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• Must-see sessions at TCUK11

  - by Roger Hart

  Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

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• Design Pattern for Complex Data Modeling

  - by Aaron Hayman

  I'm developing a program that has a SQL database as a backing store. As a very broad description, the program itself allows a user to generate records in any number of user-defined tables and make connections between them. As for specs: Any record generated must be able to be connected to any other record in any other user table (excluding itself...the record, not the table). These "connections" are directional, and the list of connections a record has is user ordered. Moreover, a record must "know" of connections made from it to others as well as connections made to it from others. The connections are kind of the point of this program, so there is a strong possibility that the number of connections made is very high, especially if the user is using the software as intended. A record's field can also include aggregate information from it's connections (like obtaining average, sum, etc) that must be updated on change from another record it's connected to. To conserve memory, only relevant information must be loaded at any one time (can't load the entire database in memory at load and go from there). I cannot assume the backing store is local. Right now it is, but eventually this program will include syncing to a remote db. Neither the user tables, connections or records are known at design time as they are user generated. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to design the backing store and the object model to best fit these specs. In my first design attempt on this, I had one object managing all a table's records and connections. I attempted this first because it kept the memory footprint smaller (records and connections were simple dicts), but maintaining aggregate and link information between tables became....onerous (ie...a huge spaghettified mess). Tracing dependencies using this method almost became impossible. Instead, I've settled on a distributed graph model where each record and connection is 'aware' of what's around it by managing it own data and connections to other records. Doing this increases my memory footprint but also let me create a faulting system so connections/records aren't loaded into memory until they're needed. It's also much easier to code: trace dependencies, eliminate cycling recursive updates, etc. My biggest problem is storing/loading the connections. I'm not happy with any of my current solutions/ideas so I wanted to ask and see if anybody else has any ideas of how this should be structured. Connections are fairly simple. They contain: fromRecordID, fromTableID, fromRecordOrder, toRecordID, toTableID, toRecordOrder. Here's what I've come up with so far: Store all the connections in one big table. If I do this, either I load all connections at once (one big db call) or make a call every time a user table is loaded. The big issue here: the size of the connections table has the potential to be huge, and I'm afraid it would slow things down. Store in separate tables all the outgoing connections for each user table. This is probably the worst idea I've had. Now my connections are 'spread out' over multiple tables (one for each user table), which means I have to make a separate DB called to each table (or make a huge join) just to find all the incoming connections for a particular user table. I've avoided making "one big ass table", but I'm not sure the cost is worth it. Store in separate tables all outgoing AND incoming connections for each user table (using a flag to distinguish between incoming vs outgoing). This is the idea I'm leaning towards, but it will essentially double the total DB storage for all the connections (as each connection will be stored in two tables). It also means I have to make sure connection information is kept in sync in both places. This is obviously not ideal but it does mean that when I load a user table, I only need to load one 'connection' table and have all the information I need. This also presents a separate problem, that of connection object creation. Since each user table has a list of all connections, there are two opportunities for a connection object to be made. However, connections objects (designed to facilitate communication between records) should only be created once. This means I'll have to devise a common caching/factory object to make sure only one connection object is made per connection. Does anybody have any ideas of a better way to do this? Once I've committed to a particular design pattern I'm pretty much stuck with it, so I want to make sure I've come up with the best one possible.

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• How would you gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

  - by ruslan

  I'm relatively new to StackExchange and not sure if it's appropriate place to ask design question. Site gives me a hint "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed". Please let me know. Anyway.. One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting? Thank you very much in advance for your thoughts.

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• yield – Just yet another sexy c# keyword?

  - by George Mamaladze

  yield (see NSDN c# reference) operator came I guess with .NET 2.0 and I my feeling is that it’s not as wide used as it could (or should) be.   I am not going to talk here about necessarity and advantages of using iterator pattern when accessing custom sequences (just google it).   Let’s look at it from the clean code point of view. Let's see if it really helps us to keep our code understandable, reusable and testable.   Let’s say we want to iterate a tree and do something with it’s nodes, for instance calculate a sum of their values. So the most elegant way would be to build a recursive method performing a classic depth traversal returning the sum.           private int CalculateTreeSum(Node top)         {             int sumOfChildNodes = 0;             foreach (Node childNode in top.ChildNodes)             {                 sumOfChildNodes += CalculateTreeSum(childNode);             }             return top.Value + sumOfChildNodes;         }     “Do One Thing” Nevertheless it violates one of the most important rules “Do One Thing”. Our  method CalculateTreeSum does two things at the same time. It travels inside the tree and performs some computation – in this case calculates sum. Doing two things in one method is definitely a bad thing because of several reasons: ·          Understandability: Readability / refactoring ·          Reuseability: when overriding - no chance to override computation without copying iteration code and vice versa. ·          Testability: you are not able to test computation without constructing the tree and you are not able to test correctness of tree iteration.   I want to spend some more words on this last issue. How do you test the method CalculateTreeSum when it contains two in one: computation & iteration? The only chance is to construct a test tree and assert the result of the method call, in our case the sum against our expectation. And if the test fails you do not know wether was the computation algorithm wrong or was that the iteration? At the end to top it all off I tell you: according to Murphy’s Law the iteration will have a bug as well as the calculation. Both bugs in a combination will cause the sum to be accidentally exactly the same you expect and the test will PASS. J   Ok let’s use yield! That’s why it is generally a very good idea not to mix but isolate “things”. Ok let’s use yield!           private int CalculateTreeSumClean(Node top)         {             IEnumerable<Node> treeNodes = GetTreeNodes(top);             return CalculateSum(treeNodes);         }             private int CalculateSum(IEnumerable<Node> nodes)         {             int sumOfNodes = 0;             foreach (Node node in nodes)             {                 sumOfNodes += node.Value;             }             return sumOfNodes;         }           private IEnumerable<Node> GetTreeNodes(Node top)         {             yield return top;             foreach (Node childNode in top.ChildNodes)             {                 foreach (Node currentNode in GetTreeNodes(childNode))                 {                     yield return currentNode;                 }             }         }   Two methods does not know anything about each other. One contains calculation logic another jut the iteration logic. You can relpace the tree iteration algorithm from depth traversal to breath trevaersal or use stack or visitor pattern instead of recursion. This will not influence your calculation logic. And vice versa you can relace the sum with product or do whatever you want with node values, the calculateion algorithm is not aware of beeng working on some tree or graph.  How about not using yield? Now let’s ask the question – what if we do not have yield operator? The brief look at the generated code gives us an answer. The compiler generates a 150 lines long class to implement the iteration logic.       [CompilerGenerated]     private sealed class <GetTreeNodes>d__0 : IEnumerable<Node>, IEnumerable, IEnumerator<Node>, IEnumerator, IDisposable     {         ...        150 Lines of generated code        ...     }   Often we compromise code readability, cleanness, testability, etc. – to reduce number of classes, code lines, keystrokes and mouse clicks. This is the human nature - we are lazy. Knowing and using such a sexy construct like yield, allows us to be lazy, write very few lines of code and at the same time stay clean and do one thing in a method. That's why I generally welcome using staff like that.   Note: The above used recursive depth traversal algorithm is possibly the compact one but not the best one from the performance and memory utilization point of view. It was taken to emphasize on other primary aspects of this post.

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• Where should you put constants and why?

  - by Tim Meyer

  In our mostly large applications, we usually have a only few locations for constants: One class for GUI and internal contstants (Tab Page titles, Group Box titles, calculation factors, enumerations) One class for database tables and columns (this part is generated code) plus readable names for them (manually assigned) One class for application messages (logging, message boxes etc) The constants are usually separated into different structs in those classes. In our C++ applications, the constants are only defined in the .h file and the values are assigned in the .cpp file. One of the advantages is that all strings etc are in one central place and everybody knows where to find them when something must be changed. This is especially something project managers seem to like as people come and go and this way everybody can change such trivial things without having to dig into the application's structure. Also, you can easily change the title of similar Group Boxes / Tab Pages etc at once. Another aspect is that you can just print that class and give it to a non-programmer who can check if the captions are intuitive, and if messages to the user are too detailed or too confusing etc. However, I see certain disadvantages: Every single class is tightly coupled to the constants classes Adding/Removing/Renaming/Moving a constant requires recompilation of at least 90% of the application (Note: Changing the value doesn't, at least for C++). In one of our C++ projects with 1500 classes, this means around 7 minutes of compilation time (using precompiled headers; without them it's around 50 minutes) plus around 10 minutes of linking against certain static libraries. Building a speed optimized release through the Visual Studio Compiler takes up to 3 hours. I don't know if the huge amount of class relations is the source but it might as well be. You get driven into temporarily hard-coding strings straight into code because you want to test something very quickly and don't want to wait 15 minutes just for that test (and probably every subsequent one). Everybody knows what happens to the "I will fix that later"-thoughts. Reusing a class in another project isn't always that easy (mainly due to other tight couplings, but the constants handling doesn't make it easier.) Where would you store constants like that? Also what arguments would you bring in order to convince your project manager that there are better concepts which also comply with the advantages listed above? Feel free to give a C++-specific or independent answer. PS: I know this question is kind of subjective but I honestly don't know of any better place than this site for this kind of question. Update on this project I have news on the compile time thing: Following Caleb's and gbjbaanb's posts, I split my constants file into several other files when I had time. I also eventually split my project into several libraries which was now possible much easier. Compiling this in release mode showed that the auto-generated file which contains the database definitions (table, column names and more - more than 8000 symbols) and builds up certain hashes caused the huge compile times in release mode. Deactivating MSVC's optimizer for the library which contains the DB constants now allowed us to reduce the total compile time of your Project (several applications) in release mode from up to 8 hours to less than one hour! We have yet to find out why MSVC has such a hard time optimizing these files, but for now this change relieves a lot of pressure as we no longer have to rely on nightly builds only. That fact - and other benefits, such as less tight coupling, better reuseability etc - also showed that spending time splitting up the "constants" wasn't such a bad idea after all ;-)

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• How can I gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

  - by ruslan

  One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting?

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• What do you need to know to be a world-class master software developer? [closed]

  - by glitch

  I wanted to bring up this question to you folks and see what you think, hopefully advise me on the matter: let's say you had 30 years of learning and practicing software development in front of you, how would you dedicate your time so that you'd get the biggest bang for your buck. What would you both learn and work on to be a world-class software developer that would make a large impact on the industry and leave behind a legacy? I think that most great developers end up being both broad generalists and specialists in one-two areas of interest. I'm thinking Bill Joy, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, K&R and so on. I'm thinking that perhaps one approach would be to break things down by categories and establish a base minimum of "software development" greatness. I'm thinking: Operating Systems: completely internalize the core concepts of OS, perhaps gain a lot of familiarity with an OSS one such as Linux. Anything from memory management to device drivers has to be complete second nature. Programming Languages: this is one of those topics that imho has to be fully grokked even if it might take many years. I don't think there's quite anything like going through the process of developing your own compiler, understanding language design trade-offs and so on. Programming Language Pragmatics is one of my favorite books actually, I think you want to have that internalized back to back, and that's just the start. You could go significantly deeper, but I think it's time well spent, because it's such a crucial building block. As a subset of that, you want to really understand the different programming paradigms out there. Imperative, declarative, logic, functional and so on. Anything from assembly to LISP should be at the very least comfortable to write in. Contexts: I believe one should have experience working in different contexts to truly be able to appreciate the trade-offs that are being made every day. Embedded, web development, mobile development, UX development, distributed, cloud computing and so on. Hardware: I'm somewhat conflicted about this one. I think you want some understanding of computer architecture at a low level, but I feel like the concepts that will truly matter will be slightly higher level, such as CPU caching / memory hierarchy, ILP, and so on. Networking: we live in a completely network-dependent era. Having a good understanding of the OSI model, knowing how the Web works, how HTTP works and so on is pretty much a pre-requisite these days. Distributed systems: once again, everything's distributed these days, it's getting progressively harder to ignore this reality. Slightly related, perhaps add solid understanding of how browsers work to that, since the world seems to be moving so much to interfacing with everything through a browser. Tools: Have a really broad toolset that you're familiar with, one that continuously expands throughout the years. Communication: I think being a great writer, effective communicator and a phenomenal team player is pretty much a prerequisite for a lot of a software developer's greatness. It can't be overstated. Software engineering: understanding the process of building software, team dynamics, the requirements of the business-side, all the pitfalls. You want to deeply understand where what you're writing fits from the market perspective. The better you understand all of this, the more of your work will actually see the daylight. This is really just a starting list, I'm confident that there's a ton of other material that you need to master. As I mentioned, you most likely end up specializing in a bunch of these areas as you go along, but I was trying to come up with a baseline. Any thoughts, suggestions and words of wisdom from the grizzled veterans out there who would like to share their thoughts and experiences with this? I'd really love to know what you think!

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• SEO/Google: How should I handle multiple countries and domains?

  - by Valorized

  Hello. I'm the webmaster of an online shop based in Austria (Europe). Therefore we registered "example.at". We also own different other domain names like "example-shop.com" and "example.info". Currently all those domains are redirected (301) to the .at one. Still available is: "example.net" and "example.org" (and .ws/.cc), unfortunately not available: .de/.eu The .com is currently owned by one of our partners, the contract ends in 2012 but until then we have no chance to get this one. Recently I read more about geo-targeting and I noticed ONE big deal. The tld ".at" is hardly recognised in Germany (google.de) whereas it is excellently listed in Austria (google.at). As a result of the .at I cannot set the target location manually (or to unlisted). More info: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399&hl=en This is a big problem. I looked at Google Analytics and - although Germany is 10x as big as Austria - there are more visits from Austria. So, how should I config the domain in order to get the best results in both, Germany and Austria? I thought of some solutions: First I could stop redirecting the .info. Then there would be a duplicate of the .at one. Moreover, in Webmastertools, I could set the target location of the .info to Germany. As the .at still targets Austria, both would be targeted - however I don't now if google punishes one of them because of the duplicate content? Same as 1. but with .net or .org (I think .info is not a "nice" domain and moreover I think search engines prefer .com, .net or .org to .info). Same as 1. (or 2.) but with a rel="canonical" on the new one (pointing to the .at). Con: I don't think this will improve the situation, because it still tells google that the .at one is more important, like: "if .info points to .at, the target may still be Austria". rel="canonical" on the .at pointing to the new (.info or .net or .org). However I fear that this will have a negative impact on the listing on google.at because: "Hey, the well-known .at is not important anymore, so let's focus on the .info which is not well-known." - Therefore: bad position in search results. Redirect .at to the new (.info or .net or .org) with a 301-Redirect. Con: Might be worse than 4, we might loose Page-Rank (or "the value of the page", because google says that page rank is not important anymore). Moreover this might be even more confusing for the customers. In 3. or 4. customers don't get redirected, they do not see the canonical-meta-tag. So, dear experts, please tell me what the best option would be! Thank you very much for your advice in advance and please excuse the long question. I really appreciate this network! Please note: It's exactly the same content AND language. In Austria we speak German.

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• Is there a way to tell what the download speed is from a site/server

  - by Memor-X

  i'm looking into which ISP i should go with at the place i'm moving into, one ISP which i have been told good things about has data limits (which when breached will drop your speed to dial-up speed) but multiple memberships which, apart from the cheapest membership, have the same data limits (the cheapest has a 10GB data limit) in their fine print, they say that each different membership has different port speeds, one particular part jumps out at me These speeds are the NBN (National Broadband Network) port speed and not the actual Internet data speed which will vary based on numerous factors including destination you are reaching, your network equipment, network congestion etc. i plan to use the net to download DLC and patch updates for games (particular the insanely large update for the Wii U) and games from Steam (if i find any good one other than this one JRPG) and downloading development resources from free sites like Deposit Files and Mediafire since one membership with a 1000GB data limit is $145 with the port speed being 12Mbps/1Mbps (cheapest) while another with the same limit is $190 with the port speed of 100Mbps/40Mbps (expensive) i am wondering how i can tell what the speed coming from site is since i don't want to be wasting money on speed that makes no difference (unlike memory which i rather have to spare) NOTE: the speeds are for a fiber optic network which where my new place is can only connect via fixed wireless which i may not be able to get with this ISP but if i can get this network then good NOTE 2: most of the resources i get from Deposit Files are always about 200 MB or less, if a resource pack is greater then it's split into multiple archives (like .7z.part) while Mediafire i have to see one bigger than 150MB NOTE 3: one update patch for a PS3 game is close to 4 GB (Disgaea 4) which i need to get access to the DLC and on the weekend i downloaded 5 GB for the Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta for the PS3 which took almost 5 hours

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• Server Performance

  - by sb12

  I know very little about performance tuning of servers etc... so i thought i'd put this up here as i start some research on it, just to get some direction. I am in the process of migrating from my old server to a new one - both are 64 bit machines. One is a few years old, the other brand new (PowerEdge R410). The old server spec is: 2 cpus, 3.4GHz Pentiums, 8G of RAM, Fedora 11 currently installed The new server spec is: 16 cpus, 3.2 GHz Xeon, 16G of RAM, CentOS 6.2 installed. Also RAID10 is on the new server - no RAID on the old one. Both servers currently have the same database (MySQL) with the same data migrated. I wrote a Perl script that simply steps through each row of a table in the database (about 18000 rows) and updates a value in that row. Every row in the table is updated. Out of curiosity i ran this perl script on both machines, just to see how the new server would perform vs. the old one, and it produced interesting results: The old server was twice as fast as the new one to complete. Looking at the database, both are configured exactly the same (the new one being a dump of the old one...)... Anyone any ideas why this would be given the hardware gap between both? As i said i'm about to start some digging, but thought i'd put this up here to maybe get some good direction.... Many thanks in advance..

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• Apache subdomain not working

  - by tandu

  I'm running apache on my local machine and I'm trying to create a subdomain, but it's not working. Here is what I have (stripped down): <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/one ServerName one.localhost </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/two ServerName two.localhost </VirtualHost> I recently added one. The two entry has been around for a while, and it still works fine (displays the webpage when I go to two.localhost). In fact, I copied the entire two.localhost entry and simply changed two to one, but it's not working. I have tried each of the following: * `apachectl -k graceful` * `apachectl -k restart` * `/etc/init.d/apache2 restart` * `/etc/init.d/apache2 stop && !#:0 start` Apache will complain if /var/www/one does not exist, so I know it's doing something, but when I visit one.localhost in my browser, the browser complains that nothing is there. I put an index.html file there and also tried going to one.localhost/index.html directly, and the browser still won't fine it. This is very perplexing since the entry I copied from two.localhost is exactly the same .. not only that, but if something were wrong I would expect to get a 500 rather than the browser not being able to find anything. The error_log also has nothing extra.

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• LCD monitor flicker when connected to a laptop using VGA

  - by Björn Lindqvist

  I have a dual screen setup with two AOC e2450Sw monitors connected to a laptop. The laptop has one HDMI and one VGA output. When one of the monitors is connected using VGA, it flickers or displays static noise. The flickering is fairly subtle and only visible on darker colors. But it is there and noticable and appears like horizontal lines. The problem only appears on the monitor connected to the laptop using the VGA cable. If I swap the monitors, the one connected using VGA is displaying the flicker but not the one connected using HDMI. The simple solution would ofcourse be to connect both monitors using HDMI, but since the laptop only has one VGA and one HDMI out that isn't possible. I've tried tweaking the monitor setting using the OSD menu, but it had little or no effect. Update: After several more trouble shooting hours, it seems the problem is not related to the monitor or VGA cable as the problem persists even if I swap the display with another brand and different cables. So it may be the graphics card? Intel HD Graphics 4000. The laptop is Acer Aspire E1-571.

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• Multiheaded X.org with a single workspace-pool

  - by blauwblaatje

  I've got an idea for x.org/$randomwindowmanager in combination with a multiheaded setup, but I haven't figured out how it should work. Also I don't really know where to place the feature request. Now for the idea. I've been working with screen (wikipedia:GNU_Screen) for some years now. One thing I like about it, is the fact that I can get a multi-display mode (screen -x), so you can have multiple terminals all connected to the same screen. The fun thing about it, is that you can get 2 terminals with the same content and switch my onscreen layout, without moving the terminals. I admit, in screen it's not extremely useful, but I think for a wm it can be. Imagine this. You've got two monitors and 4 workdesks. On one workdesk I've got my IDE with code, on the second one I've got the output, on the third one I've got the documentation and on the forth one I've got my e-mail and IM clients. At one moment, I want my IDE and output on my monitors, another moment my code and documentation and Yet another moment my IM to consult a colleague and documentation or code. Finally my colleague comes to help me at my desk. I'd like it if we could both watch the same workdesk without him sitting on my lap, so I turn one monitor so he can see it better. It would be great if we could see the same thing that's on my monitor (exclude mousepointer). The thing with most WMs is that your workspaces on the two monitors are either separated or glued together. If they're separated, you can change workspaces on each monitor autonomous, but you can't exchange applications between monitors because they're different x-clients (iirc). If they're glued together (xinerama), you can exchange the applications, but when changing your workspace, the other monitors change too. So, what I'd like to know is this. Is this already possible or should I submit a feature request somewhere (and if so, where?)

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• Confused with creating an ODBC connection, apparently I have two separate odbcad32.exe files?

  - by Hoser

  Alright, this is my first time working with this so forgive me if I'm a little confusing or vague. I have a server with Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-v (6.0, Build 6002). I'm running a small website off this server and using a Microsoft Access database to store some information coming in through the website. I'm sure the PHP I have written to open the ODBC connection is correct as it has worked for me when I created this website in a testing environment on a laptop. My current issue now is that it seems like I have two different odbcad32.exe's, and one doesn't appear to have a driver for a .accdb file, and only a .mdb file. The other has a driver for both. The first one I speak of has a driver titled 'Driver do Microsoft Access (.mdb)', the second one has a driver titled 'Microsoft Access Driver (.mdb, .accdb)'. I access the first odbcad32.exe by going to C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe, and then the one that seems to have the driver I need I go to Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Data Sources(ODBC) and simply create a new connection in the System DNS tab. Whenever I make changes to the one that I access through the Control Panel, I see no changes, however if I use the odbcad32.exe file in SysWOW64 I do get some changes in the errors that come back to me. The main difference I noticed is that when I set up an ODBC connection with the Control Panel method it said it simply couldn't find the ODBC connection, but when I made a .mdb connection in the SysWOW64 one (and pointed it to a .accdb file) it says Cannot open database '(unknown)'. It may not be a database that your application recognizes, or the file may be corrupt. Which makes it seem like it is this odbcad32.exe version in SySWOW64 that is being recognized as the 'correct' one. Is there any way to fix this? I've tried to be as thorough as possible but if I've been confusing or left anything out let me know.

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• Confused about home screen widget size in normal screen and larget screen

  - by kknight

  I am designing a home screen widget. The widget layout file is like below. <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/widget" android:layout_width="240dip" android:layout_height="200dip" android:background="@drawable/base_all" /> I ran this widget on a HTC Hero device, which has a screen of 320 pixels * 480 pixels with mdpi. It ran perfect on HTC Hero. The widget takes 3 cells * 2 cells space, i.e. 240 pixels * 200 pixels. Then I ran this widget on a Nexus One device, which has a screen of 480 pixels * 800 pixels, mdpi. Since Nexus One also is mdpi, so I though 240dip is equivalent to 240 pixels on Nexus One and 200dip is equivalent to 200 pixels on Nexus One, so the widget will not take 3 cells * 2 cells space on Nexus One device. To my surprise, when running on Nexus One device, the widget take exact 3 cells * 2 cells, about 360 pixels * 300 pixels, on Nexus One device. I am confused. The layout xml above specifies 240dip in width and 200dip in height for the widget, but why did it take 360 pixels * 300 pixels on Nexus One Device? What am I missing? Thanks.

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• How to get list of files which are currently being diffed in vim

  - by Yogesh Arora

  I am writing a vim plugin in which i need to determine all those files which are currently being diffed. That is the ones for which diff is set. I have been going through the manual but could not find much. Is it possible to do this. This question is actually related to question how-to-detect-the-position-of-window-in-vim. In that question i was trying to get the position of window, so as to detect which one of the diffs is the right one and which is left one. The solution i got was to use winnr() That solution can work only if there are only 2 windows(the ones being diffed). I want to make it generic so that even if multiple windows are open in vim, i can determine which one is on left and which one is right. This is what i was thinking to solve the problem Get a list of all listed buffers For each of this buffers determine if diff is 1 for that If diff is 1 use bufwinnr() to gets it window number. From the window numbers determine which one is left and which one is right. left one will have smaller window number And then determine if current buffer(in which alt-left`alt-right` is pressed) is left or right using winnr of current buffer. Now the pieces that are missing are 1 and 2. For 1 ls can be used but i need to parse its output. Is there a straightfwd way to get list of all listed buffers. And then is there a way to check if for that buffer diff is 1 or not. Any suggestions for a simpler solution are also appreciated.

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• How should I design my MYSQL table/s?

  - by yaya3

  I built a really basic php/mysql site for an architect that uses one 'projects' table. The website showcases various projects that he has worked on. Each project contained one piece of text and one series of images. Original projects table (create syntax): CREATE TABLE `projects` ( `project_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `project_name` text, `project_text` text, `image_filenames` text, `image_folder` text, `project_pdf` text, PRIMARY KEY (`project_id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=8 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; The client now requires the following, and I'm not sure how to handle the expansions in my DB. My suspicion is that I will need an additional table. Each project now have 'pages'. Pages either contain... One image One "piece" of text One image and one piece of text. Each page could use one of three layouts. As each project does not currently have more than 4 pieces of text (a very risky assumption) I have expanded the original table to accommodate everything. New projects table attempt (create syntax): CREATE TABLE `projects` ( `project_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `project_name` text, `project_pdf` text, `project_image_folder` text, `project_img_filenames` text, `pages_with_text` text, `pages_without_img` text, `pages_layout_type` text, `pages_title` text, `page_text_a` text, `page_text_b` text, `page_text_c` text, `page_text_d` text, PRIMARY KEY (`project_id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=8 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; In trying to learn more about MYSQL table structuring I have just read an intro to normalization and A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory. I'm going to keep reading! Thanks in advance

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• Problem pushing multiple view controllers onto navigation controller stack

  - by Jim

  Hi, I am trying to push three view controllers onto the navigation controller. [self.navigationController pushViewController:one animated:YES]; [self.navigationController pushViewController:two animated:YES]; [self.navigationController pushViewController:three animated:YES]; The desired behavior is that view three will show, and when the back button is pressed it will go to view two and then to view one... What actually happens is that view one is visible and pressing back goes to view two and then back again it goes to view one. Which is to say that view one is shown instead of view three. Very strangely, looking at the viewController array of the navigationController after the calls above show the right entries, and looking at the visibleViewController property shows that it has view three in it... even though view one is visible. If i navigate to a sub view from the visible view one (that shows in the place of view three) and press back from that sub view... it goes to view three. It looks like it is showing view one, but knows it is on view three... I am completely confused... any ideas? Jim

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• [Ruby] Object assignment and pointers

  - by Jergason

  I am a little confused about object assignment and pointers in Ruby, and coded up this snippet to test my assumptions. class Foo attr_accessor :one, :two def initialize(one, two) @one = one @two = two end end bar = Foo.new(1, 2) beans = bar puts bar puts beans beans.one = 2 puts bar puts beans puts beans.one puts bar.one I had assumed that when I assigned bar to beans, it would create a copy of the object, and modifying one would not affect the other. Alas, the output shows otherwise. ^_^[jergason:~]$ ruby test.rb #<Foo:0x100155c60> #<Foo:0x100155c60> #<Foo:0x100155c60> #<Foo:0x100155c60> 2 2 I believe that the numbers have something to do with the address of the object, and they are the same for both beans and bar, and when I modify beans, bar gets changed as well, which is not what I had expected. It appears that I am only creating a pointer to the object, not a copy of it. What do I need to do to copy the object on assignment, instead of creating a pointer? Tests with the Array class shows some strange behavior as well. foo = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] baz = foo puts "foo is #{foo}" puts "baz is #{baz}" foo.pop puts "foo is #{foo}" puts "baz is #{baz}" foo += ["a hill of beans is a wonderful thing"] puts "foo is #{foo}" puts "baz is #{baz}" This produces the following wonky output: foo is 012345 baz is 012345 foo is 01234 baz is 01234 foo is 01234a hill of beans is a wonderful thing baz is 01234 This blows my mind. Calling pop on foo affects baz as well, so it isn't a copy, but concatenating something onto foo only affects foo, and not baz. So when am I dealing with the original object, and when am I dealing with a copy? In my own classes, how can I make sure that assignment copies, and doesn't make pointers? Help this confused guy out.

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• 3 websites 1 Project

  - by godz-gift05

  Hey Guys, OK. we are currently on a plan to develop a website for 3 same company. The main difference would be just the look and maybe a couple of extra question for one or two company. Currently each company have their own website and when they required a new function we have to re-code all three website or when one wants a new function just one website update. What we wanna accomplish is to create ONE website that could house all these 3 website. Most of these website function are the same like 90% function is the same I figure out the different look which can be done changing the website style-theme.. But we have problem tackling the functionality of if one company wanted to add something. So if we wanted to update a function we just wanna do a change in one function and that should apply for all.. And if one function is required for one company then just add the new fucntion and assign it to 1 company... How do u structure something like this.. We wanna be able to control what being displayed based on the company and also the fucntions available. THANK YOU. I just need some direction on how to do this, Right now Inheritance is on my head to solve all this problem.

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• Sharepoint page menu items gone?

  - by Richard

  I'm running MOSS 2007 and have created a new site under an existing one using sitemanager.aspx. I've done this on two machines. on one of those everything works correctly, while on the other some of the menu items for pages in the site seem to be gone. Also on the faulty site I get "Access denied" when I click "Version history". The permissions on both sites should be the same. I attach a screenshot of how the menus differ from each other. The one to the right (the faulty one) is unfortunately not in English but the items appearing on it are "Open link in a new window", "Copy", "Edit page settings" and "Version history". "View properties" and some more items are missing! What could have caused this? Screenshot: I'm running MOSS 2007 and have created a new site under an existing one using sitemanager.aspx. I've done this on two machines. on one of those everything works correctly, while on the other some of the menu items for pages in the site seem to be gone. Also on the faulty site I get "Access denied" when I click "Version history". The permissions on both sites should be the same. I attach a screenshot of how the menus differ from each other. The one to the right (the faulty one) is unfortunately not in English but the items appearing on it are "Open link in a new window", "Copy", "Edit page settings" and "Version history". "View properties" and some more items are missing! What could have caused this? Screenshot: hxxp://i40.tinypic.com/302naxx.jpg

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• regexp to match string with (comma-separated) number at start and to split into number and rest?

  - by mix

  Given a string such as: 23,234,456 first second third How can I split string this into two parts, where part 1 contains the number at the beginning and part 2 contains the rest---but only if the string STARTS with a number, and the number can be comma-separated or not? In other words, I want two results: 23,234,456 and first second third. If there's a number in that string that isn't part of the first number then it should be in the second result. My best stab at this so far, to grab the number at the beginning, is something like this: ^[0-9]+(,[0-9]{3})* Which seems to grab a comma-separated or non-comma-separated number that starts the line. However, when I run this in the Javascript console I get not only the full number, but also a match on just the last 3 digits with their preceeding ,. (e.g. 23,234,456 and ,456). As for getting the rest into another var I'm having trouble. I tried working with \b, etc., but I think I must be missing something fundamental about grabbing the rest of the line. I'm doing this in Javascript in case it matters. More examples of what to match and what not to match. 2 one two three should return 2 and one two three 2345 one two three should return 2345 and one two three 2 one 2 three should return 2 and one 2 three 2,234 one two 3,000 should return 2,234 and one two 3,000 The space between parts 1 and two could be included in the beginning of part 2.

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• The SSIS tuning tip that everyone misses

  - by Rob Farley

  I know that everyone misses this, because I’m yet to find someone who doesn’t have a bit of an epiphany when I describe this. When tuning Data Flows in SQL Server Integration Services, people see the Data Flow as moving from the Source to the Destination, passing through a number of transformations. What people don’t consider is the Source, getting the data out of a database. Remember, the source of data for your Data Flow is not your Source Component. It’s wherever the data is, within your database, probably on a disk somewhere. You need to tune your query to optimise it for SSIS, and this is what most people fail to do. I’m not suggesting that people don’t tune their queries – there’s plenty of information out there about making sure that your queries run as fast as possible. But for SSIS, it’s not about how fast your query runs. Let me say that again, but in bolder text: The speed of an SSIS Source is not about how fast your query runs. If your query is used in a Source component for SSIS, the thing that matters is how fast it starts returning data. In particular, those first 10,000 rows to populate that first buffer, ready to pass down the rest of the transformations on its way to the Destination. Let’s look at a very simple query as an example, using the AdventureWorks database: We’re picking the different Weight values out of the Product table, and it’s doing this by scanning the table and doing a Sort. It’s a Distinct Sort, which means that the duplicates are discarded. It'll be no surprise to see that the data produced is sorted. Obvious, I know, but I'm making a comparison to what I'll do later. Before I explain the problem here, let me jump back into the SSIS world... If you’ve investigated how to tune an SSIS flow, then you’ll know that some SSIS Data Flow Transformations are known to be Blocking, some are Partially Blocking, and some are simply Row transformations. Take the SSIS Sort transformation, for example. I’m using a larger data set for this, because my small list of Weights won’t demonstrate it well enough. Seven buffers of data came out of the source, but none of them could be pushed past the Sort operator, just in case the last buffer contained the data that would be sorted into the first buffer. This is a blocking operation. Back in the land of T-SQL, we consider our Distinct Sort operator. It’s also blocking. It won’t let data through until it’s seen all of it. If you weren’t okay with blocking operations in SSIS, why would you be happy with them in an execution plan? The source of your data is not your OLE DB Source. Remember this. The source of your data is the NCIX/CIX/Heap from which it’s being pulled. Picture it like this... the data flowing from the Clustered Index, through the Distinct Sort operator, into the SELECT operator, where a series of SSIS Buffers are populated, flowing (as they get full) down through the SSIS transformations. Alright, I know that I’m taking some liberties here, because the two queries aren’t the same, but consider the visual. The data is flowing from your disk and through your execution plan before it reaches SSIS, so you could easily find that a blocking operation in your plan is just as painful as a blocking operation in your SSIS Data Flow. Luckily, T-SQL gives us a brilliant query hint to help avoid this. OPTION (FAST 10000) This hint means that it will choose a query which will optimise for the first 10,000 rows – the default SSIS buffer size. And the effect can be quite significant. First let’s consider a simple example, then we’ll look at a larger one. Consider our weights. We don’t have 10,000, so I’m going to use OPTION (FAST 1) instead. You’ll notice that the query is more expensive, using a Flow Distinct operator instead of the Distinct Sort. This operator is consuming 84% of the query, instead of the 59% we saw from the Distinct Sort. But the first row could be returned quicker – a Flow Distinct operator is non-blocking. The data here isn’t sorted, of course. It’s in the same order that it came out of the index, just with duplicates removed. As soon as a Flow Distinct sees a value that it hasn’t come across before, it pushes it out to the operator on its left. It still has to maintain the list of what it’s seen so far, but by handling it one row at a time, it can push rows through quicker. Overall, it’s a lot more work than the Distinct Sort, but if the priority is the first few rows, then perhaps that’s exactly what we want. The Query Optimizer seems to do this by optimising the query as if there were only one row coming through: This 1 row estimation is caused by the Query Optimizer imagining the SELECT operation saying “Give me one row” first, and this message being passed all the way along. The request might not make it all the way back to the source, but in my simple example, it does. I hope this simple example has helped you understand the significance of the blocking operator. Now I’m going to show you an example on a much larger data set. This data was fetching about 780,000 rows, and these are the Estimated Plans. The data needed to be Sorted, to support further SSIS operations that needed that. First, without the hint. ...and now with OPTION (FAST 10000): A very different plan, I’m sure you’ll agree. In case you’re curious, those arrows in the top one are 780,000 rows in size. In the second, they’re estimated to be 10,000, although the Actual figures end up being 780,000. The top one definitely runs faster. It finished several times faster than the second one. With the amount of data being considered, these numbers were in minutes. Look at the second one – it’s doing Nested Loops, across 780,000 rows! That’s not generally recommended at all. That’s “Go and make yourself a coffee” time. In this case, it was about six or seven minutes. The faster one finished in about a minute. But in SSIS-land, things are different. The particular data flow that was consuming this data was significant. It was being pumped into a Script Component to process each row based on previous rows, creating about a dozen different flows. The data flow would take roughly ten minutes to run – ten minutes from when the data first appeared. The query that completes faster – chosen by the Query Optimizer with no hints, based on accurate statistics (rather than pretending the numbers are smaller) – would take a minute to start getting the data into SSIS, at which point the ten-minute flow would start, taking eleven minutes to complete. The query that took longer – chosen by the Query Optimizer pretending it only wanted the first 10,000 rows – would take only ten seconds to fill the first buffer. Despite the fact that it might have taken the database another six or seven minutes to get the data out, SSIS didn’t care. Every time it wanted the next buffer of data, it was already available, and the whole process finished in about ten minutes and ten seconds. When debugging SSIS, you run the package, and sit there waiting to see the Debug information start appearing. You look for the numbers on the data flow, and seeing operators going Yellow and Green. Without the hint, I’d sit there for a minute. With the hint, just ten seconds. You can imagine which one I preferred. By adding this hint, it felt like a magic wand had been waved across the query, to make it run several times faster. It wasn’t the case at all – but it felt like it to SSIS.

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• How to begin? Windows 8 Development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I convinced you in my last post to do some Win8 development. You want a piece of that cake, or whatever your reasons may be. Good! Welcome to the club! Now let me ask you a question: what are you going to write? Ah. That’s the big one, isn’t it? What indeed? If you have been creating applications for computers before you’re in for quite a shock. The way people perceive apps on a tablet is quite different from what we know as applications. There’s a reason we call them apps instead of applications! Yes, technically they are applications but we don’t call them apps only because it sounds cool. The abbreviated form of the word applications itself is a pointer. Apps are small. Apps are focused. Apps are more lightweight. Apps do one thing but they do that one thing extremely good. In the ‘old’ days we wrote huge systems. We build ecosystems of services, screens, databases and more to create a system that provides value for the user. Think about it: what application do you use most at work? Can you in one sentence describe what it is, or what it does and yet still distinctively describe its purpose? I doubt you can. Let’s have a look at Outlouk. We all know it and we all love or hate it. But what is it? A mail program? No, there’s so much more there: calendar, contacts, RSS feeds and so on. Some call it a ‘collaboration’  application but that’s not really true as well. After all, why should a collaboration application give me my schedule for the day? I think the best way to describe Outlook is “client for Exchange”  although that isn’t accurate either. Anyway: Outlook is a great application but it’s not an ‘app’ and therefor not very suitable for WinRT. Ok. Disclaimer here: yes, you can write big applications for WinRT. Some will. But that’s not what 99.9% of the developers will do. So I am stating here that big applications are not meant for WinRT. If 0.01% of the developers think that this is nonsense then they are welcome to go ahead but for the majority here this is not what we’re talking about. So: Apps are small, lightweight and good at what they do but only at that. If you’re a Phone developer you already know that: Phone apps on any platform fit the description I have above. If you’ve ever worked in a large cooperation before you might have seen one of these before: the Mission Statement. It’s supposed to be a oneliner that sums up what the company is supposed to do. Funny enough: although this doesn’t work for large companies it does work for defining your app. A mission statement for an app describes what it does. If it doesn’t fit in the mission statement then your app is going to get to big and will fail. A statement like this should be in the following style “<your app name> is the best app to <describe single task>” Fill in the blanks, write it and go! Mmm.. not really. There are some things there we need to think about. But the statement is a very, very important one. If you cannot fit your app in that line you’re preparing to fail. Your app will become to big, its purpose will be unclear and it will be hard to use. People won’t download it and those who do will give it a bad rating therefor preventing that huge success you’ve been dreaming about. Stick to the statement! Ok, let’s give it a try: “PlanesAreCool” is the best app to do planespotting in the field. You might have seen these people along runways of airports: taking photographs of airplanes and noting down their numbers and arrival- and departure times. We are going to help them out with our great app! If you look at the statement, can you guess what it does? I bet you can. If you find out it isn’t clear enough of if it’s too broad, refine it. This is probably the most important step in the development of your app so give it enough time! So. We’ve got the statement. Print it out, stick it to the wall and look at it. What does it tell you? If you see this, what do you think the app does? Write that down. Sit down with some friends and talk about it. What do they expect from an app like this? Write that down as well. Brainstorm. Make a list of features. This is mine: Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. Now, I must make it clear that I am not a planespotter nor do I know what one does. So if the above list makes no sense, I apologize. There is a lesson: write apps for stuff you know about…. First of all, let’s look at our statement and then go through the list of features. Remove everything that has nothing to do with that statement! If you end up with an empty list, try again with both steps. Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. That's better. The things I removed could be pretty useful to a plane spotter and could be fun to write. But do they match the statement? I said that the app is for spotting in the field, so “look up airfields” doesn’t belong there: I know where I am so why look it up? And the same goes for inviting friends or looking up the weather conditions for tomorrow. I am at the airfield right now, looking through my binoculars at the planes. I know the weather now and I don’t care about tomorrow. If you feel the items you’ve crossed out are valuable, then why not write another app? One that says “SpotNoter” is the best app for preparing a day of spotting with my friends. That’s a different app! Remember: Win8 apps are small and very good at doing ONE thing, and one thing only! If you have made that list, it’s time to prepare the navigation of your app. The navigation is how users see your app and how they use it. We’ll do that next time!

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• PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

  - by Bill Graziano

  The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model.  (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time.  I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

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