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• Commit Review Questions

  - by Wes McClure

  Note: in this article when I refer to a commit, I mean the commit you plan to share with the rest of the team, if you have local commits that you plan to amend/combine, I am referring to the final result. In time you will find these easier to do as you develop, however, all of these are valuable before checking in!  The pre commit review is a nice time to polish what might have been several hours of intense work, during which these things were the last things on your mind!  If you are concerned about losing your work in the process of responding to these questions, first do a check-in and amend it as you go (assuming you are using a tool such as git that supports this), rolling the result into one nice commit for everyone else.  Did you review your commit, change by change, with a diff utility? If not, this is a list of reasons why you might want to start! Did you test your changes? If the test is valuable to be automated, is it? If it’s a manual testing scenario, did you at least try the basics manually? Are the additions/changes formatted consistently with the rest of the project? Lots of automated tools can help here, don’t try to manually format the code, that’s a waste of time and as a human you will fail repeatedly. Are these consistent: tabs versus spaces, indentation, spacing, braces, line breaks, etc Resharper is a great example of a tool that can automate this for you (.net) Are naming conventions respected? Did you accidently use abbreviations, unless you have a good reason to use them? Does capitalization match the conventions in the project/language? Are files partitioned? Sometimes we add new code in existing files in a pinch, it’s a good idea to split these out if they don’t belong ie: are new classes defined in new files, if this is something your project values? Is there commented out code? If you are removing an existing feature, get rid of it, that is why we have VCS If it’s not done yet, then why are you checking it in? Perhaps a stash commit (git)? Did you leave debug or unnecessary changes? Do you understand all of the changes? http://geekswithblogs.net/wesm/archive/2012/04/11/programming-doesnrsquot-have-to-be-magic.aspx Are there spelling mistakes? Including your commit message! Is your commit message concise? Is there follow up work? Are there tasks you didn’t write down that you need to follow up with? Are readability or reorganization changes needed? This might be amended into the final commit, or it might be future work that needs added to the backlog. Are there other things your team values that you should review?

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• Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

  - by Chris

  One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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• Mixing It Up with BluesMix

  - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team

  By Karen Shamban At home base in London prior to making a swing on the US west coast later this month, BluesMix took a few minutes to answer some musical questions. Q: What are the top three things people should know about your music? A: We focus on original material and blend funk with blues. We're big on songwriting but also performance, groove, and feel of the music. It's music you can dance to! We're from London, England and have been labeled 'one of the UK's leading blues/funk bands'. Oh - that's four things! :) Q: Do you prefer smaller, intimate venues or larger, louder ones? A: Actually both, for different reasons. We play many intimate club shows in London at prestigious venues such as the 100 Club. There's lots of musical history with these types of clubs where the likes of the Rolling Stones used to play week-in week-out in the '60s. Usually these shows generally have a fantastic atmosphere, with a close connection to the audience, who are packed close to the stage. They often turn up surprises too…for example, we've had artists such as Amy Winehouse and Mick Abrahams in the crowd enjoying the show and then asking to come onstage and play with the band. Lots of fun! The larger venues are great too, in a different way. We've played to 3,000-person+ crowds and the atmosphere with so many people enjoying the show is a real buzz. It's also nice to play outdoor venues, especially in places with nice weather like California! Q: What's new and different in the music you are playing today, versus a year or two ago? A: Well, we released a new album earlier this year. It's called Flat Nine; it's on the Proper Records label. Whilst our music has always been a blend of blues and vintage funk, this album in particular has evolved our funk side even further. We've received some really great reviews from the music press in the UK and had generous comparisons to the likes of The Meters, Dr. John, The Average White Band, Howlin' Wolf. The album has generated lots of interest, which is fantastic. We're playing to regular sellout shows in the UK and are also opening for some legends of the funk music scene, such as The New Mastersounds. BluesMix are headlining the Oracle OpenWorld Welcome Reception in Yerba Buena Gardens on Sunday, September 30 and are playing at the Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival at Slim's on Tuesday, October 2. More on the music: Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival BluesMix  >>

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• Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  - by DigiMortal

     Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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• Explanation of the definition of interface inheritance as described in GoF book

  - by Geek

  I am reading the first chapter of the Gof book. Section 1.6 discusses about class vs interface inheritance: Class versus Interface Inheritance It's important to understand the difference between an object's class and its type. An object's class defines how the object is implemented.The class defines the object's internal state and the implementation of its operations.In contrast,an object's type only refers to its interface--the set of requests on which it can respond. An object can have many types, and objects of different classes can have the same type. Of course, there's a close relationship between class and type. Because a class defines the operations an object can perform, it also defines the object's type . When we say that an object is an instance of a class, we imply that the object supports the interface defined by the class. Languages like c++ and Eiffel use classes to specify both an object's type and its implementation. Smalltalk programs do not declare the types of variables; consequently,the compiler does not check that the types of objects assigned to a variable are subtypes of the variable's type. Sending a message requires checking that the class of the receiver implements the message, but it doesn't require checking that the receiver is an instance of a particular class. It's also important to understand the difference between class inheritance and interface inheritance (or subtyping). Class inheritance defines an object's implementation in terms of another object's implementation. In short, it's a mechanism for code and representation sharing. In contrast,interface inheritance(or subtyping) describes when an object can be used in place of another. I am familiar with the Java and JavaScript programming language and not really familiar with either C++ or Smalltalk or Eiffel as mentioned here. So I am trying to map the concepts discussed here to Java's way of doing classes, inheritance and interfaces. This is how I think of of these concepts in Java: In Java a class is always a blueprint for the objects it produces and what interface(as in "set of all possible requests that the object can respond to") an object of that class possess is defined during compilation stage only because the class of the object would have implemented those interfaces. The requests that an object of that class can respond to is the set of all the methods that are in the class(including those implemented for the interfaces that this class implements). My specific questions are: Am I right in saying that Java's way is more similar to C++ as described in the third paragraph. I do not understand what is meant by interface inheritance in the last paragraph. In Java interface inheritance is one interface extending from another interface. But I think the word interface has some other overloaded meaning here. Can some one provide an example in Java of what is meant by interface inheritance here so that I understand it better?

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-21

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Real Architects of Los Angeles: OTN Architect Day in LA - Oct 25 No gossip. No drama. No hair pulling. Just a full day of technical sessions and peer interaction focused on using Oracle technologies in today's cloud and SOA architectures. The event is free, but seating is limited, so register now. Thursday October 25, 2012. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Why IT is a profession in 'flux' | ZDNet I usuallly don't post two items from the same person in one day, but this post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick deals with some critical issues affecting those in IT. As McKendrick puts it: "IT professionals are under considerable pressure to deliver more value to the business, versus being good at coding and testing and deploying and integrating." Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | ZDNet "SOA governance tools and processes learned over the past decade are now underpinning cloud projects as they scale across enterprises," reports Joe McKendrick. But there remains a lack of understanding about SOA Governance. For a broader discussion of the importance of IT governance check out the lastest OTN Archbeat Podcast: By Any Other Name: Governance and Architecture How I Simplified the Installation of Oracle Database on Oracle Linux 6 Michele Casey's update of Ginny Henningsen's original article. This version shows how to simplify the installation of Oracle Database 11g on Oracle Linux 6 by installing the oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall RPM package. Fault Handling Slides and Q&A | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen shares the slides and a Q&A transcript from a presentation he and fellow ACE Director Guido Schmutz gave at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne preview event organized by AMIS Technology. BPM ADF Task forms. Checking whether the current user is in a BPM Swimlane | Christopher Karl Chan "The tricky part here is that the ADF Task Details Form is in fact part of a separate J2EE application to the main workspace," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Christopher Karl Chan. "So if you try to use Java or Expression Language to get the logged in user you will only find anonymous and none of the BPM Roles you will be expecting. So what to do?" Don't guess—read the post and find out. Thought for the Day "The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture. " — Tadao Ando Source: BrainyQuote

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• Why is Double.Parse so slow?

  - by alexhildyard

  I was recently investigating a bottleneck in one of my applications, which read a CSV file from disk using a TextReader a line at a time, split the tokens, called Double.Parse on each one, then shunted the results into an object list. I was surprised to find it was actually the Double.Parse which seemed to be taking up most of the time.Googling turned up this, which is a little unfocused in places but throws out some excellent ideas:It makes more sense to work with binary format directly, rather than coerce strings into doublesThere is a significant performance improvement in composing doubles directly from the byte stream via long intermediariesString.Split is inefficient on fixed length recordsIn fact it turned out that my problem was more insidious and also more mundane -- a simple case of bad data in, bad data out. Since I had been serialising my Doubles as strings, when I inadvertently divided by zero and produced a "NaN", this of course was serialised as well without error. And because I was reading in using Double.Parse, these "NaN" fields were also (correctly) populating real Double objects without error. The issue is that Double.Parse("NaN") is incredibly slow. In fact, it is of the order of 2000x slower than parsing a valid double. For example, the code below gave me results of 357ms to parse 1000 NaNs, versus 15ms to parse 100,000 valid doubles.            const int invalid_iterations = 1000;            const int valid_iterations = invalid_iterations * 100;            const string invalid_string = "NaN";            const string valid_string = "3.14159265";            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;                        for (int i = 0; i < invalid_iterations; i++)            {                double invalid_double = Double.Parse(invalid_string);            }            Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} iterations of invalid double, time taken (ms): {1}",                invalid_iterations,                ((TimeSpan)DateTime.Now.Subtract(start)).Milliseconds            ));            start = DateTime.Now;            for (int i = 0; i < valid_iterations; i++)            {                double valid_double = Double.Parse(valid_string);            }            Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} iterations of valid double, time taken (ms): {1}",                valid_iterations,                ((TimeSpan)DateTime.Now.Subtract(start)).Milliseconds            )); I think the moral is to look at the context -- specifically the data -- as well as the code itself. Once I had corrected my data, the performance of Double.Parse was perfectly acceptable, and while clearly it could have been improved, it was now sufficient to my needs.

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• C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

  - by Jonathan Mitchem

  After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

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• Ray Intersecting Plane Formula in C++/DirectX

  - by user4585

  I'm developing a picking system that will use rays that intersect volumes and I'm having trouble with ray intersection versus a plane. I was able to figure out spheres fairly easily, but planes are giving me trouble. I've tried to understand various sources and get hung up on some of the variables used within their explanations. Here is a snippet of my code: bool Picking() { D3DXVECTOR3 vec; D3DXVECTOR3 vRayDir; D3DXVECTOR3 vRayOrig; D3DXVECTOR3 vROO, vROD; // vect ray obj orig, vec ray obj dir D3DXMATRIX m; D3DXMATRIX mInverse; D3DXMATRIX worldMat; // Obtain project matrix D3DXMATRIX pMatProj = CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->Director()->Proj(); // Obtain mouse position D3DXVECTOR3 pos = CGUIManager::GetInstance()->GUIObjectList.front().pos; // Get window width & height float w = CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->GetWidth(); float h = CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->GetHeight(); // Transform vector from screen to 3D space vec.x = (((2.0f * pos.x) / w) - 1.0f) / pMatProj._11; vec.y = -(((2.0f * pos.y) / h) - 1.0f) / pMatProj._22; vec.z = 1.0f; // Create a view inverse matrix D3DXMatrixInverse(&m, NULL, &CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->Director()->View()); // Determine our ray's direction vRayDir.x = vec.x * m._11 + vec.y * m._21 + vec.z * m._31; vRayDir.y = vec.x * m._12 + vec.y * m._22 + vec.z * m._32; vRayDir.z = vec.x * m._13 + vec.y * m._23 + vec.z * m._33; // Determine our ray's origin vRayOrig.x = m._41; vRayOrig.y = m._42; vRayOrig.z = m._43; D3DXMatrixIdentity(&worldMat); //worldMat = aliveActors[0]->GetTrans(); D3DXMatrixInverse(&mInverse, NULL, &worldMat); D3DXVec3TransformCoord(&vROO, &vRayOrig, &mInverse); D3DXVec3TransformNormal(&vROD, &vRayDir, &mInverse); D3DXVec3Normalize(&vROD, &vROD); When using this code I'm able to detect a ray intersection via a sphere, but I have questions when determining an intersection via a plane. First off should I be using my vRayOrig & vRayDir variables for the plane intersection tests or should I be using the new vectors that are created for use in object space? When looking at a site like this for example: http://www.tar.hu/gamealgorithms/ch22lev1sec2.html I'm curious as to what D is in the equation AX + BY + CZ + D = 0 and how does it factor in to determining a plane intersection? Any help will be appreciated, thanks.

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• SharePoint Thoughts

  - by Tim Murphy

  I was listening to .NET Rocks episode #713 and it got me thinking about a number of SharePoint related topics. I have been working with SharePoint since the 2001 product came out and have watched it evolve over the years.  Today SharePoint is one of the most powerful and flexible products in the market.  Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement (a lot of improvement in fact) and with much power comes much responsibility. My main gripe these days is that you have to develop on a server instance.  This adds a real barrier to entry for developers.  You either have to run VMWare or Hyper-V on your developer machine or actually develop on your dev server for most tasks.  Yes, there is a way to setup a Windows 7 machine with the SharePoint components but it is very hackish. Beyond that the tools in VS2010 are a great leap forward from past generations.  Not requiring a separate package creation tool is not the least of the improvements.  Better workflow and web part development have also eased the burden of many developers. The other thing the show brought up in my thoughts was more around usage.  Users want to be able to self server everything without regard to what affect that has on leveraging their data from a corporate perspective.  My coworkers who work on Lotus Notes ask why the user can’t just do what ever they want? Part of the reason is that those features have not been built, but the other part is that giving them those features is often like giving an infant a loaded hand gun.  You can do it but it doesn’t make it the smart thing to do. As with any tool that is going to be used in the enterprise it should be subject to governance.  If controls are not in place as they said in the episode of DNR the document libraries and I believe SharePoint in general starts to look as disarrayed and unusable as a shared drive.  Consider these factors before giving into every whim of the users.  You should be able to explain to them the tradeoffs of giving them full control versus being able to leverage the information they collect to the benefit of the organization. These are just a couple of the thoughts that were triggered by the show.  I’m sure there are more discussions that can be had.  Feel free to leave your comments about the pros and cons of SharePoint. del.icio.us Tags: .NET Rocks,SharePoint,software development

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• Styling Windows Phone Silverlight Applications

  - by Tim Murphy

  If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get.  One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade.  What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file.  This is of course analogous to placing a style in your HTML file versus an external CSS file.  This is the type of style I will concentrate on in this post. The first thing to look it how styles associate to elements.  TargetType defines the object type that your style will apply to.  In the example below the style is targeting the TextBlock object type. <Style x:Key="TextBlockSmallGray" TargetType="TextBlock"> Next we use a Setter which allows you to apply values for specific attributes of the target object type.  The setters can be a simple value or complex.  The first example here is simply applying a color to the background property of the target. <Setter Property="Background" Value="White"/> The second setter example here is for the same property, but we are applying a the definition of a LinearGradientBrush. <Setter Property="Background"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush> <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Black"/> <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="White"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> The last thing I want to cover here is that you can leverage the system styles and then override or extend them.  The BasedOn attribute of the Style tag allows this sort of inheritance.  In the example below I am going to start with the PhoneTextTitleStyle and then override properties as needed. <Style x:Key="TextBlockTitle" BasedOn="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" TargetType="TextBlock"> So now that we have our styles defined applying it is fairly straight forward.  Add the style name as a static resource to the style property of the element in your page and off you go. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Style="{StaticResource PageGridStyle}"> So this is one step in creating consistency in your application’s look.  In future posts I will dig a little deeper. del.icio.us Tags: windows phone 7,mobile development,windows phone 7 development,.NET,software development,design,UX

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• Why do old programming languages continue to be revised?

  - by SunAvatar

  This question is not, "Why do people still use old programming languages?" I understand that quite well. In fact the two programming languages I know best are C and Scheme, both of which date back to the 70s. Recently I was reading about the changes in C99 and C11 versus C89 (which seems to still be the most-used version of C in practice and the version I learned from K&R). Looking around, it seems like every programming language in heavy use gets a new specification at least once per decade or so. Even Fortran is still getting new revisions, despite the fact that most people using it are still using FORTRAN 77. Contrast this with the approach of, say, the typesetting system TeX. In 1989, with the release of TeX 3.0, Donald Knuth declared that TeX was feature-complete and future releases would contain only bug fixes. Even beyond this, he has stated that upon his death, "all remaining bugs will become features" and absolutely no further updates will be made. Others are free to fork TeX and have done so, but the resulting systems are renamed to indicate that they are different from the official TeX. This is not because Knuth thinks TeX is perfect, but because he understands the value of a stable, predictable system that will do the same thing in fifty years that it does now. Why do most programming language designers not follow the same principle? Of course, when a language is relatively new, it makes sense that it will go through a period of rapid change before settling down. And no one can really object to minor changes that don't do much more than codify existing pseudo-standards or correct unintended readings. But when a language still seems to need improvement after ten or twenty years, why not just fork it or start over, rather than try to change what is already in use? If some people really want to do object-oriented programming in Fortran, why not create "Objective Fortran" for that purpose, and leave Fortran itself alone? I suppose one could say that, regardless of future revisions, C89 is already a standard and nothing stops people from continuing to use it. This is sort of true, but connotations do have consequences. GCC will, in pedantic mode, warn about syntax that is either deprecated or has a subtly different meaning in C99, which means C89 programmers can't just totally ignore the new standard. So there must be some benefit in C99 that is sufficient to impose this overhead on everyone who uses the language. This is a real question, not an invitation to argue. Obviously I do have an opinion on this, but at the moment I'm just trying to understand why this isn't just how things are done already. I suppose the question is: What are the (real or perceived) advantages of updating a language standard, as opposed to creating a new language based on the old?

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• Best Practices for serializing/persisting String Object Dictionary entities

  - by Mark Heath

  I'm noticing a trend towards using a dictionary of string to object (or sometimes string to string), instead of strongly typed objects. For example, the new Katana project makes heavy use of IDictionary<string,object>. This approach avoids the need to continually update your entity classes/DTOs and the database tables that persist them with new properties. It also avoids the need to create new derived entity types to support new types of entity, since the Dictionary is flexible enough to store any arbitrary properties. Here's a contrived example: class StorageDevice { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } class NetworkShare : StorageDevice { public string Path { get; set; } public string LoginName { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } } class CloudStorage : StorageDevice { public string ServerUri { get; set } public string ContainerName { get; set; } public int PortNumber { get; set; } public Guid ApiKey { get; set; } } versus: class StorageDevice { public IDictionary<string, object> Properties { get; set; } } Basically I'm on the lookout for any talks, books or articles on this approach, so I can pick up on any best practices / difficulties to avoid. Here's my main questions: Does this approach have a name? (only thing I've heard used so far is "self-describing objects") What are the best practices for persisting these dictionaries into a relational database? Especially the challenges of deserializing them successfully with strongly typed languages like C#. Does it change anything if some of the objects in the dictionary are themselves lists of strongly typed entities? Should a second dictionary be used if you want to temporarily store objects that are not to be persisted/serialized across a network, or should you use some kind of namespacing on the keys to indicate this?

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• Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM)

  Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) is a methodology used to determine how specific application quality attributes were achieved and how possible changes in the future will affect quality attributes based on hypothetical cases studies. Common quality attributes that can be utilized by this methodology include modifiability, robustness, portability, and extensibility. Quality Attribute: Application Modifiability The Modifiability quality attribute refers to how easy it changing the system in the future will be. This to me is a very open-ended attribute because a business could decide to transform a Point of Sale (POS) system in to a Lead Tracking system overnight. (Yes, this did actually happen to me) In order for SAAM to be properly applied for checking this attribute specific hypothetical case studies need to be created and review for the modifiability attribute due to the fact that various scenarios would return various results based on the amount of changes. In the case of the POS change out a payment gateway or adding an additional payment would have scored very high in comparison to changing the system over to a lead management system. I personally would evaluate this quality attribute based on the S.O.I.L.D Principles of software design. I have found from my experience the use of S.O.I.L.D in software design allows for the adoption of changes within a system. Quality Attribute: Application Robustness The Robustness quality attribute refers to how an application handles the unexpected. The unexpected can be defined but is not limited to anything not anticipated in the originating design of the system. For example: Bad Data, Limited to no network connectivity, invalid permissions, or any unexpected application exceptions. I would personally evaluate this quality attribute based on how the system handled the exceptions. Robustness Considerations Did the system stop or did it handle the unexpected error? Did the system log the unexpected error for future debugging? What message did the user receive about the error? Quality Attribute: Application Portability The Portability quality attribute refers to the ease of porting an application to run in a new operating system or device. For example, It is much easier to alter an ASP.net website to be accessible by a PC, Mac, IPhone, Android Phone, Mini PC, or Table in comparison to desktop application written in VB.net because a lot more work would be involved to get the desktop app to the point where it would be viable to port the application over to the various environments and devices. I would personally evaluate this quality attribute based on each new environment for which the hypothetical case study identifies. I would pay particular attention to the following items. Portability Considerations Hardware Dependencies Operating System Dependencies Data Source Dependencies Network Dependencies and Availabilities  Quality Attribute: Application Extensibility The Extensibility quality attribute refers to the ease of adding new features to an existing application without impacting existing functionality. I would personally evaluate this quality attribute based on each new environment for the following Extensibility  Considerations Hard coded Variables versus Configurable variables Application Documentation (External Documents and Codebase Documentation.) The use of Solid Design Principles

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 13

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the advantages of using a large number of registers Discuss the way in which compilers optimize register usage Discuss the evolution of CISC machines Describe the characteristics of RISC architecture Discuss the RISC vs. CISC controversy Describe the way in which RISC and CISC design principles can be combined Instruction Execution Characteristics To understand the the line of reasoning of RISC advocates, we need a brief overview of instruction execution characteristics. These include… Operations Operands Procedure Calls These three sections can be studied in depth in the textbook at pages 503 - 505 A number of groups have come up with the conclusion that the attempt to make the instruction set architecture closer to HLLs (High Level Languages) is not the most effective design strategy. Rather HLL’s can be best supported by optimizing performance of the most time-consuming features of typical HLL programs. Generally 3 main characteristics came up to improve performance… Use a large number of registers or use a compiler to optimize register usage Careful attention needs to be paid to the design of instruction pipelines A simplified (reduced) instruction set is indicated The use of a large register optimization One of the most important design principles of RISC machines is the use of a large number of registers. The concept of register windows and the use of a large register file versus the use of cache memory are discussed. On the face of it, the use of a large set of registers should decrease the need to access memory. The design task is to organize the registers in such a fashion that this goal is realized. Read page 507 – 510 for a detailed explanation. Compiler-based register optimization   Reduced Instructions Set Architecture There are two advantages to smaller programs… Because the program takes up less memory, there is a savings in that resource (this was more compelling when memory was more expensive) Smaller programs should improve performance, and this will happen in two ways – fewer instructions means fewer instruction bytes to be fetched and in a paging environment smaller programs occupy fewer pages, reducing page faults. Certain characteristics are common to RISC processors… One instruction per cycle Register-to-register operations Simple addressing modes Simple instruction formats RISC vs. CISC After initial enthusiasm for RISC machines, there has been a growing realization that RISC designs may benefit from the inclusion of some CISC features CISC designs may benefit from the inclusion of some RISC features

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• Spotlight on an office - Nairobi, Kenya

  - by Maria Sandu

  Hi everyone, my name is Joash Mitei. I am a graduate Intern at Oracle Systems Kenya and I will briefly take you through our offices and the working environment here in Nairobi, Kenya. I’ve been with Oracle since February 2012 and I’m responsible for Applications Pre-sales focusing on Oracle EPM and E-Business Suite. My background is Finance and Accounting therefore joining Oracle was almost a totally a different ball game but the transition has been smooth. The Oracle offices here are located on the second floor of Mebank Towers. We moved to the 2nd floor just three months ago from the 5th floor mainly because of the growing workforce. We are covering the whole Eastern Africa region hence diversity in culture is evident. This is a plus since you get to interact with people of very different backgrounds, cultures and ways of thinking. The building itself is on the outskirts of the CBD hence free from the hustle and bustle of the town. The office is split into different sections; there is a main working area which has an open desk design that fosters interaction between colleagues, there are 4 conference rooms for meetings and presentations, there are 3 quiet rooms for a little privacy when needed and there is a dining area for meals and ‘hanging out’. The working environment is world-class, to say the least. The employees are very professional, quite smart and needless to say, very busy. There are 4 interns covering sales and pre-sales in both Tech and Apps. As an intern you get support from your supervisor but you are required to show initiative yourself and thus the need to be very pro-active and inquisitive. The local management is well structured and communicative to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in the office. Apart from the daily work, we usually have events to boost staff morale such as ‘TGIF hang -out’, football matches against each other or versus other companies, and team building retreats. All these are monumental in fostering the RED POTENTIAL. We also do numerous CSR activities in the local communities . Well, that’s the Kenyan office for you. Glad to be your tour guide. Have a superb day!

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• The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Manage Phase

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by John Brunswick. Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not. This is why we thankfully have an opportunity to leverage meta data, security and other settings that have been applied or inherited in the prior parts of our governance process. In the interests of keeping this process pragmatic, there is little day to day activity that needs to happen here. Most of the activity that happens post creation will occur in the final "Retire" phase in which content may be archived or removed. The Manage Phase will focus on updating content and the meta data associated with it - specifically around ownership. Often times the largest issues with content ownership occur when a content creator leaves and organization or changes roles within an organization.   1. Update Content Ownership (as needed and on a quarterly basis) Why - Without updating content to reflect ownership changes it will be impossible to continue to meaningfully govern the content. How - Run reports against the meta data (creator and department to which the creator belongs) on content items for a particular user that may have left the organization or changed job roles. If the content is without and owner connect with the department marked as responsible. The content's ownership should be reassigned or if the content is no longer needed by that department for some reason it can be archived and or deleted. With a minimal investment it is possible to create reports that use an LDAP or Active Directory system to contrast all noted content owners versus the users that exist in the directory. The delta will indicate which content will need new ownership assigned. Impact - This implicitly keeps your repository and search collection clean. A very large percent of content that ends up no longer being useful to an organization falls into this category. This management phase (automated if possible) should be completed every quarter or as needed. The impact of actually following through with this phase is substantial and will provide end users with a better experience when browsing and searching for content.

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• i5 540M or i7 720QM for laptop running VMs and software development tools?

  - by Donald Hughes

  I'm a software developer that would primarily be running Windows 7 as the primary operating system. On a typical day, I might, at any given moment, be running Visual Studio, Expression Web, SQL Server developer (and Management Console), IIS, Photoshop, a dozen browser tabs in 2-3 different browsers, Skype video chat, streaming music, and a couple of VMs (WinXP and Ubuntu) for testing/experimentation. Obviously, RAM is a concern, which is why I plan to use 8 GB so I can devote enough to the VMs to be usable. I'm also tempted to use an ExpressCard SSD for storing the VM disks to ease disk contention. And I know that that is asking a lot from a laptop, and I should just use a desktop, but I need to be able to take my work with me between several locations. It seems that at a reasonable price point, it comes down to the i5 540M versus the i7 720QM. I'm leaning toward the i7 since it would allow me to dedicate a whole hyperthreaded core to each VM, and still have two cores left for the primary OS. I've heard that the i5 has better battery life, but I'm curious for my scenario if there would be a meaningful difference. I don't usually work without a plug, but I do occasionally ride the train or fly and it would be nice to have at least 3 hours of juice for unusual circumstances. And, finally, for this usage scenario, would a dedicated video option be preferred over the i5's integrated video? It sounds like Visual Studio 2010 (and Windows 7) can take advantage of the video card.

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• Migrating from "partial" Exchange 2003 to full Exchange 2003 usability

  - by TheCleaner

  I have a client that is using Exchange 2003 on SBS 2003 R2, but only for calendar sharing and contacts sharing. Their email is still coming to their clients via a POP3 account on each client's Outlook. I'd like to move them over to using Exchange for both email and the other things they are utilizing it for now. Can you folks guide me in the right direction? The setup: external domain is akin to domain.com (and is where they get their POP3 email from now) internal domain is akin to domain.local only simple hardware firewall (no ISA) static external IP is available to use My "assumptions": Setup SMTP default connector in Exchange for their existing external domain Have their existing email backed up to PST files (just in case) Setup the new MX records to point domain.com to the static external IP I'm a little confused how I'm going to setup their existing Exchange accounts with the proper SMTP address though. Right now it is just [email protected]. Do I just need to modify or create a new recipient policy? Are there other steps involved that I'm missing? Anyone with a walkthrough or even a basic "steps" is fine. I'm fairly used to Exchange 03, but I've been on Exchange 07 for a while now so going back is the weird part...plus I don't know what issues Exchange 03 on SBS has versus the normal "version". Thanks for all the help!

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• Performance mitigations serving content from a UNC share via IIS 6

  - by codepoke

  I have a quad processor vmware instance running Windows 2003 and 1gb ethernet. I'm comparing serving the exact same heavy .NET 2.0 content from the local hard drive versus serving it from a UNC drive. If I use WCAT to load it down, I see about a 40% reduction in transactions/sec while serving from the UNC. Processor time barely moves from 45% and the NIC sits around 40% either way. I don't see any significant memory loading either way. Context Switches/Transaction, though, more than doubles when serving from the UNC. Pathlengths more than double as well, but I believe that's just an expression of the effect of context switching. All told, it looks like the bottleneck is processor switching while waiting on content from the UNC share. Is my experience about the norm? Is there some mitigation I might try? I twiddled HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters\MaxCmds a little bit per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd296694(WS.10).aspx, but to no obvious effect. I kind of doubt my problem is lack of connections, but rather just the act of switching from thread to thread while waiting on data.

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• Alternatives to Splunk?

  - by MichaelGG

  I'm pretty impressed with Splunk, especially version 4. Pretty graphs, alerting (Enterprise only), and fast, accurate, searching. It's a great product. However, the cost just way too high to consider for full production use for our company. All we really need is to be able to index different logs in a central place, and have reasonable searching on that. Having alerts based on a saved search is also really nice. We don't really go beyond that. In fact, our biggest usage has been in deploying new applications. Everything gets logged via log4net to either the Event log on Windows or a text file on Linux. Splunk makes it pretty easy to quickly search across those to make sure all the parts of the app are working ok -- that's saved us tons of time versus hunting down individual logging sources. What alternatives exist in this market? I have a sinking feeling Splunk's pricing is so high because they have the best product by far, and they know it. We want the server to run on Windows. I'd be open to a split model, using one product for general logs (collect via syslog/Snare), and a dedicated product for our custom apps (like Log4Net Dashboard). Would using a simple syslog server such as Kiwi, sent to SQL Server (perhaps with fulltext enabled) work? I'd hope the cost should be well under 5 figures, USD. (And yes, I know, we're cheap. We're a startup with little money, and BizSpark takes care of all our MS licensing.) Edit: I should add, we have about 10 physical servers, 20 VMs, and a couple firewalls and switches. 90% is Windows.

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• How can I get the root account to generate an acceptable ssh key?

  - by Jamie

  On an ubuntu machine I did the following: ~$ sudo su - [sudo] password for jamie: root@mydomain:~# ssh-keygen -t rsa Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/root/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_rsa. Your public key has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. The key fingerprint is: 12:34:56:78:9a:bc:de:f0:12:34:56:78:9a:bc:de:f0 [email protected] The key's randomart image is: +--[ RSA 2048]----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-----------------+ root@mydomain:~# cat /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh -p 443 [email protected] 'cat > authorized_keys' [email protected]'s password: root@mydomain:~# ssh -p 443 [email protected] [email protected]'s password: It's asking me for a password. However, using a regular account, the following works: $ cd ; ssh-keygen -t rsa ; cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys' $ ssh [email protected] Last login: Thu Oct 24 14:48:41 2013 from 173.45.232.105 [[email protected] ~]$ Which leads me to believe it's not an issue of authorized_keys versus authorized_keys2 or permissions. Why does the 'root' account accessing the remote 'jamie' account not work? The remote machine is CentOS if that's relevant.

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• Slow parity initialization of RAID-5 array on HP Smart Array 411 controller

  - by Rob Nicholson

  On 29th October 2011, I built a RAID-5 array using 4 x 146.8GB Seagate SAS ST3146855SS drives running at 15k connected to a PowerEdge R515 with HP Smart Array P411 controller running Windows 2008 (so nothing particularly unusual). I know that parity initialisation of a RAID-5 array can take some time but it's still running after 2.5 weeks which seems a little unusual. I'd previously built another array on the same controller using 4 x 2TB SATA-2 drives and that did take a while to complete but a) I'm sure it was less than 2.5 weeks, b) that array was ~12 times bigger and c) during initialization, the percentrage slowly increased each day. At the moment, the status display for this new 2nd array simply says "Parity Initialization Status: In Progress" and it's said that since the start. It's this lack of change on the status that worries me the most - feels like it's not actually doing anything. Do you think something has gone wrong or am I being unpatient and for some reason, the status not increasing is normal? I kind of expected a much smaller array on faster drives (15k SAS versus 7.5k SATA-2) to build in a few days. This is our primary SAN running StarWind so my "have a play" options are very limited. This 2nd array is currently in use for one small virtual disk so I could shut the target machine down, move the virtual disk to another drive and try rebuilding.

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• Curios: What makes CPUs better than others? [closed]

  - by Zizma

  I have been wondering about this for a long while now and was hoping someone here could answer it pretty easily. If I was looking for the most powerful CPU what should I really be looking at? There are so many different parameters of a CPU and I am wanting to know what each thing does and what really matters. Basically this: What is the deal with cores? If I take using optimized applications out of the mix would it theoretically better to get quad core 1.0GHz CPU or a 1 core 4 GHz CPU? Also, what is the difference between maybe an Sandy Bridge CPU versus an Ivy Bridge CPU? If they both were had the same clock speed and number of cores would the Ivy Bridge perform better? Does an older Xeon with an equal clock speed and number of cores to a new i7 really perform worse/slower? Does size matter? Why would I go with a 22nm CPU over a 32nm when the size difference is so trivial? What about the cache? When does the cache come into play with performance?

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• Backup strategy for developer-focused Apple environments?

  - by ewwhite

  It's interesting to see the technological split between structured corporate environments and more developer-driven/startup environments. Some of the Microsoft technologies I take for granted (VSS, Folder Redirection, etc.) simply are not available when managing the increasing number of Apple laptops I see in DevOps shops. I'm interested in centralized and automated backup strategies for a group of 30-40 Apple laptops... How is this typically done safely and securely, assuming these are company-owned machines (versus BYOD)? While Apple has Time Machine, it's geared toward individual computer backups and doesn't seem to work reliably in a group setting. Another issue with these workstations is the presence of Vagrant/Virtual Box VMs on the developers' systems. Time Machine and virtual machines typically don't work well unless the VMs are excluded from the backup set. I'd like a push-based backup process with some flexible scheduling options. I know how to handle the backend storage, but I'm not sure on what needs to be presented to the client systems. Due to the nature of the data here, cloud-based backup may not be a viable option. Any suggestions about how you handle this in your environment would be appreciated. Edit: The virtual machine backups are no longer important. They can be excluded from the process and planning.

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