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• I asked this yesterday, after the input given I'm still having trouble implementing..

  - by Josh

  I'm not sure how to fix this or what I did wrong, but whenever I enter in a value it just closes out the run prompt. So, seems I do have a problem somewhere in my coding. Whenever I run the program and input a variable, it always returns the same answer.."The content at location 76 is 0." On that note, someone told me that "I don't know, but I suspect that Program A incorrectly has a fixed address being branched to on instructions 10 and 11." - mctylr but I'm not sure how to fix that.. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate this idea from R Samuel Klatchko.. I'm still not sure what I'm missing but I can't get it to work.. const int OP_LOAD = 3; const int OP_STORE = 4; const int OP_ADD = 5; ... const int OP_LOCATION_MULTIPLIER = 100; mem[0] = OP_LOAD * OP_LOCATION_MULTIPLIER + ...; mem[1] = OP_ADD * OP_LOCATION_MULTIPLIER + ...; operand = memory[ j ] % OP_LOCATION_MULTIPLIER; operation = memory[ j ] / OP_LOCATION_MULTIPLIER; I'm new to programming, I'm not the best, so I'm going for simplicity. Also this is an SML program. Anyway, this IS a homework assignment and I'm wanting a good grade on this. So I was looking for input and making sure this program will do what I'm hoping they are looking for. Anyway, here are the instructions: Write SML (Simpletron Machine language) programs to accomplish each of the following task: A) Use a sentinel-controlled loop to read positive number s and compute and print their sum. Terminate input when a neg number is entered. B) Use a counter-controlled loop to read seven numbers, some positive and some negative, and compute + print the avg. C) Read a series of numbers, and determine and print the largest number. The first number read indicates how many numbers should be processed. Without further a due, here is my program. All together. int main() { const int READ = 10; const int WRITE = 11; const int LOAD = 20; const int STORE = 21; const int ADD = 30; const int SUBTRACT = 31; const int DIVIDE = 32; const int MULTIPLY = 33; const int BRANCH = 40; const int BRANCHNEG = 41; const int BRANCHZERO = 41; const int HALT = 43; int mem[100] = {0}; //Making it 100, since simpletron contains a 100 word mem. int operation; //taking the rest of these variables straight out of the book seeing as how they were italisized. int operand; int accum = 0; // the special register is starting at 0 int j; // This is for part a, it will take in positive variables in a sent-controlled loop and compute + print their sum. Variables from example in text. memory [0] = 1010; memory [01] = 2009; memory [02] = 3008; memory [03] = 2109; memory [04] = 1109; memory [05] = 4300; memory [06] = 1009; j = 0; //Makes the variable j start at 0. while ( true ) { operand = memory[ j ]%100; // Finds the op codes from the limit on the memory (100) operation = memory[ j ]/100; //using a switch loop to set up the loops for the cases switch ( operation ){ case 10: //reads a variable into a word from loc. Enter in -1 to exit cout <<"\n Input a positive variable: "; cin >> memory[ operand ]; break; case 11: // takes a word from location cout << "\n\nThe content at location " << operand << "is " << memory[operand]; break; case 20:// loads accum = memory[ operand ]; break; case 21: //stores memory[ operand ] = accum; break; case 30: //adds accum += mem[operand]; break; case 31: // subtracts accum-= memory[ operand ]; break; case 32: //divides accum /=(memory[ operand ]); break; case 33: // multiplies accum*= memory [ operand ]; break; case 40: // Branches to location j = -1; break; case 41: //branches if acc. is < 0 if (accum < 0) j = 5; break; case 42: //branches if acc = 0 if (accum == 0) j = 5; break; case 43: // Program ends exit(0); break; } j++; } return 0; }

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• My computer freezes irregularly

  - by Manhim

  My computer started to freeze at irregular times for 3 weeks now. Please note that this question change with each things that i try. (For additional details) What happens My computer freezes, the video stops. (No graphic glitches, it just stops) Sound keeps playing up to some time (Usually 10-30 seconds) then stops playing. Sometimes, randomly, the screen on my G-15 keyboard flickers and I see caracters not at the right places. Usually happens for about 1-2 seconds and a bit before my computer freezes. I have to keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds to shut my computer down. I still hear my hard drives and fans working. Sometimes it works with no problems for a full day, some other times it just keeps freezing each time I restart my computer and I have to leave it for the rest of the day. Sometimes my mouse freezes for a fraction of a second (Like 0.01 to 0.2 seconds) quite randomly, usually before it freezes. No errors spotted by the "Action center" unlike when I had problems with my last video card on this system (Driver errors). My G-15 LCD screen also freezes. Sometimes my G-15 LCD screen flickers and caracters gets caried around temporary under heavy load. Now, most of the times, the BIOS hard disks boot order gets reversed for some reason and I have to put it to the right one and save each times I boot. (Might be unrelated, not sure, but it first started yesterday) Sometimes the BIOS doesn't detect my 750GB hard drive plugged in SATA1. What I did so far I have had similar problems in the past and I had changed my hard drive (It was faulty), so I tested my software RAID-0 array and it was faulty so I changed it. (I reinstalled Windows 7 with this part). I also tested with unplugging my secondary hard drive. My CPU was running at about 100 degree Celsius, I removed the dust between the fans and the heatsink and it's now between 45-55. I ran a CPU stress-test and it didn't freeze during the tests (using Prime95 on all cores) Ran a memory test (using memtest86+) for a single pass and there were no errors. Ran a GPU stress test with ati-tools and furmark and it didn't freeze during the tests. (No artefacts either) I had troubles with my graphic card when I got it, but I think that it got fixed with a driver update. I checked the voltages in my BIOS setup and they all seemed ok (±0.2 I think). I have ran on the computer without problems with Fedora 15 on an external hard drive (Appart that it couldn't load Gnome 3 and was reverting to Gnome 2, didn't want to install drivers since I use it on multiple computers) I used it to backup my files from the raid array to my 1TB hard drive for the reinstallation of Windows. (So the crashes only happenned on Windows) [The external hard drive is plugged directly on a SATA port] I contacted EVGA (My graphic card vendor) and pointed them on this question, I'm looking for an answer. Ran sensors on Fedora 15 and got this output: http://pastebin.com/0BHJnAvu Ran 6 short different CPU stress test on Fedora 15 (Haven't found any complete stress testers for Linux) and it didn't crash. Changed the thermal paste to some Artic Silver 5 for my CPU and stress tested the CPU, temperature was at 50 idle, then 64 highest and slowly went down to 62 during the test. Ran some stress testing with a temporary graphic card and it went ok. Ran furmark stress test with my original graphic card and it freezed again. GPU had a temp of 74C, a CPU temp of 58C and a mobo temp of 40C or 45C (Dunno which one it is from SpeedFan). Ran a furmark stress test and a CPU stress test at the same time, results: http://pastebin.com/2t6PLpdJ I have been using my computer without stressing it for about 2 hours now and no crashes yet. I also have disabled the AMD Cool'n'quiet function on the BIOS for a more regular power to the CPU. When I ran Furmark without C'n'q my computer didn't freeze but I had a "Driver Kernel Error" that have recovered (And Furmark crashed) all that while running a CPU stress test. The computer eventually frozed without me being at it, but this time my screen just went on sleep and I couldn't wake it. Using the stability tester in nTune my computer freezed again (In the same manner as before). I notived that Speedfan gives me a -12V of -16.97V and a -5V of -8.78V. I wonder if these numbers are reliable and if they are good or bad. I have swapped my G-15 with another basic USB keyboard (HP) and I have ran furmark for about 10 minutes with a CPU stability test running each 60 seconds for 30 seconds and my computer haven't crashed yet. Ran some more extended tests without my G-15 and it freezed like it usually do. Removed the nForce Hard disk controler. Disabled command queuing in the NVIDIA nForce SATA Controller for both port 0 and port 1 (Errors from the logs) Used CPUID HwMonitor, here are the voltages: http://pastebin.com/dfM7p4jV Changed some configurations in the motherboard BIOS: Disabled PEG Link Mode, Changed AI Tuning to Standard, Disabled the 1394 Controller, Disabled HD Audio, Disabled JMicron RAID controller and Disabled SATA Raid. When it happens When I play video games (Mostly) When I play flash games (Second most) When I'm looking at my desktop background (It rarely happens when I have a window open, but it does, sometimes) When my Graphic card and my CPU are stressed. Sometimes when my Graphic card is stressed. Never happenned while stressing only the CPU. Sometimes when my CPU is stressed. Specs Windows Seven x64 Home Premium Motherboard: M2N-SLI Deluxe CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 x2 @ 2.6GHz Memory: Kingston 4x2GB Dual Channel (Pretty basic memory sticks) Hard drives: Was 2x250GB (Western digital caviar) in raid-0 + 1TB (WD caviar black), I replaced the raid array with a 750GB (WD caviar black) [Yes I removed the array from the raid configurations] 750W Power supply No overcloking. Ever. There have been some power-downs like 4-5 weeks ago, but the problem didn't start immediately after. (I wasn't home, so my computer got shut-down) Event logs (Warnings, errors and critical errors) for the last 24 hours: http://pastebin.com/Bvvk31T7 My current to-try list Reinstall the drivers and software 1 by 1 and do extensive stress testing between each. Update the BIOS firmware to the most recent stable one. Change my motherboard. Status updates Keeping only the last 3 (28/06 04pm) More stress testing and still pass the tests. (28/06 03pm) Been stress testing for 10 minute straight now and 5 minutes with both CPU and GPU being stressed at the same time. (28/06 03pm) Stress-testing right now, so far no problems. A little hope Tests with Furmark and Prime95. Testing Windows bare-bone: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing an Anti-virus and some software, restarting computer. Testing with Anti-virus and some software (No drivers installed): 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing audio drivers, restarting computer. Testing with the audio drivers: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing the latest graphic drivers from EVGA's website (without 3d vision since I don't use it), restarting computer. Testing with the graphic drivers: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Configuring Windows to my liking and installing more softwares. In this situation, how can I successfully pin-point the current hardware problem? (If it's a hardware problem) Because I don't really have the budget to just forget and replace everything. I also don't really have hardware to test-replace current hardware.

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• SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates

  - by Jon Galloway

  The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail. Summary: SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for traditional the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system SimpleMembership solves common problems people ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage needs SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported as is part of the ASP.NET core ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools. SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET The ASP.NET Membership system was introduces with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work). The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages: With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles. Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership. Problems with ASP.NET Membership ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions: Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider Some problems fall out of these assumptions. Requires Full SQL Server for default cases The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc. Note: Cory Fowler recently let me know about these Updated ASP.net scripts for use with Microsoft SQL Azure which do support membership, personalization, profile, and roles. But the fact that we need a support page with a set of separate SQL scripts underscores the underlying problem. Aha, you say! Jon's forgetting the Universal Providers, a.k.a. System.Web.Providers! Hold on a bit, we'll get to those... Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply. Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profiles The existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application. This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns: In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around. Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns I've already mentioned this a few times, but it bears calling out separately - ASP.NET Membership focuses on SQL Server storage, and that storage is based on a very specific database schema. SimpleMembership as a better membership system As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems. Works with your Schema As Matthew Osborn explains in his Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages post, SimpleMembership is designed to integrate with your database schema: All SimpleMembership requires is that there are two columns on your users table so that we can hook up to it – an “ID” column and a “username” column. The important part here is that they can be named whatever you want. For instance username doesn't have to be an alias it could be an email column you just have to tell SimpleMembership to treat that as the “username” used to log in. Matthew's example shows using a very simple user table named Users (it could be named anything) with a UserID and Username column, then a bunch of other columns he wanted in his app. Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner: WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true); No other tables are needed, the table can be named anything we want, and can have pretty much any schema we want as long as we've got an ID and something that we can map to a username. Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications. Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point. Note: I'm thinking it would be possible for SimpleMembership (or something compatible) to run Entity Framework so it would work with any database EF supports. That seems useful to me - thoughts? Note: SimpleMembership has the same database support - anything in the SQL Server family - that Universal Providers brings to the ASP.NET Membership system. Easy to with Entity Framework Code First The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API. SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class. [Table("UserProfile")] public class UserProfile { [Key] [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] public int UserId { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } } Now if I want to access that information, I can just grab the account by username and read the value. var context = new UsersContext(); var username = User.Identity.Name; var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username); var birthday = user.Birthday; So instead of thinking of SimpleMembership as a big membership API, think of it as something that handles membership based on your user database. In SimpleMembership, everything's keyed off a user row in a table you define rather than a bunch of entries in membership tables that were out of your control. How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET Membership Okay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships): So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider: The important thing to take away here is that a SimpleMembershipProvider is a MembershipProvider, but a MembershipProvider is not a SimpleMembershipProvider. This distinction is important in practice: you cannot use an existing MembershipProvider (including the Universal Providers found in System.Web.Providers) with an API that requires a SimpleMembershipProvider, including any of the calls in WebMatrix.WebData.WebSecurity or Microsoft.Web.WebPages.OAuth.OAuthWebSecurity. However, that's as far as it goes. Membership Providers still work if you're accessing them through the standard Membership API, and all of the core stuff  - including the AuthorizeAttribute, role enforcement, etc. - will work just fine and without any change. Let's look at how that affects you in terms of the new templates. Membership in the ASP.NET MVC 4 project templates ASP.NET MVC 4 offers six Project Templates: Empty - Really empty, just the assemblies, folder structure and a tiny bit of basic configuration. Basic - Like Empty, but with a bit of UI preconfigured (css / images / bundling). Internet - This has both a Home and Account controller and associated views. The Account Controller supports registration and login via either local accounts and via OAuth / OpenID providers. Intranet - Like the Internet template, but it's preconfigured for Windows Authentication. Mobile - This is preconfigured using jQuery Mobile and is intended for mobile-only sites. Web API - This is preconfigured for a service backend built on ASP.NET Web API. Out of these templates, only one (the Internet template) uses SimpleMembership. ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template The Basic template has configuration in place to use ASP.NET Membership with the Universal Providers. You can see that configuration in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template's web.config: <profile defaultProvider="DefaultProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultProfileProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="DefaultRoleProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultRoleProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </roleManager> <sessionState mode="InProc" customProvider="DefaultSessionProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultSessionProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultSessionStateProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" /> </providers> </sessionState> This means that it's business as usual for the Basic template as far as ASP.NET Membership works. ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template The Internet template has a few things set up to bootstrap SimpleMembership: \Models\AccountModels.cs defines a basic user account and includes data annotations to define keys and such \Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs creates the membership database using the above model, then calls WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection which verifies that the underlying tables are in place and marks initialization as complete (for the application's lifetime) \Controllers\AccountController.cs makes heavy use of OAuthWebSecurity (for OAuth account registration / login / management) and WebSecurity. WebSecurity provides account management services for ASP.NET MVC (and Web Pages) WebSecurity can work with any ExtendedMembershipProvider. There's one in the box (SimpleMembershipProvider) but you can write your own. Since a standard MembershipProvider is not an ExtendedMembershipProvider, WebSecurity will throw exceptions if the default membership provider is a MembershipProvider rather than an ExtendedMembershipProvider. Practical example: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application using the Internet application template Install the Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers for LocalDB NuGet package Run the application, click on Register, add a username and password, and click submit You'll get the following execption in AccountController.cs::Register: To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider". This occurs because the ASP.NET Universal Providers packages include a web.config transform that will update your web.config to add the Universal Provider configuration I showed in the Basic template example above. When WebSecurity tries to use the configured ASP.NET Membership Provider, it checks if it can be cast to an ExtendedMembershipProvider before doing anything else. So, what do you do? Options: If you want to use the new AccountController, you'll either need to use the SimpleMembershipProvider or another valid ExtendedMembershipProvider. This is pretty straightforward. If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things: Replace  the AccountController.cs and AccountModels.cs in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project with one from an ASP.NET MVC 3 application (you of course won't have OAuth support). Then, if you want, you can go through and remove other things that were built around SimpleMembership - the OAuth partial view, the NuGet packages (e.g. the DotNetOpenAuthAuth package, etc.) Use an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template and add in a Universal Providers NuGet package. Then copy in the AccountController and AccountModel classes. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 using the steps shown in the ASP.NET MVC 4 release notes. None of these are particularly elegant or simple. Maybe we (or just me?) can do something to make this simpler - perhaps a NuGet package. However, this should be an edge case - hopefully the cases where you'd need to create a new ASP.NET but use legacy ASP.NET Membership Providers should be pretty rare. Please let me (or, preferably the team) know if that's an incorrect assumption. Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership. Note: There may be a way to use this in ASP.NET MVC 4, although it would probably take some plumbing work to hook it up. How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)? Just to summarize: Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls. Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family. Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership. The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them. What about the Web Site Administration Tool? Visual Studio includes tooling to launch the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) to configure users and roles in your application. WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Max Arderius

  Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is almost here! We're looking forward to updating you on our products, strategy, and roadmaps. This year, the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) will participate in 25 speaker sessions, two Meet the Experts round-table discussions, five demoground booths and seven Special Interest Group meetings as guest speakers. We hope to see you at our sessions.  Please join us to hear the latest news and connect with senior ATG development staff. Here's a downloadable listing of all Applications Technology Group-related sessions with times and locations: FOCUS ON Oracle E-Business Suite - Applications Tools and Technology (PDF) General Sessions GEN8474 - Oracle E-Business Suite - Strategy, Update, and RoadmapCliff Godwin, SVP, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West 2002/2004 In this session, hear Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin deliver an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. This session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You’ll come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and will deliver in the future. GEN9173 - Optimize and Extend Oracle Applications - The Path to Oracle Fusion ApplicationsNadia Bendjedou, Oracle; Corre Curtice, Bhavish Madurai (CSC) Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3002/3004 One of the main objectives of this session is to help organizations build their IT roadmap for the next five years and be aligned with the Oracle Applications strategy in general and the Oracle Fusion Applications strategy in particular. Come hear about some of the common sense, practical steps you can take to optimize the performance of your Oracle Applications today and prepare your path to Oracle Fusion Applications for when your organization is ready to embrace them. Each step you take in adopting Oracle Fusion technology gets you partway to Oracle Fusion Applications. Conference Sessions CON9024 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap Lisa Parekh, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a comprehensive overview of Oracle’s product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, and a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements of the user interface; systems administration and configuration management tools; security-related updates; and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. CON9021 - Oracle E-Business Suite Future Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2016  What’s coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This Oracle Development session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g) and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2). Topics include an architectural overview of the latest updates, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot cloning and automated “lights-out” cloning. Come learn how online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature) will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. CON9017 - Desktop Integration in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Padmaprabodh Ambale, Gustavo Jimenez, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This presentation covers the latest functional enhancements in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager, enhanced Microsoft Office support, and greater support for building custom desktop integration solutions. The session also presents tips and tricks for upgrading from Oracle Applications Desktop Integrator to Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager. CON9023 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and Roadmap Steven Chan, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016  Is your Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack up to date? Are you taking advantage of all the latest options and capabilities? This Oracle development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including elements such as database releases and options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop operating systems, browsers, JRE releases, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, business intelligence, Oracle Application Management Packs, security options, clouds, Oracle VM, and virtualization. The session also covers the most commonly asked questions about tech stack component support dates and upgrade implications. CON9028 - Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesSantiago Bastidas, Elke Phelps, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session features a survey of the best techniques sysadmins can use to minimize patching downtimes. It starts with an architectural-level review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the various tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in noninteractive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring systemwide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks, and more. An added bonus: hear about the upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite 12 online patching capabilities based on the groundbreaking Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature. CON9116 - Extending the Use of Oracle E-Business Suite with the Oracle Endeca PlatformOsama Elkady, Muhannad Obeidat, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2018 The Oracle Endeca platform includes a leading unstructured data correlation and analytics engine, together with a best-in class catalog search and guided navigation solution, to improve the productivity of all types of users in your enterprise. This development session focuses on the details behind the Oracle Endeca platform’s integration into Oracle E-Business Suite. It demonstrates how easily you can extend the use of the Oracle Endeca platform into other areas of Oracle E-Business Suite and how you can bring in your own data and build new Oracle Endeca applications for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON9005 - Oracle E-Business Suite Integration Best PracticesVeshaal Singh, Oracle, Jeffrey Hand, Zebra Technologies Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle is investing across applications and technologies to make the application integration experience easier for customers. Today Oracle has certified Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and provides a comprehensive set of integration technologies. Learn about Oracle’s integration offering across data- and process-centric integrations. These technologies can be used to address various application integration challenges and styles. In this session, you will get an understanding of how, when, and where you can leverage Oracle’s integration technologies to connect end-to-end business processes across your enterprise, including your Oracle Applications portfolio.  CON9026 - Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability EnhancementsPadmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session details the latest UI enhancements to Oracle Application Framework in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. Developers will get a detailed look at new features to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include new rich UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, REST interface, embedded widgets for analytics content, Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) task flows, third-party widgets, a look-ahead list of values, inline attachments, pop-ups, personalization and extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration, and mobile devices. CON8805 - Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to Release 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 3002/3004 Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 upgrade planning tips from Oracle’s support, consulting, development, and IT organizations. You’ll get specific cross-product advice on how to understand the factors that affect your project’s duration, decide on your project’s scope, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. CON9053 - Advanced Management of Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Enterprise ManagerAngelo Rosado, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 The task of managing and monitoring Oracle E-Business Suite environments can be very challenging. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only product on the market that is designed to monitor and manage all the different technologies that constitute Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including end user, midtier, configuration, host, and database management—to name just a few. Customers that have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager have experienced dramatic improvements in system visibility and diagnostic capability as well as administrator productivity. The purpose of this session is to highlight the key features and benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8809 - Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices: Technical InsightIsam Alyousfi, Udayan Parvate, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3011 This session is ideal for organizations thinking about upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. It covers the fundamentals of upgrading to Release 12.1, including the technology stack components and supported upgrade paths. Hear from Oracle Development about the set of best practices for patching in general and executing the Release 12.1 technical upgrade, with special considerations for minimizing your downtime. Also get to know about relatively recent upgrade resources. CON9032 - Upgrading Your Customizations of Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1Sara Woodhull, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016 Have you personalized Oracle Forms or Oracle Application Framework screens in Oracle E-Business Suite? Have you used mod_plsql in Release 11i? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment with other tools? The technical options for upgrading these customizations as part of your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade can be bewildering. Come to this Oracle development session to learn about selecting the best upgrade approach for your existing customizations. The session will help you understand customization scenarios and use cases, tools, and technologies to ensure that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users’ needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. CON9259 - Oracle E-Business Suite Internationalization and Multilingual FeaturesMaher Al-Nubani, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle E-Business Suite supports more countries, languages, and regions than ever. Come to this Oracle development session to get an overview of internationalization features and capabilities and see new Release 12 features such as calendar support for Hijra and Thai, new group separators, lightweight multilingual support (MLS) setup, new character sets such as AL32UTF, newly supported languages, Mac certifications, Oracle iSetup support for moving MLS setups, new file export options for Unicode, new MLS number spelling options, and more. CON7188 - Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA SuiteSrikant Subramaniam, Joe Huang, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3001 Follow your mobile customers, employees, and partners with Oracle Fusion Middleware. See how native iPhone and iPad applications can easily be built for Oracle E-Business Suite with the new Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, developers can quickly develop native applications for Apple iOS and other mobile platforms. The Oracle SOA Suite/Oracle ADF Mobile combination can execute business transactions on Oracle E-Business Suite. This session includes a demo in which a mobile user approves a business transaction in Oracle E-Business Suite and a demo of the tools used to build a native on-device solution. These concepts for mobile applications also apply to other Oracle applications.CON9029 - Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Slashing Downtimes with Online PatchingKevin Hudson, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle E-Business Suite will soon include online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature), which will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. This Oracle development session details how online patching works, with special attention to what’s happening at a database object level when database patches are applied to an Oracle E-Business Suite environment that’s still running. Come learn about the operational and system management implications for minimizing maintenance downtimes when applying database patches with this new technology and the related impact on customizations you might have built on top of Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8806 - Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1: Technical and Functional PanelAndrew Katz, Komori America Corporation; Sandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. ;Srini Chavali, Cummins Inc.; Amrita Mehrok, Nadia Bendjedou, Anne Carlson Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 In this panel discussion, Oracle experts, customers, and partners share their experiences in upgrading to the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite, Release 12.1. The panelists cover aspects of a typical Release 12 upgrade, technical (upgrading the technical infrastructure) as well as functional (upgrading to the new financial infrastructure). Hear directly from the experts who either develop the product or support, implement, or upgrade it, and find out how to apply their lessons learned to your organization. CON9027 - Personalize and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite Applications with Rich MashupsGustavo Jimenez, Padmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers the use of several Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to personalize and extend your existing Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies covered include Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Endeca applications, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Application Framework applications. CON9036 - Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures: Maximum Availability, Security, and MoreElke Phelps, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session includes architecture diagrams and configuration instructions for building a maximum availability architecture (MAA) that will help you design a disaster recovery solution that fits the needs of your business. Database and application high-availability features it describes include Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, load-balancing Web and forms services, parallel concurrent processing, and the use of Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata to provide a highly available environment. The session also covers the latest updates to systems management tools, AutoConfig, cloud computing, virtualization, and Oracle WebLogic Server and provides sneak previews of upcoming functionality. CON9047 - Efficiently Scaling Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exadata and Oracle ExalogicIsam Alyousfi, Nishit Rao, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are designed from the ground up with optimizations in software and hardware to deliver superfast performance for mission-critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle E-Business Suite applications run three to eight times as fast on the Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic platform in standard benchmark tests. Besides performance, customers benefit from simplified support, enhanced manageability, and the ability to consolidate multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Attend this session to understand best practices for Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata through customer case studies. Learn how adopting the Exa* platform increases efficiency, simplifies scaling, and boosts performance for peak loads. CON8716 - Web Services and SOA Integration Options for Oracle E-Business SuiteRekha Ayothi, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a deep dive into a subset of the Web services and SOA-related integration options available to Oracle E-Business Suite systems integrators. It offers a technical look at Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Application Adapters for Data Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, and other Web services options for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Systems integrators and developers will get an overview of the latest integration capabilities and technologies available out of the box with Oracle E-Business Suite and possibly a sneak preview of upcoming functionality and features. CON9030 - Recommendations for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance TuningIsam Alyousfi, Samer Barakat, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Need to squeeze more performance out of your existing servers? This packed Oracle development session summarizes practical tips and lessons learned from performance-tuning and benchmarking the world’s largest Oracle E-Business Suite environments. Apps sysadmins will learn concrete tips and techniques for identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks on all layers, with special attention to application- and database-tier servers. Learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Oracle Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues at the Java and JVM layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules. CON3429 - Using Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite: The Full Integration ViewSiva Puthurkattil, Lake County; Juan Camilo Ruiz, Sara Woodhull, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 3003 Oracle E-Business Suite delivers functionality for handling the core business of your organization. However, user requirements and new technologies are driving an emerging need to implement new types of user interfaces for these applications. This session provides an overview of how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) to deliver cutting-edge Web 2.0 and mobile rich user interfaces that front existing Oracle E-Business Suite processes, and it also explores all the existing types of integration between the two worlds. CON9020 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Identity Management SolutionsSunil Ghosh, Elke Phelps, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Need to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite with Microsoft Windows Kerberos, Active Directory, CA Netegrity SiteMinder, or other third-party authentication systems? Want to understand your options when Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Single Sign-On ends in December 2011? This Oracle Development session covers the latest certified integrations with Oracle Access Manager 11g and Oracle Internet Directory 11g, which can be used individually or as bridges for integrating with third-party authentication solutions. The session presents an architectural overview of how Oracle Access Manager, its WebGate and AccessGate components, and Oracle Internet Directory work together, with implications for Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Portal, and other Oracle Fusion identity management products. CON9019 - Troubleshooting, Diagnosing, and Optimizing Oracle E-Business Suite TechnologyGustavo Jimenez, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers how you can proactively diagnose Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including extensions built with Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) and Oracle WebCenter to catch potential issues in the middle tier before they become more serious. Topics include debugging, logging infrastructure, warning signs, performance tuning, information required when logging service requests, general JVM optimization, and an overall picture of all the moving parts that make it possible for Oracle E-Business Suite to isolate and fix problems. Also learn how Oracle Diagnostics Framework will help prevent downtime caused by failures. CON9031 - The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Secure Your Oracle E-Business Suite InstanceEric Bing, Erik Graversen, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Learn the top 10 things you can do to secure your applications and your sensitive data. This Oracle development session for system administrators and security professionals explores some of the most important and overlooked things you can do to secure your Oracle E-Business Suite instance. It also covers data masking and other mechanisms for protecting sensitive data. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Some of our most senior staff have been invited to participate on the following SIG meetings as guest speakers: SIG10525 - OAUG - Archive & Purge SIGBrian Bent - Pre-Sales Engineer, TierData, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3011 The Archive and Purge SIG is an organization in which users can share their experiences and solicit functional and technical advice on archiving and purging data in Oracle E-Business Suite. This session provides an opportunity for users to network and share best practices, tips, and tricks. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance, Archive & Purging - Q&A SessionIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10547 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business (EBS) Applications Technology SIGSrini Chavali - IT Director, Cummins Inc Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3018 The general purpose of the EBS Applications Technology SIG is to inform and educate its members about current and future components of the tech stack as they relate to Oracle E-Business Suite. Attend this meeting for networking and education and to share best practices. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Roadmap - Presentation and Q&ASteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10559 - OAUG - User Management SIGSusan Behn - VP of Oracle Delivery, Infosemantics, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3024 The E-Business Suite User Management SIG focuses on the components of user management that enable Oracle E-Business Suite users to define administrative functions and manage users’ access to functions and data based on roles within an organization—rather than the user’s individual identity—which is referred to as role-based access control (RBAC). This meeting includes an introduction to Oracle User Management that covers the Oracle User Management building blocks and presents an example of creating a security policy.Guest: Security and User Management - Q&A SessionEric Bing, Sr. Director, EBS Security, OracleSara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10515 - OAUG – Upgrade SIGBarbara Matthews - Consultant, On Call DBASandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM - Moscone West 3009 This Upgrade SIG session starts with a business meeting and then features a Q&A panel discussion on Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade topics. The session• Reviews Upgrade SIG goals and objectives• Provides answers, during the Q&A session, to questions related to Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades• Shares “real world” experiences, tips, and techniques for Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades to Release 12.1. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade - Q&A SessionAnne Carlson - Sr. Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product Strategy, OracleUdayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, OracleSuzana Ferrari, Sr. Principal Consultant, OracleIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10552 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business Suite SIGDonna Rosentrater - Manager, Global Sourcing & Procurement Systems, TJX Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3020 The E-Business Suite SIG, affiliated with OAUG, supports Oracle E-Business Suite users through networking, education, and sharing of best practices. This SIG meeting will feature a general discussion of Oracle E-Business Suite product strategies in Release 12 and migration to Oracle Fusion Applications. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite - Q&A SessionJeanne Lowell, Vice President, EBS Product Strategy, OracleNadia Bendjedou, Sr. Director, Product Strategy, Oracle SIG10556 - OAUG - SysAdmin SIGRandy Giefer - Sr Systems and Security Architect, Solution Beacon, LLC Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3022 The SysAdmin SIG provides a forum in which OAUG members and participants can share updates, tips, and successful practices relating to system administration in an Oracle applications environment. The SysAdmin SIG strives to enable system administrators to become more effective and efficient in their jobs by providing them with access to people and information that can increase their system administration knowledge and experience. Attend this meeting to network, share best practices, and benefit from educational content. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching- Presentation and Q&AKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10553 - OAUG - Database SIGMichael Brown - Senior DBA, COLIBRI LTD LC Sunday, Sep 30, 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 3020 The OAUG Database SIG provides an opportunity for applications database administrators to learn from and share their experiences with supporting the various Oracle applications environments. This session will include a brief business meeting followed by a short presentation. It will end with an open discussion among the attendees about items of interest to those present. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance - Presentation and Q&AIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Meet the Experts We're planning two round-table discussions where you can review your questions with senior E-Business Suite ATG staff: MTE9648 - Meet the Experts for Oracle E-Business Suite: Planning Your Upgrade Jeanne Lowell - VP, EBS Product Strategy, Oracle John Abraham - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou - Sr. Director - Product Strategy, Oracle Anne Carlson - Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Udayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, Oracle Isam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade best practices. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. MTE9649 - Meet the Oracle E-Business Suite Tools and Technology Experts Lisa Parekh - Vice President, Technology Integration, Oracle Steven Chan - Sr. Director, Oracle Elke Phelps - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Max Arderius - Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite technology. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. Demos We have five booths in the exhibition demogrounds this year, where you can try ATG technologies firsthand and get your questions answered. Please stop by and meet our staff at the following locations: Advanced Architecture and Technology Stack for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-067) New User Productivity Capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite (W-065) End-to-End Management of Oracle E-Business Suite (W-063) Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Technical Upgrade Best Practices (W-066) SOA-Based Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-064)

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

  - by Michael Williamson

  Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

  - by Alan Smith

  For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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• Simplemodal: four times on a page leads to extra "next" or "previous" button

  - by DDF

  We are experiencing a problem with each instance of the call to the simplemodal div class .basic-modal-content adding an extra next or previous button in the modal windows. We are using simplemodal in four places on a page using a common JS in the container (provided below) and a common CSS format for the modal windows. In one area we are using six "statements" in a window with a next and previous button. I would include a picture of the modal window but it's being disallowed by the system as I'm a first time poster to this forum. In the other three areas we are using three "biographies" in a similar window with the ability to see each of the three bios from each of modal windows. We are using a common Simplemodal JS script in the page which has the following code: <script> $(function() { $('a').each(function() { $(this).click(function() { $('#modal_' + this.id).modal({ overlayClose:true }); }); }); var num_divs = $('div.basic-modal-content').length; $('div.basic-modal-content').each(function(i) { /* if there is a previous div add a link to it */ if (i > 0) { /* get the ID for previous div */ var prev_id = $(this).prev('.basic-modal-content').attr('id'); /* add the link with click event */ $('<a href="#" class="simplemodal-container-prev"></a>') .click(function() { $.modal.close(); $('#' + prev_id).modal({overlayClose:true}); }) .appendTo($(this)); } /* if there is a next div add a link to it */ if (i < num_divs - 1) { /* get the ID for next div */ var next_id = $(this).next('.basic-modal-content').attr('id'); /* add the link with click event */ $('<a href="#" class="simplemodal-container-next"></a>') .click(function() { $.modal.close(); $('#' + next_id).modal({overlayClose:true}); }) .appendTo($(this)); } }); }); </script> and some CSS to create an image for each window that shows the progress bar through the ul/li list. The code to produce the above looks like this: <h1>Our HEADLINE</h1> <div id='basic-modal'> <ul> <li><a href='#' id='one'>TEXT 1</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='two'>TEXT 2</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='three'>TEXT 3</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='four'>TEXT 4</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='five'>TEXT 5</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='six'>TEXT 6</a></li> </ul> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_one"> <img src="link to modal_one.png" alt="progress bar"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>body text</p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_two"> <img src="link to modal_two.png" alt="progress bar"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>body text</p> </div> <div> ... other divs 3 4 and 5 </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_six"> <img src="link to modal_six.png" alt="progress bar"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>body text</p> </div> </div> The ul/li structure works on the main page for the links. The modal windows allow one to browse through all of the six TEXTs. There is a common CSS style to the windows and a custom image in each of the modal windows derived from the "#modal_[number] img" CSS in the form of a progress bar. It should be noted that the first modal window in the first set of ul/li (the six) do not exhibit the extra previous button. Here is the relevant code from one of the three biographic links. You will note that the biographic links each have to have all three in this current configuration. <h4>Our HEADLINE</h4> <div class="bottom-widget-text"> <img src="picture" alt="not relevant to the simplemodal problem"/> <p>Read about person NUMBER 1 by clicking on the following link: <a href='#' id='seven' >Expand</a> </p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_seven"> <img src="link to modal_seven.png" alt="portrait 1"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>BIOGRAPHY</p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_eight"> <img src="link to modal_eight.png" alt="portrait 2"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>BIOGRAPHY</p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_nine"> <img src="link to modal_nine.png" alt="portrait 3"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>BIOGRAPHY</p> </div> </div> Similarly the "biographies" open up from a different area of the page. The modal windows allow one to browse through all three of the BIOs. The bios use the SAME CSS style windows and a custom image in each of the modal windows derived from the "#modal_[number] img" CSS in the form of a portrait. Everything is working well except one thing: the first six windows have an extra next button that leads to an image of the close widow button only. Similarly, the BIOs pages have extra previous button that leads to the same "close button only" shown above. We want to maintain the same base CSS for the modal windows for this page. We want to keep the JS simple. The only behavior that is bad is the extra previous and next bottons that appear to be spurious. So is this a fix to the JS? Or do I have the instances of the modal windows too entangled? Perhaps there is a better method for having multiple instances of a simplemodal window on the same page? Or is the problem the "#" variable being common to each of the uses of the JS? Thanks in advance. DDF

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• Handling aces and finding a segfault in a blackjack program

  - by Bill Adams

  Here's what i have so far... I have yet to figure out how i'm going to handle the 11 / 1 situation with an ace, and when the player chooses an option for hit/stand, i get segfault. HELP!!! #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <time.h> #define DECKSIZE 52 #define VALUE 9 #define FACE 4 #define HANDSIZE 26 typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }Card; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }dealerHand; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }playerHand; Card cards[DECKSIZE]; dealerHand deal[HANDSIZE]; playerHand dealt[HANDSIZE]; char *faceName[]={"two","three", "four","five","six", "seven","eight","nine", "ten", "jack","queen", "king","ace"}; char *suitName[]={"spades","diamonds","clubs","hearts"}; void printDeck(){ int i; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ printf("%s of %s value = %d\n ",cards[i].name,cards[i].suit,cards[i].value); if((i+1)%13==0 && i!=0) printf("-------------------\n\n"); } } void shuffleDeck(){ srand(time(NULL)); int this; int that; Card temp; int c; for(c=0;c<10000;c++){ //c is the index for number of individual card shuffles should be set to c<10000 or more this=rand()%DECKSIZE; that=rand()%DECKSIZE; temp=cards[this]; cards[this]=cards[that]; cards[that]=temp; } } /*void hitStand(i,y){ // I dumped this because of a segfault i couldn't figure out. int k; printf(" Press 1 to HIT or press 2 to STAND:"); scanf("%d",k); if(k=1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } } */ int main(){ int suitCount=0; int faceCount=0; int i; int x; int y; int d; int p; int k; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ //this for statement builds the deck if(faceCount<9){ cards[i].value=faceCount+2; }else{ //assigns face cards as value 10 cards[i].value=10; } cards[i].suit=suitName[suitCount]; cards[i].name=faceName[faceCount++]; if(faceCount==13){ //this if loop increments suit count once cards[i].value=11; //all faces have been assigned, and also suitCount++; //assigns the ace as 11 faceCount=0; } //end building deck } /*printDeck(); //prints the deck in order shuffleDeck(); //shuffles the deck printDeck(); //prints the deck as shuffled This was used in testing, commented out to keep the deck hidden!*/ shuffleDeck(); x=0; y=0; for(i=0;i<4;i++){ //this for loop deals the first 4 cards, dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; //first card to player, second to dealer, dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; //as per standard dealing practice. dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; i++; y++; deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; } printf(" Dealer's hand is: %s of %s and XXXX of XXXX. (Second card is hidden!)\n",deal[0].name,deal[0].suit,deal[1].name,deal[1].suit); printf(" Player's hand is: %s of %s and %s of %s.\n",dealt[0].name,dealt[0].suit,dealt[1].name,dealt[1].suit); printf(" the current value of the index i=%d\n",i); //this line gave me the value of i for testing d=deal[0].value+deal[1].value; p=dealt[0].value+dealt[1].value; if(d==21){ printf(" The Dealer has Blackjack! House win!\n"); }else{ if(d>21){ printf(" The dealer is Bust! You win!\n"); }else{ if(d>17){ printf(" Press 1 to HIT or 2 to STAND"); scanf("%d",k); if(k==1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } }else{ if(d<17){ printf(" Dealer Hits!"); deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; i++; } } } } return 0; }

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• ANSI C blackjack assignment, linux GCC compiler, i'm stuck...

  - by Bill Adams

  Here's what i have so far... I have yet to figure out how i'm going to handle the 11 / 1 situation with an ace, and when the player chooses an option for hit/stand, i get segfault. HELP!!! #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <time.h> #define DECKSIZE 52 #define VALUE 9 #define FACE 4 #define HANDSIZE 26 typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }Card; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }dealerHand; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }playerHand; Card cards[DECKSIZE]; dealerHand deal[HANDSIZE]; playerHand dealt[HANDSIZE]; char *faceName[]={"two","three", "four","five","six", "seven","eight","nine", "ten", "jack","queen", "king","ace"}; char *suitName[]={"spades","diamonds","clubs","hearts"}; void printDeck(){ int i; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ printf("%s of %s value = %d\n ",cards[i].name,cards[i].suit,cards[i].value); if((i+1)%13==0 && i!=0) printf("-------------------\n\n"); } } void shuffleDeck(){ srand(time(NULL)); int this; int that; Card temp; int c; for(c=0;c<10000;c++){ //c is the index for number of individual card shuffles should be set to c<10000 or more this=rand()%DECKSIZE; that=rand()%DECKSIZE; temp=cards[this]; cards[this]=cards[that]; cards[that]=temp; } } /*void hitStand(i,y){ // I dumped this because of a segfault i couldn't figure out. int k; printf(" Press 1 to HIT or press 2 to STAND:"); scanf("%d",k); if(k=1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } } */ int main(){ int suitCount=0; int faceCount=0; int i; int x; int y; int d; int p; int k; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ //this for statement builds the deck if(faceCount<9){ cards[i].value=faceCount+2; }else{ //assigns face cards as value 10 cards[i].value=10; } cards[i].suit=suitName[suitCount]; cards[i].name=faceName[faceCount++]; if(faceCount==13){ //this if loop increments suit count once cards[i].value=11; //all faces have been assigned, and also suitCount++; //assigns the ace as 11 faceCount=0; } //end building deck } /*printDeck(); //prints the deck in order shuffleDeck(); //shuffles the deck printDeck(); //prints the deck as shuffled This was used in testing, commented out to keep the deck hidden!*/ shuffleDeck(); x=0; y=0; for(i=0;i<4;i++){ //this for loop deals the first 4 cards, dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; //first card to player, second to dealer, dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; //as per standard dealing practice. dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; i++; y++; deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; } printf(" Dealer's hand is: %s of %s and XXXX of XXXX. (Second card is hidden!)\n",deal[0].name,deal[0].suit,deal[1].name,deal[1].suit); printf(" Player's hand is: %s of %s and %s of %s.\n",dealt[0].name,dealt[0].suit,dealt[1].name,dealt[1].suit); printf(" the current value of the index i=%d\n",i); //this line gave me the value of i for testing d=deal[0].value+deal[1].value; p=dealt[0].value+dealt[1].value; if(d==21){ printf(" The Dealer has Blackjack! House win!\n"); }else{ if(d>21){ printf(" The dealer is Bust! You win!\n"); }else{ if(d>17){ printf(" Press 1 to HIT or 2 to STAND"); scanf("%d",k); if(k==1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } }else{ if(d<17){ printf(" Dealer Hits!"); deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; i++; } } } } return 0; }

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• how to keep same header on starting of next page in pdf

  - by Santosh Singh

  Here is My Code. private void getActionItems(Document document, Chapter chapter, Section section, Paragraph pas) { List drbRefList = null; try { _actionService = new ActionItemImpl(); _aiBean = new ActionItemData(); if (_aiBean != null) { _actionList = new ArrayList(); LOG.info("business passed here is" + _business); _actionList = _actionService.getActionItemsForPDF(_userSSOID, _business, _reviewID, _connection); } LOG.info(" after calling getActionItemsForPDF"); LOG.info("_actionList" + _actionList); Table tablesh1 = new Table(1, 1); float[] widthsh1 = new float[1]; widthsh1[0] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTTWELVE; tablesh1.setTableFitsPage(true); tablesh1.setPadding(2); tablesh1.setSpacing(0); tablesh1.setWidth(ReviewConstants.MAGIC_ONEZEROZERO); tablesh1.setWidths(widthsh1); tablesh1.setBorderColor(Color.WHITE); Cell hcell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_ACTIONHEADING, new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD, Color.BLUE))); hcell.setHeader(true); tablesh1.addCell(hcell); section.add(tablesh1); Table actionTable = null; String businessUnit = reviewData.getBusinessUnit(); float[] widthac = null; //Updated for Nuclear Energy Engineering Business Unit Requirement by Naveen if(!"Nuclear Energy Engineering".equalsIgnoreCase(businessUnit)){ actionTable = new Table(ReviewConstants.NINE,ReviewConstants.THREE); widthac = new float[ReviewConstants.NINE]; widthac[0] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONE; widthac[1] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; widthac[2] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTTWOZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.THREE] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTTWOZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.FOUR] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.FIVE] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.SIX] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.SEVEN] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.EIGHT] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; }else{ actionTable = new Table(ReviewConstants.SIX,ReviewConstants.THREE); widthac = new float[ReviewConstants.SIX]; widthac[0] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONE; widthac[1] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_THREEZERO; widthac[2] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_THREEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.THREE] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_THREEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.FOUR] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; widthac[ReviewConstants.FIVE] = ReviewConstants.MAGIC_DOTONEZERO; } actionTable.setTableFitsPage(true); actionTable.setPadding(2); actionTable.setSpacing(0); actionTable.setWidth(ReviewConstants.MAGIC_ONEZEROZERO); actionTable.setWidths(widthac); actionTable.setBorderWidth(1); Cell accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_ACTIONID, new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); if(!"Nuclear Energy Engineering".equalsIgnoreCase(businessUnit)){ accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.PDF_RT, new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); } accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_REQA, new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_CLOSURE, new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_DISPOSITION, new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); //added by santosh on 18 june actionTable.endHeaders(); document.add(actionTable); if(!"Nuclear Energy Engineering".equalsIgnoreCase(businessUnit)){ accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_DRB_REFERENCE, new Font( Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_DEADLINE, new Font( Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); } accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_OWNER, new Font( Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); accell = new Cell(new Paragraph(ReviewConstants.S_STATE, new Font( Font.HELVETICA, fontSize, Font.BOLD))); accell.setHeader(true); actionTable.addCell(accell); int acSize = 0; if (_actionList != null) { acSize = _actionList.size(); } for (int i = 0; i < acSize; i++) { _aiBean = (ActionItemData) _actionList.get(i); Cell adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getActionID(), new Font( Font.HELVETICA, ReviewConstants.MAGIC_EIGHT))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); if(!"Nuclear Energy Engineering".equalsIgnoreCase(businessUnit)){ if (_aiBean.getActionItemType().equals("0")) { adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph("Normal", new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); } else { adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph("Critical", new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); } adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); } adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getRequiredAction(), new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getClosureCriteria(), new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); String drbLink = ReviewConstants.EMPTY; drbRefList = new ArrayList(); if (!DRUtils.isEmpty(_aiBean.getState()) && ((_aiBean.getState() .equalsIgnoreCase(ReviewConstants.DRAFT_BEGUN_STATE)) || (_aiBean.getState() .equalsIgnoreCase(ReviewConstants.SCOPE_PROPOSED)) || (_aiBean .getState() .equalsIgnoreCase(ReviewConstants.RES_PROPOSED)))) { drbLink = ReviewConstants.EMPTY; _aiBean.setDisposition(ReviewConstants.EMPTY); } else { drbRefList = _actionService.getDrbRefForPDF(_aiBean.getActionSeqID(), _connection); int drbRefCnt = 0; if (drbRefList != null) { drbRefCnt = drbRefList.size(); int j = 0; for (j = 0; j < drbRefCnt; j++) { LOG.info("drbRefList.get(j)" + drbRefList.get(j).toString()); if (j < (drbRefCnt - 1)) { drbLink += drbRefList.get(j).toString() + ReviewConstants.COMMA_SPACE; } else { drbLink += drbRefList.get(j).toString(); } } } } LOG.info("drbLink" + drbLink); adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getDisposition(), new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); //Updated for Nuclear Energy Engineering Business Unit Requirement by Naveen if(!"Nuclear Energy Engineering".equalsIgnoreCase(businessUnit)){ adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(drbLink, new Font( Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getDeadline(), new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); } adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getActionItemOwnerName(), new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); adCell = new Cell(new Paragraph(_aiBean.getState(), new Font(Font.HELVETICA, fontSize))); adCell.setHeader(false); actionTable.addCell(adCell); //added by santosh actionTable.endHeaders(); document.add(actionTable); // added by santosh end } /*Phrase headerPhrase = new Phrase(); Table headTab = (Table)actionTable.getElement(0, 5); headerPhrase.add(headTab); HeaderFooter printHeader = new HeaderFooter(headerPhrase,false); System.out.println("addHeader"); document.setHeader(printHeader); actionTable.setLastHeaderRow(1); actionTable.endHeaders(); document.add(actionTable);*/ // added by santosh actionTable.endHeaders(); document.add(actionTable); // added by santosh end section.add(actionTable); } catch (Exception e) { LOG.error("General Exception occured", e); } }

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• Implementing union of Set using basic java array

  - by lupindeterd

  Note: This is an assignment. Hi, Continuing with my Set implementation using Java basic array, I'm now struggling with the 3 to last function namely the union. import java.io.*; class Set { private int numberOfElements = 0; private String[] setElements = new String[5]; private int maxNumberOfElements = 5; // constructor for our Set class public Set(int numberOfE, int setE, int maxNumberOfE) { int numberOfElements = numberOfE; String[] setElements = new String[setE]; int maxNumberOfElements = maxNumberOfE; } // Helper method to shorten/remove element of array since we're using basic array instead of ArrayList or HashSet from collection interface :( static String[] removeAt(int k, String[] arr) { final int L = arr.length; String[] ret = new String[L - 1]; System.arraycopy(arr, 0, ret, 0, k); System.arraycopy(arr, k + 1, ret, k, L - k - 1); return ret; } int findElement(String element) { int retval = 0; for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { if ( setElements[i] != null && setElements[i].equals(element) ) { return retval = i; } retval = -1; } return retval; } void add(String newValue) { int elem = findElement(newValue); if( numberOfElements < maxNumberOfElements && elem == -1 ) { setElements[numberOfElements] = newValue; numberOfElements++; } } int getLength() { if ( setElements != null ) { return setElements.length; } else { return 0; } } String[] emptySet() { setElements = new String[0]; return setElements; } Boolean isFull() { Boolean True = new Boolean(true); Boolean False = new Boolean(false); if ( setElements.length == maxNumberOfElements ){ return True; } else { return False; } } Boolean isEmpty() { Boolean True = new Boolean(true); Boolean False = new Boolean(false); if ( setElements.length == 0 ) { return True; } else { return False; } } void remove(String newValue) { for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { if ( setElements[i].equals(newValue) ) { setElements = removeAt(i,setElements); } } } int isAMember(String element) { int retval = -1; for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++ ) { if (setElements[i] != null && setElements[i].equals(element)) { return retval = i; } } return retval; } void printSet() { for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { System.out.println("Member elements on index: "+ i +" " + setElements[i]); } } String[] getMember() { String[] tempArray = new String[setElements.length]; for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { if(setElements[i] != null) { tempArray[i] = setElements[i]; } } return tempArray; } Set union(Set x, Set y) { String[] newtemparray = new String[x.getLength]; newtemparray = x.getMember; return x; } } // This is the SetDemo class that will make use of our Set class class SetDemo { public static void main(String[] args) { //get input from keyboard BufferedReader keyboard; InputStreamReader reader; String temp = ""; reader = new InputStreamReader(System.in); keyboard = new BufferedReader(reader); try { System.out.println("Enter string element to be added" ); temp = keyboard.readLine( ); System.out.println("You entered " + temp ); } catch (IOException IOerr) { System.out.println("There was an error during input"); } /* ************************************************************************** * Test cases for our new created Set class. * ************************************************************************** */ Set setA = new Set(1,10,10); setA.add(temp); setA.add("b"); setA.add("b"); setA.add("hello"); setA.add("world"); setA.add("six"); setA.add("seven"); setA.add("b"); int size = setA.getLength(); System.out.println("Set size is: " + size ); Boolean isempty = setA.isEmpty(); System.out.println("Set is empty? " + isempty ); int ismember = setA.isAMember("sixb"); System.out.println("Element six is member of setA? " + ismember ); Boolean output = setA.isFull(); System.out.println("Set is full? " + output ); setA.printSet(); int index = setA.findElement("world"); System.out.println("Element b located on index: " + index ); setA.remove("b"); setA.emptySet(); int resize = setA.getLength(); System.out.println("Set size is: " + resize ); setA.printSet(); Set setB = new Set(0,10,10); Set SetA = setA.union(setB,setA); } } Ok the method in question will be the implementation of union. As such this: Set union(Set x, Set y) { String[] newtemparray = new String[x.getLength]; newtemparray = x.getMember; return x; } I got this error: symbol : variable getLength location: class Set String[] newtemparray = new String[x.getLength]; ^ d:\javaprojects\Set.java:122: cannot find symbol symbol : variable getMember location: class Set newtemparray = x.getMember; ^ 2 errors My approach for union would be: *) create temporary array of string with size of the object x length. *) store object x members to temporary array by looping the object and calling the getMember *) loop object y members and check if element exist against temporary array. *) discard if it exist/add if it is not there *) return obj x with the union array. thanks, lupin

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• Java constructor and modify the object properties at runtime

  - by lupin

  Note: This is an assignment Hi, I have the following class/constructor. import java.io.*; class Set { public int numberOfElements = 0; public String[] setElements = new String[5]; public int maxNumberOfElements = 5; // constructor for our Set class public Set(int numberOfE, int setE, int maxNumberOfE) { int numberOfElements = numberOfE; String[] setElements = new String[setE]; int maxNumberOfElements = maxNumberOfE; } // Helper method to shorten/remove element of array since we're using basic array instead of ArrayList or HashSet from collection interface :( static String[] removeAt(int k, String[] arr) { final int L = arr.length; String[] ret = new String[L - 1]; System.arraycopy(arr, 0, ret, 0, k); System.arraycopy(arr, k + 1, ret, k, L - k - 1); return ret; } int findElement(String element) { int retval = 0; for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { if ( setElements[i] != null && setElements[i].equals(element) ) { return retval = i; } retval = -1; } return retval; } void add(String newValue) { int elem = findElement(newValue); if( numberOfElements < maxNumberOfElements && elem == -1 ) { setElements[numberOfElements] = newValue; numberOfElements++; } } int getLength() { if ( setElements != null ) { return setElements.length; } else { return 0; } } String[] emptySet() { setElements = new String[0]; return setElements; } Boolean isFull() { Boolean True = new Boolean(true); Boolean False = new Boolean(false); if ( setElements.length == maxNumberOfElements ){ return True; } else { return False; } } Boolean isEmpty() { Boolean True = new Boolean(true); Boolean False = new Boolean(false); if ( setElements.length == 0 ) { return True; } else { return False; } } void remove(String newValue) { for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { if ( setElements[i].equals(newValue) ) { setElements = removeAt(i,setElements); } } } int isAMember(String element) { int retval = -1; for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++ ) { if (setElements[i] != null && setElements[i].equals(element)) { return retval = i; } } return retval; } void printSet() { for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { System.out.println("Member elements on index: "+ i +" " + setElements[i]); } } String[] getMember() { String[] tempArray = new String[setElements.length]; for ( int i = 0; i < setElements.length; i++) { if(setElements[i] != null) { tempArray[i] = setElements[i]; } } return tempArray; } Set union(Set x, Set y) { String[] newXtemparray = new String[x.getLength()]; String[] newYtemparray = new String[y.getLength()]; Set temp = new Set(1,20,20); newXtemparray = x.getMember(); newYtemparray = x.getMember(); for(int i = 0; i < newXtemparray.length; i++) { temp.add(newYtemparray[i]); } for(int j = 0; j < newYtemparray.length; j++) { temp.add(newYtemparray[j]); } return temp; } } // This is the SetDemo class that will make use of our Set class class SetDemo { public static void main(String[] args) { //get input from keyboard BufferedReader keyboard; InputStreamReader reader; String temp = ""; reader = new InputStreamReader(System.in); keyboard = new BufferedReader(reader); try { System.out.println("Enter string element to be added" ); temp = keyboard.readLine( ); System.out.println("You entered " + temp ); } catch (IOException IOerr) { System.out.println("There was an error during input"); } /* ************************************************************************** * Test cases for our new created Set class. * ************************************************************************** */ Set setA = new Set(1,10,10); setA.add(temp); setA.add("b"); setA.add("b"); setA.add("hello"); setA.add("world"); setA.add("six"); setA.add("seven"); setA.add("b"); int size = setA.getLength(); System.out.println("Set size is: " + size ); Boolean isempty = setA.isEmpty(); System.out.println("Set is empty? " + isempty ); int ismember = setA.isAMember("sixb"); System.out.println("Element six is member of setA? " + ismember ); Boolean output = setA.isFull(); System.out.println("Set is full? " + output ); setA.printSet(); int index = setA.findElement("world"); System.out.println("Element b located on index: " + index ); setA.remove("b"); setA.emptySet(); int resize = setA.getLength(); System.out.println("Set size is: " + resize ); setA.printSet(); Set setB = new Set(0,10,10); Set SetA = setA.union(setB,setA); SetA.printSet(); } } I have two question here, why I when I change the class property declaration to: class Set { public int numberOfElements; public String[] setElements; public int maxNumberOfElements; // constructor for our Set class public Set(int numberOfE, int setE, int maxNumberOfE) { int numberOfElements = numberOfE; String[] setElements = new String[setE]; int maxNumberOfElements = maxNumberOfE; } I got this error: \ javaprojects>java SetDemo Enter string element to be added a You entered a Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Set.findElement(Set.java:30) at Set.add(Set.java:43) at SetDemo.main(Set.java:169) Second, on the union method, why the result of SetA.printSet still printing null, isn't it getting back the return value from union method? Thanks in advance for any explaination. lupin

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• reCaptcha integration with php

  - by Neil Bradley

  Hi there, I'm building a contact us page that also uses a reCaptcha, but im having a few issues with it. I fill in all of the fields in the contact form and the correct reCaptcha words, but the form does not submit. I'm assuming this is something to do with the validation, but wondered if someone might be able to spot where i'm going wrong? The PHP code at the top of my page looks like this; <?php include('includes/session.php'); $err = ''; $success = ''; if(isset($_POST["docontact"]) && $_POST["docontact"] == "yes") { //get form details $form = new stdClass(); $form->name = sanitizeOne($_POST["name"], "str"); $form->email = sanitizeOne($_POST["email"], "str"); $form->phone = sanitizeOne($_POST["phone"], "str"); $form->mysevenprog = sanitizeOne($_POST["mysevenprog"], "str"); $form->enquiry = sanitizeOne($_POST["enquiry"], "str"); $form->howfindsite = sanitizeOne($_POST["howfindsite"], "str"); //Check for errors (required: name, email, enquiry) if($form->name == "") { $err .= '<p class="warning">Please enter your name!</p>'; } if($form->email == "") { $err .= '<p class="warning">Please enter your email address!</p>'; } if($form->enquiry == "") { $err .= '<p class="warning">Please supply an enquiry message!</p>'; } //Send Email if($err == "") { $mailer = new BlueMailer(); $mailer->AddAddress(Configuration::getVar("developer_email"), Configuration::getVar("admin_email_name")); include('templates/email/contact-us-admin.php'); if(!$mailer->Send()) { $err .= "<p>There was an error sending submitting your request!, Please try again later."; } else { $success = 'thanks'; } } } else { //Initialise empty variables $form = new stdClass(); $form->name = ""; $form->email = ""; $form->phone = ""; $form->mysevenprog = ""; $form->enquiry = ""; $form->howfindsite = ""; } ?> And then in the body of my page I have the form as follows; <?php if($err != "") : ?> <div class="error"> <?php echo $err; ?> </div> <?php endif; ?> <?php if($success == 'thanks') : ?> <h3>Thank you for your enquiry</h3> <p>Your enquiry has been successfully sent. Someone will contact you shortly.</p> <?php else: ?> <h3>If you are looking to advertise with us, have some feedback about some of our programming or want to say 'Hi' please use the fields below</h3> <form name="contactus" id="contactus" method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] ?>"> <ul> <li><label for="name">Your name: *</label> <input name="name" id="name" class="textbox" style="width: 75%;" type="text" value="<?php echo $form->name ?>" /></li> <li><label for="email">Email address: *</label> <input name="email" id="email" class="textbox" style="width: 75%;" type="text" value="<?php echo $form->email ?>" /></li> <li><label for="phone">Telephone:</label> <input name="phone" id="phone" class="textbox" style="width: 75%;" type="text" value="<?php echo $form->phone ?>" /></li> <li><label for="mysevenprog">My Seven programme</label> <input name="mysevenprog" class="textbox" style="width: 75%;" type="text" value="<?php echo $form->mysevenprog ?>" /></li> <li><label for="enquiry">Enquiry/Message: *</label> <textarea name="enquiry" class="textarea" rows="5" cols="30" style="width: 75%;" id="enquiry"><?php echo $form->enquiry ?></textarea></li> <li><label for="howfindsite">How did you find out about our site?</label> <input name="howfindsite" id="howfindsite" class="textbox" style="width: 75%;" type="text" value="<?php echo $form->howfindsite ?>" /></li> <li> <?php require_once('recaptchalib.php'); // Get a key from http://recaptcha.net/api/getkey $publickey = "6LcbbQwAAAAAAPYy2EFx-8lFCws93Ip6Vi5itlpT"; $privatekey = "6LcbbQwAAAAAAPV_nOAEjwya5FP3wzL3oNfBi21C"; # the response from reCAPTCHA $resp = null; # the error code from reCAPTCHA, if any $error = null; # was there a reCAPTCHA response? if ($_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]) { $resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($privatekey, $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"], $_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"], $_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]); if ($resp->is_valid) { echo "You got it!"; } else { # set the error code so that we can display it $error = $resp->error; } } echo recaptcha_get_html($publickey, $error); ?> </li> <li><input type="submit" value="Submit Form" class="button" /></li> </ul> <input type="hidden" name="docontact" value="yes" /> </form> <?php endif; ?>

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• Handling inheritance with overriding efficiently

  - by Fyodor Soikin

  I have the following two data structures. First, a list of properties applied to object triples: Object1 Object2 Object3 Property Value O1 O2 O3 P1 "abc" O1 O2 O3 P2 "xyz" O1 O3 O4 P1 "123" O2 O4 O5 P1 "098" Second, an inheritance tree: O1 O2 O4 O3 O5 Or viewed as a relation: Object Parent O2 O1 O4 O2 O3 O1 O5 O3 O1 null The semantics of this being that O2 inherits properties from O1; O4 - from O2 and O1; O3 - from O1; and O5 - from O3 and O1, in that order of precedence. NOTE 1: I have an efficient way to select all children or all parents of a given object. This is currently implemented with left and right indexes, but hierarchyid could also work. This does not seem important right now. NOTE 2: I have tiggers in place that make sure that the "Object" column always contains all possible objects, even when they do not really have to be there (i.e. have no parent or children defined). This makes it possible to use inner joins rather than severely less effiecient outer joins. The objective is: Given a pair of (Property, Value), return all object triples that have that property with that value either defined explicitly or inherited from a parent. NOTE 1: An object triple (X,Y,Z) is considered a "parent" of triple (A,B,C) when it is true that either X = A or X is a parent of A, and the same is true for (Y,B) and (Z,C). NOTE 2: A property defined on a closer parent "overrides" the same property defined on a more distant parent. NOTE 3: When (A,B,C) has two parents - (X1,Y1,Z1) and (X2,Y2,Z2), then (X1,Y1,Z1) is considered a "closer" parent when: (a) X2 is a parent of X1, or (b) X2 = X1 and Y2 is a parent of Y1, or (c) X2 = X1 and Y2 = Y1 and Z2 is a parent of Z1 In other words, the "closeness" in ancestry for triples is defined based on the first components of the triples first, then on the second components, then on the third components. This rule establishes an unambigous partial order for triples in terms of ancestry. For example, given the pair of (P1, "abc"), the result set of triples will be: O1, O2, O3 -- Defined explicitly O1, O2, O5 -- Because O5 inherits from O3 O1, O4, O3 -- Because O4 inherits from O2 O1, O4, O5 -- Because O4 inherits from O2 and O5 inherits from O3 O2, O2, O3 -- Because O2 inherits from O1 O2, O2, O5 -- Because O2 inherits from O1 and O5 inherits from O3 O2, O4, O3 -- Because O2 inherits from O1 and O4 inherits from O2 O3, O2, O3 -- Because O3 inherits from O1 O3, O2, O5 -- Because O3 inherits from O1 and O5 inherits from O3 O3, O4, O3 -- Because O3 inherits from O1 and O4 inherits from O2 O3, O4, O5 -- Because O3 inherits from O1 and O4 inherits from O2 and O5 inherits from O3 O4, O2, O3 -- Because O4 inherits from O1 O4, O2, O5 -- Because O4 inherits from O1 and O5 inherits from O3 O4, O4, O3 -- Because O4 inherits from O1 and O4 inherits from O2 O5, O2, O3 -- Because O5 inherits from O1 O5, O2, O5 -- Because O5 inherits from O1 and O5 inherits from O3 O5, O4, O3 -- Because O5 inherits from O1 and O4 inherits from O2 O5, O4, O5 -- Because O5 inherits from O1 and O4 inherits from O2 and O5 inherits from O3 Note that the triple (O2, O4, O5) is absent from this list. This is because property P1 is defined explicitly for the triple (O2, O4, O5) and this prevents that triple from inheriting that property from (O1, O2, O3). Also note that the triple (O4, O4, O5) is also absent. This is because that triple inherits its value of P1="098" from (O2, O4, O5), because it is a closer parent than (O1, O2, O3). The straightforward way to do it is the following. First, for every triple that a property is defined on, select all possible child triples: select Children1.Id as O1, Children2.Id as O2, Children3.Id as O3, tp.Property, tp.Value from TriplesAndProperties tp -- Select corresponding objects of the triple inner join Objects as Objects1 on Objects1.Id = tp.O1 inner join Objects as Objects2 on Objects2.Id = tp.O2 inner join Objects as Objects3 on Objects3.Id = tp.O3 -- Then add all possible children of all those objects inner join Objects as Children1 on Objects1.Id [isparentof] Children1.Id inner join Objects as Children2 on Objects2.Id [isparentof] Children2.Id inner join Objects as Children3 on Objects3.Id [isparentof] Children3.Id But this is not the whole story: if some triple inherits the same property from several parents, this query will yield conflicting results. Therefore, second step is to select just one of those conflicting results: select * from ( select Children1.Id as O1, Children2.Id as O2, Children3.Id as O3, tp.Property, tp.Value, row_number() over( partition by Children1.Id, Children2.Id, Children3.Id, tp.Property order by Objects1.[depthInTheTree] descending, Objects2.[depthInTheTree] descending, Objects3.[depthInTheTree] descending ) as InheritancePriority from ... (see above) ) where InheritancePriority = 1 The window function row_number() over( ... ) does the following: for every unique combination of objects triple and property, it sorts all values by the ancestral distance from the triple to the parents that the value is inherited from, and then I only select the very first of the resulting list of values. A similar effect can be achieved with a GROUP BY and ORDER BY statements, but I just find the window function semantically cleaner (the execution plans they yield are identical). The point is, I need to select the closest of contributing ancestors, and for that I need to group and then sort within the group. And finally, now I can simply filter the result set by Property and Value. This scheme works. Very reliably and predictably. It has proven to be very powerful for the business task it implements. The only trouble is, it is awfuly slow. One might point out the join of seven tables might be slowing things down, but that is actually not the bottleneck. According to the actual execution plan I'm getting from the SQL Management Studio (as well as SQL Profiler), the bottleneck is the sorting. The problem is, in order to satisfy my window function, the server has to sort by Children1.Id, Children2.Id, Children3.Id, tp.Property, Parents1.[depthInTheTree] descending, Parents2.[depthInTheTree] descending, Parents3.[depthInTheTree] descending, and there can be no indexes it can use, because the values come from a cross join of several tables. EDIT: Per Michael Buen's suggestion (thank you, Michael), I have posted the whole puzzle to sqlfiddle here. One can see in the execution plan that the Sort operation accounts for 32% of the whole query, and that is going to grow with the number of total rows, because all the other operations use indexes. Usually in such cases I would use an indexed view, but not in this case, because indexed views cannot contain self-joins, of which there are six. The only way that I can think of so far is to create six copies of the Objects table and then use them for the joins, thus enabling an indexed view. Did the time come that I shall be reduced to that kind of hacks? The despair sets in.

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• Java: Cannot find a method's symbol even though that method is declared later in the class. The remaining code is looking for a class.

  - by Midimistro

  This is an assignment that we use strings in Java to analyze a phone number. The error I am having is anything below tester=invalidCharacters(c); does not compile because every line past tester=invalidCharacters(c); is looking for a symbol or the class. In get invalidResults, all I am trying to do is evaluate a given string for non-alphabetical characters such as *,(,^,&,%,@,#,), and so on. What to answer: Why is it producing an error, what will work, and is there an easier method WITHOUT using regex. Here is the link to the assignment: http://cis.csuohio.edu/~hwang/teaching/cis260/assignments/assignment9.html public class PhoneNumber { private int areacode; private int number; private int ext; /////Constructors///// //Third Constructor (given one string arg) "xxx-xxxxxxx" where first three are numbers and the remaining (7) are numbers or letters public PhoneNumber(String newNumber){ //Note: Set default ext to 0 ext=0; ////Declare Temporary Storage and other variables//// //for the first three numbers String areaCodeString; //for the remaining seven characters String newNumberString; //For use in testing the second half of the string boolean containsLetters; boolean containsInvalid; /////Separate the two parts of string///// //Get the area code part of the string areaCodeString=newNumber.substring(0,2); //Convert the string and set it to the area code areacode=Integer.parseInt(areaCodeString); //Skip the "-" and Get the remaining part of the string newNumberString=newNumber.substring(4); //Create an array of characters from newNumberString to reuse in later methods for int length=newNumberString.length(); char [] myCharacters= new char [length]; int i; for (i=0;i<length;i++){ myCharacters [i]=newNumberString.charAt(i); } //Test if newNumberString contains letters & converting them into numbers String reNewNumber=""; //Test for invalid characters containsInvalid=getInvalidResults(newNumberString,length); if (containsInvalid==false){ containsLetters=getCharResults(newNumberString,length); if (containsLetters==true){ for (i=0;i<length;i++){ myCharacters [i]=(char)convertLetNum((myCharacters [i])); reNewNumber=reNewNumber+myCharacters[i]; } } } if (containsInvalid==false){ number=Integer.parseInt(reNewNumber); } else{ System.out.println("Error!"+"\t"+newNumber+" contains illegal characters. This number will be ignored and skipped."); } } //////Primary Methods/Behaviors/////// //Compare this phone number with the one passed by the caller public boolean equals(PhoneNumber pn){ boolean equal; String concat=(areacode+"-"+number); String pN=pn.toString(); if (concat==pN){ equal=true; } else{ equal=false; } return equal; } //Convert the stored number to a certain string depending on extension public String toString(){ String returned; if(ext==0){ returned=(areacode+"-"+number); } else{ returned=(areacode+"-"+number+" ext "+ext); } return returned; } //////Secondary Methods/////// //Method for testing if the second part of the string contains any letters public static boolean getCharResults(String newNumString,int getLength){ //Recreate a character array int i; char [] myCharacters= new char [getLength]; for (i=0;i<getLength;i++){ myCharacters [i]=newNumString.charAt(i); } boolean doesContainLetter=false; int j; for (j=0;j<getLength;j++){ if ((Character.isDigit(myCharacters[j])==true)){ doesContainLetter=false; } else{ doesContainLetter=true; return doesContainLetter; } } return doesContainLetter; } //Method for testing if the second part of the string contains any letters public static boolean getInvalidResults(String newNumString,int getLength){ boolean doesContainInvalid=false; int i; char c; boolean tester; char [] invalidCharacters= new char [getLength]; for (i=0;i<getLength;i++){ invalidCharacters [i]=newNumString.charAt(i); c=invalidCharacters [i]; tester=invalidCharacters(c); if(tester==true)){ doesContainInvalid=false; } else{ doesContainInvalid=true; return doesContainInvalid; } } return doesContainInvalid; } //Method for evaluating string for invalid characters public boolean invalidCharacters(char letter){ boolean returnNum=false; switch (letter){ case 'A': return returnNum; case 'B': return returnNum; case 'C': return returnNum; case 'D': return returnNum; case 'E': return returnNum; case 'F': return returnNum; case 'G': return returnNum; case 'H': return returnNum; case 'I': return returnNum; case 'J': return returnNum; case 'K': return returnNum; case 'L': return returnNum; case 'M': return returnNum; case 'N': return returnNum; case 'O': return returnNum; case 'P': return returnNum; case 'Q': return returnNum; case 'R': return returnNum; case 'S': return returnNum; case 'T': return returnNum; case 'U': return returnNum; case 'V': return returnNum; case 'W': return returnNum; case 'X': return returnNum; case 'Y': return returnNum; case 'Z': return returnNum; default: return true; } } //Method for converting letters to numbers public int convertLetNum(char letter){ int returnNum; switch (letter){ case 'A': returnNum=2;return returnNum; case 'B': returnNum=2;return returnNum; case 'C': returnNum=2;return returnNum; case 'D': returnNum=3;return returnNum; case 'E': returnNum=3;return returnNum; case 'F': returnNum=3;return returnNum; case 'G': returnNum=4;return returnNum; case 'H': returnNum=4;return returnNum; case 'I': returnNum=4;return returnNum; case 'J': returnNum=5;return returnNum; case 'K': returnNum=5;return returnNum; case 'L': returnNum=5;return returnNum; case 'M': returnNum=6;return returnNum; case 'N': returnNum=6;return returnNum; case 'O': returnNum=6;return returnNum; case 'P': returnNum=7;return returnNum; case 'Q': returnNum=7;return returnNum; case 'R': returnNum=7;return returnNum; case 'S': returnNum=7;return returnNum; case 'T': returnNum=8;return returnNum; case 'U': returnNum=8;return returnNum; case 'V': returnNum=8;return returnNum; case 'W': returnNum=9;return returnNum; case 'X': returnNum=9;return returnNum; case 'Y': returnNum=9;return returnNum; case 'Z': returnNum=9;return returnNum; default: return 0; } } } Note: Please Do not use this program to cheat in your own class. To ensure of this, I will take this question down if it has not been answered by the end of 2013, if I no longer need an explanation for it, or if the term for the class has ended.

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• Alright, I'm still stuck on this homework problem. C++

  - by Josh

  Okay, the past few days I have been trying to get some input on my programs. Well I decided to scrap them for the most part and try again. So once again, I'm in need of help. For the first program I'm trying to fix, it needs to show the sum of SEVEN numbers. Well, I'm trying to change is so that I don't need the mem[##] = ####. I just want the user to be able to input the numbers and the program run from there and go through my switch loop. And have some kind of display..saying like the sum is?.. Here's my code so far. #include <iostream> #include <iomanip> #include <ios> using namespace std; int main() { const int READ = 10; const int WRITE = 11; const int LOAD = 20; const int STORE = 21; const int ADD = 30; const int SUBTRACT = 31; const int DIVIDE = 32; const int MULTIPLY = 33; const int BRANCH = 40; const int BRANCHNEG = 41; const int BRANCHZERO = 42; const int HALT = 43; int mem[100] = {0}; //Making it 100, since simpletron contains a 100 word mem. int operation; //taking the rest of these variables straight out of the book seeing as how they were italisized. int operand; int accum = 0; // the special register is starting at 0 int counter; for ( counter=0; counter < 100; counter++) mem[counter] = 0; // This is for part a, it will take in positive variables in //a sent-controlled loop and compute + print their sum. Variables from example in text. mem[0] = 1009; mem[1] = 1109; mem[2] = 2010; mem[3] = 2111; mem[4] = 2011; mem[5] = 3100; mem[6] = 2113; mem[7] = 1113; mem[8] = 4300; counter = 0; //Makes the variable counter start at 0. while(true) { operand = mem[ counter ]%100; // Finds the op codes from the limit on the mem (100) operation = mem[ counter ]/100; //using a switch loop to set up the loops for the cases switch ( operation ){ case READ: //reads a variable into a word from loc. Enter in -1 to exit cout <<"\n Input a positive variable: "; cin >> mem[ operand ]; counter++; break; case WRITE: // takes a word from location cout << "\n\nThe content at location " << operand << " is " << mem[operand]; counter++; break; case LOAD:// loads accum = mem[ operand ];counter++; break; case STORE: //stores mem[ operand ] = accum;counter++; break; case ADD: //adds accum += mem[operand];counter++; break; case SUBTRACT: // subtracts accum-= mem[ operand ];counter++; break; case DIVIDE: //divides accum /=(mem[ operand ]);counter++; break; case MULTIPLY: // multiplies accum*= mem [ operand ];counter++; break; case BRANCH: // Branches to location counter = operand; break; case BRANCHNEG: //branches if acc. is < 0 if (accum < 0) counter = operand; else counter++; break; case BRANCHZERO: //branches if acc = 0 if (accum == 0) counter = operand; else counter++; break; case HALT: // Program ends break; } } return 0; } part B int main() { const int READ = 10; const int WRITE = 11; const int LOAD = 20; const int STORE = 21; const int ADD = 30; const int SUBTRACT = 31; const int DIVIDE = 32; const int MULTIPLY = 33; const int BRANCH = 40; const int BRANCHNEG = 41; const int BRANCHZERO = 41; const int HALT = 43; int mem[100] = {0}; int operation; int operand; int accum = 0; int pos = 0; int j; mem[22] = 7; // loop 7 times mem[25] = 1; // increment by 1 mem[00] = 4306; mem[01] = 2303; mem[02] = 3402; mem[03] = 6410; mem[04] = 3412; mem[05] = 2111; mem[06] = 2002; mem[07] = 2312; mem[08] = 4210; mem[09] = 2109; mem[10] = 4001; mem[11] = 2015; mem[12] = 3212; mem[13] = 2116; mem[14] = 1101; mem[15] = 1116; mem[16] = 4300; j = 0; while ( true ) { operand = memory[ j ]%100; // Finds the op codes from the limit on the memory (100) operation = memory[ j ]/100; //using a switch loop to set up the loops for the cases switch ( operation ){ case 1: //reads a variable into a word from loc. Enter in -1 to exit cout <<"\n enter #: "; cin >> memory[ operand ]; break; case 2: // takes a word from location cout << "\n\nThe content at location " << operand << "is " << memory[operand]; break; case 3:// loads accum = memory[ operand ]; break; case 4: //stores memory[ operand ] = accum; break; case 5: //adds accum += mem[operand];; break; case 6: // subtracts accum-= memory[ operand ]; break; case 7: //divides accum /=(memory[ operand ]); break; case 8: // multiplies accum*= memory [ operand ]; break; case 9: // Branches to location j = operand; break; case 10: //branches if acc. is < 0 break; case 11: //branches if acc = 0 if (accum == 0) j = operand; break; case 12: // Program ends exit(0); break; } j++; } return 0; }

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