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• EPM Planning (Hyperion) V11.1.2 Implementation Hands-On Boot-camp

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  5-Day Training for Partners: 29th October - 2nd November 2012, London (UK): REGISTER Here This FREE for Partners 5-day workshop is designed to provide implementation instruction on Oracle Hyperion EPM Planning.  This boot-camp is intended for prospective implementers of the Planning and Budgeting functionality of Oracle EPM or implementers that are currently familiar with the basics of EPM Planning and looking to strengthen their base of knowledge in the product. The class begins with an overview of Essbase, the foundation of Hyperion Planning. It provides a general overview of Planning and Planning terms, the architecture of all the Planning components, and how they are commonly used. The course goes over all the steps to create an application from scratch. This involves some preparation work outside of Planning and leads to developing the application in both the Planning Windows and Web clients. Participants will modify existing dimensions and build out the hierarchies using the Web client. Topics Covered The boot-camp shows developers how to build out dimensions using Classic Planning and by using EPMA. It covers the mechanics and cover strategies for automating the build process such as interface tables. It reviews data loads using Load Rules to load the Planning database. The course focuses on tasks that end-users must perform during the planning cycle. It walks students through creating and modifying forms, working with forms to enter data, adding annotations, and the rest of the form features such as running business rules and managing task lists. It covers how to use the forms in the Smart View client and finishes up the end-user perspective by going through Workflow Management and the process of submitting a plan for review. The final section of the course covers Security and other administration topics such as automation and deployment. Prerequisites Ideal participants are Oracle partners (SIs and resellers) with a background in business information systems and a clientele of customers with ongoing or prospective EPM initiatives. Alternatively, partners with the background described above and an interest in evolving their practice to a similar profile are suitable participants. Further online OPN guided learning path information and webinars are available at: Oracle Hyperion Planning 11 Essentials. Please note that attendees are required to bring a laptop. View here laptop requirements and detailed agenda. ·       REGISTER Here : acceptance is subject to availability and your place will be confirmed within two weeks  ( and for help see the Partner Registration Guide ). Training Location: Oracle Corporation UK Ltd Columbus Room Customer Visit Center 1 South Place London EC2M 2RB Training Dates: 29th October - 2nd November  9:30 am – 5:00 pm BST For more information please contact [email protected].

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• Play or Lift: which one is more explicit?

  - by Andrea

  I am going to investigate web development with Scala, and the choice is between learning Lift or Play: probably I will not have enough time to try both, at least at first. Now, many comparisons between the two are available on the internet, but I would like to know how do they compare with respect to being explicit and involving less magic. Let me explain what I mean by example. I have used, to various degrees, CakePHP, symfony2, Django and Grails. I feel a very clear distinction between Django and symfony2, which are very explicit about what you are doing, and Grails and CakePHP, which try to do their best to guess what you are trying to achieve and often feel "magical". Let me give some examples comparing Django and Grails. In Django, views are functions that take a request as input and return a response. You can instantiate explicitly an instance of HttpResponse and populate its body with a string, or you can use shortcut functions to leverage the template system. In any case the return value from your view always has the same type. In contrast, the render method from Grails is highly polymorphic. You can throw a context at it and it will try to render a template which is found by convention using that context. Or you can pass it a pair of a template path and a context and that will work too. Or a string. Or XML. Grails tries hard to make sense of whatever you return from your controller. In the Django ORM, each model class has a static attribute representing the manager for that class. That manager exposes a fluent interface to build querysets. In Grails, you can have a similar functionality by composing detached criteria. Still, the most common way to query objects seems to be the use of runtime-generated methods like FindUserByEmailNotNull or FindPostByDateGreaterThan. I will not go further, but my point is that in Django-like frameworks you have control over the whole flow of the request/response process, while in Grails-like ones I feel I only have to feel the blanks and the framework will manage the rest of the flow for me. This is not to criticize Grails or CakePHP; which type you prefer is mainly a matter of preference. In fact, I happen to like some aspects of Grails, but I feel more comfortable with a framework which does less for me. Back to the point of the question: which one among Play and Lift is more explicit about what you do and which one tries to simplify more what you have to do with a layer of "magic"?

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• Are there any concerns with using a static read-only unit of work so that it behaves like a cache?

  - by Rowan Freeman

  Related question: How do I cache data that rarely changes? I'm making an ASP.NET MVC4 application. On every request the security details about the user will need to be checked with the area/controller/action that they are accessing to see if they are allowed to view it. The security information is stored in the database. For example: User Permission UserPermission Action ActionPermission A "Permission" is a token that is applied to an MVC action to indicate that the token is required in order to access the action. Once a user is given the permission (via the UserPermission table) then they have the token and can therefore access the action. I've been looking in to how to cache this data (since it rarely changes) so that I'm only querying in-memory data and not hitting a database (which is a considerable performance hit at the moment). I've tried storing things in lists, using a caching provider but I either run in to problems or performance doesn't improve. One problem that I constantly run in to is that I'm using lazy loading and dynamic proxies with EntityFramework. This means that even if I ToList() everything and store them somewhere static, the relationships are never populated. For example, User.Permissions is an ICollection but it's always null. I don't want to Include() everything because I'm trying to keep things simple and generic (and easy to modify). One thing I know is that an EntityFramework DbContext is a unit of work that acts with 1st-level caching. That is, for the duration of the unit of work, everything that is accessed is cached in memory. I want to create a read-only DbContext that will exist indefinitely and will only be used to read about permission data. Upon testing this it worked perfectly; my page load times went from 200ms+ to 20ms. I can easily force the data to refresh at certain intervals or simply leave it to refresh when the application pool is recycled. Basically it will behave like a cache. Note that the rest of the application will interact with other contexts that exist per request as normal. Is there any disadvantage to this approach? Could I be doing something different?

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• nvidia optimus laptops

  - by kellogs

  kellogs@kellogs-K52Jc ~ $ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 18) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 18) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 06) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev 06) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a6) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 06) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 06) 00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem (rev 06) 02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) 03:00.0 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller (rev 80) 03:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller (rev 80) 03:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller (rev 80) 03:00.4 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. xD Host Controller (rev 80) 03:00.5 Ethernet controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMC250 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03) ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 05) ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 05) ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 05) ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 05) ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05) ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05) kellogs@kellogs-K52Jc ~ $ inxi -SGx System: Host: kellogs-K52Jc Kernel: 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.7.2) Desktop: KDE 4.9.5 (Qt 4.8.3) Distro: Linux Mint 14 Nadia Graphics: Card: Intel Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0 X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: [email protected] GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Ironlake Mobile GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 9.0.3 Direct Rendering: Yes Manufacturer advertises the K52Jc model which I bought as optimus enabled. However, no traces of it in the output above. Of course, Bumblebee would not start on this machine. Should I rest assured that is a defective / un-optimused machine ? thanks

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• Microsoft BUILD 2013&ndash;Day 1 Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013ndashday-1-summary.aspx I’m happy to be at BUILD this week, mainly because my flights finally got me here late on Tuesday.  My biggest complaints so far are the flights and the hotel.  It seems that almost every flight into San Francisco were delayed multiple hours.  The Sequester so lovingly forced on America by congress means that the airport was short controllers.   That, along with poor weather and airport construction meant most people were 2-3 hours late arriving.  Add on top of that the fact that the hotel that I picked durring registration is absolutely horrid.  It looks like something out of a ghost hunters show and smells like it too.  I think if Microsoft is going to select a hotel they need to make sure that it is adequate. Rant over! So what happened the first day?  Steve Balmer started off the keynote along with Julie Larson-Green and a cast of others.  We finally found out that there were around six thousand people attending BUILD and that the focus this year would be Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Azure.  For the rest of the keynote I am going to have a separate post. You can’t have a Microsoft conference without some fun.  This year they have a hunt for pins that represent different gestures in Windows 8.  I got all of mine.  Now they just need to pull my name. The sessions I attended were really good. They covered live tiles, what’s new in XAML and building Windows Phone UIs presented by Kraig Brockschmidt, Tim Heuer and Shawn Oster respectively.  These will also be covered in separate posts. The exhibit area was interesting, but somewhat disappointing.  TechEd 2012 I think was better organized and better staffed by the vendors.  It also seemed that the Microsoft teams’ booths were also in need of some organization and staffing. Overall it was a really fun day capped off by all six thousand attendees standing in like to get their Acer 8” tables and Surface Pros.  What a day!  Stay tuned for follow up posts. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote

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• .Net Application & Database Modularity/Reuse

  - by Martaver

  I'm looking for some guidance on how to architect an app with regards to modularity, separation of concerns and re-usability. I'm working on an application (ASP.Net, C#) that has distinctly generic chunks of functionality, that I'd love to be able to lift out, all layers, into re-usable components. This means the module handles the database schema, data access, API, everything so that the next time I want to use it I can just register the module and hook into it. Developing modules of re-usable functionality is a no-brainer, but what is really confusing me is what to do when it comes to handling a core re-usable database schema that serves the module's functionality. In an ideal world, I would register a module and it would ensure that the associated database schema exists in the DB. I would code on the assumption that the tables exist, calling the module's functionality through the DLL, agnostic of the database layer. Kind of like Enterprise Library's Caching/Logging Application Block, which can create a DB schema in the target DB to use as a data store. My Questions is: What do you think is the best way to achieve this, firstly, in terms design architecture, and secondly solution structure. What patterns/frameworks do you know that exist & support this kind of thing? My thoughts so far: I mostly use Entity Framework and SQL Server DB Projects. I thought about a 'black box' approach to modules of functionality. I could use use a code-first approach in EF4, and use the ObjectContext to create a database when the module is initialized. However this means that all of the entities that my module encapsulates would be disconnected from the rest of the application because they belonged to an abstracted ObjectContext. Further - Creating appropriate indexes and references between domain entities and the module's entities would be impossible to do practically. I've thought of adopting Enterprise Library and creating my own Application Blocks. I'm not sure how this would play nice with Entity Framework (if at all) though. I like the idea of building on proven patterns & practices to encapsulate established, reusable functionality. I thought of abandoning Entity Framework for the Module, and just creating a separate DB schema for the module with its own set of stored procedures & ADO.Net. Then deploying the script at run-time if interrogation shows that it doesn't exist. But once again, for application developing outside of the application, I would want to use Entity Framework and I would have to use the module separately, disconnected from the domain ObjectContext. Has anyone had experience developing these sorts of full-stack modules? What advice can you offer? Am I biting off more than I can chew?

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• The Case of the Missing Date/Time Stamp: Reporting Services 2008 R2 Snapshots

  - by smisner

  This week I stumbled upon an undocumented “feature” in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services as I was preparing a demonstration on how to set up and use report snapshots. If you’re familiar with the main changes in this latest release of Reporting Services, you probably already know that Report Manager got a facelift this time around. Although this facelift was generally a good thing, one of the casualties – in my opinion – is the loss of the snapshot label that served two purposes… First, it flagged the report as a snapshot. Second, it let you know when that snapshot was created. As part of my standard operating procedure when demonstrating report snapshots, I point out this label, so I was rather taken aback when I didn’t see it in the demonstration I was preparing. It sort of upset my routine, and I’m rather partial to my routines. I thought perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right place and changed Report Manager from Tile View to Detail View, but no – that label was still missing. In the grand scheme of life, it’s not an earth-shattering change, but you’ll have to look at the Modified Date in Details View to know when the snapshot was run. Or hope that the report developer included a textbox to show the execution time in the report. (Hint: this is a good time to add this to your list of report development best practices, whether a report gets set up as a report snapshot or not!) A snapshot from the past In case you don’t remember how a snapshot appeared in Report Manager back in the old days (of SQL Server 2008 and earlier), here’s an image I snagged from my Reporting Services 2008 Step by Step manuscript: A snapshot in the present A report server running in SharePoint integrated mode had no such label. There you had to rely on the Report Modified date-time stamp to know the snapshot execution time. So I guess all platforms are now consistent. Here’s a screenshot of Report Manager in the 2008 R2 version. One of these is a snapshot and the rest execute on demand. Can you tell which is the snapshot? Consider descriptions as an alternative So my report snapshot demonstration has one less step, and I’ll need to edit the Denali version of the Step by Step book. Things are simpler this way, but I sure wish we had an easier way to identify the execution methods of the reports. Consider using the description field to alert users that the report is a snapshot. It might save you a few questions about why the data isn’t up-to-date if the users know that something changed in the source of the report. Notice that the full description doesn’t display in Tile View, so keep it short and sweet or instruct users to open Details View to see the entire description.

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• Retail in New York - a walk down 5th Avenue

  - by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

  It's the week of the NRF Big Show and all eyes in the retail industry are on New York. The Big Apple is famous for Big Retail -with a proliferation of incredibly iconic stores. The environment is exciting and familiar even to people visiting this small island for the first time. Most of us have travelled down Fifth Avenue watching movies and TV even if we have never set foot on American soil. I find it one of the most exciting retail cities in the world and I am thrilled this year to be here with so many of Oracle's International retail customers who are joining us for the Retail Exchange. The Oracle program brings retailers from all over the planet together to share ideas and be inspired by New York retail and the NRF event. The show celebrates its 100th year in 2011 and New York itself has been recognized globally as the capital of innovative retail for just as long.  Fifth Avenue is where many global brands have placed their flagship stores, and businesses are in constant competition to set themselves apart from their competitors - both in the store and from the street.  These flag ship retail destinations present what today's customers are finding most exciting and delightful about retail. For the tourist market, they may only visit these stores once, but the impression that a trip to a flagship store leaves with a customer can last a lifetime.  One of the stores that is currently turning heads on Fifth Avenue is Hollister, sister brand to Abercrombie and Fitch, which has filled its shop front with a massive live video (and audio) feed of surfers on the beach in California.  To complete the effect, they also have troughs of water in front of the video screens to bring the sea to the street.  And this isn't the only kind of surfing that retailers are considering today and multi-channel retail is a hot topic that all of the retailers joining the Retail Exchange are considering.   The rest of the world looks to the brands along Fifth Avenue for inspiration - how they take advantage of new opportunities, how they set themselves apart from their competitors and how they keep their products fresh and desirable. With these inspiring pioneers in New York, it's little wonder that NRF's Big Show is so popular, and that New York is viewed as one of the retail capitals of the world. It is a pleasure to be here with so many of the world's greatest international retailers.

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• Another Custom Property Locator: a Library of Books

  - by Cindy McMullen

  Introduction The previous post gave an introduction to custom property locators and showed how create one using JDeveloper.  This post continues on the custom locator theme, with a slightly more complex locator: a library of books.  It demonstrates using the DAO pattern to delegate data access from the Locator, which is likely how many actual backing stores will integrate with the Locator.  You can imagine, rather than a library of books, the data store might be a user database of sorts.  The same sort of pattern would apply. This post uses the BookLocator example originally shown in the WebCenter documentation, but has: updated the source code to reflect the final Property APIs includes the steps for generating the namespace and property definition files via JDeveloper detailed usage of the PropertyService APIs Getting Started If you're new to JDeveloper, you might want to check out this tutorial.  There is also the "Jump-Start to using Personalization" blog post that you might find useful.  Otherwise, if you're already familiar with both, you can skip those tutorials and jump right in to using JDeveloper. Download the BookLocator.zip file (which has been updated from the original post) and unzip it to a new directory.  Start JDeveloper, navigate to the BookLocator.jws file, and open it.   It should look something like this: The Properties Namespace file contains the property definitions and property set definitions you define.  It is explained more in detail in the Namespace documentation.  Although this example doesn't show it, the property set definitions have the ability to reference multiple locators per property.   This can be done by right-clicking on the 'Locator Info' box.  Configure the contents of the Locator Map  by editing locators and mapping them to available property names in the property set definition. Compiling, deploying, and running your locator The rest of the steps in this tutorial basically follow those in the previous blog on custom locators, and won't be repeated here.   A scenario to invoke your locator is included with the sample app: see BookProperties.scenarios_diagram above.  Summary This post demonstrates a simple library of books accessed by the BookPropertyLocator via the DAO layer.  This is a useful pattern for more realistic property retrievals, such as a backing user store.  It also points out the possibility of retrieving properties from multiple locators, which would be quite handy to retrieve user attributes from multiple sources.

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• F# Objects &ndash; Integrating with the other .Net Languages &ndash; Part 1

  - by MarkPearl

  In the next few blog posts I am going to explore objects in F#. Up to now, my dabbling in F# has really been a few liners and while I haven’t reached the point where F# is my language of preference – I am already seeing the benefits of the language when solving certain types of programming problems. For me I believe that the F# language will be used in a silo like architecture and that the real benefit of having F# under your belt is so that you can solve problems that F# lends itself towards and then interact with other .Net languages in doing the rest. When I was still very new to the F# language I did the following post covering how to get F# & C# to talk to each other. Today I am going to use a similar approach to demonstrate the structure of F# objects when inter-operating with other languages. Lets start with an empty F# class … type Person() = class end   Very simple, and all we really have done is declared an object that has nothing in it. We could if we wanted to make an object that takes a constructor with parameters… the code for this would look something like this… type Person =     {         Firstname : string         Lastname : string     }   What’s interesting about this syntax is when you try and interop with this object from another .Net language like C# - you would see the following…   Not only has a constructor been created that accepts two parameters, but Firstname and Lastname are also exposed on the object. Now it’s important to keep in mind that value holders in F# are immutable by default, so you would not be able to change the value of Firstname after the construction of the object – in C# terms it has been set to readonly. One could however explicitly state that the value holders were mutable, which would then allow you to change the values after the actual creation of the object. type Person = { mutable Firstname : string mutable Lastname : string }   Something that bugged me for a while was what if I wanted to have an F# object that requires values in its constructor, but does not expose them as part of the object. After bashing my head for a few moments I came up with the following syntax – which achieves this result. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Fullname = Firstname + " " + Lastname What I haven’t figured out yet is what is the difference between the () & {} brackets when declaring an object.

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• SEO effects of intermix of WP blog, custom PHP site and FB app game

  - by melbournetechlover

  We're a melbourne tech company in the process of building a custom site in PHP. We plan to launch a "pre-launch" page which is also custom coded (CSS3 on twitter bootstrap framework + HTML5 front end and PHP back end). On that site will be a link to a blog - the idea behind this is to build up ranking for a variety of relevant keywords prior to the full site going live (given the majority of the site is a member only community anyway so the blog is really the main way we'll be able to execute on-site SEO. Ideally, we would like to install wordpress in a subdirectory on our servers and just customise the header to look the same as the landing page of the website. But some questions and concerns... Is there any detrimental effect on SEO efforts in having two separate systems (one custom PHP, the other an installation of wordpress) to manage the blog vs the rest of the site? Are there any benefits or detriments to installing on a sub domain such as blog.sitename.com vs. sitename.com/blog. My preference would be sitename.com/blog as it feels neater - but open to suggestions based on knowledge of Google preferences. Separately, we are building a Facebook app which is under another site name. Again because we are launching this app first, from an SEO perspective, would it actually be better to run it from a sub domain on the main site - e.g. gamename.mainsitename.com instead of on app.gamename.com? Currently we have it on app.gamename.com, but if there are SEO benefits to moving it to the other domain and server then we'll do it. Basically we don't want to have our SEO efforts divided - will Google algorithms prefer two sites heavily referring traffic, or is it better to focus our efforts on one. I guess that's the crux of the issue. But the other one is - does Google care about traffic accessing a page built for the Facebook app iFrame - does that count toward rankings? Sorry I hope these questions aren't too complex - but we're in the tech world every day and still can't seem to find a good answer to these ones...hence I'm taking to the forums!! Free beer for whoever can give me a solid answer!

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• To make or not to make...python-nautilus a dependency?

  - by George Edison

  That is the question! Okay, all silliness aside, I really am forced to make a difficult decision here. My application is written in C++ and allows other scripts to invoke methods via XML-RPC. One of these scripts is a Nautilus extension written in Python. The extension is packaged with the rest of the application and copied to the appropriate place when installed (/usr/share/nautilus-python/extensions). Now the problem is that the Nautilus extension requires the python-nautilus package to be installed to be operational. So therefore I have three options: Make the python-nautilus package a dependency. This option will ensure that anyone who installs my package will be able to use the Nautilus extension. However, this option will not be attractive to XFCE or KDE users - a ton of python-nautilus's dependencies will be installed on their machines and take up a lot of space - even if they never use Nautilus. Put the python-nautilus package in the suggests: or recommends: field. This option provides the end-user with a way to avoid installing the python-nautilus package (by providing the --no-install-suggests or --no-install-recommends argument to apt-get). However, this won't work when the user installs the package in the Software Center. (I always get mixed up as to which of those two fields are installed by default.) Prompt the user when the application is installed or first launched. This option is more complicated than the others but offers the best compromise between making it easy for the user to install python-nautilus (without going into a technical explanation) and not installing it when the user doesn't need it (or want it). I guess the best way to implement this is a simple prompt that invokes apt-get if the user would like the package installed. Don't install the package at all. This option ensures that nobody has python-nautilus installed on their machine unless they want it. However, this also means that my Nautilus extension will simply not run on the end-user's machine unless they manually install the package. Which of these options seems the best choice? Have I missed any pros and cons for each of the options?

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• OOF checklist

  - by Daniel Moth

  When going on vacation or otherwise being out of office (known as OOF in Microsoft), it is polite and professional that our absence creates the minimum disruption possible to the rest of the business, and especially our colleagues. Below is my OOF checklist - I try to do these as soon as I know I'll be OOF, rather than leave it for the night before. Let the relevant folks on the team know the planned dates of absence and check if anybody was expecting something from you during that timeframe. Reset expectations with them, and as applicable try to find another owner for individual activities that cannot wait. Go through your calendar for the OOF period and decline every meeting occurrence so the owner of the meeting knows that you won't be attending (similar to my post about responding to invites). If it is your meeting cancel it so that people don’t turn up without the meeting organizer being there. Do this even for meetings were the folks should know due to step #1. Over-communicating is a good thing here and keeps calendars all around up to date. Enter your OOF dates in whatever tool your company uses. Typically that is the notification to your manager. In your Outlook calendar, create a local Appointment (don't invite anyone) for the date range (All day event) setting the "Show As" dropdown to "Out of Office". This way, people won’t try to schedule meetings with you on that day. If you use Lync, set the status to "Off Work" for that period. If you won't be responding to email (which when on your vacation you definitely shouldn't) then in Outlook setup "Automatic Replies (Out of Office)" for that period. This way people won’t think you are rude when not replying to their emails. In your OOF message point to an alias (ideally of many people) as a fallback for urgent queries. If you want to proactively notify individuals of your OOFage then schedule and send a multi-day meeting request for the entire period. Remember to set the "Show As" to "Free" (so their calendar doesn’t show busy/oof to others), set the "Reminder" to "None" (so they don’t get a reminder about it), set "Low Importance", and uncheck both "Response Options" so if they don't want this on their calendar, it is just one click for them to get rid of it. Aside: I have another post with advice on sending invites. If you care about people who would not observe the above but could drop by your office, stick a physical OOF note at your office door or chair/monitor or desk. Have I missed any? Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• XNA Multiplayer Games and Networking

  - by JoshReuben

  ·        XNA communication must by default be lightweight – if you are syncing game state between players from the Game.Update method, you must minimize traffic. That game loop may be firing 60 times a second and player 5 needs to know if his tank has collided with any player 3 and the angle of that gun turret. There are no WCF ServiceContract / DataContract niceties here, but at the same time the XNA networking stack simplifies the details. The payload must be simplistic - just an ordered set of numbers that you would map to meaningful enum values upon deserialization.   Overview ·        XNA allows you to create and join multiplayer game sessions, to manage game state across clients, and to interact with the friends list ·        Dependency on Gamer Services - to receive notifications such as sign-in status changes and game invitations ·        two types of online multiplayer games: system link game sessions (LAN) and LIVE sessions (WAN). ·        Minimum dev requirements: 1 Xbox 360 console + Creators Club membership to test network code - run 1 instance of game on Xbox 360, and 1 on a Windows-based computer   Network Sessions ·        A network session is made up of players in a game + up to 8 arbitrary integer properties describing the session ·        create custom enums – (e.g. GameMode, SkillLevel) as keys in NetworkSessionProperties collection ·        Player state: lobby, in-play   Session Types ·        local session - for split-screen gaming - requires no network traffic. ·        system link session - connects multiple gaming machines over a local subnet. ·        Xbox LIVE multiplayer session - occurs on the Internet. Ranked or unranked   Session Updates ·        NetworkSession class Update method - must be called once per frame. ·        performs the following actions: o   Sends the network packets. o   Changes the session state. o   Raises the managed events for any significant state changes. o   Returns the incoming packet data. ·        synchronize the session à packet-received and state-change events à no threading issues   Session Config ·        Session host - gaming machine that creates the session. XNA handles host migration ·        NetworkSession properties: AllowJoinInProgress , AllowHostMigration ·        NetworkSession groups: AllGamers, LocalGamers, RemoteGamers   Subscribe to NetworkSession events ·        GamerJoined ·        GamerLeft ·        GameStarted ·        GameEnded – use to return to lobby ·        SessionEnded – use to return to title screen   Create a Session session = NetworkSession.Create(         NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,         maximumLocalPlayers,         maximumGamers,         privateGamerSlots,         sessionProperties );   Start a Session if (session.IsHost) {     if (session.IsEveryoneReady)     {        session.StartGame();        foreach (var gamer in SignedInGamer.SignedInGamers)        {             gamer.Presence.PresenceMode =                 GamerPresenceMode.InCombat;   Find a Network Session AvailableNetworkSessionCollection availableSessions = NetworkSession.Find(     NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,       maximumLocalPlayers,     networkSessionProperties); availableSessions.AllowJoinInProgress = true;   Join a Network Session NetworkSession session = NetworkSession.Join(     availableSessions[selectedSessionIndex]);   Sending Network Data var packetWriter = new PacketWriter(); foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Get the tank associated with this player.     Tank myTank = gamer.Tag as Tank;     // Write the data.     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Position);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TankRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TurretRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.IsFiring);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Health);       // Send it to everyone.     gamer.SendData(packetWriter, SendDataOptions.None);     }   Receiving Network Data foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Keep reading while packets are available.     while (gamer.IsDataAvailable)     {         NetworkGamer sender;          // Read a single packet.         gamer.ReceiveData(packetReader, out sender);          if (!sender.IsLocal)         {             // Get the tank associated with this packet.             Tank remoteTank = sender.Tag as Tank;              // Read the data and apply it to the tank.             remoteTank.Position = packetReader.ReadVector2();             …   End a Session if (session.AllGamers.Count == 1)         {             session.EndGame();             session.Update();         }   Performance •        Aim to minimize payload, reliable in order messages •        Send Data Options: o   Unreliable, out of order -(SendDataOptions.None) o   Unreliable, in order (SendDataOptions.InOrder) o   Reliable, out of order (SendDataOptions.Reliable) o   Reliable, in order (SendDataOptions.ReliableInOrder) o   Chat data (SendDataOptions.Chat) •        Simulate: NetworkSession.SimulatedLatency , NetworkSession.SimulatedPacketLoss •        Voice support – NetworkGamer properties: HasVoice ,IsTalking , IsMutedByLocalUser

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• The cost of Programmer Team Clustering

  - by MarkPearl

  I recently was involved in a conversation about the productivity of programmers and the seemingly wide range in abilities that different programmers have in this industry. Some of the comments made were reiterated a few days later when I came across a chapter in Code Complete (v2) where it says "In programming specifically, many studies have shown order-of-magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of programmers". In line with this is another comment presented by Code Complete when discussing teams - "Good programmers tend to cluster, as do bad programmers". This is something I can personally relate to. I have come across some really good and bad programmers and 99% of the time it turns out the team they work in is the same - really good or really bad. When I have found a mismatch, it hasn't stayed that way for long - the person has moved on, or the team has ejected the individual. Keeping this in mind I would like to comment on the risks an organization faces when forcing teams to remain together regardless of the mix. When you have the situation where someone is not willing to be part of the team but still wants to get a pay check at the end of each month, it presents some interesting challenges and hard decisions to make. First of all, when this occurs you need to give them an opportunity to change - for someone to change, they need to know what the problem is and what is expected. It is unreasonable to expect someone to change but have not indicated what they need to change and the consequences of not changing. If after a reasonable time of an individual being aware of the problem and not making an effort to improve you need to do two things... Follow through with the consequences of not changing. Consider the impact that this behaviour will have on the rest of the team. What is the cost of not following through with the consequences? If there is no follow through, it is often an indication to the individual that they can continue their behaviour. Why should they change if you don't care enough to keep your end of the agreement? In many ways I think it is very similar to the "Broken Windows" principles – if you allow the windows to break and don’t fix them, more will get broken. What is the cost of keeping them on? When keeping a disruptive influence in a team you risk loosing the good in the team. As Code Complete says, good and bad programmers tend to cluster - they have a tendency to keep this balance - if you are not going to help keep the balance they will. The cost of not removing a disruptive influence is that the good in the team will eventually help you maintain the clustering themselves by leaving.

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• Games at Work Part 1: Introduction to Gamification and Applications

  - by ultan o'broin

  Games Are Everywhere How many of you (will admit to) remember playing Pong? OK then, do you play Angry Birds on your phone during work hours? Thought about why we keep playing online, video, and mobile games and what this "gamification" business we're hearing about means for the enterprise applications user experience? In Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal says that playing computer and online games now provides more rewards for people than their real lives do. Games offer intrinsic rewards and happiness to the players as they pursue more satisfying work and the success, social connection, and meaning that goes with it. Yep, Gran Turismo, Dungeons & Dragons, Guitar Hero, Mario Kart, Wii Boxing, and the rest are all forms of work it seems. Games are, in fact, work taken so seriously that governments now move to limit the impact of virtual gaming currencies on the real financial system. Anyone who spends hours harvesting crops on FarmVille realizes it’s hard work too. Yet games evoke a positive emotion in players who voluntarily stay engaged with games for hours, day after day. Some 183 million active gamers in the United States play on average 13 hours per week. Weekly, 5 million of those gamers play for longer than a working week (45 hours). So why not harness the work put into games to solve real-world problems? Or, in the case of our applications users, real-world work problems? What’s a Game? Jane explains that all games have four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. We need to look at what motivational ideas behind the dynamics of the game—what we call gamification—are appropriate for our users. Typically, these motivators are achievement, altruism, competition, reward, self-expression, and status). Common game techniques for leveraging these motivations include: Badging and avatars Points and awards Leader boards Progress charts Virtual currencies or goods Gifting and giving Challenges and quests Some technology commentators argue for a game layer on top of everything, but this layer is already part of our daily lives in many instances. We see gamification working around us already: the badging and kudos offered on My Oracle Support or other Oracle community forums, becoming a Dragon Slayer implementor of Atlassian applications, being made duke of your favorite coffee shop on Yelp, sharing your workout details with Nike+, or donating to Japanese earthquake relief through FarmVille, for example. And what does all this mean for the applications that you use in your work? Read on in part two...

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• C# 5: At last, async without the pain

  - by Alex.Davies

  For me, the best feature in Visual Studio 11 is the async and await keywords that come with C# 5. I am a big fan of asynchronous programming: it frees up resources, in particular the thread that a piece of code needs to run in. That lets that thread run something else, while waiting for your long-running operation to complete. That's really important if that thread is the UI thread, or if it's holding a lock because it accesses some data structure. Before C# 5, I think I was about the only person in the world who really cared about asynchronous programming. The trouble was that you had to go to extreme lengths to make code asynchronous. I would forever be writing methods that, instead of returning a value, accepted an extra argument that is a "continuation". Then, when calling the method, I'd have to pass a lambda in to it, which contained all the stuff that needed to happen after the method finished. Here is a real snippet of code that is in .NET Demon: m_BuildControl.FilterEnabledForBuilding(     projects,     enabledProjects = m_OutOfDateProjectFinder.FilterNeedsBuilding(         enabledProjects,         newDirtyProjects =         {             // Mark any currently broken projects as dirty             newDirtyProjects.UnionWith(m_BrokenProjects);             // Copy what we found into the set of dirty things             m_DirtyProjects = newDirtyProjects;             RunSomeBuilds();         })); It's just obtuse. Who puts a lambda inside a lambda like that? Well, me obviously. But surely enabledProjects should just be the return value of FilterEnabledForBuilding? And newDirtyProjects should just be the return value of FilterNeedsBuilding? C# 5 async/await lets you write asynchronous code without it looking so stupid. Here's what I plan to change that code to, once we upgrade to VS 11: var enabledProjects = await m_BuildControl.FilterEnabledForBuilding(projects); var newDirtyProjects = await m_OutOfDateProjectFinder.FilterNeedsBuilding(enabledProjects); // Mark any currently broken projects as dirty newDirtyProjects.UnionWith(m_BrokenProjects); // Copy what we found into the set of dirty things m_DirtyProjects = newDirtyProjects; RunSomeBuilds(); Much easier to read! But how is this the same code? If we were on the UI thread, doesn't the UI thread have to block while FilterEnabledForBuilding runs? No, it doesn't, and that's the magic of the await keyword! It cuts your method up into its constituent pieces, much like I did manually with lambdas before. When you run it, only the piece up to the first await actually runs. The rest is passed to FilterEnabledForBuilding as a continuation, which will get called back whenever that method is finished. In the meantime, our thread returns, and can go back to making the UI responsive, or whatever else threads do in their spare time. This is actually a massive simplification, and if you're interested in all the gory details, and speed hacks that the await keyword actually does for you, I recommend Jon Skeet's blog posts about it.

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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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• I need help installing Ubuntu 11.10 to multi-drive system

  - by CookyMonzta

  I have a machine with 3 hard drives; the primary, which is 750GB (drive 0), and 2 others, each of which is 640GB (drives 1 and 2). On the last screen before the actual installation begins, this is how my hard drive configuration looks: /dev/sda [DISK0, 750GB] /dev/sda1 ntfs 104MB [Win7 System Reserved] /dev/sda2 ntfs 499,997MB [Windows 7 Pro] free space 250,052MB [This space intended for Windows 8] /dev/sdb [DISK1, 640GB] /dev/sdb1 ntfs 400,085MB [Windows XP Pro] free space 240,049MB [This space intended for Ubuntu] /dev/sdc [DISK2, 640GB] [This drive intended for various backups] free space 160,033MB /dev/sdc5 ntfs 480,101MB [Acronis Secure Zone] As you can see, I have 3 drives, all SATA. I have Win7 on my first drive (0), WinXP on my second drive (1) and a secure zone for daily backups on my third drive (2). I want to put Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot on the drive that also has XP. I've already used 400GB for XP and I have 240GB remaining, for which, my intention was to create a 4GB swap file and use the rest for Ubuntu itself. This is what my second hard drive looked like, for my intended setup before installation: /dev/sdb /dev/sdb5 swap 4,095MB [Linux swap] /dev/sdb6 ext4 235,951MB [Ubuntu 11.10] Needless to say, this is only the second time I have attempted to install Linux. I managed to get 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon working on an old machine. I have two problems with this installation: Ubuntu asks for a location to install the boot loader (i.e., "Device for Boot Loader Installation"). I already have a boot loader; namely, Acronis OS Selector (from Acronis Disk Director 11). So I decided to put the Ubuntu boot loader in /dev/sdb6 (where I intend to install Ubuntu), to keep it from interfering with my Acronis OS Selector. Once I hit "Install now", I ended up with the following error: "No root file system is defined. Please correct this from the partitioning menu." What am I missing? Did I attempt to put the boot loader in the wrong place? I assume I did, because as I am writing this entry, I am looking at LinuxIdentity.com's Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal magazine, and I see a screenshot (Figure 7 on Page 13) that implies that the boot loader can be installed anywhere, including the first hard drive (in the MBR, which would obviously force me to reinstall the Acronis OS Selector) or even on a floppy. But why do I get an undefined root file system error? I thought /dev/sdb6 was the root file. Obviously I'm missing something in the installation procedure. Should I try installing it in Windows using the WUBI Installer? I assume that, if I attempt to install Ubuntu from WinXP (on the second drive), it will automatically install Ubuntu on the empty partition alongside XP. But will I have the option of creating a swap partition? And what if the WUBI Installer searches all of my drives and decides to install Ubuntu on my first drive's empty partition (which I have left empty for Win8 upon its release)?

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• What is SOA ?

  - by llaszews

  First, let’s mention what SOA is not: • SOA is not the same thing as web services. Web Services implies the use of standard such as Java/JAX-RPC, .NET or REST. Web Services also implies the use of a WSDL, SOAP, and/or J2EE Connector Architecture (J2EE CA) and HTTP. SOA architectures can be implemented using J2EE CA, XML file transfer or Remote Procedural Call (RPC) over File Transfer Protocol (FTP), TCP/IP, Remote Method Invocation (RMI) or other protocols. In other words, Web Services are a very specific set of technologies. SOA is a concept and can be implemented in many different ways. Some very rudimentary, such as transfering flat files between applications. • SOA will not solve all of your problems. It will make your business more agile, increase business visibility, reduce integration costs and provide better reuse. However, if you don’t need help in these area or expect SOA to cure all of your IT problems, you are looking in the wrong place. • The concepts behind SOA are not new, but SOA is also not mature. SOA as it stands today has really only been around for 5 years. The concepts of standards based protocol handlers, predefined communication schemas and remote method invocation have been around for decades. So, what is SOA? SOA is an architectural blueprint, a way of developing applications, and a set of best practices. SOA is not an ‘out of the box’ solution you buy, install and then have up and running in a matter of months. SOA is a journey to a better way of doing business and the technology architecture to support this better way of doing business. SOA is also a broader set of technologies including more then just web services. Techologies like an Enterpirse Service Bus (ESB), Business Processs Execution Language (BPEL), message queues and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) all are part of a SOA architecture. So, what is SOA? SOA is an architectural blueprint, a way of developing applications, and a set of best practices. SOA is not an ‘out of the box’ solution you buy, install and then have up and running in a matter of months. SOA is a journey to a better way of doing business and the technology architecture to support this better way of doing business. SOA is also a broader set of technologies including more then just web services. Techologies like an Enterpirse Service Bus (ESB), Business Processs Execution Language (BPEL), message queues and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) all are part of a SOA architecture. Read more here: Oracle Modernization Solutions

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• Determining cause of random latency/loading issues

  - by Sherwin Flight

  I'm not sure exactly what details to post in regards to my issue, because I'm not sure what is relevant. Prior to the end of September my websites all loaded quickly, in almost all cases. Loading time wasn't usually more than a few seconds. However, since the end of September I noticed a big increase in page loading times. In some cases pages were taking 30 seconds or more to load. I do have a remote monitoring service monitoring some of the sites as well, and the image below shows the response times over the past month. The response times shown at the beginning of this graph were what the usual response times were prior to this issue occurring. You can see that there has been a significant increase in response times from the beginning to the end of this graph. The thing is, the problem is not happening 100% of the time. If I click through the site, or even just keep refreshing the page, about 25% of the time the pages load quickly, the remaining 75% of the time they load slowly. Sometimes the pages take so long to load that they time out, and don't load at all. I have contacted my hosting provider, and they said things at their end was fine. I don't believe the problem is my home internet provider, because all other websites load without a problem. The server is located in Texas, USA. This also raises another interesting point. My remote monitor checks my site from two locations, California, USA, and London, England. As you can see in the chart below the response time is actually shorter when checked from London, which doesn't seem to make sense, since the server is physically closer to the California monitoring location. I would have expected the London monitoring location to have higher response times since they are physically farther away. I should also point out that in some traceroute test I've done it seem like the first connection to the server seems to take the longest, then after that the rest of the page loads quickly. Below is a little chart showing the times for the first connection to the server. So, what could be causing this problem, and what steps can I take to resolve it or at least narrow down the problem? Sending the request to the server was very quick, and receiving the reply back seems pretty quick, but the WAIT time is really long. So it connects, sends the request, but then waits close to 30 seconds before it starts receiving data back. I am also aware that there are things I can do to speed up page loading times, like reducing the number of css/js files used on a page, compressing images, etc. This is not really what the source of the problem is though, because nothing has really changed on the site since before the problem started, and other sites on the same server are loading slowly as well. Any help or advice is much appreciated.

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• Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5

  - by Shub Lahiri, A-Team

  Background SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration pack comes with a pre-installed simulator that can be used as an external endpoint to generate inbound and outbound HL7 traffic on specified MLLP ports. This is a command-line utility that can be very handy when trying to build a complete end-to-end demo within a standalone, closed environment. The ant-based utility accepts the name of a configuration file as the command-line input argument. The format of this configuration file has changed between PS4 and PS5. In PS4, the configuration file was XML based and in PS5, it is name-value property based. The rest of this note highlights these differences and provides samples that can be used to run the first scenario from the product samples set. PS4 - Configuration File The sample configuration file for PS4 is shown below. The configuration file contains information about the following items: Directory for incoming and outgoing files for the host running SOA Suite Healthcare Polling Interval for the directory External Endpoint Logical Names External Endpoint Server Host Name and Ports Message throughput to be simulated for generating outbound messages Documents to be handled by different endpoints A copy of this file can be downloaded from here. PS5 - Configuration File The corresponding sample configuration file for PS5 is shown below. The configuration file contains similar information about the sample scenario but is not in XML format. It has name-value pairs specified in the form of a properties file. This sample file can be downloaded from here. Simulator Configuration Before running the simulator, the environment has to be set by defining the proper ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME. The following extract is taken from a working sample shell script to set the environment: Also, as a part of setting the environment, template jndi.properties and logging.properties can be generated by using the following ant command: ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulator-prop Sample jndi.properties and logging.properties are shown below and can be modified, as needed. The jndi.properties contains information about connectivity to the local Weblogic Managed Server instance and the logging.properties file controls the amount of logging that can be generated from the running simulator process. Simulator Usage - Start and Stop The command syntax to launch the simulator via ant is the same in PS4 and PS5. Only the appropriate configuration file has to be supplied as the command-line argument, for example: ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulatorstart -Dargs="simulator1.hl7-config.xml" This will start the simulator and will keep running to provide an active external endpoint for SOA Healthcare Integration engine. To stop the simulator, a similar ant command can be used, for example: ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulatorstop

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• Delay command execution over sockets

  - by David

  I've been trying to fix the game loop in a real time (tick delay) MUD. I realized using Thread.Sleep would seem clunky when the user spammed commands through their choice of client (Zmud, etc) e.g. east;south;southwest would wait three move ticks and then output everything from the past couple rooms. The game loop basically calls a Flush and Fill method for each socket during each tick (50ms) private void DoLoop() { Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch(); stopWatch.Start(); while (running) { // for each socket, flush and fill ConnectionMonitor.Update(); stopWatch.Stop(); WaitIfNeeded(stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds); stopWatch.Reset(); } } The Fill method fires the command events, but as mentioned before, they currently block using Thread.Sleep. I tried adding a "ready" flag to the state object that attempts to execute the command along with a queue of spammed commands, but it ends up executing one command and queuing up the rest i.e. each subsequent command executes something that got queued up that should've been executed before. I must be missing something about the timer. private readonly Queue<SpammedCommand> queuedCommands = new Queue<SpammedCommand>(); private bool ready = true; private void TryExecuteCommand(string input) { var commandContext = CommandContext.Create(input); var player = Server.Current.Database.Get<Player>(Session.Player.Key); var commandInfo = Server.Current.CommandLookup .FindCommand(commandContext.CommandName, player.IsAdmin); if (commandInfo != null) { if (!ready) { // queue command queuedCommands.Enqueue(new SpammedCommand() { Context = commandContext, Info = commandInfo }); return; } if (queuedCommands.Count > 0) { // queue the incoming command queuedCommands.Enqueue(new SpammedCommand() { Context = commandContext, Info = commandInfo, }); // dequeue and execute var command = queuedCommands.Dequeue(); command.Info.Command.Execute(Session, command.Context); setTimeout(command.Info.TickLength); return; } commandInfo.Command.Execute(Session, commandContext); setTimeout(commandInfo.TickLength); } else { Session.WriteLine("Command not recognized"); } } Finally, setTimeout was supposed to set the execution delay (TickLength) for that command, and makeReady just sets the ready flag on the state object to true. private void setTimeout(TickDelay tickDelay) { ready = false; var t = new System.Timers.Timer() { Interval = (long) tickDelay, AutoReset = false, }; t.Elapsed += makeReady; t.Start(); // fire this in tickDelay ms } // MAKE READYYYYY!!!! private void makeReady(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e) { ready = true; } Am I missing something about the System.Timers.Timer created in setTimeout? How can I execute (and output) spammed commands per TickLength without using Thread.Sleep?

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• Using elapsed time for SlowMo in XNA

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm trying to create a slow-mo effect in my pong game so that when a player is a button the paddles and ball will suddenly move at a far slower speed. I believe my understanding of the concepts of adjusting the timing in XNA are done, but I'm not sure of how to incorporate it into my design exactly. The updates for my bats (paddles) are done in my Bat.cs class: /// Controls the bat moving up the screen /// </summary> public void MoveUp() { SetPosition(Position + new Vector2(0, -moveSpeed)); } /// <summary> /// Controls the bat moving down the screen /// </summary> public void MoveDown() { SetPosition(Position + new Vector2(0, moveSpeed)); } /// <summary> /// Updates the position of the AI bat, in order to track the ball /// </summary> /// <param name="ball"></param> public virtual void UpdatePosition(Ball ball) { size.X = (int)Position.X; size.Y = (int)Position.Y; } While the rest of my game updates are done in my GameplayScreen.cs class (I'm using the XNA game state management sample) Class GameplayScreen { ........... bool slow; .......... public override void Update(GameTime gameTime, bool otherScreenHasFocus, bool coveredByOtherScreen) base.Update(gameTime, otherScreenHasFocus, false); if (IsActive) { // SlowMo Stuff Elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; if (Slowmo) Elapsed *= .8f; MoveTimer += Elapsed; double elapsedTime = gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds; if (Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) slow = true; else if (Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Down)) slow = false; if (slow == true) elapsedTime *= .1f; // Updating bat position leftBat.UpdatePosition(ball); rightBat.UpdatePosition(ball); // Updating the ball position ball.UpdatePosition(); and finally my fixed time step is declared in the constructor of my Game1.cs Class: /// <summary> /// The main game constructor. /// </summary> public Game1() { IsFixedTimeStep = slow = false; } So my question is: Where do I place the MoveTimer or elapsedTime, so that my bat will slow down accordingly?

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• Perfect is the enemy of “Good Enough”

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the quotes that I was against, but now it is totally part of my core beliefs: "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough" Folks used to share this quote a lot with me in my early career and my frequent interpretation was that they were incompetent people that were satisfied with mediocrity, i.e. I ignored them and their advice. (Yes, I went through an arrogance phase). I later "grew up" and "realized" that they were missing the point, so instead of ignoring them I would retort: "Of course we have to aim for perfection, because as human beings we'll never achieve perfection, so by aiming for perfection we will indeed achieve good enough results". (Yes, I went through a smart ass phase). Later I grew up a bit more and "understood" that what I was really being told is to finish my work earlier and move on to other things because by trying to perfect that one thing, another N things that I was responsible for were suffering by not getting my attention - all things on my plate need to move beyond the line, not just one of them to go way over the line. It is really a statement of increasing scale and scope. To put it in other words, getting PASS grades on 10 things is better than getting an A+ with distinction on 1-2 and a FAIL on the rest. Instead of saying “I am able to do very well these X items” it is best if you can say I can do well enough on these X * Y items”, where Y > 1. That is how breadth impact is achieved. In the future, I may grow up again and have a different interpretation, but for now - even though I secretly try to "perfect" things, I try not to do that at the expense of other responsibilities. This means that I haven't had anybody quote that saying to me in a while (or perhaps my quality of work has dropped so much that it doesn't apply to me any more - who knows :-)). Wikipedia attributes the quote to Voltaire and it also makes connections to the “Law of diminishing returns”, and to the “80-20 rule” or “Pareto principle”… it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort …check out the Wikipedia entry on “Perfect is the enemy of Good” and its links. Also use your favorite search engine to search and see what others are saying (Bing, Google) – it is worth internalizing this in a way that makes sense to you… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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