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  • Bringing Scala into my company

    - by raichoo
    Hi, Now i know that this one is actually not a very technical question but one that has been bothering me for some time. Actually we are using a lot of C++ and PHP at our company and some of our developers are really hoping for a new and modern language to come by to help us getting more productive. I have been talking about what scala can do and the other coders seem to gain some interest in the language. The tough job is, how do you convince your boss to consider scala as a language for the company. I saw the presentation "Sneaking Scala into your company", but it deals with the situation that you are using Java at your company which we don't. How do you fight of the usual "that is just esoteric stuff" and "we can already do that in $LANGUAGE" arguments. I was planing to give a talk about Scala, and since I don't have much time I need Killer Arguments. How did you guys do it? Regards, raichoo

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  • Optimizing Code

    - by Claudiu
    You are given a heap of code in your favorite language which combines to form a rather complicated application. It runs rather slowly, and your boss has asked you to optimize it. What are the steps you follow to most efficiently optimize the code? What strategies have you found to be unsuccessful when optimizing code? Re-writes: At what point do you decide to stop optimizing and say "This is as fast as it'll get without a complete re-write." In what cases would you advocate a simple complete re-write anyway? How would you go about designing it?

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  • Moving UITableView row to top of list when selected

    - by Max Kilgore
    I am sure this is an easy thing to do. I am very new to objective C (picked up a job the boss was going to outsource) and could use all the help I can get. Just point me in the right direction here. Basically what I want to set up is this: I have a list of phone numbers that expands to as many rows as needed. I have no problem populating and the list works fine, but I would like for all of the recently selected items in the list to be more easily accessible at the top. So, whenever the user "didSelectRowAtIndexPath", I would like the row to move to the top. I just KNOW this is super simple... but I haven't found the solution yet. No hurry. I am just trying to figure things out on my own. Thanks in advance!

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  • Which is the best CMS?

    - by Nitz
    Hello Guys, My Boss wants to know about CMS. means he want to know which is best CMS We are using Drupal. But he still not satisfied with it? So i had thought, what is best resource for find that? Then I realize that who can give me better suggestion then big community like SO. So I am asking you as developer what will you suggest about CMS? CMS can be in any language but it should be use for building website. So what do you think which CMS is best?

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  • Java: Is it possible to take a GUI Panel and output it into a picture?

    - by user369748
    So I have this chart that's a little special. Kind of like an XY plot of points but my boss wanted to look like a bunch of boxes rather than dots connected by lines. And I basically made a chart using gridlayout and a whole bunch of cells that I'll be colouring in black or white depending on the data. Now he sorta wants it to be outputted to a image file. Is there any way to save a Panel into a picture? He wants to display not only the data but also save a visual representation of the data into an image file.

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  • Which DB Server should I use?

    - by Alex
    I have to develop a new (desktop) app for a small business. This business currently has an Access database with millions of records. The file size is about 1.5 GB. The boss told me that searching on this DB is very slow. The DB consists of a single table with about 20 fields. I also think the overall DB design isn't great. I thought to use another DB server with a new design to improve both performance and efficiency. Considering this is a relatively small business, I don't want to spend much for a DB license, so I want to ask you what would you do. Continue to use Access, maybe improving and optimizing the DB in some way Buy a DB server license (in this case, which one?) ? (any idea?)

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  • Import external dll based on 64bit or 32bit OS

    - by Mike_G
    I have a dll that comes in both 32bit and 64bit version. My .NET WinForm is configured for "Any CPU" and my boss will not let us have separate installs for the different OS versions. So I am wondering: if I package both dlls in the install, then is there a way to have the WinForm determine if its 64bit/32bit and load the proper dll. I found this article for determining version. But i am not sure how to inject the proper way to define the DLLImport attribute on the methods i wish to use. Any ideas?

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  • [C++] which is better, throw an exception or return nonzero value?

    - by xis19
    While you are doing C++ programming, you have two choices of reporting an error. I suppose many teachers would suggest you throw an exception, which is derived from std::exception. Another way, which might be more "C" style, is to return a non-zero value, as zero is "ERROR_SUCCESS". Definitively, return an exception can provide much more information of the error and recovery; while the code will bloat a little bit, and making exception-safe in your mind is a little difficult for me, at least. Other way like returning something else, will make reporting an error much easier; the defect is that managing recovery will be a possibly big problem. So folks, as good programmers, which would be your preference, not considering your boss' opinion? For me, I would like to return some nonzero values.

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  • Upcoming UPK Events

    - by kathryn.lustenberger(at)oracle.com
    February 15th: UPK: Follow Panduit's Lead and Leverage Oracle's User Productivity Kit To Achieve Your Goals - Join us for a live webcast to learn how Oracle's User Productivity Kit can help you meet and exceed your goals. The webcast will feature Jim Boss, from the Panduit Corporation, who will share how Oracle's User Productivity Kit was used with both Oracle and Non-Oracle applications to helped Panduit to meet their goals. Date: February 15th, 2011 at 12:00 PST / 3:00 EST Evite: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/65630-naod10046029mpp005c010-se-300908.html March 2nd: Synaptis teams with Oracle to deliver a UPK customer success story - Webinar Offering The Value of UPK (Customer Success Story): How to leverage the value of UPK to streamline processes and maximize end user adoption for a global implementation Join us to learn how the power of UPK can be leveraged to train end users globally in a successful and cost effective manner. A valued Oracle UPK customer will share experiences, successes, challenges, and strategies. The webinar will also include a question and answer session to give the attendees an opportunity to interact directly with the Oracle UPK customer, Synaptis, and the Oracle UPK Team. Date: March 2, 2011 Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm EST Register for this webinar March 27 - 30th: The Alliance 2011 conference is an annual event for all higher education, government, and public sector users of Oracle applications. The Alliance conference is organized and managed by the Higher Education User Group (www.heug.org). This is the 14th annual event for the HEUG. This is your opportunity to join with over 3200 other Higher Education, Federal, State and Local Government users to network, learn and share in our amazing combined experiences. The Alliance conference team is hard at work, putting together the best conference ever for 2011 - so don't delay, make your plans now to be part of Alliance 2011! When: Sunday, March 27th, 2011 - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 Where: The Colorado Convention Center (Denver, Colorado) Registration for Alliance 2011 is Now Open! UPK will be represented at this event offering: Pre-Conference Training Learn the Basics of Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) Taking Your UPKs to a Whole New Level, Advanced Use of UPK Demo Pod Staff Sessions: Oracle User Productivity Kit: Creating Value throughout the Project Lifecycle Beyond Basic UPK -- User Tracking and SmartHelp Leveraging Oracle and User Productivity Kit (UPK) to Develop a Comprehensive Training Program Oracle User Productivity Kit Strategy and Roadmap -- Key to User Adoption April 10 - 14th: Registration for COLLABORATE 11 has begun - Don't miss the most comprehensive, user-driven conference devoted to Oracle applications and technology. Collaborate with a global network of more than 5,000 peers and experts to share real-world experiences, solve your challenges and gain insights to validate your technology plans. Read below to discover which group to register with for the best value. UPK will be represented at this event offering: Demo Pod Staff Sessions: Oracle User Productivity Kit: Creating Value throughout the Project Lifecycle Centralize all Project Team assets, AND, Deploy Fully Measurable Training with UPK Pro Oracle User Productivity Kit Strategy and Roadmap - Key to User Adoption Registration is Now Open!

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  • A toolset for self improvement and learning [closed]

    - by Sebastian
    Possible Duplicate: I’m having trouble learning I've been working as an IT consultant for 1½ years and I am very passionate about programming. Before that I studied MSc Software Engineering and had both a part time job as a developer for a big telecom company. During that time I also took extra courses and earned a SCJP certificate. I have been continuously reading a lot of books during the last 3½ years. Now to my problem. I want to continue learning and become a really, really good developer. Apart from my daytime job as a full time java developer I have taken university courses in, for me, new languages and paradigms. Most recently, android game development and then functional programming with Scala. I've read books, went to conferences and had a couple of presentations for internal training purposes in our local office. I want to have some advice from other people who have previously been in my situation or currently are. What are you guys doing to keep improving yourselves? Here is some things that I have found are working for me: Reading books I've mostly read books about best practices for programming, OO-design, refactoring, design patterns, tdd. Software craftmanship if you like. I keep a reading list and my current book is Apprenticeship patterns. Taking courses In my country we have a really good system for taking online distance courses. I have also taken one course at coursera.org and a highly recommend that platform. Ive looked at courses at oreilly.com, industriallogic, javaspecialists.eu and they seem to be okay. If someone gives these type of courses a really good review, I can probably convince my boss. Workshops that span over a couple of days would probably be harder, but Ive seen that uncle Bob will have one about refactoring and tdd in 6months not far from here.. :) Are their possibly some online learning platforms that I dont know about? Educational videos I've bought uncle bobs videos from cleancoders.com and I highly recommend them. The only thing I dont like is that they are quite expensive and that he talks about astronomy for ~10 minutes in every episode. Getting certified I had a lot of fun and learned a lot when I studied for the SCJP. I have also done some preparation for the microsoft equivalent but never went for it. I think it is a good when selling yourself as a newly graduated student and also will boost your knowledge if your are interested in it. Now I would like others to start sharing their experiences and possibly give me some advice! BR Sebastian

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  • SQL Developer Debugging, Watches, Smart Data, & Data

    - by thatjeffsmith
    After presenting the SQL Developer PL/SQL debugger for about an hour yesterday at KScope12 in San Antonio, my boss came up and asked, “Now, would you really want to know what the Smart Data panel does?” Apparently I had ‘made up’ my own story about what that panel’s intent is based on my experience with it. Not good Jeff, not good. It was a very small point of my presentation, but I probably should have read the docs. The Smart Data tab displays information about variables, using your Debugger: Smart Data preferences. You can also specify these preferences by right-clicking in the Smart Data window and selecting Preferences. Debugger Smart Data Preferences, control number of variables to display The Smart Data panel auto-inspects the last X accessed variables. So if you have a program with 26 variables, instead of showing you all 26, it will just show you the last two variables that were referenced in your program. If you were to click on the ‘Data’ debug panel, you’ll see EVERYTHING. And if you only want to see a very specific set of values, then you should use Watches. The Smart Data Panel As I step through the code, the variables being tracked change as they are referenced. Only the most recent ones display. This is controlled by the ‘Maximum Locations to Remember’ preference. Step through the code, see the latest variables accessed The Data Panel All variables are displayed. Might be information overload on large PL/SQL programs where you have many dozens or even hundreds of variables to track. Shows everything all the time Watches Watches are added manually and only show what you ask for. Data on Demand – add a watch to track a specific variable Remember, you can interact with your data If you want to do more than just watch, you can mouse-right on a data element, and change the value of the variable as the program is running. This is one of the primary benefits to debugging over using DBMS_OUTPUT to track what’s happening in your program. Change the values while the program is running to test your ‘What if?’ scenarios

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • What to do if I am working on a language that I don't like

    - by Sayem Ahmed
    Hi there, I really don't know if this is the right place to ask this question, but if it isn't, then I guess someone will notify. Anyway, I am working in a software development farm which is currently using PowerBuilder to develop a mid-size ERP solution. The work environment and company management are so great that it may be the best in the whole Bangladesh. Only problem is the technology that are currently being used, which is this PowerBuilder. Now I am a guy who tends to prefer modern development technologies, like DI containers, ORM, TDD, JQuery etc. PowerBuilder is a great tool too, but I couldn' like the application techniques used to build PB applications. These techniques are so inheritance-dependent that many a times these create a great deal of sufferings. I remember two days ago I had to change some processing logic in a core user object and as a result I had to test and re-test all the forms that the application have(apparently, there are almost 20 forms there, each of them with 3-4 kinds of functionalities). Also, learning PB is tough, because online material on this thing is very, very low. I can't afford to read all the documentation that PB provide because I have hard deadlines on the work that I have to do. Another thing with PB is that applications tend to rely on business logic that are implemented on databases which causes debugging to be a nightmare. As a result, I don't feel motivated enough to work in this IDE/System/Framework (or whatever) anymore. My productivity has greatly decreased, and I am not delivering quality code. I think I have the following options available to me - Remain in the current job, keep delivering worse code and let my productivity decrease day by day, taking salaries and bonuses but not delivering quality codes/doing my job the way I should, Search for a new job. At this point number 2 seems a good option, but there are also some issues. As I mentioned before, our management may be the best in the country. Our company owner is himself a software developer with 24 years of experience in software development. He is currently our Team Leader and System Analyst. He is by far the greatest manager and boss I have ever seen. He understands developer's mentality very well(as he IS himself a developer). He is also a great, kind and generous guy. Our company is only a start-up company with 10 developers. Among them, only 3-4 people knows about the business logic behind the ERP, and I am one of them. If I switch my current job, it may hamper the development of this product which I really don't want. I couldn't decide what to do in this situation, so I turned to the community for advice.

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  • Most Unprofessional Workplace

    - by TehGrumpyCoder
    I've worked lots of places in lots of roles: Delivery truck driver, Boilermaker, antenna rigger, Professional Musician, Electronic Technician, Electrical Engineer, and for most of my career: Software Turkey. I want to say this large company is the most unprofessional place I've ever worked, but then I think about other jobs such as TTI that stiffed us all for 10 months salary -- or had us work 2-1/2 years at 66% however you want to look at it, or maybe NeoPlanet with a cast from a bad sitcom running the show, I could go on, but I digress (as usual). So maybe this place isn't the *most* unprofessional, but the personnel rank up there. I'm in a small room off a factory. There are 3 managerial offices, and 36 common-folk of various skill-sets in a variety of single to quad cubicles. No matter where you sit though, because of the layout and location, you've got a hard wall as one wall of your cubicle. Because of that hard wall, everything echoes. I get off the phone, and the guy in the next cubicle makes a comment in response to my phone conversation... I hate that it can be heard and I hate that they do that! These people have no problem yelling from cube to cube to carry on running conversations some of which are actually work-related. There's a lady two cubes away that talks so loud I can clearly hear every phone conversation she has... all work-related but still... Then the one in the next cubicle must have been raised on a farm because there's only one volume setting: LOUD... "HEY MARGE, CAN I GET IN FOR A QUICK APPOINTMENT AFTER WORK TONIGHT?" ... sigh Also that cube is the 'party cube' so that's where all the candy, cake, donuts, and leftovers sits. Anything MzLoud brings in has to have a verbal recipe associated with it at least 10 times during the day, and of course at volume. I've had running conversations over the top of my cube from people in the next one on each side. The weird thing is... the boss sits with an open door closer to this whole fiasco than me. So I wear a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and crank up Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Wes Montgomery, or Jimmy Smith to the point I can't hear the racket... what the heck, I already have a hearing loss from playing guitar.

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  • Rights and use of developed software

    - by Nils Munch
    I have been working on a piece of software for a company, that they wish to resell. There was an mail-based agreement upon a flat hourly rate for my work, and eager me chose to accept a rather low fee. Due to the stress and tempo of the task, a direct contract was never formed or signed. The software was developed locally on my machine, and I was pretty much alone with it, except by excellent help from StackOverflow when I got stuck. Now, the software is nearing completion, I suddenly hear that they have hired a new developer to make the same piece of software as me, and that I was expected to resign within long. Confused I ask around, and realize that the CEO of the company had informed the rest of the company that I was terminally ill and had cancer, and was expected to leave the company soon. Since I'm perfectly healthy, this confused me even more, until I realized what was going on. When I confronted my boss with this, I was no longer seen as a member of the company, and I left the same day, never to return. Later, I raised the question about my missing pay, since I had been working for quite a bit, and not received any payment for my software. I saw that they had already sold a fair copy of my software, and since it's not exactly sold cheap, the company should have plenty of gold to pay me. The company refused, and said that they owned the software, and everything it contained. That was a lot of drama, but my question is this: Who has the rights to the software ? The source code had my personal watermarks and copyrights inprinted, but they have since simply deleted it. The company claim that they have all the rights, because they have a website made about the product, where they write that they have "All rights reserved" in the bottom. My instinct tells me that if a company buys a service like this, and then refuses to pay their developer, then they should not be allowed to keep, and much less resell the product. I have not signed any agreements about giving the company the use of this product, I have made it in my own time and without help from the rest of the company. This all takes place in Denmark, Europe, but I would guess that the rules about this is somewhat universal. Im not the strongest person to legal-talk, so I might be wrong.

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  • So, what&rsquo;s your blog URL?

    - by johndoucette
    Asked by many of my colleagues often enough, I decided to take the plunge and begin blogging. After many attempts to start and long discussions about what I should write about, I decided to give my “buddies” a series of lessons and tidbits to help them understand what it takes to manage a software development project in the real world. Stories of success and failure to keep hope alive. I am formally trained as a developer (BS/CS) and have scattered my code throughout the matrix since 1985 (officially working for the man). As I moved from job-to-job over my career, I have had good managers, bad ones, and ones who were – well, just sitting in the corner office. It wasn't until I began the transition and commitment to the role of project management that I began to take real software development management seriously. A boss once told me “put down the code. Start managing the people and process.” That was a scary time in my career. I loved solving really cool problems with a blank sheet of paper. It was an adrenaline rush to get an opportunity to start from scratch and write an application solution people would actually use and help them in their work/business. I felt that moving into “management” would remove me from the thrill and ownership I felt as a developer. It was a hard step to take, and one which I believe is hard for any developer. Well, I am here to help you through this transition. For those of you wanting to read my stories or learn about the tools and techniques I use on a daily basis, you too might just learn something you would have never thought of as an architect/developer. I am currently a Sr. Consultant at Magenic with the Boston branch office and primarily work with clients in the New England area. I am typically engaged as the lead project manager on our engagements, but also perform Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) assessments for development organizations as well as augment the Technical Evangelists for Microsoft and perform many Team Foundation Server (TFS) demos, installs and “get started” engagements. I have spoken at the New England Code Camp, our most recent CodeMastery event in Boston, and have written several whitepapers.   I am looking forward to helping you “Put down the code.” John Doucette

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  • iTorque for a simple arcade game

    - by Herfus
    I have a basic understanding of programming, but I am no programmer. I've had a couple of a semesters with java programming, so we're talking pretty basic here. I have some scripting experience with game editors where I've created a few (simple) encounters, boss AI, abilities, events and so on. I've mostly done level design with UDK, Source and several other toolsets for a few years now, but I'd like to divert some of the focus to iphone-development. I've participated in a few development projects (source, udk, daot) where I've had a variety of roles (yet never beyond simple scripting). I have just finished prototyping an Iphone game (using game maker) and begun a bit more precise planning on what I'll have to do for the real version. The game is fairly simple, perhaps the best comparison in scope and complexity would be Doodlejump for iPhone. The reason I created the prototype was not just to answer a few questions about the gameplay, but to get some insight into what kind of problems I might face when trying to develop the real thing. I've been looking for engines that I can use for this. iTorque looks, so far, like the best option with a scripting language and WYSIWYG-editor. However the price is fairly steep and I'd like to prepare myself as much as possible before jumping into this, which is why I'm going to ask a few questions here. What kind of difficulties do you think I might run into, considering what you've read so far? Not just with torque, but development in general. I'm making this question mostly to have someone to reality check me. I usually achieve to do what I'm trying to do with scripting, but something tells me there's a very big difference between scripting an AI or an event and creating game logic. Will it be too much of a leap? Just how simple is it to use the Torque scripting language? Obviously I don't expect to be prepared, I expect it to be a learning process. However, I'd still like to be at least a bit confident on the time I'll have to dedicate to this first.

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  • I owe you an explanation

    - by Blueberry Coder
    Welcome to my blog! I am Frédéric Desbiens, a new member of the ADF Product Management team.  I joined Oracle only a few weeks ago. My boss is Grant Ronald, and I have the privilege to work in the same team as Susan Duncan, Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger and Chris Muir. I share with them a passion for all things Java and ADF. With this blog, I hope to help you be more successful with our products – whether you are a customer or a partner. You may have heard of me before. Maybe you have my book in your bookshelf; or maybe we met at a conference. I went to JavaOne, ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle OpenWorld in the past, when I worked for a major consulting firm. I will spare you all the details of my career; you can have a look at my LinkedIn profile if you are curious about my past.  Usually, my posts will be of a technical nature, and will focus on Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper. SOA and portals have always been two topics of interest for me, however, and I will write about them. Over time, you will probably get acquainted with my « strategic » side as well. I devour history books, and always had a tendency to look at the big picture. I will probably not resist to the temptation of mixing IT and history, but this will be occasional, I promise!  At this point, I owe you an explanation about the title of the blog. I am French-Canadian, and wanted to evoke my roots in an obvious yet unobtrusive way. I was born in Chicoutimi, which is one of the main cities found in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. Traditionally, a large part of the wild blueberry production of the province of Québec come from there. A common nickname for the inhabitants is thus Les Bleuets, « The Blueberries » in English. I hope to see you around. You can also follow me on Twitter under  @BlueberryCoder.

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  • How to handle this unfortunately non hypothetical situation with end-users?

    - by User Smith
    I work in a medium sized company but with a very small IT force. Last year (2011), I wrote an application that is very popular with a large group of end-users. We hit a deadline at the end of last year and some functionality (I will call funcA from now on) was not added into the application that was wanted at the very end. So, this application has been running in live/production since the end of 2011, I might add without issue. Yesterday, a whole group of end-users started complaining that funcA that was never in the application is no longer working. Our priority at this company is that if an application is broken it must be fixed first prior to prioritized projects. I have compared code and queries and there is no difference since 2011, which is proofA. I then was able to get one of the end-users to admit that it never worked proofB, but since then that end-user has went back and said that it was working previously......I believe the horde of end-users has assimilated her. I have also reviewed my notes for this project which has requirements and daily updates regarding the project which specifically states, "funcA not achieved due to time constraints", proofC. I have spoken with many of them and I can see where they could be confused as they are very far from a programming background, but I also know they are intelligent enough to act in a group in order to bypass project prioritization orders in order to get functionality that they want to make their job easier. The worst part is is that now group think is setting in and my boss and the head of IT is actually starting to believe them, even though there is no code or query changes. As far as reviewing the state of the logic it is very cut and dry to the point of if 1 = 1, funcA will not work. So, this is the end of the description of my scenario, but I am trying not to get severally dinged on my performance metrics due to this which would essentially have me moved to fixing a production problem that doesn't exist that will probably take over 1 month. I am looking for direct answers to this question. This question is not for rants, polling, or discussions as this is not the format for StackExchange. Please don't downvote me too terribly it is pretty common on this specific site of stack, I am looking for honest answers to this situation and I couldn't find a forum more appropriate.

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  • Forced to be trained [closed]

    - by steeb
    is it OK to force employees to take a training in order to make them sign a contract to stay in the job for X years? Here I'm the only developer in the company and before this job I've developed in VB6, VB.Net and others. There are others technicians here but they query the database server to make reports and make little programs but do not spend all day in programming. I was hired here to manage some legacy data to be migrated to a new system and I used my experience to accomplish the task. I also have made some utilities and other developments. Since we went live with the new system I've been developing a lot of side programs, add-ons and changed the source code of it and basically I've been learning from it since then and became some sort of jack of all trades when some feature needs to be changed or corrected. I have one and a half year in this company but during the last 8 months I've been entirely programming in the system. There have been times when even the implementers ask me how I accomplish certain things. The issue here is that the company has come and told me and other co-workers (which do not program in the system but know basic programming and databases) to have a basic training to program for the new system's platform and when we finish it we will sign a contract to stay in the company for an unspecified time. They have offered also an unspecified better salary. I'm feeling very suspicious cause I know the basics of system and I don't understand why I have to take it, being known by everybody all developments I've made. I gathered with my boss and told him that I should not take that course because I feel that I can learn more with all the daily requirements I've been asked and they should save that money. But he responded me that I have to take it and sign after that. I think they want me to be with them for a long time, and I'd like to, but my opinion is that I would like to stay in the company because I feel comfortable in all laboral aspects (including salary) but not because I signed a contract forced to do more tasks and forced to say no if I have others and better job offers. What advice can you give me in this kind of situation?

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  • Windows Server Backup - Recover only shows the latest backup

    - by Steffen
    We're having quite some trouble at work using Windows Server Backup. We have a HyperV server (Win 2008) running 8 virtual web servers, these are running a variety of OS'es: Win 2003, Win 2008 and a lone Debian. Each virtual server has a separate partition on the physical HyperV server, so e.g. E: is virtual server #1, F: is #2 and so forth. For backup we use Windows Server Backup, or more exactly we use the commandline tool: wbadmin.exe We need to make the backups without stopping the virtual servers, as we cannot afford the downtime (we've got users online both day and night), and Windows Server Backup offers to use the shadow copy provider to archive this. We run wbadmin like this: wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:\\remotebackuplocation\somefolder -include:E: -quiet We run it once per partition, because we've got a script wrapped around that command, for sending us an email about how it went. Each time we run wbadmin it'll delete the Backup xxxx folder it created in last backup, and just create a new. In order to prevent this from happening, we rename the backup xxx folder after each backup is run, before starting the next one. I realize we must rename it back to its original name prior to recovering, and we obviously do this. Now the issue is as follows: Even though we have all the backed up files, and rename whichever backup we want to use, to its original name, we can only see the latest backup in the Windows Server Backup GUI when we select "Recover". This means we can only recover the last partition we backup up, so e.g. E: can never be recovered. In other words we're screwed :-( My question is: Does anyone know how to use Windows Server Backup for a scenario like this ? Or is it simply not possible due to the simplicity of Windows Server Backup ? If it's not possible, could you recommend some backup software for this purpose ? We've already looked at MS' System Center Data Protection Manager, however it's quite expensive and the boss doesn't like that :-/

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  • Iverter, inverter cable, or a display cable?

    - by krebshack
    I was recently hired at a small repair shop. I work indoors while my boss does on site calls for small businesses. I have to troubleshoot and fix laptop screens a few times a week and this is why I'm posting this question. I'm having trouble figuring out how to stream line the troubleshooting process. For example, how do I determine whether the inverter is broken while also determining that the inverter cable is not. How can I quickly decide that the inverter cable is broken while knowing that the inverter is most likely not broke. Or how do I know that it's just the display cable? It seems like this is a good way to approach things: "It could be the inverter, backlight, or the LCD panel itself. Backlight failure is usually hinted at by a pink hue to everything. Inverter failure usually results in the dimming of images on the screen to the point where the backlight is not even on (the inverter provides power to the backlight)" Source. While remembering that things "like flickering, screen freeze in dark image and [a] corner starts to get brighter" point to a "failure in the LCD panel itself, though it could just as easily be a loose data cable connected to the back of the LCD." Source. In short, I'm soliciting advice that anyone might have on how to quickly make the best decision about what's causing problems with laptops display. Thank you.

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  • To clone or to automate a system installation?

    - by Shtééf
    Let's say you're setting up a cluster of servers performing the same task. Or say you're just setting up a bunch of different servers, but you expect to use a base configuration on all of your servers. Would it be better practice to create a base image and clone it, or to automate the installation and configuration? I occasionally end up in this argument with my boss, in situations where we're time-pressed. When he sees me struggle with perfecting the automation, his suggestion is often to clone the entire disk to the other machines. But my instinct has always been to avoid cloning. This is mostly from an Ubuntu perspective, but the question is fairly general. My reasons for avoiding cloning are: On a typical install, even if it's fresh, there are already several unique identifiers installed: filesystem UUIDs, SSH host keys, among others. These would have to be regenerated. Network needs to be reconfigured for each clone. This would need to be done off-line, of course, or the settings will conflict with other machines on the network. On the other hand, some of the cloning advantages are quite clear as well: (Initially?) less effort required than automating configuration. Tools exist to quickly address (some) of the above disadvantages. (I can see right through my own bias there.)

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  • Setting up a Pagefile and Partition in Server 2008

    - by Brett Powell
    I am setting up 18 new machines for our company, and I have instructions from my new boss on setting up a Pagefile and Partition. I have looked at their existing machines to base the new setups off of, but there is no consistency between any 2 machines, which has left me extremely frustrated to say the least. My instructions are... 1) Set a static pagefile (use recommended value as max/min), set it on SSD if SSD available. 2) Make 3 partitions: C: is used for OS and install files D: is used for backups on machines with a SSD. On machines without SSD create a D: partition for pagefile (2*installed RAM for partition size) E: must be the partition hosting user files I have never messed with Pagefiles before, and looking at their existing machines is offering no help. My questions are... 1) As the machines I am setting up have no SSD (just 2 SATA drives) does it sound like the Pagefile should be setup on the C: (primary) drive or the D:? The instructions are vague so I have no idea. 2) As C: and D: are both Physical drives, does it sound like C: should be partitioned out to create the E: drive or D:? Thanks for any help I can get. I am extremely stressed out under a massive workload right now, and these vague instructions are quite infuriating.

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  • Changing order of Thunderbird email address autocomplete?

    - by Brooks Moses
    I recently did a system wipe and installed Thunderbird 3.0, and imported all of my email setup from a previous Thunderbird 2.0 installation. Almost everything is working fine, but I'm having a problem with the autocomplete in email addresses when writing messages. The relevant behavior is this: In the old 2.0 installation, the autocomplete appeared to know which email addresses I used most frequently, and so when I typed "m" in the address line, it would pick as the default selection the "m"-person who I frequently write email to. (It's possible this is an illusion and it simply picked people in the order I added them to my address book.) Thus, I have become used to typing "m"-"enter" in the address field, and getting this person. In the current 3.0 installation, however, the autocomplete order has changed. It's not the same as it was, and it's not alphabetical. The result is that I'm spending extra time looking at the email address bar, and more annoyingly, half the time the old muscle-memory kicks in and I find myself with an email that's addressed to a couple of customers rather than to my boss and coworker. Thus, two questions: How does Thunderbird determine this autocomplete order, among a set of addresses all of which are in the same address book? How can I change this ordering to be what I want? (I have tried Google-searching, and found a number of incomplete answers, nearly all of which were for version 1.0 or thereabouts, and reference settings dialog boxes that no longer exist.)

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