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• How to arrange models, views, controllers in a Kohana 3 project

  - by Pekka

  I'm looking at how to set up a mid-sized web application with Kohana 3. I have implemented MVC patterns in the past but never worked against a "formalized" MVC framework so I'm still getting my head around the terminology - toying around with basic examples, building views and templates, and so on. I'm progressing fairly well but I want to set up a real-world web project (one of my own that I've been planning for quite some time now) as a learning object. I learn best by example, but example-based documentation is a bit sparse for Kohana 3 right now - they say so themselves on the site. While I'm not worried about getting into the framework soon enough, I'm a bit concerned about arranging a healthily structured code base from the start - i.e. how to split up controllers, how to name them, and how to separate the functionality into the appropriate models. My application could, in its core, be described as a business directory with a main businesses table. Businesses can be listed by category and by street name. Each business has a detail page. Business owners can log in and edit their business's entry. Businesses can post offers into an offers table. I know this is not very detailed, but I don't want to cram too much information into this question. I'll be more than happy to go into more detail if needed. Supposing I have all the basic functionality worked out and in place already - list all businesses, edit business, list businesses by street name, create offer logged in as business, and so on, and I'm just looking for how to fit the functionality into a MVC pattern and into a Kohana application structure that can be easily extended: Do you know real-life, publicly accessible examples of "database-heavy" applications like directories, online communities... with a log-in area built on Kohana 3 where I could take a peek how they do it? Are there conventions or best practices on how to structure an extendable login area for end users in a Kohana project that is not only able to handle a business directory page, but further products on separate pages as well? Do you know application structuring HOWTOs or best practices for Kohana 3 not mentioned in the user guide and the inofficial Wiki? Have you built something similar and could give me some recommendations?

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• Gateway Page Between ASP and an ASP.NET Page

  - by ajdams

  I'll admit, I am pretty new with ASP .NET programming and I have been asked to take all our gateway pages (written in classic ASP) and make one universal gateway page to the few C# .NET applications we have (that I wrote). I tried searching here and the web and couldn't find much of anything describing a great way to do this and figured I was either not searching properly or was not properly naming what I am trying to do. I decided to to take one of the main gateway pages we had in classic ASP and use that as a base for my new gateway. Without boring you with a bunch of code I will summarize my gateway in steps and then can take advice/critique from there. EDIT: Basically what I am trying to do is go from a classic ASP page to a ASP .NET page and then back again. EDIT2: If my question is still unclear I am asking if what I have an the right start and if anyone has suggestions as to how this could be better. It can be as generic as need-be, not looking for a specific off-the-shelf code answer. My Gateway page: In the first part of the page I grab session variables and determine if the user is leaving or returning through the gateway: Code (in VB): uid = Request.QueryString("GUID") If uid = "" Then direction = "Leaving" End If ' Gather available user information. userid = Session("lnglrnregid") bankid = Session("strBankid") ' Return location. floor = Request.QueryString("Floor") ' The option chosen will determine if the user continues as SSL or not. ' If they are currently SSL, they should remain if chosen. option1 = Application(bankid & "Option1") If MID(option1, 6, 1) = "1" Then sslHttps = "s" End If Next I enter the uid into a database table (SQL-Server 2005) as a uniqueidentifier field called GUID. I omitted the stored procedure call. Lastly, I use the direction variable to determine if the user is leaving or returning and do redirects from there to the different areas of the site. Code (In VB again): If direction = "Leaving" Then Select Case floor Case "sscat", "ssassign" ' A SkillSoft course Response.Redirect("Some site here") Case "lrcat", "lrassign" ' A LawRoom course Response.Redirect("Some site here") Case Else ' Some other SCORM course like MindLeaders or a custom upload. Response.Redirect("Some site here") End Select Session.Abandon Else ' The only other direction is "Returning" ..... That's about it so far - so like I said, not an expert so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

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• Arranging models, views, controllers in a Kohana 3 project

  - by Pekka

  I'm looking at how to set up a mid-sized web application with Kohana 3. I have implemented MVC patterns in the past but never worked against a "formalized" MVC framework so I'm still getting my head around the terminology - toying around with basic examples, building views and templates, and so on. I'm progressing fairly well but I want to set up a real-world web project (one of my own that I've been planning for quite some time now) as a learning object. I learn best by example, but example-based documentation is a bit sparse for Kohana 3 right now - they say so themselves on the site. While I'm not worried about getting into the framework soon enough, I'm a bit concerned about arranging a healthily structured code base from the start - i.e. how to split up controllers, how to name them, and how to separate the functionality into the appropriate models. My application could, in its core, be described as a business directory with a main businesses table. Businesses can be listed by category and by street name. Each business has a detail page. Business owners can log in and edit their business's entry. Businesses can post offers into an offers table. I know this is pretty vague, but I don't want to cram too much information into this question. I'll be more than happy to go into more detail if needed. Supposing I have all the basic functionality worked out and in place already - list all businesses, edit business, list businesses by street name, create offer, and so on, and I'm just looking for how to fit the functionality into a MVC pattern and into a Kohana application structure that can be easily extended: Do you know real-life, publicly accessible examples of "database-heavy" applications like directories, online communities... with a log-in area built on Kohana 3 where I could take a peek how they do it? Are there conventions or best practices on how to structure an extendable login area for end users in a Kohana project that is not only able to handle a business directory page, but further products on separate pages as well? Do you know application structuring HOWTOs or best practices for Kohana 3 not mentioned in the user guide and the inofficial Wiki? Have you built something similar and could give me some recommendations?

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• Help me stabilize this jRun configuration (CF9/Win2k3/IIS6)

  - by jfrobishow

  Not sure if this would be better suited for ServerFault, but since I am not an admin but a developer I figured I would try SO. We've been struggling to keep our multi-server configuration stable for quite some time now. At the end of last month we were running under CF 7.0.2 on a two servers setup (one instance each). At that point we managed to get our uptime to around 1 week per instance before they would restart by themselves. Since the beginning of the month we upgraded to CF 9 and we're back to square one with multi-restart a day. Our current configuration is 2 Win2k3 servers, running a cluster of 4 instances, 2 instances per server. At this point we are pretty certain this is due to improper JVM settings. We've been toying with them and while some are more stable than others we never quite got it right. From the default: java.args=-server -Xmx512m -Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false -XX:MaxPermSize=192m -XX:+UseParallelGC -Dcoldfusion.rootDir={application.home}/ To currently: java.args=-server -Xmx896m -Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:SurvivorRatio=8 -XX:TargetSurvivorRatio=90 -XX:+UseParallelGC -Dcoldfusion.rootDir={application.home}/ -verbose:gc -Xloggc:c:/Jrun4/logs/gc/gcInstance1b.log We have determined that we do need more than the default 512MB simply by monitoring with FusionReactor, on average our amount of memory consumed is hovering in the mid 300MB and can go up to low 700MB under heavy load. Most of the crash will be logged in jrun4/bin/hs_err_pid*.log always an "Out of swap space" I've attached links to the hs_err and garbage collector log file from yesterday at the bottom of the post. The relevant part is (I think) this: Heap PSYoungGen total 89856K, used 19025K [0x55490000, 0x5b6f0000, 0x5b810000) eden space 79232K, 16% used [0x55490000,0x561a64c0,0x5a1f0000) from space 10624K, 52% used [0x5ac90000,0x5b20e2f8,0x5b6f0000) to space 10752K, 0% used [0x5a1f0000,0x5a1f0000,0x5ac70000) PSOldGen total 460416K, used 308422K [0x23810000, 0x3f9b0000, 0x55490000) object space 460416K, 66% used [0x23810000,0x36541bb8,0x3f9b0000) PSPermGen total 107520K, used 106079K [0x03810000, 0x0a110000, 0x23810000) object space 107520K, 98% used [0x03810000,0x09fa7e40,0x0a110000) From it, I gather that its the PSPermGen that is full (most logs will show the same before a crash), which is why we increased MaxPermSize but the total still show as 107520K!??! No one here is a jRun expert, so any help or even ideas on what to try next would be greatly appreciated!! The log files: Sorry I know sendspace isn't the friendliest of places - if you have other host suggestion for log files let me know and I'll update the post (SO doesn't like them inline, it blows up the format of the post). The hs_err log file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/fgak8l The gc log: http://www.sendspace.com/file/w0r2ct

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• Accidental Complexity in OpenSSL HMAC functions

  - by Hassan Syed

  SSL Documentation Analaysis This question is pertaining the usage of the HMAC routines in OpenSSL. Since Openssl documentation is a tad on the weak side in certain areas, profiling has revealed that using the: unsigned char *HMAC(const EVP_MD *evp_md, const void *key, int key_len, const unsigned char *d, int n, unsigned char *md, unsigned int *md_len); From here, shows 40% of my library runtime is devoted to creating and taking down **HMAC_CTX's behind the scenes. There are also two additional function to create and destroy a HMAC_CTX explicetly: HMAC_CTX_init() initialises a HMAC_CTX before first use. It must be called. HMAC_CTX_cleanup() erases the key and other data from the HMAC_CTX and releases any associated resources. It must be called when an HMAC_CTX is no longer required. These two function calls are prefixed with: The following functions may be used if the message is not completely stored in memory My data fits entirely in memory, so I choose the HMAC function -- the one whose signature is shown above. The context, as described by the man page, is made use of by using the following two functions: HMAC_Update() can be called repeatedly with chunks of the message to be authenticated (len bytes at data). HMAC_Final() places the message authentication code in md, which must have space for the hash function output. The Scope of the Application My application generates a authentic (HMAC, which is also used a nonce), CBC-BF encrypted protocol buffer string. The code will be interfaced with various web-servers and frameworks Windows / Linux as OS, nginx, Apache and IIS as webservers and Python / .NET and C++ web-server filters. The description above should clarify that the library needs to be thread safe, and potentially have resumeable processing state -- i.e., lightweight threads sharing a OS thread (which might leave thread local memory out of the picture). The Question How do I get rid of the 40% overhead on each invocation in a (1) thread-safe / (2) resume-able state way ? (2) is optional since I have all of the source-data present in one go, and can make sure a digest is created in place without relinquishing control of the thread mid-digest-creation. So, (1) can probably be done using thread local memory -- but how do I resuse the CTX's ? does the HMAC_final() call make the CTX reusable ?. (2) optional: in this case I would have to create a pool of CTX's. (3) how does the HMAC function do this ? does it create a CTX in the scope of the function call and destroy it ? Psuedocode and commentary will be useful.

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• JavaScript: What would cause setInterval to stop firing?

  - by Rosarch

  I am writing a chat AJAX app. Randomly, in FF 3.5.9, setInterval() seems to stop firing. I don't have clearInterval() anywhere in my code. What could be causing this to happen? $(document).ready(function () { $("#no-js-warning").empty(); messageRefresher = new MessageRefresher(0); setInterval($.proxy(messageRefresher, "refresh"), 2000); }); function notifyInRoom(user) { $.getJSON('API/users_in_room', { room_id: $.getUrlVar('key'), username: user }, function (users) { if (!$.isEmptyObject(users)) { $("#users").empty(); $.each(users, function (index, username) { var newChild = sprintf("<li>%s</li>", username); $("#users").append(newChild); }); } else { $("#users-loading-msg").text("No one is in this room."); } }); } function MessageRefresher(latest_mid) { this._latest_mid = latest_mid; } MessageRefresher.prototype.refresh = function () { notifyInRoom($("#user-name").val()); var refresher = this; $.getJSON('API/read_messages', { room_id: $.getUrlVar('key'), mid: refresher._latest_mid }, function (messages) { if (! (messages == null || $.isEmptyObject(messages[0]))) { // messages will always be at least [[], [], 0] $("#messages-loading-msg").hide(); for (var i = 0; i < messages[0].length; i++) { var newChild = sprintf('<li><span class="username">%s:</span> %s</li>', messages[1][i], messages[0][i]); $("#messages").append(newChild); } refresher._latest_mid = messages[2]; setUserBlockClass(); } else { $("#messages-loading-msg").text("No messages here. Say anything..."); } }); } // Give the end-user-block class to the appropriate messages // eg, those where the next message is by a different user function setUserBlockClass() { $("#messages li").each(function (index) { if ($(this).children(".username").text() != $(this).next().children(".username").text()) { $(this).addClass("end-user-block"); } }); } I checked the most recent responses in Firebug, and it was the same responses that had been sent earlier. (So, it's not like an unusual response caused a crash.) If I refresh the page, the calls resume.

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• Make a compiled binary run at native speed flawlessly without recompiling from source on a another system?

  - by unknownthreat

  I know that many people, at a first glance of the question, may immediately yell out "Java", but no, I know Java's qualities. Allow me to elaborate my question first. Normally, when we want our program to run at a native speed on a system, whether it be Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, we need to compile from source codes. If you want to run a program of another system in your system, you need to use a virtual machine or an emulator. While these tools allow you to use the program you need on the non-native OS, they sometimes have problems of performance and glitches. We also have a newer compiler called "JIT Compiler", where the compiler will parse the bytecode program to native machine language before execution. The performance may increase to a very good extent with JIT Compiler, but the performance is still not the same as running it on a native system. Another program on Linux, WINE, is also a good tool for running Windows program on Linux system. I have tried running Team Fortress 2 on it, and tried experiment with some settings. I got ~40 fps on Windows at its mid-high setting on 1280 x 1024. On Linux, I need to turn everything low at 1280 x 1024 to get ~40 fps. There are 2 notable things though: Polygon model settings do not seem to affect framerate whether I set it low or high. When there are post-processing effects or some special effects that require manipulation of drawn pixels of the current frame, the framerate will drop to 10-20 fps. From this point, I can see that normal polygon rendering is just fine, but when it comes to newer rendering methods that requires graphic card to the job, it slows down to a crawl. Anyway, this question is rather theoretical. Is there anything we can do at all? I see that WINE can run STEAM and Team Fortress 2. Although there are flaws, they can run at lower setting. Or perhaps, I should also ask, "is it possible to translate one whole program on a system to another system without recompiling from source and get native speed?" I see that we also have AOT Compiler, is it possible to use it for something like this? Or there are so many constraints (such as DirectX call or differences in software architecture) that make it impossible to have a flawless and not native to the system program that runs at native speed?

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• Designing a database file format

  - by RoliSoft

  I would like to design my own database engine for educational purposes, for the time being. Designing a binary file format is not hard nor the question, I've done it in the past, but while designing a database file format, I have come across a very important question: How to handle the deletion of an item? So far, I've thought of the following two options: Each item will have a "deleted" bit which is set to 1 upon deletion. Pro: relatively fast. Con: potentially sensitive data will remain in the file. 0x00 out the whole item upon deletion. Pro: potentially sensitive data will be removed from the file. Con: relatively slow. Recreating the whole database. Pro: no empty blocks which makes the follow-up question void. Con: it's a really good idea to overwrite the whole 4 GB database file because a user corrected a typo. I will sell this method to Twitter ASAP! Now let's say you already have a few empty blocks in your database (deleted items). The follow-up question is how to handle the insertion of a new item? Append the item to the end of the file. Pro: fastest possible. Con: file will get huge because of all the empty blocks that remain because deleted items aren't actually deleted. Search for an empty block exactly the size of the one you're inserting. Pro: may get rid of some blocks. Con: you may end up scanning the whole file at each insert only to find out it's very unlikely to come across a perfectly fitting empty block. Find the first empty block which is equal or larger than the item you're inserting. Pro: you probably won't end up scanning the whole file, as you will find an empty block somewhere mid-way; this will keep the file size relatively low. Con: there will still be lots of leftover 0x00 bytes at the end of items which were inserted into bigger empty blocks than they are. Rigth now, I think the first deletion method and the last insertion method are probably the "best" mix, but they would still have their own small issues. Alternatively, the first insertion method and scheduled full database recreation. (Probably not a good idea when working with really large databases. Also, each small update in that method will clone the whole item to the end of the file, thus accelerating file growth at a potentially insane rate.) Unless there is a way of deleting/inserting blocks from/to the middle of the file in a file-system approved way, what's the best way to do this? More importantly, how do databases currently used in production usually handle this?

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• Insane CPU usage in QT 5.0

  - by GravityScore

  I'm having trouble using the QT framework, particularly with the paintEvent of QWidget. I have a QWidget set up, and am overriding the paintEvent of it. I need to render a bunch of rectangles (grid system), 51 by 19, leading to 969 rectangles being drawn. This is done in a for loop. Then I also need to draw an image on each on of these grids. The QWidget is added to a QMainWindow, which is shown. This works nicely, but it's using up 47% of CPU per window open! And I want to allow the user to open multiple windows like this, likey having 3-4 open at a time, which puts the CPU close to 150%. Why does this happen? Here is the paintEvent contents. The JNI calls don't cause the CPU usage, commenting them out doesn't lower it, but commenting out the p.fillRect and Renderer::renderString (which draws the image) lowers the CPU to about 5%. // Background QPainter p(this); p.fillRect(0, 0, this->width(), this->height(), QBrush(QColor(0, 0, 0))); // Lines for (int y = 0; y < Global::terminalHeight; y++) { // Line and color method ID jmethodID lineid = Manager::jenv->GetMethodID(this->javaClass, "getLine", "(I)Ljava/lang/String;"); error(); jmethodID colorid = Manager::jenv->GetMethodID(this->javaClass, "getColorLine", "(I)Ljava/lang/String;"); error(); // Values jstring jl = (jstring) Manager::jenv->CallObjectMethod(this->javaObject, lineid, jint(y)); error(); jstring cjl = (jstring) Manager::jenv->CallObjectMethod(this->javaObject, colorid, jint(y)); error(); // Convert to C values const char *l = Manager::jenv->GetStringUTFChars(jl, 0); const char *cl = Manager::jenv->GetStringUTFChars(cjl, 0); QString line = QString(l); QString color = QString(cl); // Render line for (int x = 0; x < Global::terminalWidth; x++) { QColor bg = Renderer::colorForHex(color.mid(x + color.length() / 2, 1)); // Cell location on widget int cellx = x * Global::cellWidth + Global::xoffset; int celly = y * Global::cellHeight + Global::yoffset; // Background p.fillRect(cellx, celly, Global::cellWidth, Global::cellHeight, QBrush(bg)); // String // Renders the image to the grid Renderer::renderString(p, tc, text, cellx, celly); } // Release Manager::jenv->ReleaseStringUTFChars(jl, l); Manager::jenv->ReleaseStringUTFChars(cjl, cl); }

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• What's Wrong With My VB.NET Code Of Windows Forms Application?

  - by Krishanu Dey

  I've to forms frmPrint & frmEmail and a dataset(MyDataset) with some DataTable and DataTable Adapters. In frmPrint I've the following Sub Public Sub StartPrinting() try adapterLettersInSchedules.Fill(ds.LettersInSchedules) adapterLetters.Fill(ds.Letters) adapterClients.Fill(ds.Clients) adapterPrintJobs.GetPrintJobsDueToday(ds.PrintJobs, False, DateTime.Today) For Each prow As MyDataSet.PrintJobsRow In ds.PrintJobs Dim lisrow As MyDataSet.LettersInSchedulesRow = ds.LettersInSchedules.FindByID(prow.LetterInScheduleID) If lisrow.Isemail = False Then Dim clientrow As MyDataSet.ClientsRow = ds.Clients.FindByClientID(prow.ClientID) Dim letterrow As MyDataSet.LettersRow = ds.Letters.FindByID(lisrow.LetterID) 'prow. 'lisrow.is Label1.SuspendLayout() Label1.Refresh() Label1.Text = "Printing letter" txt.Rtf = letterrow.LetterContents txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%Firstname%>", clientrow.FirstName) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%Lastname%>", clientrow.LastName) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%Title%>", clientrow.Title) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%Street%>", clientrow.Street) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%City%>", clientrow.City) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%State%>", clientrow.State) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%Zip%>", clientrow.Zip) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%PhoneH%>", clientrow.PhoneH) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%PhoneW%>", clientrow.PhoneW) txt.Rtf = txt.Rtf.Replace("<%Date%>", DateTime.Today.ToShortDateString) Try PDoc.PrinterSettings = printDlg.PrinterSettings PDoc.Print() prow.Printed = True adapterPrintJobs.Update(prow) Catch ex As Exception End Try End If Next prow ds.PrintJobs.Clear() Catch ex As Exception MessageBox.Show(ex.Message, "Print", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error) End Try End Sub And in frmEmail i've the Following Sub Public Sub SendEmails() try adapterLettersInSchedules.Fill(ds.LettersInSchedules) adapterLetters.Fill(ds.Letters) adapterClients.Fill(ds.Clients) adapterEmailJobs.GetEmailJobsDueToday(ds.EmailJobs, False, Today) Dim ls_string As String For Each prow As MyDataSet.EmailJobsRow In ds.EmailJobs Dim lisrow As MyDataSet.LettersInSchedulesRow = ds.LettersInSchedules.FindByID(prow.LetterInScheduleID) If lisrow.Isemail = True Then Dim clientrow As MyDataSet.ClientsRow = ds.Clients.FindByClientID(prow.ClientID) Dim letterrow As MyDataSet.LettersRow = ds.Letters.FindByID(lisrow.LetterID) txt.Rtf = letterrow.LetterContents ls_string = RTF2HTML(txt.Rtf) ls_string = Mid(ls_string, 1, Len(ls_string) - 176) If ls_string = "" Then Throw New Exception("Rtf To HTML Conversion Failed") Label1.SuspendLayout() Label1.Refresh() Label1.Text = "Sending Email" If SendEmail(clientrow.Email, ls_string, letterrow.EmailSubject) Then Try prow.Emailed = True adapterEmailJobs.Update(prow) Catch ex As Exception End Try Else prow.Emailed = False adapterEmailJobs.Update(prow) End If End If Next prow Catch ex As Exception MessageBox.Show(ex.Message, "Email", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error) End Try End Sub I'm running this two subs using two different Threads. Public th As New Thread(New ThreadStart(AddressOf StartFirstPrint)) Public th4 As New Thread(New ThreadStart(AddressOf sendFirstEmail)) Here is the code of StartFirstPrint and sendFirstEmail Public Sub StartFirstPrint() Do While thCont Try Dim frm As New frmPrint() 'frm.MdiParent = Me frm.StartPrinting() Catch ex As Exception End Try Loop End Sub Public Sub sendFirstEmail() Do While thCont Try Dim frmSNDEmail As New frmEmail frmSNDEmail.SendEmails() Catch ex As Exception End Try Loop End Sub the thCont is a public boolean variable that specifies when to shop those threads. Most Of the time this works very well. But some times it gives errors Like the following image I don't know why is this occurring. Please help me.

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• Are there any modern GUI toolkits which implement a heirarchical menu buffer zone?

  - by scomar

  In Bruce Tognazzini's quiz on Fitt's Law, the question discussing the bottleneck in the hierarchical menu (as used in almost every modern desktop UI), talks about his design for the original Mac: The bottleneck is the passage between the first-level menu and the second-level menu. Users first slide the mouse pointer down to the category menu item. Then, they must carefully slide the mouse directly across (horizontally) in order to move the pointer into the secondary menu. The engineer who originally designed hierarchicals apparently had his forearm mounted on a track so that he could move it perfectly in a horizontal direction without any vertical component. Most of us, however, have our forarms mounted on a pivot we like to call our elbow. That means that moving our hand describes an arc, rather than a straight line. Demanding that pivoted people move a mouse pointer along in a straight line horizontally is just wrong. We are naturally going to slip downward even as we try to slide sideways. When we are not allowed to slip downward, the menu we're after is going to slam shut just before we get there. The Windows folks tried to overcome the pivot problem with a hack: If they see the user move down into range of the next item on the primary menu, they don't instantly close the second-level menu. Instead, they leave it open for around a half second, so, if users are really quick, they can be inaccurate but still get into the second-level menu before it slams shut. Unfortunately, people's reactions to heightened chance of error is to slow down, rather than speed up, a well-established phenomenon. Therefore, few users will ever figure out that moving faster could solve their problem. Microsoft's solution is exactly wrong. When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorthm in the mid-'80s, I called for a buffer zone shaped like a <, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu. As long as the user's pointer was moving a few pixels over for every one down, on average, the menu stayed open, no matter how slow they moved. (Cancelling was still really easy; just deliberately move up or down.) This just blew me away! Such a simple idea which would result in a huge improvement in usability. I'm sure I'm not the only one who regularly has the next level of a menu slam shut because I don't move the mouse pointer in a perfectly horizontal line. So my question is: Are there any modern UI toolkits which implement this brilliant idea of a < shaped buffer zone in hierarchical menus? And if not, why not?!

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• Firefox all but freezes during large file upload; Ajax progress bar infeasible; IE6 works fine

  - by Sean

  I want to provide a progress bar for my users who upload very large files. I did some reading and implemented what should be a pretty straightforward solution: I have a <form> element that contains an file input element; its target is set to the ID of a hidden iframe. On the server side, there's some Spring magic that attaches an object to the user's session; the progress of the upload can be queried from this object. After submitting the form, I start a repeating Ajax call using setInterval that queries the server for the percent-complete using the aforementioned session object. The call repeats every half-second, skipping the Ajax call if the previous call has not yet completed. I use the data from the call to update the width of an onscreen element. When the server call reports that the upload is complete, I clear the interval timer. I created a 100-megabyte file and uploaded it using my interface. This is using Firefox 3.6.3. What I found is that although the upload takes 20-25 seconds, the progress bar doesn't get updated until the very end. Moreover, the entire browser is basically frozen until the upload completes. I assumed that my method must be flawed, but I tried the same page using IE6, and was utterly amazed when it behaved as I had designed it to--the progress bar got updated every half second, and the whole upload only took about 15 seconds, much faster than Firefox. I don't have many add-ons installed, but I tried disabling Firebug and restarting my browser. This marginally improved the performance--I got perhaps a single additional progress bar update mid-upload--but still far from acceptable. Can anyone tell me what I can do to bring Firefox's performance up to the level of IE6? Ugh, I can't believe I actually typed that. EDIT: I just tried uploading a large file from a Firefox 3.6.3 browser on a different machine than the one that's running my web server, and it worked fine. Huh.

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• Pass variables between separate instances of ruby (without writing to a text file or database)

  - by boulder_ruby

  Lets say I'm running a long worker-script in one of several open interactive rails consoles. The script is updating columns in a very, very, very large table of records. I've muted the ActiveRecord logger to speed up the process, and instruct the script to output some record of progress so I know how roughly how long the process is going to take. That is what I am currently doing and it would look something like this: ModelName.all.each_with_index do |r, i| puts i if i % 250 ...runs some process... r.save end Sometimes its two nested arrays running, such that there would be multiple iterators and other things running all at once. Is there a way that I could do something like this and access that variable from a separate rails console? (such that the variable would be overwritten every time the process is run without much slowdown) records = ModelName.all $total = records.count records.each_with_index do |r, i| $i = i ...runs some process... r.save end meanwhile mid-process in other console puts "#{($i/$total * 100).round(2)}% complete" #=> 67.43% complete I know passing global variables from one separate instance of ruby to the next doesn't work. I also just tried this to no effect as well unix console 1 $X=5 echo {$X} #=> 5 unix console 2 echo {$X} #=> "" Lastly, I also know using global variables like this is a major software design pattern no-no. I think that's reasonable, but I'd still like to know how to break that rule if I'd like. Writing to a text file obviously would work. So would writing to a separate database table or something. That's not a bad idea. But the really cool trick would be sharing a variable between two instances without writing to a text file or database column. What would this be called anyway? Tunneling? I don't quite know how to tag this question. Maybe bad-idea is one of them. But honestly design-patterns isn't what this question is about.

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• Graphics card initialisation problems when booting - requires a "double" boot

  - by DMA57361

  Problem Outline When booting from cold (and my machine is disconnected from main power when off, but leaving it connected doesn't help) the graphics card (single PCI-e card GeForce 460) will not initialise on the first boot, leaving me with the motherboards on-board graphics (which kick in automatically if no PCI-e card is found). However, if I restart the computer - normally I do this by powering it off just after the numlock lights up on the keyboard (ie, just after POST/BIOS and before Windows takes over), wait for the system to whirr down, and power up again - the graphics card will work correctly. Once double-booted in this matter the system seems to work correctly - with no noticeable problems. This is reproducible every time I try to boot - it has been working like this for about a month now. Background Information Sept 2010 - I suffered a hardware malfunction (crashes in Windows and graphics corruption on BIOS screens). By way of spare hardware I determined that replacing the PSU removed the issue, so I replaced the PSU with a brand new one of slightly higher power (460W replaced with 500W). Oct 2010 - The problem resurfaced. I purchased a new graphics card (GeForce 460), which removed the problem. The new graphics card immediately started having the boot initialisation problems mentioned. I presumed there was a motherboard fault all along, but because the system worked once booted, and I was temporarily out of spare money, I left the system alone and continued to use it. Early/Mid Dec 2010 - In the space of 5 days I recieved 3 instances of hard drive corruption (seemlingly fixed by chkdsk and sfc in each case...). Since I was already under the impression the motherboard was faulty, I purchased a new one ASAP, this also required new RAM (as I dropped from 4 slots to 2 and didn't want to drop mem quantity). Past 3-4 weeks - With a brand new PSU, Graphics Card, Motherboard and RAM I'm suffering the problem outlined above. So, what could be causing this and how do I can resolve it? Additional Notes Once double-booted the system seems to work entirely correctly. The graphics card problem has occured on two entirely different motherboards. I do not have the opportunity to test the graphics card in a different computer (I've only the old motherboard, which is dubious, or a really old desktop that still has an AGP port). Under load (ie, modern games for long enough for temperatures to plateau) the system remains stable and performs as expected. The software that came with the new motherboard and SpeenFan both report all voltages and temperatures are within nominal bounds, when idle and when under load. I've looking over the BIOS settings for my motherboard multiple times and can find nothing that helps. This system is configured to run with everything at standard levels - no overclocking. I've tried booting the system with only the mobo and graphics card connected (thinking maybe my new PSU was too weak for the new gfx card, even though it meets the quoted PSU requirements for the card) but the same problem persists (and really if the PSU was weak I'd have problems with the system under load). When the gfx card does not initialise the fan on its cooling unit is running, possibly slower than otherwise - but this measurement is by eye and so unreliable.

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• Securing smtp with login

  - by Paul Peelen

  I have a ispconfig server, and it seems that someone is using it to send spam. I got about 130 "Mail Delivery System" email about declined send email. This spammer uses my email address as sent from adress, so I get all these email adresses to my mail. I am using Postfix and Courier. I installed my server according to this guide: http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-debian-lenny-ispconfig3-p3 I did this a few months ago. My question: Can I secure my server to require login to be able to send email, and if so... how? Thanks! EDIT Some data from mail.log, these kind of error show up constantly: Jun 15 17:58:16 bolt postfix/qmgr[10712]: CC7DA1242AE: from=<paul@*****.se>, size=3782, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jun 15 17:58:16 bolt postfix/smtp[11337]: CC7DA1242AE: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=4641, delays=4640/0.01/0.32/0, dsn=4.4.3, status=deferred (Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=cmlisboa.pt type=MX: Host not found, try again) Jun 15 17:58:19 bolt postfix/smtpd[10836]: connect from static-200-105-220-154.acelerate.net[200.105.220.154] Jun 15 17:58:20 bolt postfix/smtpd[10836]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from static-200-105-220-154.acelerate.net[200.105.220.154]: 550 5.1.1 <advertising@*****.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table; from=<[email protected]> to=<advertising@*****.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<static-200-105-220-154.acelerate.net> Jun 15 17:58:20 bolt postfix/smtpd[10836]: lost connection after DATA (0 bytes) from static-200-105-220-154.acelerate.net[200.105.220.154] Jun 15 17:58:20 bolt postfix/smtpd[10836]: disconnect from static-200-105-220-154.acelerate.net[200.105.220.154] Jun 15 17:58:29 bolt postfix/smtpd[10834]: connect from unknown[62.176.172.226] Jun 15 17:58:32 bolt postfix/smtpd[10834]: 386791241F9: client=unknown[62.176.172.226] Jun 15 17:58:34 bolt postfix/cleanup[10975]: 386791241F9: message-id=<[email protected]> Jun 15 17:58:34 bolt postfix/qmgr[10712]: 386791241F9: from=<[email protected]>, size=867, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jun 15 17:58:35 bolt postfix/smtpd[10834]: disconnect from unknown[62.176.172.226] Jun 15 17:58:35 bolt amavis[11084]: (11084-17) Blocked SPAM, [62.176.172.226] [62.176.172.226] <[email protected]> -> <*****@*****>, Message-ID: <[email protected]>, mail_id: XczovKoMBYNr, Hits: 18.471, size: 867, 833 ms Jun 15 17:58:35 bolt postfix/smtp[10732]: 386791241F9: to=<*****@*****>, relay=127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10024, delay=3.5, delays=2.7/0/0/0.83, dsn=2.7.0, status=sent (250 2.7.0 Ok, discarded, id=11084-17 - SPAM) Jun 15 17:58:35 bolt postfix/qmgr[10712]: 386791241F9: removed Jun 15 17:58:43 bolt postfix/smtpd[10836]: warning: 178.121.154.194: address not listed for hostname mm-194-154-121-178.dynamic.pppoe.mgts.by Jun 15 17:58:43 bolt postfix/smtpd[10836]: connect from unknown[178.121.154.194] Jun 15 17:58:45 bolt postfix/smtpd[10727]: connect from unknown[180.134.223.86] EDIT #2 Got some more info from the logs, this is a send request: mail.info.1:Jun 15 16:41:57 bolt amavis[5399]: (05399-06) Passed CLEAN, [110.139.48.64] [110.139.48.64] <paul@*****.se> -> <[email protected]>, Message-ID: <CHILKAT-MID-7c54ebcf-5501-de9b-f0b1-4f0234290d8d@HP-IRISH>, mail_id: 35l56Ramx6Nc, Hits: -2.941, size: 3329, queued_as: 2485770086, 136 ms mail.info.1:Jun 15 16:41:57 bolt postfix/smtp[4743]: 375C570082: to=<[email protected]>, relay=127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10024, delay=4.8, delays=4.7/0/0/0.14, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok, id=05399-06, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10025): 250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 2485770086) Which apparently got thrue. Any ideas how to restrict this?

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• Linux bcm43224 wifi adapter slows down a couple minutes after boot

  - by Blubber

  I just installed Ubuntu on my mid 2012 MacBook Air. Everything worked out of the box, but the wifi is showing some weird behavior. When I first login it's really fast, loading google.com is near instant, and browsing in general feels at least as smooth as it did on Mac OS. However, after a couple minutes the connection slows down dramatically, sometimes it takes over 5s to load google.com, a simple reboot fixes the problem for another couple minutes. Specs: Wifi: 02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 01) Driver: open-source brcmsmac driver Kernel: Linux wega 3.8.0-21-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Tue May 14 22:16:46 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Distro: Ubuntu 13.04 (uptodate) I tried a number of things, none of which actually helped Use proprietary sta driver from broadcom Installed firmware into /lib/firmware/brcms (which, as far as I can tell from logs, does not get loaded at all) Switch router to only use 2.4 OR 5 GHz Set router to only use a OR g OR n Set router to use AES encryption only Turned off power management on the adapter Set regulatory region to the correct value (NL) on both router and laptop Disable ipv6 Nothing seems to help, the slowdown always occurs. I did notice that the latency (ping google.com) stays roughly the same (around 9ms). Below is some more information that might be of use. $ lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net 02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4353] (rev 01) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device [106b:00e9] Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge $ rfkill list 0: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no $ lsmod Module Size Used by dm_crypt 22820 1 arc4 12615 2 brcmsmac 550698 0 coretemp 13355 0 kvm_intel 132891 0 parport_pc 28152 0 kvm 443165 1 kvm_intel ppdev 17073 0 cordic 12574 1 brcmsmac brcmutil 14755 1 brcmsmac mac80211 606457 1 brcmsmac cfg80211 510937 2 brcmsmac,mac80211 bnep 18036 2 rfcomm 42641 12 joydev 17377 0 applesmc 19353 0 input_polldev 13896 1 applesmc snd_hda_codec_hdmi 36913 1 microcode 22881 0 snd_hda_codec_cirrus 23829 1 nls_iso8859_1 12713 1 uvcvideo 80847 0 btusb 22474 0 snd_hda_intel 39619 3 videobuf2_vmalloc 13056 1 uvcvideo snd_hda_codec 136453 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec_cirrus bcm5974 17347 0 bluetooth 228619 22 bnep,btusb,rfcomm snd_hwdep 13602 1 snd_hda_codec lpc_ich 17061 0 videobuf2_memops 13202 1 videobuf2_vmalloc videobuf2_core 40513 1 uvcvideo videodev 129260 2 uvcvideo,videobuf2_core bcma 41051 1 brcmsmac snd_pcm 97451 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel snd_page_alloc 18710 2 snd_pcm,snd_hda_intel snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_rawmidi 30180 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61554 2 snd_seq_midi_event,snd_seq_midi snd_seq_device 14497 3 snd_seq,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_midi snd_timer 29425 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd 68876 16 snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_rawmidi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_device,snd_hda_codec_cirrus mei 41158 0 soundcore 12680 1 snd apple_bl 13673 0 mac_hid 13205 0 lp 17759 0 parport 46345 3 lp,ppdev,parport_pc usb_storage 57204 0 hid_apple 13237 0 hid_generic 12540 0 ghash_clmulni_intel 13259 0 aesni_intel 55399 399 aes_x86_64 17255 1 aesni_intel xts 12885 1 aesni_intel lrw 13257 1 aesni_intel gf128mul 14951 2 lrw,xts ablk_helper 13597 1 aesni_intel cryptd 20373 4 ghash_clmulni_intel,aesni_intel,ablk_helper i915 600351 3 ahci 25731 3 libahci 31364 1 ahci video 19390 1 i915 i2c_algo_bit 13413 1 i915 drm_kms_helper 49394 1 i915 usbhid 47074 0 drm 286313 4 i915,drm_kms_helper hid 101002 3 hid_generic,usbhid,hid_apple $ dmesg | egrep 'b43|bcma|brcm|[F]irm' [ 0.055025] [Firmware Bug]: ioapic 2 has no mapping iommu, interrupt remapping will be disabled [ 0.152336] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored [ 2.187681] pci_root PNP0A08:00: [Firmware Info]: MMCONFIG for domain 0000 [bus 00-99] only partially covers this bridge [ 12.553600] bcma-pci-bridge 0000:02:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002) [ 12.553657] bcma: bus0: Found chip with id 0xA8D8, rev 0x01 and package 0x08 [ 12.553688] bcma: bus0: Core 0 found: ChipCommon (manuf 0x4BF, id 0x800, rev 0x22, class 0x0) [ 12.553715] bcma: bus0: Core 1 found: IEEE 802.11 (manuf 0x4BF, id 0x812, rev 0x17, class 0x0) [ 12.553764] bcma: bus0: Core 2 found: PCIe (manuf 0x4BF, id 0x820, rev 0x0F, class 0x0) [ 12.605777] bcma: bus0: Bus registered [ 12.852925] brcmsmac bcma0:0: mfg 4bf core 812 rev 23 class 0 irq 17 [ 13.085176] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_ops_bss_info_changed: qos enabled: false (implement) [ 13.085186] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_ops_config: change power-save mode: false (implement) [ 20.862617] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcmsmac: brcms_ops_bss_info_changed: associated [ 20.862622] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_ops_bss_info_changed: arp filtering: enabled true, count 0 (implement) [ 20.862625] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_ops_bss_info_changed: qos enabled: true (implement) [ 20.897957] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_ops_bss_info_changed: arp filtering: enabled true, count 1 (implement) $ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"wlan" Mode:Managed Frequency:5.22 GHz Access Point: E0:46:9A:4E:63:9A Bit Rate=65 Mb/s Tx-Power=17 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=63/70 Signal level=-47 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:13 Invalid misc:56 Missed beacon:0

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• Server Cabinet/Room Cooling

  - by user37226

  Hello all. I currently have two desktops and three servers in my office sitting on the floor (I know this is bad). With that many servers the ambient temperature in the room goes up quickly. I am located in Dallas, TX so during the winter, if the heat is kept low, it is not a problem, but during the summer it easily jumps the room +10 degrees. I have decided and found a free 42U server cabinet that a hosting company was throwing away to house all of these systems in. One server is in a rack mount case while the other four servers are housed in mid-tower cases. I have purchased shelves for each computer and plan to lay the towers side ways on these shelves (as replacing the cases costs a heck of a lot of money). I like the idea of housing all of these systems in the cabinet because it will save a lot of room and clean up all of the cabling currently laying all over the office floor. When putting this setup together over the next couple of weeks, I want to address issues with dust and cooling. The server cabinet has a fan on top, front plexiglass door and a rear metal door with vent wholes on the bottom. First the cooling issues. I know I am going to want to have cool air enter the bottom of the cabinet and exit the top. I do not want the room heating up though as this will make my work area hot and then make the servers warmer as the air eventually reenters the cabinet. I had an idea to fix this problem, but am unsure if it will work. I was thinking of taking flexible piping and adapting it to the back fans of the computer having the other end of the pipe at the top close to the cabinet's top mounted fan. I was then thinking of creating a duct around the top fan into the attic. Now I am very concerned that the attic will cause issues with this type of setup because during July/August time frame, the attic is easily 120 degrees F. I could also use the flexible pipe to take it to an attic exhaust vent if it would be better to vent it into the 100 degree air outside (at least there may be wind. The other option would be to buy a small portable air conditioner. This may be a possibility, but do I want to spend the extra money on power? I bet this increases the noise. Plus they are around $250 on Amazon. What would you all recommend? Depending on the solution I end up running with above, I would also like to limit the dust that gets into the cabinet. If I were to cut a whole and mount a second cabinet fan on the bottom of the rear door, could I possibly mount a standard home air filter on the other side of that whole? Thanks in advance for your recommendations. I look forward to reading your interesting ideas.

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• Server Cabinet/Room Cooling

  - by user37226

  Hello all. I currently have two desktops and three servers in my office sitting on the floor (I know this is bad). With that many servers the ambient temperature in the room goes up quickly. I am located in Dallas, TX so during the winter, if the heat is kept low, it is not a problem, but during the summer it easily jumps the room +10 degrees. I have decided and found a free 42U server cabinet that a hosting company was throwing away to house all of these systems in. One server is in a rack mount case while the other four servers are housed in mid-tower cases. I have purchased shelves for each computer and plan to lay the towers side ways on these shelves (as replacing the cases costs a heck of a lot of money). I like the idea of housing all of these systems in the cabinet because it will save a lot of room and clean up all of the cabling currently laying all over the office floor. When putting this setup together over the next couple of weeks, I want to address issues with dust and cooling. The server cabinet has a fan on top, front plexiglass door and a rear metal door with vent wholes on the bottom. First the cooling issues. I know I am going to want to have cool air enter the bottom of the cabinet and exit the top. I do not want the room heating up though as this will make my work area hot and then make the servers warmer as the air eventually reenters the cabinet. I had an idea to fix this problem, but am unsure if it will work. I was thinking of taking flexible piping and adapting it to the back fans of the computer having the other end of the pipe at the top close to the cabinet's top mounted fan. I was then thinking of creating a duct around the top fan into the attic. Now I am very concerned that the attic will cause issues with this type of setup because during July/August time frame, the attic is easily 120 degrees F. I could also use the flexible pipe to take it to an attic exhaust vent if it would be better to vent it into the 100 degree air outside (at least there may be wind. The other option would be to buy a small portable air conditioner. This may be a possibility, but do I want to spend the extra money on power? I bet this increases the noise. Plus they are around $250 on Amazon. What would you all recommend? Depending on the solution I end up running with above, I would also like to limit the dust that gets into the cabinet. If I were to cut a whole and mount a second cabinet fan on the bottom of the rear door, could I possibly mount a standard home air filter on the other side of that whole? Thanks in advance for your recommendations. I look forward to reading your interesting ideas.

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• My 2009 MacBook Logic board failed - options to proceed and how difficult?

  - by user181061

  Scannerz just gave my MacBook logic board a big fat F! I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion about 3 weeks ago. The system was running short of memory so I upgraded it. The system was running fine for about 2 weeks. Yesterday the thing started acting erratic. A lot of spinning beach balls, delays, and then some errors saying files couldn't be read to or from the drive. I figured the drive was going because the system is over 3 years old. I ran Scannerz on it and it indicated a lot of errors and irregularities. I rescanned it in cursory mode, and none of them were repeatable, just showing up all over the place in different regions of the scan. I went through the docs and they implied either an I/O cable was bad, a connection was damaged, or the logic board was bad. I tossed on my backup of Snow Leopard that I cloned from the original hard drive because I figured Mountain Lion was to blame and booted from the USB drive with the clone on it. It wasn't. I performed scans on every single port, and errors and irregularities that couldn't be repeated were showing up on every single one of them. I then, for kicks, put a CD into the CD player. Scannerz doesn't test optical drives but I figured surely that will work. No it won't. More spinning beach balls and messages telling me it can't be read. It was working fine 3 days ago. I know a lot of people don't like MacBook's, but mine's been great, at least until now. It was working great even with Mountain Lion after the upgrade. The system is a mid-2009 MacBook. In my opinion, it's a complete waste to toss this system. The display is too good, the keyboard works great, and it still looks good, plus this type of MacBook still uses the FireWire 400 port and I use that for Time Machine backups. I've tried reseating the RAM, it didn't do anything. I shut the system down and put in the old RAM, booted to Snow Leopard, and the problems persist. Here are my questions: The Scannerz documentation somewhere said something about the Airport card not being seated properly, but when I go to iFixit, it's apparent, at least I think it's apparent, that this isn't a slot type Airport card that the user can easily install or remove. If the cables or connections to the Airport card are bad, could they be causing this problem. How about any other connections that can be intermittent, failing or erratic? Any type of resets that I could possibly do to get rid of this? For any of those that have replaced a logic board on a MacBook, if this really is the culprit, are there any "gotcha's" I need to be aware of? As an FYI, I replaced the hard drive on an old iBook @500MHz that I had a long time ago, and I replaced the drive on a 1.33GHz PowerBook about 6 years ago. You have to be careful, but using some of the info on web sites like iFixit it's not that hard. Time consuming, but not that hard. The Intel based MacBook's to me look like they're easier to service than either of those. I'm thinking about getting a unit off of eBay that matches mine but has something else wrong with it, like a busted display. I REFUSE to buy a new system. A guy at my office has a 2007 Mac Pro and he can't upgrade to Mountain Lion because his system is "obsoleted." That's ridiculous. If you pay nearly $7,500 for a system it shouldn't be trash just because Apple decides they don't have enough money (sorry for the soap box, but it's true, IMO!) Any input is appreciated.

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• Tips on installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 went up on MSDN downloads (here) on March 8, and will be released publicly on March 10 here. Release announcements: Soma: Visual Studio 2010 enhancements Jason Zander: Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 I started on this post with tips on installing VS2010 SP1 when I realized I’ve been writing these up for Visual Studio and .NET framework SP releases for a while (e.g. VS2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1 post, VS2005 SP1 post). Looking back the years of Visual Studio SP installs (and remembering when we’d get up to SP6 for a Visual Studio release), I’m happy to see that it just keeps getting easier. Service Packs are a lot less finicky about requiring beta software to be uninstalled, install more quickly, and are just generally a lot less scary. If I can’t have a jetpack, at least my future provided me faster, easier service packs. Disclaimer: These tips are just general things I've picked up over the years. I don't have any inside knowledge here. If you see anything wrong, be sure to let me know in the comments. You may want to check the readme file before installing - it's short, and it's in that new-fangled HTML format. On with the tips! Before starting, uninstall Visual Studio features you don't use Visual Studio service packs (and other Microsoft service packs as well) install patches for the specific features you’ve got installed. This is a big reason to always do a custom install when you first install Visual Studio, but it’s not difficult to update your existing installation. Here’s the quick way to do that: Tap the windows key and type “add or remove programs” and press enter (or click on the “Add or remove programs” link if you must).   Type “Visual Studio 2010” in the search box in the upper right corner, click on the Visual Studio program (the one with the VS infinity looking logo) and click on Uninstall/Change. Click on Add or Remove Features The next part’s up to you – what features do you actually use? I’ve been doing primarily ASP.NET MVC development in C# lately, so I selected Visual C# and Visual Web Developer. Remember that you can install features later if needed, and can also install the express versions if you want. Selecting everything just because it’s there - or you paid for it – means that you install updates for everything, every time. When you’ve made your changes, click on the Update button to uninstall unused features. Shut down all instances of Visual Studio It probably goes without saying that you should close a program down before installing it, partly to avoid the file-in-use-reboot-after-install horror. Additional "hunch / works on my machine" quality tip: On one computer I saw a note in the setup log about Visual Studio a prompt for user input to close Visual Studio, although I never saw the prompt. Just to  be sure, I'd personally open up Task Manager and kill any devenv.exe processes I saw running, as it couldn't hurt. Use the web installer I use the Web Installers whenever possible. There’s no point in downloading the DVD unless you’re doing multiple installs or won’t have internet access. The DVD IS is 1.5GB, since it needs to be able to service every possible supported installation option on both x86 and x64. The web installer is 776 KB (smaller than calc.exe), so you can start the installation right away. Like other web installers, the real benefit is that it only installs the updates you need (hence the reason for step 1 – uninstalling unused components). Instead of 1.5GB, my download was roughly 530MB. If you’re installing from MSDN (this link takes you right to the Visual Studio installs), select the first one on the list: The first step in the installation process is to analyze the machine configuration and tell you what needs to be installed. Since I've trimmed down my features, that's a pretty short list. The time's not far off where I may not install SQL Server on my dev machines, just using SQL Server Compact - that would shorten the list further. When I hit next, you can see that the download size has shrunk considerably. When I start the install, note that the installation begins while other components are downloading - another benefit of the web install. On my mid-range desktop machine, the install took 25 minutes. What if it takes longer? According to Heath Stewart (Visual Studio installer guru), average SP1 installs take roughly 45 minutes. An installation which takes hours to complete may be a sign of a problem: see his post Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem. Why so long? Yes, even 25 minutes is a while. Heath's got another blog post explaining why the update can take longer than the initial install (see: A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product) which explains all the additional steps and complexities a patch needs to deal with, as well as some mitigation steps that deployment authors can take to mitigate the impact. Other things to know about Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Installs over Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta That's nice. Previous Visual Studio versions did a number of annoying things when you installed SP's over beta's - fail with weird errors, get part way through and tell you needed to cancel and uninstall first, etc. I've installed this on two machines that had random beta stuff installed without tears. That Readme file you didn't read I mentioned the readme file earlier (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=210711 ). Some interesting things I picked up in there: 2.1.3. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installation may fail when a USB drive or other removeable drive is connected 2.1.4. Visual Studio must be restarted after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 tooling for SQL Server Compact (Compact) 4.0 is installed 2.2.1. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled to restore certain components 2.2.2. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled before SP1 can be installed again 2.4.3.1. Async CTP If you installed the pre-SP1 version of Async CTP but did not uninstall it before you installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, then your computer will be in a state in which the version of the C# compiler in the .NET Framework does not match the C# compiler in Visual Studio. To resolve this issue: After you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, reinstall the SP1 version of the Async CTP from here. Hardware acceleration for Visual Studio is disabled on Windows XP Visual Studio 2010 SP1 disables hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP (only on XP). You can turn it back on in the Visual Studio options, under Environment / General, as shown below. See Jason Zander's post titled Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change.

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• Who IS Brian Solis?

  - by Michael Snow

  Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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• Is Berkeley DB a NoSQL solution?

  - by Gregory Burd

  Berkeley DB is a library. To use it to store data you must link the library into your application. You can use most programming languages to access the API, the calls across these APIs generally mimic the Berkeley DB C-API which makes perfect sense because Berkeley DB is written in C. The inspiration for Berkeley DB was the DBM library, a part of the earliest versions of UNIX written by AT&T's Ken Thompson in 1979. DBM was a simple key/value hashtable-based storage library. In the early 1990s as BSD UNIX was transitioning from version 4.3 to 4.4 and retrofitting commercial code owned by AT&T with unencumbered code, it was the future founders of Sleepycat Software who wrote libdb (aka Berkeley DB) as the replacement for DBM. The problem it addressed was fast, reliable local key/value storage. At that time databases almost always lived on a single node, even the most sophisticated databases only had simple fail-over two node solutions. If you had a lot of data to store you would choose between the few commercial RDBMS solutions or to write your own custom solution. Berkeley DB took the headache out of the custom approach. These basic market forces inspired other DBM implementations. There was the "New DBM" (ndbm) and the "GNU DBM" (GDBM) and a few others, but the theme was the same. Even today TokyoCabinet calls itself "a modern implementation of DBM" mimicking, and improving on, something first created over thirty years ago. In the mid-1990s, DBM was the name for what you needed if you were looking for fast, reliable local storage. Fast forward to today. What's changed? Systems are connected over fast, very reliable networks. Disks are cheep, fast, and capable of storing huge amounts of data. CPUs continued to follow Moore's Law, processing power that filled a room in 1990 now fits in your pocket. PCs, servers, and other computers proliferated both in business and the personal markets. In addition to the new hardware entire markets, social systems, and new modes of interpersonal communication moved onto the web and started evolving rapidly. These changes cause a massive explosion of data and a need to analyze and understand that data. Taken together this resulted in an entirely different landscape for database storage, new solutions were needed. A number of novel solutions stepped up and eventually a category called NoSQL emerged. The new market forces inspired the CAP theorem and the heated debate of BASE vs. ACID. But in essence this was simply the market looking at what to trade off to meet these new demands. These new database systems shared many qualities in common. There were designed to address massive amounts of data, millions of requests per second, and scale out across multiple systems. The first large-scale and successful solution was Dynamo, Amazon's distributed key/value database. Dynamo essentially took the next logical step and added a twist. Dynamo was to be the database of record, it would be distributed, data would be partitioned across many nodes, and it would tolerate failure by avoiding single points of failure. Amazon did this because they recognized that the majority of the dynamic content they provided to customers visiting their web store front didn't require the services of an RDBMS. The queries were simple, key/value look-ups or simple range queries with only a few queries that required more complex joins. They set about to use relational technology only in places where it was the best solution for the task, places like accounting and order fulfillment, but not in the myriad of other situations. The success of Dynamo, and it's design, inspired the next generation of Non-SQL, distributed database solutions including Cassandra, Riak and Voldemort. The problem their designers set out to solve was, "reliability at massive scale" so the first focal point was distributed database algorithms. Underneath Dynamo there is a local transactional database; either Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB Java Edition, MySQL or an in-memory key/value data structure. Dynamo was an evolution of local key/value storage onto networks. Cassandra, Riak, and Voldemort all faced similar design decisions and one, Voldemort, choose Berkeley DB Java Edition for it's node-local storage. Riak at first was entirely in-memory, but has recently added write-once, append-only log-based on-disk storage similar type of storage as Berkeley DB except that it is based on a hash table which must reside entirely in-memory rather than a btree which can live in-memory or on disk. Berkeley DB evolved too, we added high availability (HA) and a replication manager that makes it easy to setup replica groups. Berkeley DB's replication doesn't partitioned the data, every node keeps an entire copy of the database. For consistency, there is a single node where writes are committed first - a master - then those changes are delivered to the replica nodes as log records. Applications can choose to wait until all nodes are consistent, or fire and forget allowing Berkeley DB to eventually become consistent. Berkeley DB's HA scales-out quite well for read-intensive applications and also effectively eliminates the central point of failure by allowing replica nodes to be elected (using a PAXOS algorithm) to mastership if the master should fail. This implementation covers a wide variety of use cases. MemcacheDB is a server that implements the Memcache network protocol but uses Berkeley DB for storage and HA to replicate the cache state across all the nodes in the cache group. Google Accounts, the user authentication layer for all Google properties, was until recently running Berkeley DB HA. That scaled to a globally distributed system. That said, most NoSQL solutions try to partition (shard) data across nodes in the replication group and some allow writes as well as reads at any node, Berkeley DB HA does not. So, is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution? Not really, but it certainly is a component of many of the existing NoSQL solutions out there. Forgetting all the noise about how NoSQL solutions are complex distributed databases when you boil them down to a single node you still have to store the data to some form of stable local storage. DBMs solved that problem a long time ago. NoSQL has more to do with the layers on top of the DBM; the distributed, sometimes-consistent, partitioned, scale-out storage that manage key/value or document sets and generally have some form of simple HTTP/REST-style network API. Does Berkeley DB do that? Not really. Is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution today? Nope, but it's the most robust solution on which to build such a system. Re-inventing the node-local data storage isn't easy. A lot of people are starting to come to appreciate the sophisticated features found in Berkeley DB, even mimic them in some cases. Could Berkeley DB grow into a NoSQL solution? Absolutely. Our key/value API could be extended over the net using any of a number of existing network protocols such as memcache or HTTP/REST. We could adapt our node-local data partitioning out over replicated nodes. We even have a nice query language and cost-based query optimizer in our BDB XML product that we could reuse were we to build out a document-based NoSQL-style product. XML and JSON are not so different that we couldn't adapt one to work with the other interchangeably. Without too much effort we could add what's missing, we could jump into this No SQL market withing a single product development cycle. Why isn't Berkeley DB already a NoSQL solution? Why aren't we working on it? Why indeed...

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 2

  - by AjarnMark

  In Part 1, I started talking about using Red-Gate’s newest version of SQL Source Control and how I really like it as a viable method to source control your database development.  It looks like this is going to turn into a little series where I will explain how we have done things in the past, and how life is different with SQL Source Control.  I will also explain some of my philosophy and methodology around deployment with these tools.  But for now, let’s talk about some of the good and the bad of the tool itself. More Kudos and Features I mentioned previously how impressed I was with the responsiveness of Red-Gate’s team.  I have been having an ongoing email conversation with Gyorgy Pocsi, and as I have run into problems or requested things behave a little differently, it has not been more than a day or two before a new Build is ready for me to download and test.  Quite impressive! I’m sure much of the requests I put in were already in the plans, so I can’t really take credit for them, but throughout this conversation, Red-Gate has implemented several features that were not in the first Early Access version.  Those include: Honoring the Fortress configuration option to require Work Item (Bug) IDs on check-ins. Adding the check-in comment text as a comment to the Work Item. Adding the list of checked-in files, along with the Fortress links for automatic History and DIFF view Updating the status of a Work Item on check-in (e.g. setting the item to Complete or, in our case “Dev-Complete”) Support for the Fortress 2.0 API, and not just the Vault Pro 5.1 API.  (See later notes regarding support for Fortress 2.0). These were all features that I felt we really needed to have in-place before I could honestly consider converting my team to using SQL Source Control on a regular basis.  Now that I have those, my only excuse is not wanting to switch boats on the team mid-stream.  So when we wrap up our current release in a few weeks, we will make the jump.  In the meantime, I will continue to bang on it to make sure it is stable.  It passed one test for stability when I did a test load of one of our larger database schemas into Fortress with SQL Source Control.  That database has about 150 tables, 200 User-Defined Functions and nearly 900 Stored Procedures.  The initial load to source control went smoothly and took just a brief amount of time. Warnings Remember that this IS still in pre-release stage and while I have not had any problems after that first hiccup I wrote about last time, you still need to treat it with a healthy respect.  As I understand it, the RTM is targeted for February.  There are a couple more features that I hope make it into the final release version, but if not, they’ll probably be coming soon thereafter.  Those are: A Browse feature to let me lookup the Work Item ID instead of having to remember it or look back in my Item details.  This is just a matter of convenience. I normally have my Work Item list open anyway, so I can easily look it up, but hey, why not make it even easier. A multi-line comment area.  The current space for writing check-in comments is a single-line text box.  I would like to have a multi-line space as I sometimes write lengthy commentary.  But I recognize that it is a struggle to get most developers to put in more than the word “fixed” as their comment, so this meets the need of the majority as-is, and it’s not a show-stopper for us. Merge.  SQL Source Control currently does not have a Merge feature.  If two or more people make changes to the same database object, you will get a warning of the conflict and have to choose which one wins (and then manually edit to include the others’ changes).  I think it unlikely you will run into actual conflicts in Stored Procedures and Functions, but you might with Views or Tables.  This will be nice to have, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.  And I have multiple tools at my disposal to do merges manually, so really not a show-stopper for us. Automation has its limits.  As cool as this automation is, it has its limits and there are some changes that you will be better off scripting yourself.  For example, if you are refactoring table definitions, and want to change a column name, you can write that as a quick sp_rename command and preserve the data within that column.  But because this tool is looking just at a before and after picture, it cannot tell that you just renamed a column.  To the tool, it looks like you dropped one column and added another.  This is not a knock against Red-Gate.  All automated scripting tools have this issue, unless the are actively monitoring your every step to know exactly what you are doing.  This means that when you go to Deploy your changes, SQL Compare will script the change as a column drop and add, or will attempt to rebuild the entire table.  Unfortunately, neither of these approaches will preserve the existing data in that column the way an sp_rename will, and so you are better off scripting that change yourself.  Thankfully, SQL Compare will produce warnings about the potential loss of data before it does the actual synchronization and give you a chance to intercept the script and do it yourself. Also, please note that the current official word is that SQL Source Control supports Vault Professional 5.1 and later.  Vault Professional is the new name for what was previously known as Fortress.  (You can read about the name change on SourceGear’s site.)  The last version of Fortress was 2.x, and the API for Fortress 2.x is different from the API for Vault Pro.  At my company, we are currently running Fortress 2.0, with plans to upgrade to Vault Pro early next year.  Gyorgy was able to come up with a work-around for me to be able to use SQL Source Control with Fortress 2.0, even though it is not officially supported.  If you are using Fortress 2.0 and want to use SQL Source Control, be aware that this is not officially supported, but it is working for us, and you can probably get the work-around instructions from Red-Gate if you’re really, really nice to them. Upcoming Topics Some of the other topics I will likely cover in this series over the next few weeks are: How we used to do source control back in the old days (a few weeks ago) before SQL Source Control was available to Vault users What happens when you restore a database that is linked to source control Handling multiple development branches of source code Concurrent Development practices and handling Conflicts Deployment Tips and Best Practices A recap after using the tool for a while

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• Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

  The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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• The Great Divorce

  - by BlackRabbitCoder

  I have a confession to make: I've been in an abusive relationship for more than 17 years now.  Yes, I am not ashamed to admit it, but I'm finally doing something about it. I met her in college, she was new and sexy and amazingly fast -- and I'd never met anything like her before.  Her style and her power captivated me and I couldn't wait to learn more about her.  I took a chance on her, and though I learned a lot from her -- and will always be grateful for my time with her -- I think it's time to move on. Her name was C++, and she so outshone my previous love, C, that any thoughts of going back evaporated in the heat of this new romance.  She promised me she'd be gentle and not hurt me the way C did.  She promised me she'd clean-up after herself better than C did.  She promised me she'd be less enigmatic and easier to keep happy than C was.  But I was deceived.  Oh sure, as far as truth goes, it wasn't a complete lie.  To some extent she was more fun, more powerful, safer, and easier to maintain.  But it just wasn't good enough -- or at least it's not good enough now. I loved C++, some part of me still does, it's my first-love of programming languages and I recognize its raw power, its blazing speed, and its improvements over its predecessor.  But with today's hardware, at speeds we could only dream to conceive of twenty years ago, that need for speed -- at the cost of all else -- has died, and that has left my feelings for C++ moribund. If I ever need to write an operating system or a device driver, then I might need that speed.  But 99% of the time I don't.  I'm a business-type programmer and chances are 90% of you are too, and even the ones who need speed at all costs may be surprised by how much you sacrifice for that.   That's not to say that I don't want my software to perform, and it's not to say that in the business world we don't care about speed or that our job is somehow less difficult or technical.  There's many times we write programs to handle millions of real-time updates or handle thousands of financial transactions or tracking trading algorithms where every second counts.  But if I choose to write my code in C++ purely for speed chances are I'll never notice the speed increase -- and equally true chances are it will be far more prone to crash and far less easy to maintain.  Nearly without fail, it's the macro-optimizations you need, not the micro-optimizations.  If I choose to write a O(n2) algorithm when I could have used a O(n) algorithm -- that can kill me.  If I choose to go to the database to load a piece of unchanging data every time instead of caching it on first load -- that too can kill me.  And if I cross the network multiple times for pieces of data instead of getting it all at once -- yes that can also kill me.  But choosing an overly powerful and dangerous mid-level language to squeeze out every last drop of performance will realistically not make stock orders process any faster, and more likely than not open up the system to more risk of crashes and resource leaks. And that's when my love for C++ began to die.  When I noticed that I didn't need that speed anymore.  That that speed was really kind of a lie.  Sure, I can be super efficient and pack bits in a byte instead of using separate boolean values.  Sure, I can use an unsigned char instead of an int.  But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  The key is maintainability, and that's where C++ failed me.  I like to tell the other developers I work with that there's two levels of correctness in coding: Is it immediately correct? Will it stay correct? That is, you can hack together any piece of code and make it correct to satisfy a task at hand, but if a new developer can't come in tomorrow and make a fairly significant change to it without jeopardizing that correctness, it won't stay correct. Some people laugh at me when I say I now prefer maintainability over speed.  But that is exactly the point.  If you focus solely on speed you tend to produce code that is much harder to maintain over the long hall, and that's a load of technical debt most shops can't afford to carry and end up completely scrapping code before it's time.  When good code is written well for maintainability, though, it can be correct both now and in the future. And you know the best part is?  My new love is nearly as fast as C++, and in some cases even faster -- and better than that, I know C# will treat me right.  Her creators have poured hundreds of thousands of hours of time into making her the sexy beast she is today.  They made her easy to understand and not an enigmatic mess.  They made her consistent and not moody and amorphous.  And they made her perform as fast as I care to go by optimizing her both at compile time and a run-time. Her code is so elegant and easy on the eyes that I'm not worried where she will run to or what she'll pull behind my back.  She is powerful enough to handle all my tasks, fast enough to execute them with blazing speed, maintainable enough so that I can rely on even fairly new peers to modify my work, and rich enough to allow me to satisfy any need.  C# doesn't ask me to clean up her messes!  She cleans up after herself and she tries to make my life easier for me by taking on most of those optimization tasks C++ asked me to take upon myself.  Now, there are many of you who would say that I am the cause of my own grief, that it was my fault C++ didn't behave because I didn't pay enough attention to her.  That I alone caused the pain she inflicted on me.  And to some extent, you have a point.  But she was so high maintenance, requiring me to know every twist and turn of her vast and unrestrained power that any wrong term or bout of forgetfulness was met with painful reminders that she wasn't going to watch my back when I made a mistake.  But C#, she loves me when I'm good, and she loves me when I'm bad, and together we make beautiful code that is both fast and safe. So that's why I'm leaving C++ behind.  She says she's changing for me, but I have no interest in what C++0x may bring.  Oh, I'll still keep in touch, and maybe I'll see her now and again when she brings her problems to my door and asks for some attention -- for I always have a soft spot for her, you see.  But she's out of my house now.  I have three kids and a dog and a cat, and all require me to clean up after them, why should I have to clean up after my programming language as well?

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