimulatorCathy Sullivan shows how to debug W8 Contracts in VS2011... why you ask? because when you hit one in the debugger, the target app disappears.. but enter the simulator... check it outStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows PhoneMIX10

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• #iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

  - by andrewbrust

  I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults.  Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew.  For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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• Creative, busy Devoxx week

  - by JavaCecilia

  I got back from my first visit to the developer conference Devoxx in Antwerp. I can't describe the vibes of the conference, it was a developer amusement park, hackergartens, fact sessions, comic relief provided by Java Posse, James Bond and endless hallway discussions.All and all - I had a lot of fun, my main mission was to talk about Oracle's main focus for OpenJDK which besides development and bug fixing is making sure the infrastructure is working out for the full community. My focus was not to hang out at night club the Noxx, but that was came included in the package :)The London Java community leaders Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg are leading discussions in the community to lay out the necessary requirements for the infrastructure for build and test in the open. They called a first meeting at JavaOne gathering 25 people, including people from RedHat, IBM and Oracle. The second meeting at Devoxx included 14 participants and had representatives from Oracle and IBM. I hope we really can find a way to collaborate on this, making sure we deliver an efficient infrastructure for all engineers to contribute to OpenJDK with.My home in all of this was the BOF rooms and the sessions there meeting the JUG leaders, talking about OpenJDK infrastructure and celebrating the Duchess Duke Award together with the others. The restaurants in the area was slower than I've ever seen, so I missed out on Trisha Gee's brilliant replay of the workshop "The Problem with Women in IT - an Agile Approach" where she masterly leads the audience (a packed room, 50-50 gender distribution) to solve the problem of including more diversity in the developer community. A tough and sometimes sensitive topic where she manages to keep the discussion objective with a focus of improving the matter from a business perspective. Mattias Karlsson is organizing the Java developer conference Jfokus in Stockholm and was there talking to Andres Almires planning a Hackergarten with a possible inclusion of an OpenJDK bugathon. That would be really cool, especially as the Oracle Stockholm Java development office is just across the water from the Jfokus venue, some of the local JVM engineers will likely attend and assist, even though the bug smashing theme will likely be more starter level build warnings in Swing or langtools than fixing JVM bugs.I was really happy that I managed to catch a seat for the Java Posse live podcast "the Third Presidential Debate" a lot of nerd humor, a lot of beer, a lot of fun :) The new member Chet had a perfect dead pan delivery and now I just have to listen more to the podcasts! Can't get the most perfect joke out of my head, talking about beer "As my father always said: Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" - hilarious :)I attended the sessions delivered by my Stockholm office colleagues Marcus Lagergren (on dynamic languages on the jvm, JavaScript in particular) and Joel Borggrén-Franck (Annotations) and was happy to see the packed room and all the questions raised at the end.There's loads of stuff to write about the event, but just have to pace myself for now. It was a fantastic event, captain Stephan Janssen with crew should be really proud to provide this forum to the developer community!

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• Finding work as a college student

  - by lightburst

  I'm a 3rd year CS student. I'm currently really, really, bored and tired of cheap school programming(I go to a fairly respectable(albeit not top) university in my country, but, really, it's not MIT) so I've been thinking about getting a part-time dev job for a long while now. I'm not some hotshot programmer or anything, but "Add/Delete XYZ class objects to list" or "Do this web feature/pattern in PHP" does get old after a few semesters. I also only learned(heard?) of programming when I entered college, so the duration of me being in contact with any code is short. I can't really apply as an intern as I have not accumulated the necessary credits yet to do that so I was thinking of selling myself as a part-time dev. I still need to go to school, and don't want to subject myself to living two lives. Plus, I think I'd have better chances considering my lack of things to write on the resume. The only language I know at heart is C (I've written several pointer-oriented stuff on my freshman year, which is apparently pretty leet(for some reason), or so Joel says. That sort of boosted my morale a bit) but I've worked with several other languages only for the sake of course work such as C#/Java/PHP/ASM. My only user-worthy project was a recursive quicksort simulator I wrote for class using GTK+ that used a textbox to output the progress. I also have not taken the compiler theory class yet, or my thesis. All that being said, I wonder if any legitimate software company(big or small) would hire somebody like me considering all that. If there are companies that do accept anybody like me, would I be doing programming or maybe just be a tester or something? Would anybody hire me as a dev at all? I know I don't have much(not even a degree) but what I lack in experience, I compensate with interest? I am less interested in websites and 'management' software(no offense or anything. also, most of the places here ONLY have those), and more into 'process driven'(I'm not sure how to call it) and system software. I have my eyes on a startup that sells basically an extension of Google Drive, but I feel like I'm too 'risky' for them. Oh, I'm also 19 if that means anything. We're not K-12 so kids go to college earlier than in the US.

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• dynamic? I'll never use that ... or then again, maybe it could ...

  - by adweigert

  So, I don't know about you, but I was highly skeptical of the dynamic keywork when it was announced. I thought to myself, oh great, just another move towards VB compliance. Well after seeing it being used in things like DynamicXml (which I use for this example) I then was working with a MVC controller and wanted to move some things like operation timeout of an action to a configuration file. Thinking big picture, it'd be really nice to have configuration for all my controllers like that. Ugh, I don't want to have to create all those ConfigurationElement objects... So, I started thinking self, use what you know and do something cool ... Well after a bit of zoning out, self came up with use a dynamic object duh! I was thinking of a config like this ...<controllers> <add type="MyApp.Web.Areas.ComputerManagement.Controllers.MyController, MyApp.Web"> <detail timeout="00:00:30" /> </add> </controllers> So, I ended up with a couple configuration classes like this ...blic abstract class DynamicConfigurationElement : ConfigurationElement { protected DynamicConfigurationElement() { this.DynamicObject = new DynamicConfiguration(); } public DynamicConfiguration DynamicObject { get; private set; } protected override bool OnDeserializeUnrecognizedAttribute(string name, string value) { this.DynamicObject.Add(name, value); return true; } protected override bool OnDeserializeUnrecognizedElement(string elementName, XmlReader reader) { this.DynamicObject.Add(elementName, new DynamicXml((XElement)XElement.ReadFrom(reader))); return true; } } public class ControllerConfigurationElement : DynamicConfigurationElement { [ConfigurationProperty("type", Options = ConfigurationPropertyOptions.IsRequired | ConfigurationPropertyOptions.IsKey)] public string TypeName { get { return (string)this["type"]; } } public Type Type { get { return Type.GetType(this.TypeName, true); } } } public class ControllerConfigurationElementCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection { protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() { return new ControllerConfigurationElement(); } protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) { return ((ControllerConfigurationElement)element).Type; } } And then had to create the meat of the DynamicConfiguration class which looks like this ...public class DynamicConfiguration : DynamicObject { private Dictionary<string, object> properties = new Dictionary<string, object>(StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase); internal void Add<T>(string name, T value) { this.properties.Add(name, value); } public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { var propertyName = binder.Name; result = null; if (this.properties.ContainsKey(propertyName)) { result = this.properties[propertyName]; } return true; } } So all being said, I made a base controller class like a good little MVC-itizen ...public abstract class BaseController : Controller { protected BaseController() : base() { var configuration = ManagementConfigurationSection.GetInstance(); var controllerConfiguration = configuration.Controllers.ForType(this.GetType()); if (controllerConfiguration != null) { this.Configuration = controllerConfiguration.DynamicObject; } } public dynamic Configuration { get; private set; } } And used it like this ...public class MyController : BaseController { static readonly string DefaultDetailTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue.ToString(); public MyController() { this.DetailTimeout = TimeSpan.Parse(this.Configuration.Detail.Timeout ?? DefaultDetailTimeout); } public TimeSpan DetailTimeout { get; private set; } } And there I have an actual use for the dynamic keyword ... never thoguht I'd see the day when I first heard of it as I don't do much COM work ... oh dont' forget this little helper extension methods to find the controller configuration by the controller type.public static ControllerConfigurationElement ForType<T>(this ControllerConfigurationElementCollection collection) { Contract.Requires(collection != null); return ForType(collection, typeof(T)); } public static ControllerConfigurationElement ForType(this ControllerConfigurationElementCollection collection, Type type) { Contract.Requires(collection != null); Contract.Requires(type != null); return collection.Cast<ControllerConfigurationElement>().Where(element => element.Type == type).SingleOrDefault(); } Sure, it isn't perfect and I'm sure I can tweak it over time, but I thought it was a pretty cool way to take advantage of the dynamic keyword functionality. Just remember, it only validates you did it right at runtime, which isn't that bad ... is it? And yes, I did make it case-insensitive so my code didn't have to look like my XML objects, tweak it to your liking if you dare to use this creation.

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• Why are you doing this? [closed]

  - by NIcholas Lawson

  I am working on a story that I am going to be querying to several magazines in my hometown about this work that is being done by the AXR group. This is a group of people who have networked online and are working on developing a higher level syntax structure than CSS and HTML currently offer. I am covering this is as a story because I see potential in this as a human interest story in cosmopolitan society. I have been asked by the group to pose this question to you and would appreciate any and all comments you would have on the following ... To AXR: So when does the internet become finished? At what point does a computer scientist say to himself ... my job here is finished ... the internet is complete? When is the internet ready to be more about the display of content than the uploading of new websites or computer tech? You are embarking on upon a sixty year project every day you work with this internet, what drives you? Why are you spending your hard earned hours working on the code to this computer? I spend thirty hours a week online because I love the writing and I know what would make the internet better ... ease of use ... i know it is difficult to program but I see some very elegant solutions online ... in this early inception phase of your programming development for this HSS prototype ... I would like to know why I do not see you programmers asking questions such as ... What would make the end user's life the easiest when using this code? I know you can solve the problem but an evolution forward would be simple, not simple to a computer scientist but simple to use for a career janitor ... if you could solve the problem of alleviating the stress at using a the computer you could get better content out of the computer ... right now the main problem is that the best content is in the hands of the people least likely to use the computer and the more simple you make the computer to use ... the better the content collection will be in the long run ... That is not what I want to talk about though ... why are you writing code when you could be writing stories? I know the computer is worthless without content so I build content, I know the book is worthless without the combinations of words in them, i know the television is worthless without the television news anchor or the actor, what I want to know from you folks in a very journalistic sense is why are you even bothering to bother to write code for a machine that has only made our lives i would dare say less interesting. why are you feeding the beast your time when you could be writing stories or being an actor or musician or auto mechanic ... why code? why this machine? what do you love about it? what do you hate about it? what do you wonder about it? I want to know so that starting out I know how to further shape my questions with axr ... i want the full story ... i want the real answers ... and i want to know why you are doing this, it would make for great writing if you could elucidate on this point.

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• Communication between state machines with hidden transitions

  - by slartibartfast

  The question emerged for me in embedded programming but I think it can be applied to quite a number of general networking situations e.g. when a communication partner fails. Assume we have an application logic (a program) running on a computer and a gadget connected to that computer via e.g. a serial interface like RS232. The gadget has a red/green/blue LED and a button which disables the LED. The LEDs color can be driven by software commands over the serial interface and the state (red/green/blue/off) is read back and causes a reaction in the application logic. Asynchronous behaviour of the application logic with regard to the LED color down to a certain delay (depending on the execution cycle of the application) is tolerated. What we essentially have is a resource (the LED) which can not be reserved and handled atomically by software because the (organic) user can at any time press the button to interfere/break the software attempt to switch the LED color. Stripping this example from its physical outfit I dare to say that we have two communicating state machines A (application logic) and G (gadget) where G executes state changes unbeknownst to A (and also the other way round, but this is not significant in our example) and only A can be modified at a reasonable price. A needs to see the reaction and state of G in one piece of information which may be (slightly) outdated but not inconsistent with respect to the short time window when this information was generated on the side of G. What I am looking for is a concise method to handle such a situation in embedded software (i.e. no layer/framework like CORBA etc. available). A programming technique which is able to map the complete behaviour of both participants on classical interfaces of a classical programming language (C in this case). To complicate matters (or rather, to generalize), a simple high frequency communication cycle of A to G and back (IOW: A is rapidly polling G) is out of focus because of technical restrictions (delay of serial com, A not always active, etc.). What I currently see as a general solution is: the application logic A as one thread of execution an adapter object (proxy) PG (presenting G inside the computer), together with the serial driver as another thread a communication object between the two (A and PG) which is transactionally safe to exchange The two execution contexts (threads) on the computer may be multi-core or just interrupt driven or tasks in an RTOS. The com object contains the following data: suspected state (written by A): effectively a member of the power set of states in G (in our case: red, green, blue, off, red_or_green, red_or_blue, red_or_off...etc.) command data (written by A): test_if_off, switch_to_red, switch_to_green, switch_to_blue operation status (written by PG): operation_pending, success, wrong_state, link_broken new state (written by PG): red, green, blue, off The idea of the com object is that A writes whichever (set of) state it thinks G is in, together with a command. (Example: suspected state="red_or_green", command: "switch_to_blue") Notice that the commands issued by A will not work if the user has switched off the LED and A needs to know this. PG will pick up such a com object and try to send the command to G, receive its answer (or a timeout) and set the operation status and new state accordingly. A will take back the oject once it is no longer at operation_pending and can react to the outcome. The com object could be separated of course (into two objects, one for each direction) but I think it is convenient in nearly all instances to have the command close to the result. I would like to have major flaws pointed out or hear an entirely different view on such a situation.

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• Ruby on rails generates tests for you. Do those give a false sense of a safety net?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Disclaimer: I have not used RoR, and I have not generated tests. But, I will still dare to post this question. Quality Assurance is theoretically impossible to get 100% right in general (Undecidable problem ;), and it is hard in practice. So many developers do not understand that writing good automated tests is an art, and it is hard. When I hear that RoR generates the tests for you, I get very skeptical. It cannot be that easy. Testing is a general concept; it applies across languages. So does the concept of code contracts, it is similar for languages that support it. Code contracts do not generate themselves. The programmer must add the requirements and the promises manually, after doing some thinking about the algorithm / function. If a human gets it wrong, then the tools will propagate the error. Similarly with testing - it takes human judgement about what should happen. Tests do not write themselves, and we are far from the day when a business analyst can just have a conversation with a computer and tell it informally what the requirements are and have the computer do all the work. There is no magic ... how can RoR generate good tests for you? Please shed some light on this. Opinions are ok, for this is a community wiki. Thanks!

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• In xpath why can I use greater-than symbol > but not less-than <

  - by runrunraygun

  Using c#3 compiled transforms the following seems to work just fine... <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="$valA > $valB"> <xsl:value-of select="$maxUnder" /> </xsl:when> <xsl:when test="$valA &lt; $valC"> <xsl:value-of select="$maxOver" /> </xsl:when> </xsl:choose> However if i dare use a < in place of &lt; it gives an error... <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="$valA > $valB"> <xsl:value-of select="$maxUnder" /> </xsl:when> <xsl:when test="$valA < $valC"> <xsl:value-of select="$maxOver" /> </xsl:when> </xsl:choose> System.Xml.XmlException: '<', hexadecimal value 0x3C, is an invalid attribute character. So why is > ok and not < ?

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• mysql startup, shtudown and logging on osx

  - by Joelio

  Hi, I am trying to troubleshoot some mysql problems (I have a table I cant seem to delete or drop, it hangs forever) I have 10.5.8 osx, I dont remember how/if I installed mysql, here is what I know: it automatically starts on boot the process looks like this: /usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld --basedir=/usr/local/mysql --datadir=/usr/local/mysql/var --pid-file=/usr/local/mysql/var/Joels-New-Pro.local.pid _mysql 96 0.0 0.0 75884 684 ?? Ss Sat06PM 0:00.02 /bin/sh /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe when I run: /usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld --verbose --help it says: /usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld Ver 5.0.45 for apple-darwin9.1.0 on i686 (Source distribution) it seems to use my.cnf from /etc/my.cnf Now here are my questions: I dont see anything in the startupitems that remotely looks like mysql ls /Library/StartupItems/ BRESINKx86Monitoring ChmodBPF HP IO HP Trap Monitor Parallels ParallelsTransporter 1.) So how does it startup automatically? 2.) How do I start & stop this type of installation? Also, looking at the config, the logs have no values: /usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld --verbose --help|grep '^log' log (No default value) log-bin (No default value) log-bin-index (No default value) log-bin-trust-function-creators FALSE log-bin-trust-routine-creators FALSE log-error log-isam myisam.log log-queries-not-using-indexes FALSE log-short-format FALSE log-slave-updates FALSE log-slow-admin-statements FALSE log-slow-queries (No default value) log-tc tc.log log-tc-size 24576 log-update (No default value) log-warnings 1 3.) Does that mean there is no logging enabled in mysetup? thanks in advance! Joel

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• Mouse Error Code 24. Windows 7

  - by Cj.

  I've had the same mouse for a while, and it's been working fine until one day, it started giving me a message about a device not working properly. I tried updating the drivers, and re-installing, I even deleted old drivers in case my computer should be a little confused. It never made a difference, and my mouse seemed to be working just fine despite getting the permanent error in my device manager, I looked it up several times online, but I never found anything I could actually use, when I go to official websites, I always get the same response "plug in so so into a different place - drivers - install silverlight before you can watch this tutorial, try it on a different machine". so I gave up on that. But now is where I have a real problem, lately, my little strange error evolved into a fullblown Error 24, and my mouse is starting to turn on and off randomely, especially when it is being used, but I do hear it go "badum..dadum" when I'm off doing something else. when I looked up error code 24, I really didn't find much other than it meaning: Code 24 This device is not present, is not working properly, or does not have all its drivers installed. (Code 24) Cause The device is installed incorrectly. The problem could be a hardware failure, or a new driver might be needed. Devices stay in this state if they have been prepared for removal. After you remove the device, this error disappears. But, I have tried uninstalling the device entirely several times, and it'll go right back to its previous state with error 24, and turning on and off randomely. what do I do? I cannot afford taking it to a repair place, I can't really afford a new mouse either, I refuse to buy cheap ones as I am a gamer, in need of more than 3 buttons, and a good grip is important. Could there possibly be some confusion in the registry? I do remember having gotten some early problems after I converted my vista to windows7. But I hardly dare going in there unless I'm 100% certain of what I'm going for, and I can honestly say I am at a loss here. Edit: it is a USB mouse we're talking about here. MX™518 Optical Gaming Mouse (logitech) Edit2: I am seeing no rupture, so it must be on the inside of my mouse, or inside the rubber, protecting the cable, that would be really inconvenient to search for

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• SQL SERVER – Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time – SQL Server Magazine

  - by pinaldave

  I am glad to announce that along with SQLAuthority.com, I will be blogging on the prominent site of SQL Server Magazine. My very first blog post there is already live; read here: Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time. My association with SQL Server Magazine has been quite long, I have written nearly 7 to 8 SQL Server articles for the print magazine and it has been a great experience. I used to stay in the United States at that time. I moved back to India for good, and during this process, I had put everything on hold for a while. Just like many things, “temporary” things become “permanent” – coming back to SQLMag was on hold for long time. Well, this New Year, things have changed – once again, I am back with my online presence at SQLMag.com. Everybody is a beginner at every task or activity at some point of his/her life: spelling words for the first time; learning how to drive for the first time, etc. No one is perfect at the start of any task, but every human is different. As time passes, we all develop our interests and begin to study our subject of interest. Most of us dream to get a job in the area of our study – however things change as time passes. I recently read somewhere online (I could not find the link again while writing this one) that all the successful people in various areas have never studied in the area in which they are successful. After going through a formal learning process of what we love, we refuse to stop learning, and we finally stop changing career and focus areas. We move, we dare and we progress. IT field is similar to our life. New IT professionals come to this field every day. There are two types of beginners – a) those who are associated with IT field but not familiar with other technologies, and b) those who are absolutely new to the IT field. Learning a new technology is always exciting and overwhelming for enthusiasts. I am working with database (in particular) for SQL Server for more than 7 years but I am still overwhelmed with so many things to learn. I continue to learn and I do not think that I should ever stop doing so. Just like everybody, I want to be in the race and get ahead in learning the technology. For the same, I am always looking for good guidance. I always try to find a good article, blog or book chapter, which can teach me what I really want to learn at this stage in my career and can be immensely helpful. Quite often, I prefer to read the material where the author does not judge me or assume my understanding. I like to read new concepts like a child, who takes his/her first steps of learning without any prior knowledge. Keeping my personal philosophy and preference in mind, I will be blogging on SQL Server Magazine site. I will be blogging on the beginners stuff. I will be blogging for them, who really want to start and make a mark in this area. I will be blogging for all those who have an extreme passion for learning. I am happy that this is a good start for this year. One of my resolutions is to help every beginner. It is totally possible that in future they all will grow and find the same article quite ‘easy‘ – well when that happens, it indicates the success of the article and material! Well, I encourage everybody to read my SQL Server Magazine blog – I will be blogging there frequently on various topics. To begin, we will be talking about performance tuning, and I assure that I will not shy away from other multiple areas. Read my SQL Server Magazine Blog: Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time I think the title says it all. Do leave your comments and feedback to indicate your preference of subject and interest. I am going to continue writing on subject, and the aim is of course to help grow in this field. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

  - by Ben Griswold

  A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed.  But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard.  McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment  of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight?  Well, no.  I don’t think any book can make that claim.  If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket!  That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC.  Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development?  Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach.  I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen.  If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

  - by Duncan Mills

  With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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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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• XNA Notes 008

  - by George Clingerman

  This week has been a rough one. I’ve been sick and then in some kind of slump for my afternoon coding sessions. It could be from the cold, could be I’m still tired from writing that Windows Phone 7 game development book (which is out now!) or it could just be I’m tired of winter and want some sunshine. All I know is that even while I’m stick, the XNA world keeps going along at it’s whirlwind pace. Below are the things I caught in between my coughing fits.. Time Critical XNA News: The 2011 MVP summit is almost here so pass along your feelings and thoughts so the MVPs can take them and share them with the team in person http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76317/464136.aspx#464136 Dream Build Play - there’s no new announcement yet, but you can’t get much more to the end of February than this! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx XNA Team: Dean Johnson from the XNA team shares an excellent way of handling Guide.IsTrialMode on WP7 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dejohn/archive/2011/02/21/calling-guide-istrialmode-on-windows-phone-7.aspx Nick Gravelyn tries a new tactic in deciding if there’s enough interest to develop a sequel or not. Don’t YOU want Pixel Man 2 to come out? http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn finally shares what he’s been secretly working on these past 4 months http://twitter.com/#!/The_Zman/status/40590269392887808 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8Z0ZdYbvg&feature=youtu.be Joel Martinez lets developers around NYC know they should by signing up for Game Hack Day http://twitter.com/joelmartinez/statuses/41118590862102528 http://gamehackday.org/71fdk XNA Developers: Michael McLaughlin shares an XNA RenderTarget2D Sample http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/18/xna-rendertarget2d-sample.aspx Martin Caine starts a new series on Deferred Rendering in XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/#!/MartinCaine/status/39735221339291648 http://martincaine.com/xna/deferred_rendering_in_xna_4_introduction ElemenyCy posts about his fun time with the IntermediateSerializer http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/xna/holy-bloated-xml-batman/ Ben Kane releases a narrated dev diary video for Project Splice. Let him know if you’d like to see more! (I know I do!) http://twitter.com/#!/benkane/status/39846959498002432 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmziXZUo08&feature=youtu.be Jason Swearingen (of Novaleaf) posts his part 1 of Spatial Partitioning solutions http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/02/21/spatial-partitioning-part-1-survey-of-spatial-partitioning-solutions/ Brian Lawson of Dark Flow Studios shares what his been up to lately with lots of pretty screenshots and hints of announcements from Microsoft... http://www.darkflowstudios.com/entry/short-and-sweet-part-1 Luke Avery starts a new blog where he plans on making XNA tutorials for beginners (and he’s got a few started already!) http://programmingwithovery.wordpress.com/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): GameMarx Episode 10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/24/ep-10-february-18-2010.aspx Minecraft clone FortressCraft coming to XBLIG http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-23-minecraft-clone-fortresscraft-hits-xblig ezMuze+ starts an IndieGoGo fundraiser campaign to help fund their second game and get it onto even more devices! http://www.indiegogo.com/ezmuze Gamergeddon XBLIG round up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/20/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-20th/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter JForce Games loses their Ego http://jforcegames.com/blog/index.php?itemid=121&catid=4 XNA Game Development: @BallerIndustry reminds all XNA developers that the Maths are important ;) http://twitter.com/#!/BallerIndustry/status/39317618280243200 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjV3XDFsjP4&feature=player_embedded#at=106 @suhinini stumbles on an older but extremely useful post on XNA Content Pipeline debugging http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/39270189476352000 http://badcorporatelogo.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/xna-content-pipeline-debugging-4-0/ XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://innovativesingapore.com/2011/02/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities/ Indiefreaks announces that IGF v0.3 is out with Xbox 360 support, SunBurn 2.0.12 and it’s now Open Source! http://twitter.com/#!/indiefreaks/status/39391953971982336 @liotral announces a new series on properly designing a game http://twitter.com/#!/liortal53/status/39466905081217024 http://liortalblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/hello-cosmos/ Indies and XNA at CodeStock 2011 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/20/indies-and-xna-at-codestock-2011.aspx Train Frontier Express posts about XNA Content Hotloading http://trainfrontierexpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-content-hotloading-overview.html Slyprid announces a new character editor in Transmute http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/40146992818696192 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhFAc78LDs&feature=youtu.be The XNA 2D from the ground up tutorial series http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/23/recap-the-xna-2d-from-the-ground-up-tutorial-series.aspx Sgt.Conker posts a “Clingerman” (hey that’s me!) to stay relevant http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/posting-a-clingerman-to-stay-relevant/

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• Best Practices for Handing over Legacy Code

  - by PersonalNexus

  In a couple of months a colleague will be moving on to a new project and I will be inheriting one of his projects. To prepare, I have already ordered Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But this books as well as most questions on legacy code I found so far are concerned with the case of inheriting code as-is. But in this case I actually have access to the original developer and we do have some time for an orderly hand-over. Some background on the piece of code I will be inheriting: It's functioning: There are no known bugs, but as performance requirements keep going up, some optimizations will become necessary in the not too distant future. Undocumented: There is pretty much zero documentation at the method and class level. What the code is supposed to do at a higher level, though, is well-understood, because I have been writing against its API (as a black-box) for years. Only higher-level integration tests: There are only integration tests testing proper interaction with other components via the API (again, black-box). Very low-level, optimized for speed: Because this code is central to an entire system of applications, a lot of it has been optimized several times over the years and is extremely low-level (one part has its own memory manager for certain structs/records). Concurrent and lock-free: While I am very familiar with concurrent and lock-free programming and have actually contributed a few pieces to this code, this adds another layer of complexity. Large codebase: This particular project is more than ten thousand lines of code, so there is no way I will be able to have everything explained to me. Written in Delphi: I'm just going to put this out there, although I don't believe the language to be germane to the question, as I believe this type of problem to be language-agnostic. I was wondering how the time until his departure would best be spent. Here are a couple of ideas: Get everything to build on my machine: Even though everything should be checked into source code control, who hasn't forgotten to check in a file once in a while, so this should probably be the first order of business. More tests: While I would like more class-level unit tests so that when I will be making changes, any bugs I introduce can be caught early on, the code as it is now is not testable (huge classes, long methods, too many mutual dependencies). What to document: I think for starters it would be best to focus documentation on those areas in the code that would otherwise be difficult to understand e.g. because of their low-level/highly optimized nature. I am afraid there are a couple of things in there that might look ugly and in need of refactoring/rewriting, but are actually optimizations that have been out in there for a good reason that I might miss (cf. Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I) How to document: I think some class diagrams of the architecture and sequence diagrams of critical functions accompanied by some prose would be best. Who to document: I was wondering what would be better, to have him write the documentation or have him explain it to me, so I can write the documentation. I am afraid, that things that are obvious to him but not me would otherwise not be covered properly. Refactoring using pair-programming: This might not be possible to do due to time constraints, but maybe I could refactor some of his code to make it more maintainable while he was still around to provide input on why things are the way they are. Please comment on and add to this. Since there isn't enough time to do all of this, I am particularly interested in how you would prioritize.

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• The Oracle Retail Week Awards - most exciting awards yet?

  - by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

  Last night's annual Oracle Retail Week Awards saw the UK's top retailers come together to celebrate the very best of our industry over the last year.  The Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in London was the setting for an exciting ceremony which this year marked several significant milestones in British - and global - retail.  Check out our videos about the event at our Oracle Retail YouTube channel, and see if you were snapped by our photographer on our Oracle Retail Facebook page. There were some extremely hot contests for many of this year's awards - and all very deserving winners.  The entries have demonstrated beyond doubt that retailers have striven to push their standards up yet again in all areas over the past year.  The judging panel includes some of the most prestigious names in the retail industry - to impress the panel enough to win an award is a substantial achievement.  This year the panel included the likes of Andy Clarke - Chief Executive of ASDA Group; Mark Newton Jones - CEO of Shop Direct Group; Richard Pennycook - the finance director at Morrisons; Rob Templeman - Chief Executive of Debenhams; and Stephen Sunnucks - the president of Gap Europe.  These are retail veterans  who have each helped to shape the British High Street over the last decade.  It was great to chat with many of them in the Oracle VIP area last night.  For me, last night's highlight was honouring both Sir Stuart Rose and Sir Terry Leahy for their contributions to the retail industry.  Both have set the standards in retailing over the last twenty years and taken their respective businesses from strength to strength, demonstrating that there is always a need for innovation even in larger businesses, and that a business has to adapt quickly to new technology in order to stay competitive.  Sir Terry Leahy's retirement this year marks the end of an era of global expansion for the Tesco group and a milestone in the progression of British retail.  Sir Terry has helped steer Tesco through nearly 20 years of change, with 14 years as Chief Executive.  During this time he led the drive for international expansion and an aggressive campaign to increase market share.  He has led the way for High Street retailers in adapting to the rise of internet retailing and nurtured a very successful home delivery service.  More recently he has pioneered the notion of cross-channel retailing with the introduction of Tesco apps for the iPhone and Android mobile phones allowing customers to scan barcodes of items to add to a shopping list which they can then either refer to in store or order for delivery.  John Lewis Partnership was a very deserving winner of The Oracle Retailer of the Year award for their overall dedication to excellent retailing practices.  The business was also named the American Express Marketing/Advertising Campaign of the Year award for their memorable 'Never Knowingly Undersold' advert series, which included a very successful viral video and radio campaign with Fyfe Dangerfield's cover of Billy Joel's 'She's Always a Woman' used for the adverts.  Store Design of the Year was another exciting category with Topshop taking the accolade for its flagship Oxford Street store in London, which combines boutique concession-style stalls with high fashion displays and exclusive collections from leading designers.  The store even has its own hairdressers and food hall, making it a truly all-inclusive fashion retail experience and a global landmark for any self-respecting international fashion shopper. Over the next few weeks we'll be exploring some of the winning entries in more detail here on the blog, so keep an eye out for some unique insights into how the winning retailers have made such remarkable achievements. 

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• Tuesday at OpenWorld: Identity Management

  - by Tanu Sood

  At Oracle OpenWorld? From keynotes, general sessions to product deep dives and executive events, this Tuesday is full of informational, educational and networking opportunities for you. Here’s a quick run-down of what’s happening today: Tuesday, October 2, 2012 KEYNOTE: The Oracle Cloud: Oracle’s Cloud Platform and Applications Strategy 8:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m., Moscone North, Hall D Leading customers will join Oracle Executive Vice President Thomas Kurian to discuss how Oracle’s innovative cloud solutions are transforming how they manage their business, excite and retain their employees, and deliver great customer experiences through Oracle Cloud. GENERAL SESSION: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone North - Hall D Join Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Product in this strategy and roadmap session to hear how developers leverage new innovations in their applications and customers achieve their business innovation goals with Oracle Fusion Middleware. CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 The session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9162: Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Customer Projects 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 a.m., Moscone West, 3001 Hear from the winners of the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards and see which customers are taking home a trophy for the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award.  Read more about the Innovation Awards here. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. EVENTS: Executive Edge @ OpenWorld: Chief Security Officer (CSO) Summit 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. If you are attending the Executive Edge at Open World, be sure to check out the sessions at the Chief Security Officer Summit. Former Sr. Counsel for the National Security Agency, Joel Brenner, will be speaking about his new book "America the Vulnerable". In addition, PWC will present a panel discussion on "Crisis Management to Business Advantage: Security Leadership". See below for the complete agenda. PRODUCT DEMOS: And don’t forget to see Oracle identity Management solutions in action at Oracle OpenWorld DEMOgrounds. DEMOS LOCATION EXHIBITION HALL HOURS Access Management: Complete and Scalable Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-218 Monday, October 1 9:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 9:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m. (Dedicated Hours) Tuesday, October 2 9:45 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–2:45 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Wednesday, October 3 9:45 a.m.–4:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–3:30 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Access Management: Federating and Leveraging Social Identities Moscone South, Right - S-220 Access Management: Mobile Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-219 Access Management: Real-Time Authorizations Moscone South, Right - S-217 Access Management: Secure SOA and Web Services Security Moscone South, Right - S-223 Identity Governance: Modern Administration and Tooling Moscone South, Right - S-210 Identity Management Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone South, Right - S-212 Oracle Directory Services Plus: Performant, Cloud-Ready Moscone South, Right - S-222 Oracle Identity Management: Closed-Loop Access Certification Moscone South, Right - S-221 For a complete listing, keep the Focus on Identity Management document handy. And don’t forget to converse with us while at OpenWorld @oracleidm. We look forward to hearing from you.

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• 10 Best Programming Podcast 2010 Edition

  - by mbcrump

  This list is in no particular order. Just the 10 best programming podcast that I have found so far. Stack Overflow Podcast -  Jeff Atwood (of codinghorror.com) and Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware.com) discuss the development of their new programming community, StackOverflow.com. [This Podcast hasn’t been updated in a while, but its always great to hear more from Jeff Atwood] Hanselminutes - Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds. [This Podcast has recently started talking about random topics like diabetes, plane travel and geek relationship tips.  I am not sure if Scott is trying to move to a more mainstream audience or not] Herding Code - A weekly discussion featuring K. Scott Allen (odetocode.com), Kevin Dente, Scott Koon (lazycoder.com), and Jon Galloway. [Great all all-around podcast that I would recommend to all] Deep Fried Bytes - Deep Fried Bytes is an audio talk show with a Southern flavor hosted by technologists and developers Keith Elder and Chris Woodruff. The show discusses a wide range of topics including application development, operating systems and technology in general. Anything is fair game if it plugs into the wall or takes a battery. [This is one that just keeps getting better] Dot Net Rocks - .NET Rocks! is an Internet Audio Talk Show for Microsoft .NET Developers. [One of the first and usually very high quality content] Connected Show - Connected Show Podcast! A podcast covering new Microsoft technology for the developer community. The show is hosted by Dmitry Lyalin and Peter Laudati. [This and Polymorphic are one of my favorite podcast – Dmitry is a great host and would recommend this to all] Polymorphic Podcast - Object oriented development, architecture and best practices in .NET [Craig is a ASP.NET MVP and a great presenter. His podcast is great and it could only be better if he recorded it more often] ASP.NET Podcast - Wallace B. (Wally) McClure presents interviews and short technical talks on .NET Technologies. [Has great information on ASP.NET of course as well as iPhone Dev] Ruby on Rails Podcast - News and interviews about the Ruby language and the Rails website framework. [Even though I am not a Ruby programmer, I’ve found this podcast very interesting] Software Engineering Radio - Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Every ten days, a new episode is published that covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content ? we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is an independent and non-commercial organization. [Another excellent podcast – I would recommend any programmer add this to his/her drive home] If I have missed something, please feel free to email me and it might make the 2011 list. =)

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• How can I thoroughly evaluate a prospective employer?

  - by glenviewjeff

  We hear much about code smells, test smells, and even project smells, but I have heard no discussion about employer "smells" outside of the Joel Test. After much frustration working for employers with a bouquet of unpleasant corporate-culture odors, I believe it's time for me to actively seek a more mature development environment. I've started assembling a list of questions to help vet employers by identifying issues during a job interview, and am looking for additional ideas. I suppose this list could easily be modified by an employer to vet an employee as well, but please answer from the interviewee's perspective. I think it would be important to ask many of these questions of multiple people to find out if consistent answers are given. For the most part, I tried to put the questions in each section in the order they could be asked. An undesired answer to an early question will often make follow-ups moot. Values What constitutes "well-written" software? What attributes does a good developer have? Same question for manager. Process Do you have a development process? How rigorously do you follow it? How do you decide how much process to apply to each project? Describe a typical project lifecycle. Ask the following if they don't come up otherwise: Waterfall/iterative: How much time is spent in upfront requirements gathering? upfront design? Testing Who develops tests (developers or separate test engineers?) When are they developed? When are the tests executed? How long do they take to execute? What makes a good test? How do you know you've tested enough? What percentage of code is tested? Review What is the review process like? What percentage of code is reviewed? Design? How frequently can I expect to participate as code/design reviewer/reviewee? What are the criteria applied to review and where do the criteria come from? Improvement What new tools and techniques have you evaluated or deployed in the past year? What training courses have your employees been given in the past year? What will I be doing for the first six months in your company (hinting at what kind of organized mentorship/training has been thought through, if any) What changes to your development process have been made in the past year? How do you improve and learn from your mistakes as an organization? What was your organizations biggest mistake in the past year, and how was it addressed? What feedback have you given to management lately? Was it implemented? If not, why? How does your company use "best practices?" How do you seek them out from the outside or within, and how do you share them with each other? Ethics Tell me about an ethical problem you or your employees experienced recently and how was it resolved? Do you use open-source software? What open-source contributions have you made? Follow-Ups I liked what @jim-leonardo said on this Stack Overflow question: Really a thing to ask yourself: "Does this person seem like they are trying to recruit me and make me interested?" I think this is one of the most important bits. If they seem to be taking the attitude that the only one being interviewed is you, then they probably will treat you poorly. Good interviewers understand they have to sell the position as much as the candidate needs to sell themselves. @SethP added: Glassdoor.com is a good web site for researching potential employers. It contains information about how specific companies conduct interviews...

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