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  • How to get a Class literal from a generically specific Class

    - by h2g2java
    There are methods like these which require Class literals as argument. Collection<EmpInfo> emps = SomeSqlUtil.select( EmpInfo.class, "select * from emps"); or GWT.create(Razmataz.class); The problem presents itself when I need to supply generic specific classes like EmpInfo<String> Razmataz<Integer> The following would be wrong syntax Collection<EmpInfo<String>> emps = SomeSqlUtil.select( EmpInfo<String>.class, "select * from emps"); or GWT.create(Razmataz<Integer>.class); Because you cannot do syntax like Razmataz<Integer>.class So, how would I be able to squeeze a class literal out of EmpInfo<String> Razmataz<Integer> so that I could feed them as arguments to methods requiring Class literals? Further info Okay, I confess that I am asking this primarily for GWT. I have a pair of GWT RPC interface Razmataz. (FYI, GWT RPC interface has to be defined in server-client pairs). I plan to use the same interface pair for communicating whether it be String, Integer, Boolean, etc. GWT.create(Razmataz) for Razmataz<T> complains that, since I did not specify T, GWT compiler treated it as Object. Then GWT compiler would not accept Object class. It needs to be more specific than being an Object. So, it seems there is no way for me to tell GWT.create what T is because a Class literal is a runtime concept while generics is a compile time concept, Right?

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  • Extending / changing how Zend_Search_Lucene searches

    - by Grant Collins
    Hi, I am currently using Zend_Search_Lucene to index and search a number of documents currently at around a 1000 or so. What I would like to do is change how the engine scores hits on a document, from the current default. Zend_Search_Lucene scores on the frequency of number of hits within a document, so a document that has 10 matches of the word PHP will score higher than a document with only 3 matches of PHP. What I am trying to do is pass a number of key words and score depending on the hits of those keywords. e.g. I pass 5 key words say,PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML and CSS that I search against the index. One document has 3 matches to those key words and one document has all 4 matches, the 4 matches scores the highest. The number of instances of those words in the document do not concern me. Now I've had a quick look at Zend_Search_Lucene_Search_Similarity however I have to confess that I am not sure (or that bright) to know how to use this to achieve what I am after. Is what I want to do possible using Lucene or is there a better solution out there?

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  • VC9 C1083 Cannot open include file: 'boost...' after trying to abstract an include dependency

    - by ronivek
    Hey, So I've been working on a project for the past number of weeks and it uses a number of Boost libraries. In particular I'm using the boost::dynamic_bitset library quite extensively. I've had zero issues up until now; but tonight I discovered a dependency between some includes which I had to resolve; and I tried to do so by providing an abstract callback class. Effectively I now have the following: First include... class OtherClassCallback { public: virtual int someOtherMethod() const = 0; }; class SomeClass { public: void someMethod(OtherClassCallback *oc) { ... oc->someOtherMethod(); ... } }; Second include... #include "SomeClass.h" class SomeOtherClass : public OtherClassCallback { public: int someOtherMethod() const { return this->someInt; } }; Here is the issue; ever since I implemented this class I'm now getting the following error: fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'boost/dynamic_bitset/dynamic_bitset.hpp': No such file or directory Now I'm getting no other compiler errors; and it's a pretty substantial project. My include paths and so on are perfect; my files are fully accessible and removing the changes fixes the issue. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on? I'm compiling to native Windows executables in VS9. I should confess that I'm very inexperienced with C++ in general so go easy on me if it's something horribly straightforward; I can't figure it out.

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  • Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - Business Intelligence Samples

    - by smisner
    On April 14, 2010, Microsoft Press (blog | twitter) released my latest book, co-authored with Ross Mistry (twitter), as a free ebook download - Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. As the title implies, this ebook is an introduction to the latest SQL Server release. Although you'll find a comprehensive review of the product's features in this book, you will not find the step-by-step details that are typical in my other books. For those readers who are interested in a more interactive learning experience, I have created two samples file for download: IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project Sales Analysis workbook Here's a recap of the business intelligence chapters and the samples I used to generate the screen shots by chapter: Chapter 6: Scalable Data Warehousing covers a new edition of SQL Server, Parallel Data Warehouse. Understandably, Microsoft did not ship me the software and hardware to set up my own Parallel Data Warehouse environment for testing purposes and consequently you won't see any screenshots in this chapter. I received a lot of information and a lot of help from the product team during the development of this chapter to ensure its technical accuracy. Chapter 7: Master Data Services is a new component in SQL Server. After you install Master Data Services (MDS), which is a separate installation from SQL Server although it's found on the same media, you can install sample models to explore (which is what I did to create screenshots for the book). To do this, you deploying packages found at \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Master Data Services\Samples\Packages. You will first need to use the Configuration Manager (in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2\Master Data Services program group) to create a database and a Web application for MDS. Then when you launch the application, you'll see a Getting Started page which has a Deploy Sample Data link that you can use to deploy any of the sample packages. Chapter 8: Complex Event Processing is an introduction to another new component, StreamInsight. This topic was way too large to cover in-depth in a single chapter, so I focused on information such as architecture, development models, and an overview of the key sections of code you'll need to develop for your own applications. StreamInsight is an engine that operates on data in-flight and as such has no user interface that I could include in the book as screenshots. The November CTP version of SQL Server 2008 R2 included code samples as part of the installation, but these are not the official samples that will eventually be available in Codeplex. At the time of this writing, the samples are not yet published. Chapter 9: Reporting Services Enhancements provides an overview of all the changes to Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2, and there are many! In previous posts, I shared more details than you'll find in the book about new functions (Lookup, MultiLookup, and LookupSet), properties for page numbering, and the new global variable RenderFormat. I will confess that I didn't use actual data in the book for my discussion on the Lookup functions, but I did create real reports for the blog posts and will upload those separately. For the other screenshots and examples in the book, I have created the IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project for you to download. To preview these reports in Business Intelligence Development Studio, you must have the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database installed, and you must download and install SQL Server 2008 R2. For the map report, you must execute the PopulationData.sql script that I included in the samples file to add a table to the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database. The IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project includes the following files: 01_AggregateOfAggregates.rdl to illustrate the use of embedded aggregate functions 02_RenderFormatAndPaging.rdl to illustrate the use of page break properties (Disabled, ResetPageNumber), the PageName property, and the RenderFormat global variable 03_DataSynchronization.rdl to illustrate the use of the DomainScope property 04_TextboxOrientation.rdl to illustrate the use of the WritingMode property 05_DataBar.rdl 06_Sparklines.rdl 07_Indicators.rdl 08_Map.rdl to illustrate a simple analytical map that uses color to show population counts by state PopulationData.sql to provide the data necessary for the map report Chapter 10: Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot introduces two new components to the Microsoft BI stack, PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint, which you can learn more about at the PowerPivot site. To produce the screenshots for this chapter, I created the Sales Analysis workbook which you can download (although you must have Excel 2010 and the PowerPivot for Excel add-in installed to explore it fully). It's a rather simple workbook because space in the book did not permit a complete exploration of all the wonderful things you can do with PowerPivot. I used a tutorial that was available with the CTP version as a basis for the report so it might look familiar if you've already started learning about PowerPivot. In future posts, I'll continue exploring the new features in greater detail. If there's any special requests, please let me know! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Kill a tree, save your website? Content strategy in action, part III

    - by Roger Hart
    A lot has been written about how driving content strategy from within an organisation is hard. And that's true. Red Gate is pretty receptive to new ideas, so although I've not had a total walk in the park, it's been a hike with charming scenery. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Lots of people are involved in content, and depending on your organisation some of those people might be the kind who'll gleefully call themselves "stakeholders". People holding a stake generally want to stick it through something's heart and bury it at a crossroads. Winning them over is not always easy. (Richard Ingram has made a nice visual summary of how this can feel - Content strategy Snakes & ladders - pdf ) So yes, a lot of content strategy advocates are having a hard time. And sure, we've got a nice opportunity to get together and have a hug and a cry, but in the interim we could use a hand. What to do? My preferred approach is, I'll confess, brutal. I'd like nothing so much as to take a scorched earth approach to our website. Burn it, salt the ground, and build the new one right: focusing on clearly delineated business and user content goals, and instrumented so we can tell if we're doing it right. I'm never getting buy-in for that, but a boy can dream. So how about just getting buy-in for some small, tenable improvements? Easier, but still non-trivial. I sat down for a chat with our marketing and design guys. It seemed like a good place to start, even if they weren't up for my "Ctrl-A + Delete"  solution. We talked through some of this stuff, and we pretty much agreed that our content is a bit more broken than we'd ideally like. But to get everybody on board, the problems needed visibility. Doing a visual content inventory Print out the internet. Make a Wall Of Content. Seriously. If you've already done a content inventory, you know your architecture, and you know the scale of the problem. But it's quite likely that very few other people do. So make it big and visual. I'm going to carbon hell, but it seems to be working. This morning, I printed out a tiny, tiny part of our website: the non-support content pertaining to SQL Compare I made big, visual, A3 blowups of each page, and covered a wall with them. A page per web page, spread over something like 6M x 2M, with metrics, right in front of people. Even if nobody reads it (and they are doing) the sheer scale is shocking. 53 pages, all told. Some are redundant, some outdated, some trivial, a few fantastic, and frighteningly many that are great ideas delivered not-quite-right. You have to stand quite far away to get it all in your field of vision. For a lot of today, a whole bunch of folks have been gawping in amazement, talking each other through it, peering at the details, and generally getting excited about content. Developers, sales guys, our CEO, the marketing folks - they're engaged. Will it last? I make no promises. But this sort of wave of interest is vital to getting a content strategy project kicked off. While the content strategist is a saucer-eyed orphan in the cupboard under the stairs, they're not getting a whole lot done. Of course, just printing the site won't necessarily cut it. You have to know your content, and be able to talk about it. Ideally, you'll also have page view and time-on-page metrics. One of the most powerful things you can do is, when people are staring at your wall of content, ask them what they think half of it is for. Pretty soon, you've made a case for content strategy. We're also going to get folks to mark it up - cover it with notes and post-its, let us know how they feel about our content. I'll be blogging about how that goes, but it's exciting. Different business functions have different needs from content, so the more exposure the content gets, and the more feedback, the more you know about those needs. Fingers crossed for awesome.

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  • Can Kind People Finish First?

    - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies
    by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs In an earlier post, I expressed my undying love for KIND Snacks' products. This month's Oracle Profit magazine features an interview with KIND Healthy Snacks Founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky entitled "Better Business". Lubetzky expresses his vision for making KIND a "not for profit only" company.  All great companies start with a good idea. In this case, that one great idea was to offer a healthy snack with ingredients you can "see and pronounce". That's one of things I really like about this company--that coupled with the fact that their snacks taste great. They compete in an over crowded playing field but I've found that it's rare to find an energy snack that both tastes good and is good for you.  A couple of interesting facts I learned from reading this article: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} 9 out of 10 consumers who try a KIND bar will purchase a KIND product again and recommend it to others KIND has the highest Net Promoter Score among the top 10 brands in the nutritional bar category (I confess I've never heard about this rating before but now that I have it's pretty cool) KIND's coporate mantra, "Do the Kind Thing" both encourages people to do random acts of kindness and provides easy mechanisms for doing so. Not coincidentally, I think, KIND is indeed a story about how nice guys can finish first. KIND has doubled in size every year for the last ten  years and now employees over 300 people, with sales exceeding $120M annually. Growth Applies Pressures One thing I know for certain from interacting our with fast growing customers over the last fifteen years is that growth applies myriad pressures across the organization--resources, processes, technology systems, and leadership agility. And it's easy to forget that Oracle was once an entrepreneurial startup and experienced all those same pressures that other growing companies are experiencing today. When asked by Profit Editor in Chief Aaron Lazenby, " What sort of pressure does KIND"s growth and success place on operations?", Lubetzky responded, "We have a demand planning process right now that is manual to a significant extent, and it just takes so much management time. It takes us days and sometimes weeks to produce information that is critical to our business—and by the time we get the results, we need revised data. Our sales leadership could go out selling, but instead they’re talking to our team about forecasts." Hitching Your Wagon to Oracle Lubetzky and his team selected Oracle for what I believe is our company's greatest strength: hitch your wagon to Oracle and you can trust that we will be there for the long run with the solutions you need and financial staying power. In Lubetzky's words, "The KIND philosophy requires you to have a long-term view of things; taking shortcuts may be the fastest way to get things done, but in the long term that can come back and bite you. Oracle is the type of company—and has the kind of platform—that is here for the long term. It’s not going to go away tomorrow. And Oracle is going to invest all the necessary resources into staying ahead of the game and improving." o next time you're in the supermarket or an REI (my favorite store in the world) or any of the other 80,000 locations that carry KIND, give one a try. Maybe some day you'll want to become a KIND Brand Ambassador.   Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

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  • Is there an algorithm for converting quaternion rotations to Euler angle rotations?

    - by Will Baker
    Is there an existing algorithm for converting a quaternion representation of a rotation to an Euler angle representation? The rotation order for the Euler representation is known and can be any of the six permutations (i.e. xyz, xzy, yxz, yzx, zxy, zyx). I've seen algorithms for a fixed rotation order (usually the NASA heading, bank, roll convention) but not for arbitrary rotation order. Furthermore, because there are multiple Euler angle representations of a single orientation, this result is going to be ambiguous. This is acceptable (because the orientation is still valid, it just may not be the one the user is expecting to see), however it would be even better if there was an algorithm which took rotation limits (i.e. the number of degrees of freedom and the limits on each degree of freedom) into account and yielded the 'most sensible' Euler representation given those constraints. I have a feeling this problem (or something similar) may exist in the IK or rigid body dynamics domains. Solved: I just realised that it might not be clear that I solved this problem by following Ken Shoemake's algorithms from Graphics Gems. I did answer my own question at the time, but it occurs to me it may not be clear that I did so. See the answer, below, for more detail. Just to clarify - I know how to convert from a quaternion to the so-called 'Tait-Bryan' representation - what I was calling the 'NASA' convention. This is a rotation order (assuming the convention that the 'Z' axis is up) of zxy. I need an algorithm for all rotation orders. Possibly the solution, then, is to take the zxy order conversion and derive from it five other conversions for the other rotation orders. I guess I was hoping there was a more 'overarching' solution. In any case, I am surprised that I haven't been able to find existing solutions out there. In addition, and this perhaps should be a separate question altogether, any conversion (assuming a known rotation order, of course) is going to select one Euler representation, but there are in fact many. For example, given a rotation order of yxz, the two representations (0,0,180) and (180,180,0) are equivalent (and would yield the same quaternion). Is there a way to constrain the solution using limits on the degrees of freedom? Like you do in IK and rigid body dynamics? i.e. in the example above if there were only one degree of freedom about the Z axis then the second representation can be disregarded. I have tracked down one paper which could be an algorithm in this pdf but I must confess I find the logic and math a little hard to follow. Surely there are other solutions out there? Is arbitrary rotation order really so rare? Surely every major 3D package that allows skeletal animation together with quaternion interpolation (i.e. Maya, Max, Blender, etc) must have solved exactly this problem?

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  • Doubt about adopting CI (Hudson) into an existing automated Build Process (phing, svn)

    - by maraspin
    OUR CURRENT BUILD PROCESS We're a small team of developers (2 to 4 people depending on project) who currently use Phing to deploy code to a staging environment, before going live. We keep our code in a SVN repo, where the trunk holds current active development and, at certain times, we do make branches that we test and then (if successful), tag and export to the staging env. If everything goes well there too, we finally deploy'em in production servers. Actions are highly automated, but always triggered by human intervention. THE DOUBT We'd now like to introduce Continuous Integration (with Hudson) in the process; unfortunately we have a few doubts about activity syncing, since we're afraid that CI could somewhat interfere with our build process and cause certain problems. Considering that an automated CI cycle has a certain frequency of automatically executed actions, we in fact only see 2 possible cases for "integration", each with its own problems: Case A: each CI cycle produces a new branch with its own name; we do use such a name to manually (through phing as it happens now) export the code from the SVN to the staging env. The problem I see here is that (unless specific countermeasures are taken) the number of branches we have can grow out of control (let's suppose we commit often, so that we have a fresh new build/branch every N minutes). Case B: each CI cycle creates a new branch named 'current', for instance, which is tagged with a unique name only when we manually decide to export it to staging; the current branch, at any case is then deleted, as soon as the next CI cycle starts up. The problem we see here is that a new cycle could kick in while someone is tagging/exporting the 'current' branch to staging thus creating an inconsistent build (but maybe here I'm just too pessimist, since I confess I don't know whether SVN offers some built-in protection against this). With all this being said, I was wondering if anyone with similar experiences could be so kind to give us some hints on the subject, since none of the approaches depicted above looks completely satisfing to us. Is there something important we just completely left off in the overall picture? Thanks for your attention &, in advance, for your help!

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  • NameClaimType in ClaimsIdentity from SAML

    - by object88
    I am attempting to understand the world of WIF in context of a WCF Data Service / REST / OData server. I have a hacked up version of SelfSTS that is running inside a unit test project. When the unit tests start, it kicks off a WCF service, which generates my SAML token. This is the SAML token being generated: <saml:Assertion MajorVersion="1" MinorVersion="1" ... > <saml:Conditions>...</saml:Conditions> <saml:AttributeStatement> <saml:Subject> <saml:NameIdentifier Format="EMAIL">4bd406bf-0cf0-4dc4-8e49-57336a479ad2</saml:NameIdentifier> <saml:SubjectConfirmation>...</saml:SubjectConfirmation> </saml:Subject> <saml:Attribute AttributeName="emailaddress" AttributeNamespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims"> <saml:AttributeValue>[email protected]</saml:AttributeValue> </saml:Attribute> <saml:Attribute AttributeName="name" AttributeNamespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims"> <saml:AttributeValue>bob</saml:AttributeValue> </saml:Attribute> </saml:AttributeStatement> <ds:Signature>...</ds:Signature> </saml:Assertion> (I know the Format of my NameIdentifier isn't really EMAIL, this is something I haven't gotten to cleaning up yet.) Inside my actual server, I put some code borrowed from Pablo Cabraro / Cibrax. This code seems to run A-OK, although I confess that I don't understand what's happening. I note that later in my code, when I need to check my identity, Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity is an instance of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Claims.ClaimsIdentity, which has a claim for all the attributes, plus a nameidentifier claim with the value in my NameIdentifier element in saml:Subject. It also has a property NameClaimType, which points to "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name". It would make more sense if NameClaimType mapped to nameidentifier, wouldn't it? How do I make that happen? Or am I expecting the wrong thing of the name claim? Thanks!

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  • How to Sync CI (Hudson) Activity into an existing automated Build Process (phing, svn)?

    - by maraspin
    OUR CURRENT BUILD PROCESS We're a small team of developers (2 to 4 people depending on project) who currently use Phing to deploy code to a staging environment, before going live. We keep our code in a SVN repo, where the trunk holds current active development and, at certain times, we do make branches that we test and then (if successful), tag and export to the staging env. If everything goes well there too, we finally deploy'em in production servers. Actions are highly automated, but always triggered by human intervention. THE DOUBT We'd now like to introduce Continuous Integration (with Hudson) in the process; unfortunately we have a few doubts about activity syncing, since we're afraid that CI could somewhat interfere with our build process and cause certain problems. Considering that an automated CI cycle has a certain frequency of automatically executed actions, we see 2 possible cases for "integration", each with its own problems: Case A: each CI cycle produces a new branch with its own name; we do use such a name to manually (through phing as it happens now) export the code from the SVN to the staging env. The problem I see here is that (unless specific countermeasures are taken - IE deletion) the number of branches we have can easily grow out of control (let's suppose we commit often, so that we have a fresh new build/branch every N minutes). Case B: each CI cycle creates a new branch named 'current', which is then tagged with a unique name only when we manually decide to export it to staging; the current branch, at any case is then deleted, as soon as the next CI cycle starts up. The problem we see here is that a new cycle could kick in while someone is tagging/exporting the 'current' branch to staging thus creating an inconsistent build (but maybe here I'm just too pessimist, since I confess I don't know whether SVN offers some built-in protection against this). With all this being said, I was wondering if anyone with similar experiences could be so kind to give us some hints on the subject, since none of the approaches depicted above looks completely satisfing to us. Is there something important we just completely left off in the overall picture? Thanks for your attention & (in advance) for your help!

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  • SQL Server CTE referred in self joins slow

    - by Kharlos Dominguez
    Hello, I have written a table-valued UDF that starts by a CTE to return a subset of the rows from a large table. There are several joins in the CTE. A couple of inner and one left join to other tables, which don't contain a lot of rows. The CTE has a where clause that returns the rows within a date range, in order to return only the rows needed. I'm then referencing this CTE in 4 self left joins, in order to build subtotals using different criterias. The query is quite complex but here is a simplified pseudo-version of it WITH DataCTE as ( SELECT [columns] FROM table INNER JOIN table2 ON [...] INNER JOIN table3 ON [...] LEFT JOIN table3 ON [...] ) SELECT [aggregates_columns of each subset] FROM DataCTE Main LEFT JOIN DataCTE BananasSubset ON [...] AND Product = 'Bananas' AND Quality = 100 LEFT JOIN DataCTE DamagedBananasSubset ON [...] AND Product = 'Bananas' AND Quality < 20 LEFT JOIN DataCTE MangosSubset ON [...] GROUP BY [ I have the feeling that SQL Server gets confused and calls the CTE for each self join, which seems confirmed by looking at the execution plan, although I confess not being an expert at reading those. I would have assumed SQL Server to be smart enough to only perform the data retrieval from the CTE only once, rather than do it several times. I have tried the same approach but rather than using a CTE to get the subset of the data, I used the same select query as in the CTE, but made it output to a temp table instead. The version referring the CTE version takes 40 seconds. The version referring the temp table takes between 1 and 2 seconds. Why isn't SQL Server smart enough to keep the CTE results in memory? I like CTEs, especially in this case as my UDF is a table-valued one, so it allowed me to keep everything in a single statement. To use a temp table, I would need to write a multi-statement table valued UDF, which I find a slightly less elegant solution. Did some of you had this kind of performance issues with CTE, and if so, how did you get them sorted? Thanks, Kharlos

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  • Big Data&rsquo;s Killer App&hellip;

    - by jean-pierre.dijcks
    Recently Keith spent  some time talking about the cloud on this blog and I will spare you my thoughts on the whole thing. What I do want to write down is something about the Big Data movement and what I think is the killer app for Big Data... Where is this coming from, ok, I confess... I spent 3 days in cloud land at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara and it was quite a lot of fun. One of the nice things at Cloud Connect was that there was a track dedicated to Big Data, which prompted me to some extend to write this post. What is Big Data anyways? The most valuable point made in the Big Data track was that Big Data in itself is not very cool. Doing something with Big Data is what makes all of this cool and interesting to a business user! The other good insight I got was that a lot of people think Big Data means a single gigantic monolithic system holding gazillions of bytes or documents or log files. Well turns out that most people in the Big Data track are talking about a lot of collections of smaller data sets. So rather than thinking "big = monolithic" you should be thinking "big = many data sets". This is more than just theoretical, it is actually relevant when thinking about big data and how to process it. It is important because it means that the platform that stores data will most likely consist out of multiple solutions. You may be storing logs on something like HDFS, you may store your customer information in Oracle and you may store distilled clickstream information in some distilled form in MySQL. The big question you will need to solve is not what lives where, but how to get it all together and get some value out of all that data. NoSQL and MapReduce Nope, sorry, this is not the killer app... and no I'm not saying this because my business card says Oracle and I'm therefore biased. I think language is important, but as with storage I think pragmatic is better. In other words, some questions can be answered with SQL very efficiently, others can be answered with PERL or TCL others with MR. History should teach us that anyone trying to solve a problem will use any and all tools around. For example, most data warehouses (Big Data 1.0?) get a lot of data in flat files. Everyone then runs a bunch of shell scripts to massage or verify those files and then shoves those files into the database. We've even built shell script support into external tables to allow for this. I think the Big Data projects will do the same. Some people will use MapReduce, although I would argue that things like Cascading are more interesting, some people will use Java. Some data is stored on HDFS making Cascading the way to go, some data is stored in Oracle and SQL does do a good job there. As with storage and with history, be pragmatic and use what fits and neither NoSQL nor MR will be the one and only. Also, a language, while important, does in itself not deliver business value. So while cool it is not a killer app... Vertical Behavioral Analytics This is the killer app! And you are now thinking: "what does that mean?" Let's decompose that heading. First of all, analytics. I would think you had guessed by now that this is really what I'm after, and of course you are right. But not just analytics, which has a very large scope and means many things to many people. I'm not just after Business Intelligence (analytics 1.0?) or data mining (analytics 2.0?) but I'm after something more interesting that you can only do after collecting large volumes of specific data. That all important data is about behavior. What do my customers do? More importantly why do they behave like that? If you can figure that out, you can tailor web sites, stores, products etc. to that behavior and figure out how to be successful. Today's behavior that is somewhat easily tracked is web site clicks, search patterns and all of those things that a web site or web server tracks. that is where the Big Data lives and where these patters are now emerging. Other examples however are emerging, and one of the examples used at the conference was about prediction churn for a telco based on the social network its members are a part of. That social network is not about LinkedIn or Facebook, but about who calls whom. I call you a lot, you switch provider, and I might/will switch too. And that just naturally brings me to the next word, vertical. Vertical in this context means per industry, e.g. communications or retail or government or any other vertical. The reason for being more specific than just behavioral analytics is that each industry has its own data sources, has its own quirky logic and has its own demands and priorities. Of course, the methods and some of the software will be common and some will have both retail and service industry analytics in place (your corner coffee store for example). But the gist of it all is that analytics that can predict customer behavior for a specific focused group of people in a specific industry is what makes Big Data interesting. Building a Vertical Behavioral Analysis System Well, that is going to be interesting. I have not seen much going on in that space and if I had to have some criticism on the cloud connect conference it would be the lack of concrete user cases on big data. The telco example, while a step into the vertical behavioral part is not really on big data. It used a sample of data from the customers' data warehouse. One thing I do think, and this is where I think parts of the NoSQL stuff come from, is that we will be doing this analysis where the data is. Over the past 10 years we at Oracle have called this in-database analytics. I guess we were (too) early? Now the entire market is going there including companies like SAS. In-place btw does not mean "no data movement at all", what it means that you will do this on data's permanent home. For SAS that is kind of the current problem. Most of the inputs live in a data warehouse. So why move it into SAS and back? That all worked with 1 TB data warehouses, but when we are looking at 100TB to 500 TB of distilled data... Comments? As it is still early days with these systems, I'm very interested in seeing reactions and thoughts to some of these thoughts...

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  • JMS ConnectionFactory creation error WSVR0073W

    - by scottyab
    I must confess I’m not a JMS aficionado, one of our guys has written a Java webservice client [postcode lookup web service] and from a Remote Java client are calling a Message Driven Bean running in Websphere 6.1, using JMS. Getting the following error when attempted to create the Connection Factory. To which configured within Websphere jms/WSProxyQueueConnectionFactory. WARNING: WSVR0073W. Googling WSVR0073W yields little, the error code is an unknown error. Can anyone shed any light on potential issues creating the connection factory. Code Hashtable env = new Hashtable(); env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, contextFactoryName); env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, providerURL); env.put("com.ibm.CORBA.ORBInit","com.ibm.ws.sib.client.ORB"); namingContext = new InitialContext(env); System.out.println("callRemoteService: get connectionFactoriy, request/response queues, session. Naming contex env =" + env); // Find everything we need to communicate... connectionFactory = (QueueConnectionFactory) namingContext.lookup(getQueueConnectionFactoryName()); requestQueue = (Queue) namingContext.lookup(getRequestQueueName()); Console output: calling RemoteService with hostname[MyServer:2813] and postcode[M4E 3W1]callRemoteService hostname[MyServer:2813] messess text[M4E 3W1] callRemoteService: get connectionFactoriy, request/response queues, session. Naming contex env ={com.ibm.CORBA.ORBInit=com.ibm.ws.sib.client.ORB, java.naming.provider.url=iiop:// MyServer:2813/, java.naming.factory.initial=com.ibm.websphere.naming.WsnInitialContextFactory} 05-Jan-2011 13:51:04 null null WARNING: WSVR0073W 05-Jan-2011 13:51:05 null null WARNING: jndiGetObjInstErr 05-Jan-2011 13:51:05 null null WARNING: jndiNamingException callRemoteService: closing connections and resources com.ibm.websphere.naming.CannotInstantiateObjectException: Exception occurred while the JNDI NamingManager was processing a javax.naming.Reference object. [Root exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Invalid Implementation Key, com.ibm.ws.transaction.NonRecovWSTxManager] at com.ibm.ws.naming.util.Helpers.processSerializedObjectForLookupExt(Helpers.java:1000) at com.ibm.ws.naming.util.Helpers.processSerializedObjectForLookup(Helpers.java:705) at com.ibm.ws.naming.jndicos.CNContextImpl.processResolveResults(CNContextImpl.java:2097) at com.ibm.ws.naming.jndicos.CNContextImpl.doLookup(CNContextImpl.java:1951) at com.ibm.ws.naming.jndicos.CNContextImpl.doLookup(CNContextImpl.java:1866) at com.ibm.ws.naming.jndicos.CNContextImpl.lookupExt(CNContextImpl.java:1556) at com.ibm.ws.naming.jndicos.CNContextImpl.lookup(CNContextImpl.java:1358) at com.ibm.ws.naming.util.WsnInitCtx.lookup(WsnInitCtx.java:172) at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:450) at com.das.jms.clients.BaseWSProxyClient.callRemoteService(BaseWSProxyClient.java:180) at com.das.jms.clients.RemotePostCodeLookup.findAddress(RemotePostCodeLookup.java:38) at com.das.jms.RemoteServiceAccess.findAddress(RemoteServiceAccess.java:80) at com.das.jms.TestRemoteAccess.testSuccessLookup(TestRemoteAccess.java:20) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:37) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:599) at junit.framework.TestCase.runTest(TestCase.java:168) at junit.framework.TestCase.runBare(TestCase.java:134) at junit.framework.TestResult$1.protect(TestResult.java:110) at junit.framework.TestResult.runProtected(TestResult.java:128) at junit.framework.TestResult.run(TestResult.java:113) at junit.framework.TestCase.run(TestCase.java:124) at junit.framework.TestSuite.runTest(TestSuite.java:232) at junit.framework.TestSuite.run(TestSuite.java:227) at org.junit.internal.runners.OldTestClassRunner.run(OldTestClassRunner.java:76) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestReference.run(JUnit4TestReference.java:45) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.TestExecution.run(TestExecution.java:38) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:460)com.ibm.websphere.naming.CannotInstantiateObjectException: Exception occurred while the JNDI NamingManager was processing a javax.naming.Reference object. [Root exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Invalid Implementation Key, com.ibm.ws.transaction.NonRecovWSTxManager] [[B@4d794d79 at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:673) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.run(RemoteTestRunner.java:386) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.main(RemoteTestRunner.java:196) Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Invalid Implementation Key, com.ibm.ws.transaction.NonRecovWSTxManager at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.TransactionManagerFactory.getUOWCurrent(TransactionManagerFactory.java:125) at com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.AdapterUtil.<clinit>(AdapterUtil.java:271) at java.lang.J9VMInternals.initializeImpl(Native Method) at java.lang.J9VMInternals.initialize(J9VMInternals.java:200) at com.ibm.ejs.j2c.ConnectionFactoryBuilderImpl.getObjectInstance(ConnectionFactoryBuilderImpl.java:281) at javax.naming.spi.NamingManager.getObjectInstanceByFactoryInReference(NamingManager.java:480) at javax.naming.spi.NamingManager.getObjectInstance(NamingManager.java:345) at com.ibm.ws.naming.util.Helpers.processSerializedObjectForLookupExt(Helpers.java:896) ... 31 more

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  • is Boost Library's weighted median broken?

    - by user624188
    I confess that I am no expert in C++. I am looking for a fast way to compute weighted median, which Boost seemed to have. But it seems I am not able to make it work. #include <iostream> #include <boost/accumulators/accumulators.hpp> #include <boost/accumulators/statistics/stats.hpp> #include <boost/accumulators/statistics/median.hpp> #include <boost/accumulators/statistics/weighted_median.hpp> using namespace boost::accumulators; int main() { // Define an accumulator set accumulator_set<double, stats<tag::median > > acc1; accumulator_set<double, stats<tag::median >, float> acc2; // push in some data ... acc1(0.1); acc1(0.2); acc1(0.3); acc1(0.4); acc1(0.5); acc1(0.6); acc2(0.1, weight=0.); acc2(0.2, weight=0.); acc2(0.3, weight=0.); acc2(0.4, weight=1.); acc2(0.5, weight=1.); acc2(0.6, weight=1.); // Display the results ... std::cout << " Median: " << median(acc1) << std::endl; std::cout << "Weighted Median: " << median(acc2) << std::endl; return 0; } produces the following output, which is clearly wrong. Median: 0.3 Weighted Median: 0.3 Am I doing something wrong? Any help will be greatly appreciated. * however, the weighted sum works correctly * @glowcoder: The weighted sum works perfectly fine like this. #include <iostream> #include <boost/accumulators/accumulators.hpp> #include <boost/accumulators/statistics/stats.hpp> #include <boost/accumulators/statistics/sum.hpp> #include <boost/accumulators/statistics/weighted_sum.hpp> using namespace boost::accumulators; int main() { // Define an accumulator set accumulator_set<double, stats<tag::sum > > acc1; accumulator_set<double, stats<tag::sum >, float> acc2; // accumulator_set<double, stats<tag::median >, float> acc2; // push in some data ... acc1(0.1); acc1(0.2); acc1(0.3); acc1(0.4); acc1(0.5); acc1(0.6); acc2(0.1, weight=0.); acc2(0.2, weight=0.); acc2(0.3, weight=0.); acc2(0.4, weight=1.); acc2(0.5, weight=1.); acc2(0.6, weight=1.); // Display the results ... std::cout << " Median: " << sum(acc1) << std::endl; std::cout << "Weighted Median: " << sum(acc2) << std::endl; return 0; } and the result is Sum: 2.1 Weighted Sum: 1.5

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  • Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties

    - by dwahlin
    I have the opportunity to teach a lot of people about Silverlight (amongst other technologies) and one of the topics that definitely confuses people initially is the concept of dependency properties. I confess that when I first heard about them my initial thought was “Why do we need a specialized type of property?” While you can certainly use standard CLR properties in Silverlight applications, Silverlight relies heavily on dependency properties for just about everything it does behind the scenes. In fact, dependency properties are an essential part of the data binding, template, style and animation functionality available in Silverlight. They simply back standard CLR properties. In this post I wanted to put together a (hopefully) simple explanation of dependency properties and why you should care about them if you’re currently working with Silverlight or looking to move to it.   What are Dependency Properties? XAML provides a great way to define layout controls, user input controls, shapes, colors and data binding expressions in a declarative manner. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes in order to make XAML work and an important part of that magic is the use of dependency properties. If you want to bind data to a property, style it, animate it or transform it in XAML then the property involved has to be a dependency property to work properly. If you’ve ever positioned a control in a Canvas using Canvas.Left or placed a control in a specific Grid row using Grid.Row then you’ve used an attached property which is a specialized type of dependency property. Dependency properties play a key role in XAML and the overall Silverlight framework. Any property that you bind, style, template, animate or transform must be a dependency property in Silverlight applications. You can programmatically bind values to controls and work with standard CLR properties, but if you want to use the built-in binding expressions available in XAML (one of my favorite features) or the Binding class available through code then dependency properties are a necessity. Dependency properties aren’t needed in every situation, but if you want to customize your application very much you’ll eventually end up needing them. For example, if you create a custom user control and want to expose a property that consumers can use to change the background color, you have to define it as a dependency property if you want bindings, styles and other features to be available for use. Now that the overall purpose of dependency properties has been discussed let’s take a look at how you can create them. Creating Dependency Properties When .NET first came out you had to write backing fields for each property that you defined as shown next: Brush _ScheduleBackground; public Brush ScheduleBackground { get { return _ScheduleBackground; } set { _ScheduleBackground = value; } } Although .NET 2.0 added auto-implemented properties (for example: public Brush ScheduleBackground { get; set; }) where the compiler would automatically generate the backing field used by get and set blocks, the concept is still the same as shown in the above code; a property acts as a wrapper around a field. Silverlight dependency properties replace the _ScheduleBackground field shown in the previous code and act as the backing store for a standard CLR property. The following code shows an example of defining a dependency property named ScheduleBackgroundProperty: public static readonly DependencyProperty ScheduleBackgroundProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("ScheduleBackground", typeof(Brush), typeof(Scheduler), null);   Looking through the code the first thing that may stand out is that the definition for ScheduleBackgroundProperty is marked as static and readonly and that the property appears to be of type DependencyProperty. This is a standard pattern that you’ll use when working with dependency properties. You’ll also notice that the property explicitly adds the word “Property” to the name which is another standard you’ll see followed. In addition to defining the property, the code also makes a call to the static DependencyProperty.Register method and passes the name of the property to register (ScheduleBackground in this case) as a string. The type of the property, the type of the class that owns the property and a null value (more on the null value later) are also passed. In this example a class named Scheduler acts as the owner. The code handles registering the property as a dependency property with the call to Register(), but there’s a little more work that has to be done to allow a value to be assigned to and retrieved from the dependency property. The following code shows the complete code that you’ll typically use when creating a dependency property. You can find code snippets that greatly simplify the process of creating dependency properties out on the web. The MVVM Light download available from http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com comes with built-in dependency properties snippets as well. public static readonly DependencyProperty ScheduleBackgroundProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("ScheduleBackground", typeof(Brush), typeof(Scheduler), null); public Brush ScheduleBackground { get { return (Brush)GetValue(ScheduleBackgroundProperty); } set { SetValue(ScheduleBackgroundProperty, value); } } The standard CLR property code shown above should look familiar since it simply wraps the dependency property. However, you’ll notice that the get and set blocks call GetValue and SetValue methods respectively to perform the appropriate operation on the dependency property. GetValue and SetValue are members of the DependencyObject class which is another key component of the Silverlight framework. Silverlight controls and classes (TextBox, UserControl, CompositeTransform, DataGrid, etc.) ultimately derive from DependencyObject in their inheritance hierarchy so that they can support dependency properties. Dependency properties defined in Silverlight controls and other classes tend to follow the pattern of registering the property by calling Register() and then wrapping the dependency property in a standard CLR property (as shown above). They have a standard property that wraps a registered dependency property and allows a value to be assigned and retrieved. If you need to expose a new property on a custom control that supports data binding expressions in XAML then you’ll follow this same pattern. Dependency properties are extremely useful once you understand why they’re needed and how they’re defined. Detecting Changes and Setting Defaults When working with dependency properties there will be times when you want to assign a default value or detect when a property changes so that you can keep the user interface in-sync with the property value. Silverlight’s DependencyProperty.Register() method provides a fourth parameter that accepts a PropertyMetadata object instance. PropertyMetadata can be used to hook a callback method to a dependency property. The callback method is called when the property value changes. PropertyMetadata can also be used to assign a default value to the dependency property. By assigning a value of null for the final parameter passed to Register() you’re telling the property that you don’t care about any changes and don’t have a default value to apply. Here are the different constructor overloads available on the PropertyMetadata class: PropertyMetadata Constructor Overload Description PropertyMetadata(Object) Used to assign a default value to a dependency property. PropertyMetadata(PropertyChangedCallback) Used to assign a property changed callback method. PropertyMetadata(Object, PropertyChangedCalback) Used to assign a default property value and a property changed callback.   There are many situations where you need to know when a dependency property changes or where you want to apply a default. Performing either task is easily accomplished by creating a new instance of the PropertyMetadata class and passing the appropriate values to its constructor. The following code shows an enhanced version of the initial dependency property code shown earlier that demonstrates these concepts: public Brush ScheduleBackground { get { return (Brush)GetValue(ScheduleBackgroundProperty); } set { SetValue(ScheduleBackgroundProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty ScheduleBackgroundProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("ScheduleBackground", typeof(Brush), typeof(Scheduler), new PropertyMetadata(new SolidColorBrush(Colors.LightGray), ScheduleBackgroundChanged)); private static void ScheduleBackgroundChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { var scheduler = d as Scheduler; scheduler.Background = e.NewValue as Brush; } The code wires ScheduleBackgroundProperty to a property change callback method named ScheduleBackgroundChanged. What’s interesting is that this callback method is static (as is the dependency property) so it gets passed the instance of the object that owns the property that has changed (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get to the object instance). In this example the dependency object is cast to a Scheduler object and its Background property is assigned to the new value of the dependency property. The code also handles assigning a default value of LightGray to the dependency property by creating a new instance of a SolidColorBrush. To Sum Up In this post you’ve seen the role of dependency properties and how they can be defined in code. They play a big role in XAML and the overall Silverlight framework. You can think of dependency properties as being replacements for fields that you’d normally use with standard CLR properties. In addition to a discussion on how dependency properties are created, you also saw how to use the PropertyMetadata class to define default dependency property values and hook a dependency property to a callback method. The most important thing to understand with dependency properties (especially if you’re new to Silverlight) is that they’re needed if you want a property to support data binding, animations, transformations and styles properly. Any time you create a property on a custom control or user control that has these types of requirements you’ll want to pick a dependency property over of a standard CLR property with a backing field. There’s more that can be covered with dependency properties including a related property called an attached property….more to come.

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  • T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots.  I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year.  Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept.  I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques.  It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'. I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance.  It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it. Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;) This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works.  It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals.  I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it.  Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files. Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information.  And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.) Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line.  For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM): cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn" C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt   I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names.  There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!) If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings.  You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size. And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish.  (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad.  And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.)  Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there.  As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting.  I'm boring like that. Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences.  For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons.  He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne".  Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated. Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts.  Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed.  As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons.  And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons. One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan.  What the heck is a hekaton?  Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English.  I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure.  I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton.  Here's what I found: hekaton_slow_param_passing Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason sp_deploy_hekaton_database sp_undeploy_hekaton_database sp_drop_hekaton_database sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database sp_restore_hekaton_database e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp Interesting!  The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code".  Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command?  Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time? And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance?  Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)? I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions: SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%' SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%' Which revealed: name ------------------------ (0 row(s) affected) name ------------------------ sp_createstats sp_recompile sp_updatestats (3 row(s) affected)   Hmm.  Well that didn't find much.  Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil? (No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading.  I know I'd fall asleep without it.) OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton": sp_createstats: -- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions -- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables   OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further: ((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table   Wellllll, that tells us a few new things: There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!) They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post. The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option Let's check out sp_recompile: -- (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure.   And once again go a little further: if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0)   And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc.  (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.) This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats.  But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for: SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%'   I'll leave that to you as more homework.  I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features.  That seems to be really good advice! Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server!  Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server?  As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source??? Actually, no. Well, maybe a little bit.  While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server.  And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones.  Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!)  And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else.  It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring! So what did we learn?  We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server.  We've even learned how to use command-line utilities!  We are now 1337 h4X0rz!  (Not really.  I hate that leetspeak crap.) Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post.  I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination.  There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals.  It's not The Matrix.  It's not like you'd find anything like that in there: Attach Matrix Database DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS dm_matrix_agents   Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting!  Microsoft are not really evil!  It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek: ALTER FEDERATION DROP ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT DROP FEDERATION   #tsql2sday

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  • The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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  • The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers.

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  • Who writes the words? A rant with graphs.

    - by Roger Hart
    If you read my rant, you'll know that I'm getting a bit of a bee in my bonnet about user interface text. But rather than just yelling about the way the world should be (short version: no UI text would suck), it seemed prudent to actually gather some data. Rachel Potts has made an excellent first foray, by conducting a series of interviews across organizations about how they write user interface text. You can read Rachel's write up here. She presents the facts as she found them, and doesn't editorialise. The result is insightful, but impartial isn't really my style. So here's a rant with graphs. My method, and how it sucked I sent out a short survey. Survey design is one of my hobby-horses, and since some smartarse in the comments will mention it if I don't, I'll step up and confess: I did not design this one well. It was potentially ambiguous, implicitly excluded people, and since I only really advertised it on Twitter and a couple of mailing lists the sample will be chock full of biases. Regardless, these were the questions: What do you do? Select the option that best describes your role What kind of software does your organization make? (optional) In your organization, who writes the text on your software user interfaces? (for example: button names, static text, tooltips, and so on) Tick all that apply. In your organization who is responsible for user interface text? Who "owns" it? The most glaring issue (apart from question 3 being a bit broken) was that I didn't make it clear that I was asking about applications. Desktop, mobile, or web, I wouldn't have minded. In fact, it might have been interesting to categorize and compare. But a few respondents commented on the seeming lack of relevance, since they didn't really make software. There were some other issues too. It wasn't the best survey. So, you know, pinch of salt time with what follows. Despite this, there were 100 or so respondents. This post covers the overview, and you can look at the raw data in this spreadsheet What did people do? Boring graph number one: I wasn't expecting that. Given I pimped the survey on twitter and a couple of Tech Comms discussion lists, I was more banking on and even Content Strategy/Tech Comms split. What the "Others" specified: Three people chipped in with Technical Writer. Author, apparently, doesn't cut it. There's a "nobody reads the instructions" joke in there somewhere, I'm sure. There were a couple of hybrid roles, including Tech Comms and Testing, which sounds gruelling and thankless. There was also, an Intranet Manager, a Creative Director, a Consultant, a CTO, an Information Architect, and a Translator. That's a pretty healthy slice through the industry. Who wrote UI text? Boring graph number two: Annoyingly, I made this a "tick all that apply" question, so I can't make crude and inflammatory generalizations about percentages. This is more about who gets involved in user interface wording. So don't panic about the number of developers writing UI text. First off, it just means they're involved. Second, they might be good at it. What? It could happen. Ours are involved - they write a placeholder and flag it to me for changes. Sometimes I don't make any. It's also not surprising that there's so much UX in the mix. Some of that will be people taking care, and crafting an understandable interface. Some of it will be whatever text goes on the wireframe making it into production. I'm going to assume that's what happened at eBay, when their iPhone app purportedly shipped with the placeholder text "Some crappy content goes here". Ahem. Listing all 17 "other" responses would make this post lengthy indeed, but you can read them in the raw data spreadsheet. The award for the approach that sounds the most like a good idea yet carries the highest risk of ending badly goes to whoever offered up "External agencies using focus groups". If you're reading this, and that actually works, leave a comment. I'm fascinated. Who owned UI text Stop. Bar chart time: Wow. Let's cut to the chase, and by "chase", I mean those inflammatory generalizations I was talking about: In around 60% of cases the person responsible for user interface text probably lacks the relevant expertise. Even in the categories I count as being likely to have relevant skills (Marketing Copywriters, Content Strategists, Technical Authors, and User Experience Designers) there's a case for each role being unsuited, as you'll see in Rachel's blog post So it's not as simple as my headline. Does that mean that you personally, Mr Developer reading this, write bad button names? Of course not. I know nothing about you. It rather implies that as a category, the majority of people looking after UI text have neither communication nor user experience as their primary skill set, and as such will probably only be good at this by happy accident. I don't have a way of measuring those frequency of those accidents. What the Others specified: I don't know who owns it. I assume the project manager is responsible. "copywriters" when they wish to annoy me. the client's web maintenance person, often PR or MarComm That last one chills me to the bone. Still, at least nobody said "the work experience kid". You can see the rest in the spreadsheet. My overwhelming impression here is of user interface text as an unloved afterthought. There were fewer "nobody" responses than I expected, and a much broader split. But the relative predominance of developers owning and writing UI text suggests to me that organizations don't see it as something worth dedicating attention to. If true, that's bothersome. Because the words on the screen, particularly the names of things, are fundamental to the ability to understand an use software. It's also fascinating that Technical Authors and Content Strategists are neck and neck. For such a nascent discipline, Content Strategy appears to have made a mark on software development. Or my sample is skewed. But it feels like a bit of validation for my rant: Content Strategy is eating Tech Comms' lunch. That's not a bad thing. Well, not if the UI text is getting done well. And that's the caveat to this whole post. I couldn't care less who writes UI text, provided they consider the user and don't suck at it. I care that it may be falling by default to people poorly disposed to doing it right. And I care about that because so much user interface text sucks. The most interesting question Was one I forgot to ask. It's this: Does your organization have technical authors/writers? Like a lot of survey data, that doesn't tell you much on its own. But once we get a bit dimensional, it become more interesting. So taken with the other questions, this would have let me find out what I really want to know: What proportion of organizations have Tech Comms professionals but don't use them for UI text? Who writes UI text in their place? Why this happens? It's possible (feasible is another matter) that hundreds of companies have tech authors who don't work on user interfaces because they've empirically discovered that someone else, say the Marketing Copywriter, is better at it. And once we've all finished laughing, I'll point out that I've met plenty of tech authors who just aren't used to thinking about users at the point of need in the way UI text and embedded user assistance require. If you've got what I regard, perhaps unfairly, as the bad kind of tech author - the old-school kind with the thousand-page pdf and the grammar obsession - if you've got one of those then you probably are better off getting the UX folk or the copywriters to do your UI text. At the very least, they'll derive terminology from user research.

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  • Enumerable Interleave Extension Method

    - by João Angelo
    A recent stackoverflow question, which I didn’t bookmark and now I’m unable to find, inspired me to implement an extension method for Enumerable that allows to insert a constant element between each pair of elements in a sequence. Kind of what String.Join does for strings, but maintaining an enumerable as the return value. Having done the single element part I got a bit carried away and ended up expanding it adding overloads to support interleaving elements of another sequence and support for a predicate to control when interleaving takes place. I have to confess that I did this for fun and now I can’t think of any real usage scenario, nonetheless, it may prove useful for someone. First a simple example: var target = new string[] { "(", ")", "(", ")" }; var result = target.Interleave(".", (f, s) => f == "("); // Prints: (.)(.) Console.WriteLine(String.Join(string.Empty, result)); And now the untested but documented implementation: using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; public static class EnumerableExtensions { /// <summary> /// Iterates infinitely over a constant element. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T"> /// The type of element in the sequence. /// </typeparam> private class InfiniteSequence<T> : IEnumerable<T>, IEnumerator<T> { public InfiniteSequence(T element) { this.Element = element; } public T Element { get; private set; } public IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator() { return this; } IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() { return this; } T IEnumerator<T>.Current { get { return this.Element; } } void IDisposable.Dispose() { } object IEnumerator.Current { get { return this.Element; } } bool IEnumerator.MoveNext() { return true; } void IEnumerator.Reset() { } } /// <summary> /// Interleaves the specified <paramref name="element"/> between each pair of elements in the <paramref name="target"/> sequence. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T"> /// The type of elements in the sequence. /// </typeparam> /// <param name="target"> /// The target sequence to be interleaved. /// </param> /// <param name="element"> /// The element used to perform the interleave operation. /// </param> /// <exception cref="ArgumentNullException"> /// <paramref name="target"/> or <paramref name="element"/> is a null reference. /// </exception> /// <returns> /// The <paramref name="target"/> sequence interleaved with the specified <paramref name="element"/>. /// </returns> public static IEnumerable<T> Interleave<T>( this IEnumerable<T> target, T element) { if (target == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("target"); if (element == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("element"); return InterleaveInternal(target, new InfiniteSequence<T>(element), (f, s) => true); } /// <summary> /// Interleaves the specified <paramref name="element"/> between each pair of elements in the <paramref name="target"/> sequence. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The interleave operation is interrupted as soon as the <paramref name="target"/> sequence is exhausted; If the number of <paramref name="elements"/> to be interleaved are not enough to completely interleave the <paramref name="target"/> sequence then the remainder of the sequence is returned without being interleaved. /// </remarks> /// <typeparam name="T"> /// The type of elements in the sequence. /// </typeparam> /// <param name="target"> /// The target sequence to be interleaved. /// </param> /// <param name="elements"> /// The elements used to perform the interleave operation. /// </param> /// <exception cref="ArgumentNullException"> /// <paramref name="target"/> or <paramref name="element"/> is a null reference. /// </exception> /// <returns> /// The <paramref name="target"/> sequence interleaved with the specified <paramref name="elements"/>. /// </returns> public static IEnumerable<T> Interleave<T>( this IEnumerable<T> target, IEnumerable<T> elements) { if (target == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("target"); if (elements == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("elements"); return InterleaveInternal(target, elements, (f, s) => true); } /// <summary> /// Interleaves the specified <paramref name="element"/> between each pair of elements in the <paramref name="target"/> sequence that satisfy <paramref name="predicate"/>. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T"> /// The type of elements in the sequence. /// </typeparam> /// <param name="target"> /// The target sequence to be interleaved. /// </param> /// <param name="element"> /// The element used to perform the interleave operation. /// </param> /// <param name="predicate"> /// A predicate used to assert if interleaving should occur between two target elements. /// </param> /// <exception cref="ArgumentNullException"> /// <paramref name="target"/> or <paramref name="element"/> or <paramref name="predicate"/> is a null reference. /// </exception> /// <returns> /// The <paramref name="target"/> sequence interleaved with the specified <paramref name="element"/>. /// </returns> public static IEnumerable<T> Interleave<T>( this IEnumerable<T> target, T element, Func<T, T, bool> predicate) { if (target == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("target"); if (element == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("element"); if (predicate == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("predicate"); return InterleaveInternal(target, new InfiniteSequence<T>(element), predicate); } /// <summary> /// Interleaves the specified <paramref name="element"/> between each pair of elements in the <paramref name="target"/> sequence that satisfy <paramref name="predicate"/>. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The interleave operation is interrupted as soon as the <paramref name="target"/> sequence is exhausted; If the number of <paramref name="elements"/> to be interleaved are not enough to completely interleave the <paramref name="target"/> sequence then the remainder of the sequence is returned without being interleaved. /// </remarks> /// <typeparam name="T"> /// The type of elements in the sequence. /// </typeparam> /// <param name="target"> /// The target sequence to be interleaved. /// </param> /// <param name="elements"> /// The elements used to perform the interleave operation. /// </param> /// <param name="predicate"> /// A predicate used to assert if interleaving should occur between two target elements. /// </param> /// <exception cref="ArgumentNullException"> /// <paramref name="target"/> or <paramref name="element"/> or <paramref name="predicate"/> is a null reference. /// </exception> /// <returns> /// The <paramref name="target"/> sequence interleaved with the specified <paramref name="elements"/>. /// </returns> public static IEnumerable<T> Interleave<T>( this IEnumerable<T> target, IEnumerable<T> elements, Func<T, T, bool> predicate) { if (target == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("target"); if (elements == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("elements"); if (predicate == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("predicate"); return InterleaveInternal(target, elements, predicate); } private static IEnumerable<T> InterleaveInternal<T>( this IEnumerable<T> target, IEnumerable<T> elements, Func<T, T, bool> predicate) { var targetEnumerator = target.GetEnumerator(); if (targetEnumerator.MoveNext()) { var elementsEnumerator = elements.GetEnumerator(); while (true) { T first = targetEnumerator.Current; yield return first; if (!targetEnumerator.MoveNext()) yield break; T second = targetEnumerator.Current; bool interleave = true && predicate(first, second) && elementsEnumerator.MoveNext(); if (interleave) yield return elementsEnumerator.Current; } } } }

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  • Session Evaluations

    - by BuckWoody
    I do a lot of public speaking. I write, teach, present and communicate at many levels. I love to do those things. And I love to get better at them. And one of the ways you get better at something is to get feedback on how you did. That being said, I have to confess that I really despise the “evaluations” I get at most venues. From college to technical events to other locations, at Microsoft and points in between, I find these things to be just shy of damaging, and most certainly useless. And it’s not always your fault. Ouch. That seems harsh. But let me ask you one question – and be as honest as you can with the answer – think about it first: “What is the point of a session evaluation?” I’m not saying there isn’t one. In fact, I think there’s a really important reason for them. In my mind, it’s really this: To make the speaker / next session better. Now, if you look at that, you can see right away that most session evals don’t accomplish this goal – not even a little. No, the way that they are worded and the way you (and I) fill them out, it’s more like the implied goal is this: Tell us how you liked this speaker / session. The current ones are for you, not for the speaker or the next person. It’s a popularity contest. Don’t get me wrong. I want to you have a good time. I want you to learn. I want (desperately, oh, please oh please) for you to like me. But in fact, that’s probably not why you went to the session / took the class / read that post. No, you want to learn, and to learn for a particular reason. Remember, I’m talking about college classes, sessions and other class environments here, not a general public event. Most – OK, all – session evaluations make you answer the second goal, not the first. Let’s see how: First, they don’t ask you why you’re there. They don’t ask you if you’re even qualified to evaluate the session or speaker. They don’t ask you how to make it better or keep it great. They use odd numeric scales that are meaningless. For instance, can someone really tell me the difference between a 100-level session and a 200-level one? Between a 400-level and a 500? Is it “internals” (whatever that means) or detail, or length or code, or what? I once heard a great description: A 100-level session makes me say, “wow - I’m smart.” A 500-level session makes me say “wow – that presenter is smart.” And just what is the difference between a 6 and a 7 answer on this question: How well did the speaker know the material? 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 Oh. My. Gosh. How does that make the next session better, or the speaker? And what criteria did you use to answer? And is a “10” better than a “1” (not always clear, and various cultures answer this differently). When it’s all said and done, a speaker basically finds out one thing from the current session evals: “They liked me. They really really liked me.” Or, “Wow. I think I may need to schedule some counseling for the depression I’m about to go into.” You may not think that’s what the speaker hears, but trust me, they do. Those are the only two reactions to the current feedback sheets they get. Either they keep doing what they are doing, or they get their feelings hurt. They just can’t use the information provided to do better. Sorry, but there it is. Keep in mind I do want your feedback. I want to get better. I want you to get your money and time’s worth, probably as much as any speaker alive. But I want those evaluations to be accurate, specific and actionable. I want to know if you had a good time, sure, but I also want to know if I did the right things, and if not, if I can do something different or better. And so, for your consideration, here is the evaluation form I would LOVE for you to use. Feel free to copy it and mail it to me any time. I’m going to put some questions here, and then I’ll even include why they are there. Notice that the form asks you a subjective question right away, and then makes you explain why. That’s work on your part. Notice also that it separates the room and the coffee and the lights and the LiveMeeting from the presenter. So many presenters are faced with circumstances beyond their control, and yet are rated high or low personally on those things. This form helps tease those apart. It’s not numeric. Numbers are easier for the scoring committees but are useless for you and me. So I don’t have any numbers. We’re actually going to have to read these things, not put them in a machine. Hey, if you put in the work to write stuff down, the least we could do is take the time to read it. It’s not anonymous. If you’ve got something to say, say it, and own up to it. People are not “more honest” when they are anonymous, they are less honest. So put your name on it. In fact – this is radical – I posit that these evaluations should be publicly available. Forever. Just like replies to a blog post. Hey, if I’m an organizer, I would LOVE to be able to have access to specific, actionable information on the attendees and the speakers. So if you want mine to be public, go for it. I’ll take the good and the bad. Enjoy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Session Evaluation – Date, Time, Location, Topic Thanks for giving us your time today. We know that’s valuable, and we hope you learned something you can use from the session. If you can answer these questions as completely as you can, it will help the next person who attends a session here. Your Name: What you do for a living: (We Need your background to evaluate your evaluation) How long you have been doing that: (Again, we need your background to evaluate your evaluation) Paste Session Description Here: (This is what I said I would talk about) Did you like the session?                     No        Meh        Yes (General subjective question – overall “feeling”. You’ll tell us why in a minute.)  Tell us about the venue. Temperature, lights, coffee, or the online sound, performance, anything other than the speaker and the material. (Helps the logistics to be better or as good for the next person) 1. What did you expect to learn in this session? (How did you interpret that extract – did you have expectations that I should work towards for the next person?) 2. Did you learn what you expected to learn? Why? Be very specific. (This is the most important question there is. It tells us how to make the session better for someone like you.) 3. If you were giving this presentation, would you have done anything differently? What? (Helps us to gauge you, the listener, and might give us a great idea on how to do something better. Thanks!) 4. What will you do with the information you got? (Every presenter wants you to learn, and learn something useful. This will help us do that as well or better)  

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  • QLogic QLE8152 won't link up with a fiber loop

    - by Mike Pennington
    I have a Dell R710 running Debian Linux 6.0 (Squeeze). I installed a QLogic QLE8152 CNA in the PCI-E riser today and I have been trying to get the CNA's ethernet layer to come up after I put a fiber loop on it; I also scoped it with a light meter, and the SFP+ transceiver is getting the correct amount of light. The whole time I have been working on this problem, the lights on the CNA are blinking green at a rate of about 1 flash every 3 seconds. When I plug the fiber into a Juniper EX4500 10GE in a rack next to it, the Juniper's link stays down as well. I have to confess that this is my first wrangling with a CNA, so perhaps I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, but here is what I have found so far... First the basics... [mpenning@Finger ~]$ uname -a Linux Finger 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Oct 3 03:59:20 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux [mpenning@Finger ~]$ cat /etc/issue Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l [mpenning@Finger ~]$ lspci -v shows that the card is properly installed (physically) 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: QLogic Corp. 10GbE Converged Network Adapter (TCP/IP Networking) (rev 02) Subsystem: QLogic Corp. Device 017e Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 34 I/O ports at e000 [size=256] Memory at df8f0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Memory at df900000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M] Expansion ROM at df800000 [disabled] [size=256K] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [4c] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [88] MSI: Enable- Count=1/32 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [98] Vital Product Data Capabilities: [a0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=8 Masked- Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [138] Device Serial Number 00-c0-dd-ff-fe-1c-53-b4 Capabilities: [144] Power Budgeting <?> Kernel driver in use: qlge The output from ethtool shows that eth4 is the QLE8152... [mpenning@Finger ~]$ sudo ethtool eth4 Settings for eth4: Supported ports: [ FIBRE ] Supported link modes: 10000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: No Advertised link modes: 10000baseT/Full Advertised pause frame use: No Advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: 10000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: FIBRE PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: external Auto-negotiation: on Current message level: 0x000060f7 (24823) Link detected: no [mpenning@Finger ~]$ sudo ethtool -i eth4 driver: qlge version: v1.00.00-b3 firmware-version: v1.35.11 bus-info: 0000:04:00.0 [mpenning@Finger ~]$ Finally, I tried modprobe -r qlge; modprobe -r qla2xxx and then modprobe qla2xxx; modprobe qlge to kick the system again... I don't see a smoking gun in /var/log/messages... Nov 17 19:46:21 finger kernel: [ 6212.298275] qlge 0000:04:00.1: PCI INT B disabled Nov 17 19:46:22 finger kernel: [ 6213.779974] qlge 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A disabled Nov 17 19:46:33 finger kernel: [ 6224.554074] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: PCI INT D disabled Nov 17 19:46:33 finger kernel: [ 6224.555322] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: PCI INT C disabled Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.625854] QLogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver: 8.03.01-k6 Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.625888] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: PCI INT C -> GSI 35 (level, low) -> IRQ 35 Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.626837] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: MSI-X vector count: 7 Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.626841] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Found an ISP8001, irq 35, iobase 0xffffc90012664000 Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.627113] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Configuring PCI space... Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.639429] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Configure NVRAM parameters... Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.642597] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Verifying loaded RISC code... Nov 17 19:46:54 finger kernel: [ 6245.642708] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: FW: Loading from flash (a0000)... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.273340] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Allocated (64 KB) for FCE... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.273401] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Allocated (64 KB) for EFT... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.273486] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Allocated (1350 KB) for firmware dump... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.273856] scsi9 : qla2xxx Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274631] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.2: Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274633] QLogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver: 8.03.01-k6 Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274634] QLogic QLE8152 - QLogic PCI-Express Dual Channel 10GbE CNA Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274636] ISP8001: PCIe (5.0GT/s x4) @ 0000:04:00.2 hdma+, host#=9, fw=5.01.04 (8d4) Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274666] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: PCI INT D -> GSI 37 (level, low) -> IRQ 37 Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274748] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: MSI-X vector count: 7 Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.274751] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Found an ISP8001, irq 37, iobase 0xffffc900125c4000 Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.275098] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Configuring PCI space... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.287329] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Configure NVRAM parameters... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.290624] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Verifying loaded RISC code... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.290736] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: FW: Loading from flash (a0000)... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.920204] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Allocated (64 KB) for FCE... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.920264] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Allocated (64 KB) for EFT... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.920345] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Allocated (1350 KB) for firmware dump... Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.920749] scsi10 : qla2xxx Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.921715] qla2xxx 0000:04:00.3: Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.921716] QLogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver: 8.03.01-k6 Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.921717] QLogic QLE8152 - QLogic PCI-Express Dual Channel 10GbE CNA Nov 17 19:46:55 finger kernel: [ 6246.921719] ISP8001: PCIe (5.0GT/s x4) @ 0000:04:00.3 hdma+, host#=10, fw=5.01.04 (8d4) Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.519911] qlge 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 34 (level, low) -> IRQ 34 Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.533970] qlge 0000:04:00.0: QLogic 10 Gigabit PCI-E Ethernet Driver Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.533975] qlge 0000:04:00.0: Driver name: qlge, Version: v1.00.00-b3. Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.534856] qlge 0000:04:00.0: ql_display_dev_info: Function #0, Port 0, NIC Roll 0, NIC Rev = 1, XG Roll = 0, XG Rev = 1. Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.534860] qlge 0000:04:00.0: ql_display_dev_info: MAC address 00:c0:dd:1c:53:b4 Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.534888] qlge 0000:04:00.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 44 (level, low) -> IRQ 44 Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.549109] qlge 0000:04:00.1: ql_display_dev_info: Function #1, Port 1, NIC Roll 0, NIC Rev = 1, XG Roll = 0, XG Rev = 1. Nov 17 19:46:58 finger kernel: [ 6249.549112] qlge 0000:04:00.1: ql_display_dev_info: MAC address 00:c0:dd:1c:53:b6 Any assistance getting a link up on this is greatly appreciated...

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  • Zend_Navigation failing to load

    - by Grant Collins
    Hi, Following on from my earlier question, I am still having issues with loading the xml file into Zend_Navigation. I am now getting the following error message: <b>Fatal error</b>: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Navigation_Exception' with message 'Invalid argument: Unable to determine class to instantiate' in C:\www\mysite\development\website\library\Zend\Navigation\Page.php:223 I've tried to make my navigation.xml file look similar to the example on the Zend Documentation, However I just can't seem to get it to work. My XML file looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configdata> <navigation> <default> <label>Home</label> <controller>index</controller> <action>index</action> <module>default</module> <pages> <tour> <label>Tour</label> <controller>tour</controller> <action>index</action> <module>default</module> </tour> <blog> <label></label> <uri>http://blog.mysite.com</uri> </blog> <support> <label>Support</label> <controller>support</controller> <action>index</action> <module>default</module> </support> </pages> </default> <users> <label>Home</label> <controller>index</controller> <action>index</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> <pages> <jobmanger> <label>Job Manager</label> <controller>jobmanager</controller> <action>index</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> </jobmanger> <myaccount> <label>My Account</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>index</action> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> <module>users</module> <pages> <detail> <label>Account Details</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>detail</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> <pages> <history> <label>Account History</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>history</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> </history> <password> <label>Change Password</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>changepwd</action> <module>users</module> <role>employer</role> <resource>employers</resource> </password> </pages> </detail> ... </navigation> </configdata> Now I confess that I've totally got the wrong end of the stick with this, but rapidly running out of ideas, and it's been a long week. Thanks, Grant

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  • Conceal packet loss in PCM stream

    - by ZeroDefect
    I am looking to use 'Packet Loss Concealment' to conceal lost PCM frames in an audio stream. Unfortunately, I cannot find a library that is accessible without all the licensing restrictions and code bloat (...up for some suggestions though). I have located some GPL code written by Steve Underwood for the Asterisk project which implements PLC. There are several limitations; although, as Steve suggests in his code, his algorithm can be applied to different streams with a bit of work. Currently, the code works with 8kHz 16-bit signed mono streams. Variations of the code can be found through a simple search of Google Code Search. My hope is that I can adapt the code to work with other streams. Initially, the goal is to adjust the algorithm for 8+ kHz, 16-bit signed, multichannel audio (all in a C++ environment). Eventually, I'm looking to make the code available under the GPL license in hopes that it could be of benefit to others... Attached is the code below with my efforts. The code includes a main function that will "drop" a number of frames with a given probability. Unfortunately, the code does not quite work as expected. I'm receiving EXC_BAD_ACCESS when running in gdb, but I don't get a trace from gdb when using 'bt' command. Clearly, I'm trampimg on memory some where but not sure exactly where. When I comment out the *amdf_pitch* function, the code runs without crashing... int main (int argc, char *argv[]) { std::ifstream fin("C:\\cc32kHz.pcm"); if(!fin.is_open()) { std::cout << "Failed to open input file" << std::endl; return 1; } std::ofstream fout_repaired("C:\\cc32kHz_repaired.pcm"); if(!fout_repaired.is_open()) { std::cout << "Failed to open output repaired file" << std::endl; return 1; } std::ofstream fout_lossy("C:\\cc32kHz_lossy.pcm"); if(!fout_lossy.is_open()) { std::cout << "Failed to open output repaired file" << std::endl; return 1; } audio::PcmConcealer Concealer; Concealer.Init(1, 16, 32000); //Generate random numbers; srand( time(NULL) ); int value = 0; int probability = 5; while(!fin.eof()) { char arr[2]; fin.read(arr, 2); //Generate's random number; value = rand() % 100 + 1; if(value <= probability) { char blank[2] = {0x00, 0x00}; fout_lossy.write(blank, 2); //Fill in data; Concealer.Fill((int16_t *)blank, 1); fout_repaired.write(blank, 2); } else { //Write data to file; fout_repaired.write(arr, 2); fout_lossy.write(arr, 2); Concealer.Receive((int16_t *)arr, 1); } } fin.close(); fout_repaired.close(); fout_lossy.close(); return 0; } PcmConcealer.hpp /* * Code adapted from Steve Underwood of the Asterisk Project. This code inherits * the same licensing restrictions as the Asterisk Project. */ #ifndef __PCMCONCEALER_HPP__ #define __PCMCONCEALER_HPP__ /** 1. What does it do? The packet loss concealment module provides a suitable synthetic fill-in signal, to minimise the audible effect of lost packets in VoIP applications. It is not tied to any particular codec, and could be used with almost any codec which does not specify its own procedure for packet loss concealment. Where a codec specific concealment procedure exists, the algorithm is usually built around knowledge of the characteristics of the particular codec. It will, therefore, generally give better results for that particular codec than this generic concealer will. 2. How does it work? While good packets are being received, the plc_rx() routine keeps a record of the trailing section of the known speech signal. If a packet is missed, plc_fillin() is called to produce a synthetic replacement for the real speech signal. The average mean difference function (AMDF) is applied to the last known good signal, to determine its effective pitch. Based on this, the last pitch period of signal is saved. Essentially, this cycle of speech will be repeated over and over until the real speech resumes. However, several refinements are needed to obtain smooth pleasant sounding results. - The two ends of the stored cycle of speech will not always fit together smoothly. This can cause roughness, or even clicks, at the joins between cycles. To soften this, the 1/4 pitch period of real speech preceeding the cycle to be repeated is blended with the last 1/4 pitch period of the cycle to be repeated, using an overlap-add (OLA) technique (i.e. in total, the last 5/4 pitch periods of real speech are used). - The start of the synthetic speech will not always fit together smoothly with the tail of real speech passed on before the erasure was identified. Ideally, we would like to modify the last 1/4 pitch period of the real speech, to blend it into the synthetic speech. However, it is too late for that. We could have delayed the real speech a little, but that would require more buffer manipulation, and hurt the efficiency of the no-lost-packets case (which we hope is the dominant case). Instead we use a degenerate form of OLA to modify the start of the synthetic data. The last 1/4 pitch period of real speech is time reversed, and OLA is used to blend it with the first 1/4 pitch period of synthetic speech. The result seems quite acceptable. - As we progress into the erasure, the chances of the synthetic signal being anything like correct steadily fall. Therefore, the volume of the synthesized signal is made to decay linearly, such that after 50ms of missing audio it is reduced to silence. - When real speech resumes, an extra 1/4 pitch period of sythetic speech is blended with the start of the real speech. If the erasure is small, this smoothes the transition. If the erasure is long, and the synthetic signal has faded to zero, the blending softens the start up of the real signal, avoiding a kind of "click" or "pop" effect that might occur with a sudden onset. 3. How do I use it? Before audio is processed, call plc_init() to create an instance of the packet loss concealer. For each received audio packet that is acceptable (i.e. not including those being dropped for being too late) call plc_rx() to record the content of the packet. Note this may modify the packet a little after a period of packet loss, to blend real synthetic data smoothly. When a real packet is not available in time, call plc_fillin() to create a sythetic substitute. That's it! */ /*! Minimum allowed pitch (66 Hz) */ #define PLC_PITCH_MIN(SAMPLE_RATE) ((double)(SAMPLE_RATE) / 66.6) /*! Maximum allowed pitch (200 Hz) */ #define PLC_PITCH_MAX(SAMPLE_RATE) ((SAMPLE_RATE) / 200) /*! Maximum pitch OLA window */ //#define PLC_PITCH_OVERLAP_MAX(SAMPLE_RATE) ((PLC_PITCH_MIN(SAMPLE_RATE)) >> 2) /*! The length over which the AMDF function looks for similarity (20 ms) */ #define CORRELATION_SPAN(SAMPLE_RATE) ((20 * (SAMPLE_RATE)) / 1000) /*! History buffer length. The buffer must also be at leat 1.25 times PLC_PITCH_MIN, but that is much smaller than the buffer needs to be for the pitch assessment. */ //#define PLC_HISTORY_LEN(SAMPLE_RATE) ((CORRELATION_SPAN(SAMPLE_RATE)) + (PLC_PITCH_MIN(SAMPLE_RATE))) namespace audio { typedef struct { /*! Consecutive erased samples */ int missing_samples; /*! Current offset into pitch period */ int pitch_offset; /*! Pitch estimate */ int pitch; /*! Buffer for a cycle of speech */ float *pitchbuf;//[PLC_PITCH_MIN]; /*! History buffer */ short *history;//[PLC_HISTORY_LEN]; /*! Current pointer into the history buffer */ int buf_ptr; } plc_state_t; class PcmConcealer { public: PcmConcealer(); ~PcmConcealer(); void Init(int channels, int bit_depth, int sample_rate); //Process a block of received audio samples. int Receive(short amp[], int frames); //Fill-in a block of missing audio samples. int Fill(short amp[], int frames); void Destroy(); private: int amdf_pitch(int min_pitch, int max_pitch, short amp[], int channel_index, int frames); void save_history(plc_state_t *s, short *buf, int channel_index, int frames); void normalise_history(plc_state_t *s); /** Holds the states of each of the channels **/ std::vector< plc_state_t * > ChannelStates; int plc_pitch_min; int plc_pitch_max; int plc_pitch_overlap_max; int correlation_span; int plc_history_len; int channel_count; int sample_rate; bool Initialized; }; } #endif PcmConcealer.cpp /* * Code adapted from Steve Underwood of the Asterisk Project. This code inherits * the same licensing restrictions as the Asterisk Project. */ #include "audio/PcmConcealer.hpp" /* We do a straight line fade to zero volume in 50ms when we are filling in for missing data. */ #define ATTENUATION_INCREMENT 0.0025 /* Attenuation per sample */ #if !defined(INT16_MAX) #define INT16_MAX (32767) #define INT16_MIN (-32767-1) #endif #ifdef WIN32 inline double rint(double x) { return floor(x + 0.5); } #endif inline short fsaturate(double damp) { if (damp > 32767.0) return INT16_MAX; if (damp < -32768.0) return INT16_MIN; return (short)rint(damp); } namespace audio { PcmConcealer::PcmConcealer() : Initialized(false) { } PcmConcealer::~PcmConcealer() { Destroy(); } void PcmConcealer::Init(int channels, int bit_depth, int sample_rate) { if(Initialized) return; if(channels <= 0 || bit_depth != 16) return; Initialized = true; channel_count = channels; this->sample_rate = sample_rate; ////////////// double min = PLC_PITCH_MIN(sample_rate); int imin = (int)min; double max = PLC_PITCH_MAX(sample_rate); int imax = (int)max; plc_pitch_min = imin; plc_pitch_max = imax; plc_pitch_overlap_max = (plc_pitch_min >> 2); correlation_span = CORRELATION_SPAN(sample_rate); plc_history_len = correlation_span + plc_pitch_min; ////////////// for(int i = 0; i < channel_count; i ++) { plc_state_t *t = new plc_state_t; memset(t, 0, sizeof(plc_state_t)); t->pitchbuf = new float[plc_pitch_min]; t->history = new short[plc_history_len]; ChannelStates.push_back(t); } } void PcmConcealer::Destroy() { if(!Initialized) return; while(ChannelStates.size()) { plc_state_t *s = ChannelStates.at(0); if(s) { if(s->history) delete s->history; if(s->pitchbuf) delete s->pitchbuf; memset(s, 0, sizeof(plc_state_t)); delete s; } ChannelStates.erase(ChannelStates.begin()); } ChannelStates.clear(); Initialized = false; } //Process a block of received audio samples. int PcmConcealer::Receive(short amp[], int frames) { if(!Initialized) return 0; int j = 0; for(int k = 0; k < ChannelStates.size(); k++) { int i; int overlap_len; int pitch_overlap; float old_step; float new_step; float old_weight; float new_weight; float gain; plc_state_t *s = ChannelStates.at(k); if (s->missing_samples) { /* Although we have a real signal, we need to smooth it to fit well with the synthetic signal we used for the previous block */ /* The start of the real data is overlapped with the next 1/4 cycle of the synthetic data. */ pitch_overlap = s->pitch >> 2; if (pitch_overlap > frames) pitch_overlap = frames; gain = 1.0 - s->missing_samples * ATTENUATION_INCREMENT; if (gain < 0.0) gain = 0.0; new_step = 1.0/pitch_overlap; old_step = new_step*gain; new_weight = new_step; old_weight = (1.0 - new_step)*gain; for (i = 0; i < pitch_overlap; i++) { int index = (i * channel_count) + j; amp[index] = fsaturate(old_weight * s->pitchbuf[s->pitch_offset] + new_weight * amp[index]); if (++s->pitch_offset >= s->pitch) s->pitch_offset = 0; new_weight += new_step; old_weight -= old_step; if (old_weight < 0.0) old_weight = 0.0; } s->missing_samples = 0; } save_history(s, amp, j, frames); j++; } return frames; } //Fill-in a block of missing audio samples. int PcmConcealer::Fill(short amp[], int frames) { if(!Initialized) return 0; int j =0; for(int k = 0; k < ChannelStates.size(); k++) { short *tmp = new short[plc_pitch_overlap_max]; int i; int pitch_overlap; float old_step; float new_step; float old_weight; float new_weight; float gain; short *orig_amp; int orig_len; orig_amp = amp; orig_len = frames; plc_state_t *s = ChannelStates.at(k); if (s->missing_samples == 0) { // As the gap in real speech starts we need to assess the last known pitch, //and prepare the synthetic data we will use for fill-in normalise_history(s); s->pitch = amdf_pitch(plc_pitch_min, plc_pitch_max, s->history + plc_history_len - correlation_span - plc_pitch_min, j, correlation_span); // We overlap a 1/4 wavelength pitch_overlap = s->pitch >> 2; // Cook up a single cycle of pitch, using a single of the real signal with 1/4 //cycle OLA'ed to make the ends join up nicely // The first 3/4 of the cycle is a simple copy for (i = 0; i < s->pitch - pitch_overlap; i++) s->pitchbuf[i] = s->history[plc_history_len - s->pitch + i]; // The last 1/4 of the cycle is overlapped with the end of the previous cycle new_step = 1.0/pitch_overlap; new_weight = new_step; for ( ; i < s->pitch; i++) { s->pitchbuf[i] = s->history[plc_history_len - s->pitch + i]*(1.0 - new_weight) + s->history[plc_history_len - 2*s->pitch + i]*new_weight; new_weight += new_step; } // We should now be ready to fill in the gap with repeated, decaying cycles // of what is in pitchbuf // We need to OLA the first 1/4 wavelength of the synthetic data, to smooth // it into the previous real data. To avoid the need to introduce a delay // in the stream, reverse the last 1/4 wavelength, and OLA with that. gain = 1.0; new_step = 1.0/pitch_overlap; old_step = new_step; new_weight = new_step; old_weight = 1.0 - new_step; for (i = 0; i < pitch_overlap; i++) { int index = (i * channel_count) + j; amp[index] = fsaturate(old_weight * s->history[plc_history_len - 1 - i] + new_weight * s->pitchbuf[i]); new_weight += new_step; old_weight -= old_step; if (old_weight < 0.0) old_weight = 0.0; } s->pitch_offset = i; } else { gain = 1.0 - s->missing_samples*ATTENUATION_INCREMENT; i = 0; } for ( ; gain > 0.0 && i < frames; i++) { int index = (i * channel_count) + j; amp[index] = s->pitchbuf[s->pitch_offset]*gain; gain -= ATTENUATION_INCREMENT; if (++s->pitch_offset >= s->pitch) s->pitch_offset = 0; } for ( ; i < frames; i++) { int index = (i * channel_count) + j; amp[i] = 0; } s->missing_samples += orig_len; save_history(s, amp, j, frames); delete [] tmp; j++; } return frames; } void PcmConcealer::save_history(plc_state_t *s, short *buf, int channel_index, int frames) { if (frames >= plc_history_len) { /* Just keep the last part of the new data, starting at the beginning of the buffer */ //memcpy(s->history, buf + len - plc_history_len, sizeof(short)*plc_history_len); int frames_to_copy = plc_history_len; for(int i = 0; i < frames_to_copy; i ++) { int index = (channel_count * (i + frames - plc_history_len)) + channel_index; s->history[i] = buf[index]; } s->buf_ptr = 0; return; } if (s->buf_ptr + frames > plc_history_len) { /* Wraps around - must break into two sections */ //memcpy(s->history + s->buf_ptr, buf, sizeof(short)*(plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr)); short *hist_ptr = s->history + s->buf_ptr; int frames_to_copy = plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr; for(int i = 0; i < frames_to_copy; i ++) { int index = (channel_count * i) + channel_index; hist_ptr[i] = buf[index]; } frames -= (plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr); //memcpy(s->history, buf + (plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr), sizeof(short)*len); frames_to_copy = frames; for(int i = 0; i < frames_to_copy; i ++) { int index = (channel_count * (i + (plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr))) + channel_index; s->history[i] = buf[index]; } s->buf_ptr = frames; return; } /* Can use just one section */ //memcpy(s->history + s->buf_ptr, buf, sizeof(short)*len); short *hist_ptr = s->history + s->buf_ptr; int frames_to_copy = frames; for(int i = 0; i < frames_to_copy; i ++) { int index = (channel_count * i) + channel_index; hist_ptr[i] = buf[index]; } s->buf_ptr += frames; } void PcmConcealer::normalise_history(plc_state_t *s) { short *tmp = new short[plc_history_len]; if (s->buf_ptr == 0) return; memcpy(tmp, s->history, sizeof(short)*s->buf_ptr); memcpy(s->history, s->history + s->buf_ptr, sizeof(short)*(plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr)); memcpy(s->history + plc_history_len - s->buf_ptr, tmp, sizeof(short)*s->buf_ptr); s->buf_ptr = 0; delete [] tmp; } int PcmConcealer::amdf_pitch(int min_pitch, int max_pitch, short amp[], int channel_index, int frames) { int i; int j; int acc; int min_acc; int pitch; pitch = min_pitch; min_acc = INT_MAX; for (i = max_pitch; i <= min_pitch; i++) { acc = 0; for (j = 0; j < frames; j++) { int index1 = (channel_count * (i+j)) + channel_index; int index2 = (channel_count * j) + channel_index; //std::cout << "Index 1: " << index1 << ", Index 2: " << index2 << std::endl; acc += abs(amp[index1] - amp[index2]); } if (acc < min_acc) { min_acc = acc; pitch = i; } } std::cout << "Pitch: " << pitch << std::endl; return pitch; } } P.S. - I must confess that digital audio is not my forte...

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