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• How to deal with overly aggressive "Link Take Down Demands"?

  - by Eoin

  I've been receiving a large number of emails recently requesting I clean from link spam from my forum. Initially the emails were very polite and professional, and I was happy to remove the links. Recently the email have gotten very abrasive, here is a particularly rude example: From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hi, This is the second time we are reaching out to you regarding your link to our site hxxp://www.company-two.com from hxxp://www.my-forum.com/some-topic-id. We really do need to remove this link. We have to report to Google any link we were unable to remove, and I wouldn't want to have to include your site in the list. Could you please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site? Thank You, Name Changed Behind the superficial pleasantries I feel there is some very real maliciousness. Note the email address, DMCA Violations, I don't see how the DMCA is involved here, except as a word which tends to strike fear in many people. Also relating to the email address, it doesn't match the company being linked to at all. How am I to trust they are truely operating on behalf of company-two when they don't even use one of it's email addresses. My email is hidden by privacypost. While a service with legitimate uses, I feel it's highly unprofessional for communications between to companies. The claim "This is the second time..." Every email I've received has started like this, but a check of my spam filters has never revealed a 1st mail. Initially I gave them the benefit of the doubt, by now though it's clear this is a cheap ploy to start me off on the defensive. And finally worst of all- the threats of reporting me to Google if I don't do everything they ask. I sent a polite reply asking for more information. I have no idea if the email address was even valid but I never received any response. Much later I got this followup mail From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hi, This is the final time we are reaching out to you regarding your link to our site hxxp://www.company-two.com from hxxp://www.my-forum.com/some-topic-id. We will soon be reporting to Google any link we were unable to remove, and currently your site will have to be on the list. Could you please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site? I appreciate your urgent attention to this matter. Thank You, Name Changed This time the from address was more personal, though still not obviously connected to the spammed company. Lets be honest, I don't for one second believe that the companies were the victim of a 3rd party spammer as they claim. The links in questions were generated well over a year ago, and I firmly believe the companies were directly responsible for the spam links in question, a type of spam that has plagued my forum. Now they have the audacity to demand I spend my time cleaning up their mess, using threats to ensure they get their way. Have recent changes in Googles algorithms meant all the cash they spent spamming the web has now turned into a liability? If so I can see why these companies are all of a sudden running scared. Frankly, cleaning up my forum is a good things, but the threats they are using sickens me. So my question here is specifically about the threats: Are they vaild, and would such reports to Google destroy my page rankings? Is there a way I can report this abusive behaviour to Google?

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• Questions to ask to ensure someone understands programming? (and iOS)

  - by Stephen J

  So, I've been tutoring my friend for 2 years. Most people learn programming on their own in 3-6 months, (sans algorithms). It's confusing 'cause he'll run anywhere I tell him to, understands how to read C and C++ honestly better than the average college student, and he'll modify and repeat anything I do... but for the love of god he doesn't move on to new things and he still has test anxiety. I've recently realized he's copied and toyed with existing, but not once gained an understanding of why. I was under the impression he was learning fast because he could write it, but when you say "Make a function that takes an NSString" and he says "How?" and I say "The same way you make ANY function that takes any parameter, NSString is just a type like int" and all I hear is "No, it's an NSString, it's a special thing." and we get into an arguing match 'cause I'm like "It's just a class like any other class, you've used them for months now" and blah... I've subconsciously avoided comprehension questions because of this. Anyway, if you have him copy a program and say "Just initialize it" "Where?" "I don't care, didLoad or initWithCoder or Awake from nib, anywhere it gets initialized" and "No, it has to be exactly where you had it!" "No it doesn't!" I'm sick of this, but he won't give up. So I'm done avoiding these yelling matches and becoming a sadist from now on. I would like some help in finding questions to ask him that force him to understand what he's doing. I'd like some help and any resources I can find. CQuestions looked like a good site, but now I need some iPhone stuff. For example: *What do properties do? How are they changed? How do you change the name of the getter? *Why are Booleans inefficent? What advantage does int have over a boolean and how does the bit-shift operator help? *What does Copy do to a string? *What's the difference between a view controller and a uiview? *Write a program from memory that displays blah on screen, and flashes each view one by one. From beginner up to intermediate, hobbyist with some algebra at most. I'm just looking for resources to work with. I left in backstory so you know to "twist" the questions so he doesn't know he's supposed to init a variable here or there, but has to figure it out, and learn why it goes "here" or that "anywhere is fine as long as it's". Sample programs, anything. I'm relatively open about this because, being a programmer, I seriously doubt he's the only one who has this issue. I'd like to know how others have overcome similar. What made things "click"? for you? Did you have a hard time finding answers on Google, and how did you learn a better way to find what you were looking for? (He's so exact, he'll search for how to write a checkers program with color X and Y inside a uiview, as his search string, instead of breaking it up into components, I need help with that too, and believe it is related). This type of problem has to remind one of us of someone they know. So, Exercises to force them to think? Ways we overcame this thing in the past? I greatly appreciate any help.

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• Does Jquery and Mootools usually have conflict if both are used on a webpage? [migrated]

  - by Charming Prince

  I have this website am designing, i tried using mootools 1.31 to animate some of the div boxes when clicked or when the mouse hover rounds it, to shows the content. the thing is that it doesn't seem to work on the webpage, but if i try the same script on a blank webpage it works, am thinking probably it's because i have Jquery 1.52 on the same page and maybe both scripts are conflicting with each other because, if i remove the Jquery, the Mootools works. What should be my option, because i need the Jquery to do some validations for me, so i can't remove it completely. Here are the codes <script> //-vertical var mySlide = new Fx.Slide('test'); $('slidein').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.slideIn(); e.stop(); }); $('slideout').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.slideOut(); e.stop(); }); $('toggle').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.toggle(); e.stop(); }); $('hide').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.hide(); e.stop(); }); </script> here's the HTML <html> <h3 class="section">Fx.Slide Vertical</h3> <a id="slideout" href="#">slideout</a> | <a id="slidein" href="#">slidein</a> | <a id="toggle" href="#"> toggle</a> | <a id="hide" href="#">hide</a> <div id="test"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad mi nim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. </div> Here's the CSS #test { background: #222; color: #fff; padding: 10px; margin: 20px; border: 10px solid pink; } #test2 { background: #222; color: #fff; padding: 10px; margin: 20px; border: 10px solid pink; } Am using the exact same code supplied by Mootools in their own example, if i do this on a blank webpage it works but incorporated into my own webpage, it doesn't, and my own page just have the script tag of the Jquery in the head section of the HTML.

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• Experimenting with other search engines

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’ve been a Google user so long I can hardly remember what I used before it.  Alta Vista maybe?  Or Yahoo.  I’ve tried Bing off and on but it never really stuck.  I probably care more about search engines than your average user because of their impact on SQLTeam.com.  Lately I’ve been trying two other search engines and actually switched to one of them. I’ve played with Blekko a little in the past.  They have some interesting ways to “slice up” your results.  For example, searching on “SQL Server /blogs /date” should just search all the recently updated blogs.  Those two extra words on the search are slashtags.  The full list of slashtags runs from /forums to just see forums to /twitter to /nikon to /reviews and on and on and on.  I laughed when I saw they had slashtags for both liberal and conservative.  I’d hate to find any search results that don’t match my existing worldview :)  You can also create your own slashtags.  I created a mini-search engine for the SQL Server blogs that I read.  You can search it for “backup” at http://blekko.com/ws/backup+/billgraziano/sql-sites.  I uploaded my OPML and it limited the search to just those sites.  It seems like the site is focusing more on curating results and less on algorithms.  This is an interesting site for those power searchers.  There are some great ways to curate results using slashtags.  For 99% of my searches (type words, click on one of the first few links) slashtags are overkill.  They do have some good information on page and site ranking though so I’ll probably send some time looking through that. Blekko recently got my attention again when they said they were banning “content farms” - and that includes eHow and experts-exchange.  I always feel used when I click on a link to EE and find myself scrolling all the way to the bottom to see if I can find the answer.  Sometimes it’s there but sometimes it tells me I need to pay first.  I’ve longed for a way to always exclude certain sites.  Blekko might be taking a hammer to a problem that needs a scalpel but it’s an interesting choice.  (And some of the comments in the TechCrunch link are interesting if you’re a search nerd.) DuckDuckGo is an odd name for a search engine.  Their big hook is that they don’t have search history.  If you wade through your Google account you can probably find the page where it stores your search history.  It was pretty enlightening to find mine.  It was easy to disable but that got me started looking at other search engines.  DDG (or DukGo) just feels like Google used to in the old days.  The results are good enough and the site is fast. Searches will return a snippet from WikiPedia or other site (like StackOverflow) at the top.  I think the idea is to answer the question without needing to visit the site.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing for SQLTeam.com. The only thing I really miss is image search.  You can add a “!i” at the end of any search and it will search the images on Bing.  Bing doesn’t have a great image search but it works for most of what I need.  They call these exclamation marks “!bangs” and they are kinda, sorta like slashtags.  I’ve been using DuckDuckGo now for a few weeks and I’m pretty happy with it.  I use Chrome for my browser and it was an easy switch to make.  It’s still a little surprising seeing my search results come up in a different format.  I’m starting to get used to it though.

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• SQL to select random mix of rows fairly [migrated]

  - by Matt Sieker

  Here's my problem: I have a set of tables in a database populated with data from a client that contains product information. In addition to the basic product information, there is also information about the manufacturer, and categories for those products (a product can be in one or more categories). These categories are then referred to as "Product Categories", and which stores these products are available at. These tables are updated once a week from a feed from the customer. Since for our purposes, some of the product categories are the same, or closely related for our purposes, there is another level of categories called "General Categories", a general category can have one or more product categories. For the scope of these tables, here's some rough numbers: Data Tables: Products: 475,000 Manufacturers: 1300 Stores: 150 General Categories: 245 Product Categories: 500 Mapping Tables: Product Category -> Product: 655,000 Stores -> Products: 50,000,000 Now, for the actual problem: As part of our software, we need to select n random products, given a store and a general category. However, we also need to ensure a good mix of manufacturers, as in some categories, a single manufacturer dominates the results, and selecting rows at random causes the results to strongly favor that manufacturer. The solution that is currently in place, works for most cases, involves selecting all of the rows that match the store and category criteria, partition them on manufacturer, and include their row number from within their partition, then select from that where the row number for that manufacturer is less than n, and use ROWCOUNT to clamp the total rows returned to n. This query looks something like this: SET ROWCOUNT 6 select p.Id, GeneralCategory_Id, Product_Id, ISNULL(m.DisplayName, m.Name) AS Vendor, MSRP, MemberPrice, FamilyImageName from (select p.Id, gc.Id GeneralCategory_Id, p.Id Product_Id, ctp.Store_id, Manufacturer_id, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Manufacturer_id ORDER BY NEWID()) AS 'VendorOrder', MSRP, MemberPrice, FamilyImageName from GeneralCategory gc inner join GeneralCategoriesToProductCategories gctpc ON gc.Id=gctpc.GeneralCategory_Id inner join ProductCategoryToProduct pctp on gctpc.ProductCategory_Id = pctp.ProductCategory_Id inner join Product p on p.Id = pctp.Product_Id inner join StoreToProduct ctp on p.Id = ctp.Product_id where gc.Id = @GeneralCategory and ctp.Store_id=@StoreId and p.Active=1 and p.MemberPrice >0) p inner join Manufacturer m on m.Id = p.Manufacturer_id where VendorOrder <=6 order by NEWID() SET ROWCOUNT 0 (I've tried to somewhat format it to make it cleaner, but I don't think it really helps) Running this query with an execution plan shows that for the majority of these tables, it's doing a Clustered Index Seek. There are two operations that take up roughly 90% of the time: Index Seek (Nonclustered) on StoreToProduct: 17%. This table just contains the key of the store, and the key of the product. It seems that NHibernate decided not to make a composite key when making this table, but I'm not concerned about this at this point, as compared to the other seek... Clustered Index Seek on Product: 69%. I really have no clue how I could make this one more performant. On categories without a lot of products, performance is acceptable (<50ms), however larger categories can take a few hundred ms, with the largest category taking 3s (which has about 170k products). It seems I have two ways to go from this point: Somehow optimize the existing query and table indices to lower the query time. As almost every expensive operation is already a clustered index scan, I don't know what could be done there. The inner query could be tuned to not return all of the possible rows for that category, but I am unsure how to do this, and maintain the requirements (random products, with a good mix of manufacturers) Denormalize this data for the purpose of this query when doing the once a week import. However, I am unsure how to do this and maintain the requirements. Does anyone have any input on either of these items?

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• Blind As a Bat in Multi-Monitor Hell &ndash; Free Program Inside!

  - by ToStringTheory

  If you know me personally, then you probably know that I am going blind thanks to a rare genetic eye disease.  My eye disease has already been a huge detriment to my eyesight.  One of the big things to suffer is my ability to see small things moving fast right in front of me.  On a multi-monitor setup, this makes finding the cursor absolute hell. The Problem I’ll keep this short, as I’ve basically already told you what the problem is.  On my three monitor development computer, I am constantly losing the mouse during the day.  I had used the Microsoft accessibility mousefinder (press CTRL, and it pings around the mouse).  The problem with this is, there is only an effect around 50-100 PX around the mouse, and it is a very light gray, almost unnoticeable.. For someone like me, if I am not looking at the monitor when I click the CTRL button, I have to click it multiple times and dart my eyes back and forth in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the action…  I had tried other cursor finders, but none I liked… The Solution So what’s a guy to do when he doesn’t like his options?  MAKE A NEW OPTION…  What else should we as developers do, am I right?  So, I went ahead and made a mousefinder of my own, with 6 separate settings to change the effect.  I am releasing it here for anyone else that may also have problems finding their mouse at times. Some of its features include: Multiple options to change to achieve the exact effect you want. If your mouse moves while it is honing in, it will hone in on its current position. Many times, I would press the button and move my mouse at the same time, and many times, the mouse happened to be at a screen edge, so I would miss it. This program will restart its animation on a new screen if the mouse changes its screen while playing. Tested on Windows 7 x64 Stylish color changing from green to red. Deployed as a ClickOnce, so easy to remove if you don't like it. Press Right CTRL to trigger effect Application lives in notification area so that you can easily reach configuration or close it. To get it to run on startup, copy its application shortcut from its startmenu directory to the “Startup” folder in your startmenu. Conclusion I understand if you don’t download this…  You don’t know me and I don’t know you.  I can only say that I have honestly NOT added any virus’ or malware to the package. Yeah, I know it’s weird Download: ‘ToString(theory) Mousefinder.zip’ CRC32: EEBCE300 MD5: 0394DA581BE6F3371B5BA11A8B24BC91 SHA-1: 2080C4930A2E7D98B81787BB5E19BB24E118991C Finally, if you do use this application - please leave a comment, or email me and tell me what you think of it. Encounter a bug or hashes no longer match? I want to know that too! <warning type=”BadPun”>Now, stop messing around and start mousing around!</warning>

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• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

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• WF4 &ndash; Guess the number game!

  - by MarkPearl

  I posted yesterday how really good WF4 was looking. Today I thought I would show some real basics that I was able to figure out. This will be a simple example, I am going to make a flowchart workflow – which will prompt the user to guess the number until they guess the right number. Lets begin… Make a new project and make it a Workflow console Application. Then select the Workflow file and drag a FlowChart (2) to point 3. This will now show a green start circle in the designer form. We are going to work with primitives to start with. We are now going to drag a few objects onto the Workflow, We drag the WriteLine, Assign & Decision items onto the designer. Once they are dragged onto the designer we will want to link them up. The order that they are linked is critical since this will determine the order of the solution. In this case, we want the system to first ask “Guess a number”, then to wait for the user to input some code, and then to display “You got it” if they got it right, and “Try again” if they got it wrong. So we now link the arrows to the objects. This is done by moving the mouse pointer over the start objects and clicking on one of the toggles and then dragging it to the next object and releasing the button over one of the toggles. This will place an arrow from the source object to the target object. Okay… pretty simple stuff – now we just need these primitive objects to do stuff. Lets start with the WriteLine primitive. We place the text in inverted commas in the Text field. Because this field accepts any valid VB expression we could have put variables etc. in there if we wanted to. The next thing we want to do is allow the user to input a number. This brings up an interesting problem, if a user were to type in a number, there would need to be someway to declare a variable to hold that value for the life of the workflow. We can achieve this by declaring a variable. To declare a variable, move your cursor over the variables tab at the bottom of the workflow, and then type the name of the new variable in the “Create Variable” field and set it as shown in the image above. Now that we have a variable, we want to call the Console.Readline method and assign the inputted value from the Console to that variable. The code that cannot be seen is actually this – Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()) We now have a workflow that first prompts the user for a number, then allows the user to type in a number. We are almost done, we just need to make the system react to the value inputted. There are a few ways we could do this, I am going to use the Decision item. So select the Decision object on the designer and then view its properties (F4 for me), and in the condition field place a condition. For simplicity sake I have decided that if the user guesses 10, they will have guessed the number. This is now the completed workflow. Its really easy to understand and shows some really powerful principles for Business applications. You can run the application and see what it does. Imagine writing business solutions that do not worry about the exact flow of objects, but simply allows a business analyst or someone to configure the solution to work exactly as the business rules would dictate. And if the rules changed six months later all they would need to do is re-drag some of the flows. Now I do not know if WF4 will allow for this, but it feels like it is a step in the right direct.

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• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

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• Wireless connection works but the internet is too slow to use in Ubuntu 11.04

  - by Garrin

  The internet is so slow as to be unusable. And I'm not being picky. Even after minutes I can't get my Google home page to load. I tried installing a package through apt-get and was getting rates between 0 and a few hundred bytes/s. That's bytes, not kilobytes! Mostly 0 however (no exaggeration, it spends large amounts of time stalled). And I would go to a speed test web site of some kind but I can't since nothing will load. Briefly put, the laptop I am using was connected to two wireless networks while using Ubuntu 11.04 without any issues before this. It was also connected to a wired network without any issues. It dual boats Windows 7 which has never had any issues, not even with the current wireless network. Just to be clear, on the current wi-fi network, Windows 7 encounters no issues (speedtest.net puts the network speed at 1mb/s) but my network connection in Ubuntu 11.04 is so slow as to literally be unusable. I am unfamiliar with the router except for the fact that it boasts a Rogers logo (that's a large ISP/cable provider in Canada for those not familiar with the land of igloos and polar bears). I am far from the router and some desktop widget I use tells me the signal strength is at 58% (it seems fairly reliable and this would appear to match up with the filled bars in the network icon). I should also mention I'm just renting a room in this house so I'm not the network administrator and while I can access the 192.168.0.1 router page, the password wasn't set to 'password' so it's not much use to me. Here are a bunch of commands I ran which don't tell me a whole lot but I thought might be more instructive to the wise around here: lspci (just showing my network card): 05:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) This one is self explanatory. PING www.googele.com (216.65.41.185) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from nnw.net (216.65.41.185): icmp_req=1 ttl=51 time=267 ms 64 bytes from nnw.net (216.65.41.185): icmp_req=2 ttl=51 time=190 ms 64 bytes from nnw.net (216.65.41.185): icmp_req=3 ttl=51 time=212 ms 64 bytes from nnw.net (216.65.41.185): icmp_req=4 ttl=51 time=207 ms 64 bytes from nnw.net (216.65.41.185): icmp_req=5 ttl=51 time=220 ms --- www.googele.com ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4003ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 190.079/219.699/267.963/26.121 ms ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 20:6a:8a:02:20:da UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:42 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:960 (960.0 B) TX bytes:960 (960.0 B) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 20:7c:8f:05:c6:bf inet addr:192.168.0.16 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::227c:8fff:fe05:c6bf/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:982 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:658 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:497250 (497.2 KB) TX bytes:95076 (95.0 KB) Thank you

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• MySQL Server 5.6 defaults changes

  - by user12626240

  We're improving the MySQL Server defaults, as announced by Tomas Ulin at MySQL Connect. Here's what we're changing:  Setting  Old  New  Notes back_log  50  50 + ( max_connections / 5 ) capped at 900 binlog_checksum  off  CRC32  New variable in 5.6 binlog_row_event_max_size  1k  8k flush_time  1800  Windows changes from 1800 to 0  Was already 0 on other platforms host_cache_size  128  128 + 1 for each of the first 500 max_connections + 1 for every 20 max_connections over 500, capped at 2000  New variable in 5.6 innodb_autoextend_increment  8  64  Now affects *.ibd files. 64 is 64 megabytes innodb_buffer_pool_instances  0  8. On 32 bit Windows only, if innodb_buffer_pool_size is greater than 1300M, default is innodb_buffer_pool_size / 128M innodb_concurrency_tickets  500  5000 innodb_file_per_table  off  on innodb_log_file_size  5M  48M  InnoDB will always change size to match my.cnf value. Also see innodb_log_compressed_pages and binlog_row_image innodb_old_blocks_time 0  1000 1 second innodb_open_files  300  300; if innodb_file_per_table is ON, higher of table_open_cache or 300 innodb_purge_batch_size  20  300 innodb_purge_threads  0  1 innodb_stats_on_metadata  on  off join_buffer_size 128k  256k max_allowed_packet  1M  4M max_connect_errors  10  100 open_files_limit  0  5000  See note 1 query_cache_size  0  1M query_cache_type  on/1  off/0 sort_buffer_size  2M  256k sql_mode  none  NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION  See later post about default my.cnf for STRICT_TRANS_TABLES sync_master_info  0  10000  Recommend: master_info_repository=table sync_relay_log  0  10000 sync_relay_log_info  0  10000  Recommend: relay_log_info_repository=table. Also see Replication Relay and Status Logs table_definition_cache  400  400 + table_open_cache / 2, capped at 2000 table_open_cache  400  2000   Also see table_open_cache_instances thread_cache_size  0  8 + max_connections/100, capped at 100 Note 1: In 5.5 there was already a rule to make open_files_limit 10 + max_connections + table_cache_size * 2 if that was higher than the user-specified value. Now uses the higher of that and (5000 or what you specify). We are also adding a new default my.cnf file and guided instructions on the key settings to adjust. More on this in a later post. We're also providing a page with suggestions for settings to improve backwards compatibility. The old example files like my-huge.cnf are obsolete. Some of the improvements are present from 5.6.6 and the rest are coming. These are ideas, and until they are in an official GA release, they are subject to change. As part of this work I reviewed every old server setting plus many hundreds of emails of feedback and testing results from inside and outside Oracle's MySQL Support team and the many excellent blog entries and comments from others over the years, including from many MySQL Gurus out there, like Baron, Sheeri, Ronald, Schlomi, Giuseppe and Mark Callaghan. With these changes we're trying to make it easier to set up the server by adjusting only a few settings that will cause others to be set. This happens only at server startup and only applies to variables where you haven't set a value. You'll see a similar approach used for the Performance Schema. The Gurus don't need this but for many newcomers the defaults will be very useful. Possibly the most unusual change is the way we vary the setting for innodb_buffer_pool_instances for 32-bit Windows. This is because we've found that DLLs with specified load addresses often fragment the limited four gigabyte 32-bit address space and make it impossible to allocate more than about 1300 megabytes of contiguous address space for the InnoDB buffer pool. The smaller requests for many pools are more likely to succeed. If you change the value of innodb_log_file_size in my.cnf you will see a message like this in the error log file at the next restart, instead of the old error message: [Warning] InnoDB: Resizing redo log from 2*64 to 5*128 pages, LSN=5735153 One of the biggest challenges for the defaults is the millions of installations on a huge range of systems, from point of sale terminals and routers though shared hosting or end user systems and on to major servers with lots of CPU cores, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of fast disk space. Our past defaults were for the smaller systems and these change that to larger shared hosting or shared end user systems, still with a bias towards the smaller end. There is a bias in favour of OLTP workloads, so reporting systems may need more changes. Where there is a conflict between the best settings for benchmarks and normal use, we've favoured production, not benchmarks. We're very interested in your feedback, comments and suggestions.

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• Access Control Lists for Roles

  - by Kyle Hatlestad

  Back in an earlier post, I wrote about how to enable entity security (access control lists, aka ACLs) for UCM 11g PS3.  Well, there was actually an additional security option that was included in that release but not fully supported yet (only for Fusion Applications).  It's the ability to define Roles as ACLs to entities (documents and folders).  But now in PS5, this security option is now fully supported.   The benefit of defining Roles for ACLs is that those user roles come from the enterprise security directory (e.g. OID, Active Directory, etc) and thus the WebCenter Content administrator does not need to define them like they do with ACL Groups (Aliases).  So it's a bit of best of both worlds.  Users are managed through the LDAP repository and are automatically granted/denied access through their group membership which are mapped to Roles in WCC.  A different way to think about it is being able to add multiple Accounts to content items...which I often get asked about.  Because LDAP groups can map to Accounts, there has always been this association between the LDAP groups and access to the entity in WCC.  But that mapping had to define the specific level of access (RWDA) and you could only apply one Account per content item or folder.  With Roles for ACLs, it basically takes away both of those restrictions by allowing users to define more then one Role and define the level of access on-the-fly. To turn on ACLs for Roles, there is a component to enable.  On the Component Manager page, click the 'advanced component manager' link in the description paragraph at the top.   In the list of Disabled Components, enable the RoleEntityACL component. Then restart.  This is assuming the other configuration settings have been made for the other ACLs in the earlier post.   Once enabled, a new metadata field called xClbraRoleList will be created.  If you are using OracleTextSearch as the search indexer, be sure to run a Fast Rebuild on the collection. For Users and Groups, these values are automatically picked up from the corresponding database tables.  In the case of Roles, there is an explicitly defined list of choices that are made available.  These values must match the roles that are coming from the enterprise security repository. To add these values, go to Administration -> Admin Applets -> Configuration Manager.  On the Views tab, edit the values for the ExternalRolesView.  By default, 'guest' and 'authenticated' are added.  Once added, you can assign the roles to your content or folder. If you are a user that can both access the Security Group for that item and you belong to that particular Role, you now have access to that item.  If you don't belong to that Role, you won't! [Extra] Because the selection mechanism for the list is using a type-ahead field, users may not even know the possible choices to start typing to.  To help them, one thing you can add to the form is a placeholder field which offers the entire list of roles as an option list they can scroll through (assuming its a manageable size)  and view to know what to type to.  By being a placeholder field, it won't need to be added to the custom metadata database table or search engine.  

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• Should I expose IObservable<T> on my interfaces?

  - by Alex

  My colleague and I have dispute. We are writing a .NET application that processes massive amounts of data. It receives data elements, groups subsets of them into blocks according to some criterion and processes those blocks. Let's say we have data items of type Foo arriving some source (from the network, for example) one by one. We wish to gather subsets of related objects of type Foo, construct an object of type Bar from each such subset and process objects of type Bar. One of us suggested the following design. Its main theme is exposing IObservable objects directly from the interfaces of our components. // ********* Interfaces ********** interface IFooSource { // this is the event-stream of objects of type Foo IObservable<Foo> FooArrivals { get; } } interface IBarSource { // this is the event-stream of objects of type Bar IObservable<Bar> BarArrivals { get; } } / ********* Implementations ********* class FooSource : IFooSource { // Here we put logic that receives Foo objects from the network and publishes them to the FooArrivals event stream. } class FooSubsetsToBarConverter : IBarSource { IFooSource fooSource; IObservable<Bar> BarArrivals { get { // Do some fancy Rx operators on fooSource.FooArrivals, like Buffer, Window, Join and others and return IObservable<Bar> } } } // this class will subscribe to the bar source and do processing class BarsProcessor { BarsProcessor(IBarSource barSource); void Subscribe(); } // ******************* Main ************************ class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var fooSource = FooSourceFactory.Create(); var barsProcessor = BarsProcessorFactory.Create(fooSource) // this will create FooSubsetToBarConverter and BarsProcessor barsProcessor.Subscribe(); fooSource.Run(); // this enters a loop of listening for Foo objects from the network and notifying about their arrival. } } The other suggested another design that its main theme is using our own publisher/subscriber interfaces and using Rx inside the implementations only when needed. //********** interfaces ********* interface IPublisher<T> { void Subscribe(ISubscriber<T> subscriber); } interface ISubscriber<T> { Action<T> Callback { get; } } //********** implementations ********* class FooSource : IPublisher<Foo> { public void Subscribe(ISubscriber<Foo> subscriber) { /* ... */ } // here we put logic that receives Foo objects from some source (the network?) publishes them to the registered subscribers } class FooSubsetsToBarConverter : ISubscriber<Foo>, IPublisher<Bar> { void Callback(Foo foo) { // here we put logic that aggregates Foo objects and publishes Bars when we have received a subset of Foos that match our criteria // maybe we use Rx here internally. } public void Subscribe(ISubscriber<Bar> subscriber) { /* ... */ } } class BarsProcessor : ISubscriber<Bar> { void Callback(Bar bar) { // here we put code that processes Bar objects } } //********** program ********* class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var fooSource = fooSourceFactory.Create(); var barsProcessor = barsProcessorFactory.Create(fooSource) // this will create BarsProcessor and perform all the necessary subscriptions fooSource.Run(); // this enters a loop of listening for Foo objects from the network and notifying about their arrival. } } Which one do you think is better? Exposing IObservable and making our components create new event streams from Rx operators, or defining our own publisher/subscriber interfaces and using Rx internally if needed? Here are some things to consider about the designs: In the first design the consumer of our interfaces has the whole power of Rx at his/her fingertips and can perform any Rx operators. One of us claims this is an advantage and the other claims that this is a drawback. The second design allows us to use any publisher/subscriber architecture under the hood. The first design ties us to Rx. If we wish to use the power of Rx, it requires more work in the second design because we need to translate the custom publisher/subscriber implementation to Rx and back. It requires writing glue code for every class that wishes to do some event processing.

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• Application Logging needs work

  Application Logging Application logging is the act of logging events that occur within an application much like how a court report documents what happens in court case. Application logs can be useful for several reasons, but the most common use for logs is to recreate steps to find the root cause of applications errors. Other uses can include the detection of Fraud, verification of user activity, or provide audits on user/data interactions. “Logs can contain different kinds of data. The selection of the data used is normally affected by the motivation leading to the logging. “ (OWASP, 2009) OWASP also stats that logging include applicable debugging information like the event date time, responsible process, and a description of the event. “There are many reasons why a logging system is a necessary part of delivering a distributed application. One of the most important is the ability to track exactly how many users are using the application during different time periods.” (Hatton, 2000) Hatton also states that application logging helps system designers determine whether parts of an application aren't being used as designed. He implies that low usage can be used to identify if users like or do not like aspects of a system based on user usage of the application. This enables application designers to extract why users don't like aspects of an application so that changes can be made to increase its usefulness and effectiveness. “Logging memory usage can also assist you in tuning up the internals of your application. If you're experiencing a randomly occurring problem, being able to match activities performed with the memory status at the time may enable you to discover the cause of the problem. It also gives you a good indication of the health of the distributed server machine at the time any activity is performed. “ (Hatton, 2000) Commonly Logged Application Events (Defined by OWASP) Access of Data Creation of Data Modification of Data in any form Administrative Functions  Configuration Changes Debugging Information(Application Events)  Authorization Attempts  Data Deletion Network Communication  Authentication Events  Errors/Exceptions Application Error Logging The functionality associated with application error logging is actually the combination of proper error handling and applications logging.  If we look back at Figure 4 and Figure 5, these code examples allow developers to handle various types of errors that occur within the life cycle of an application’s execution. Application logging can be applied within the Catch section of the TryCatch statement allowing for the errors to be logged when they occur. By placing the logging within the Catch section specific error details can be accessed that help identify the source of the error, the path to the error, what caused the error and definition of the error that occurred. This can then be logged and reviewed at a later date in order recreate the error that was received based data found in the application log. By allowing applications to log errors developers IT staff can use them to recreate errors that are encountered by end-users or other dependent systems.

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• Introducing the Metro User Interface on Windows 2012

  - by andywe

  Although I am a big fan of using PowerShell to do many of my server operations, that aspect is well covered by those far more knowledgeable than I, and there is vast information around the web already on that. The new Metro interface, and getting around both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 though is relatively new, even for those whop ran the previews. What is this? A blank Desktop!   Where did the start button go? Well, it is still there...sort of. It is hidden, and acts like an auto hidden component that appear only when the mouse is hovered over the lower left corner of the screen. Those familiar with Gnome or OSX can relate this to the "Hot Corners" functions. To get to the start button, hover your mouse in the very left corner of the task bar. Let it sit there a moment, and a small blue square with colored tiles in it called start will appear. Click it. I clicked it and now I have all the tiles..What is this?   Welcome to the Metro interface. This is a much more modern look, and although at first seems weird and cumbersome, I have actually found that it is a bit more extensible, allowing greater organization and customization than the older explorer desktop. If you look closely, you'll see each box represents either a program, or program group. First, a few basics about using the start view. First and foremost, a right mouse click will bring up a bar on the bottom, with an icon towards the right. Notice it is titled “All Apps”. An even easier way in many places is to hover your mouse in the exact opposite corner, in the upper right. A sidebar will open and expose what used to be a widget bar (remember Vista?), and there are options for Search, Start, and Settings.   Ok Great, but where is everything? It’s all there…Click the All Apps icon.   Look better? Notice the scroll bar at the bottom. Move it right..your desktop is sized to your content..so you can have a smaller, or larger amount of programs exposed. Each icon can be secondary clicked (right mouse click for most of us, and an options bar at the bottom, rather than the old small context menu, is opened with some very familiar options.   Notice the top of the Windows Explorer window has some new features. You still have your right mouse click functions, but since the shortcuts for these items already exist..just copy them. There are many ways, but here is a long way to show you more of the interface. 1. Right mouse click a program icon, and select the Open File Location option. 2. Trusty file manager opens…but if you look closely up at top edge of the window, you’ll see a nifty enhancement. An orange colored box that is titled Shortcut Tools and another lavender box Title Application tools. Each of these adds options at the top of the file manager window to make selection easy. Of course, you can still secondary click an item in the listing window too. 3. Click shortcut tools, right click your app shortcut and copy it. Then simply paste it into the desktop outside the File Explorer window Also note some of the newer features. The large icons up top below the menu that has many common operations. The options change as you select each menu item. Well, that’s it for this installment. I hope this helps you out.

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• Cloud Adoption Challenges

  - by Herve Roggero

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/hroggero/archive/2013/11/07/cloud-adoption-challenges.aspxWhile cloud computing makes sense for most organizations and countless projects, I have seen customers significantly struggle with cloud adoption challenges. This blog post is not an attempt to provide a generic assessment of cloud adoption; rather it is an account of personal experiences in the field, some of which may or may not apply to your organization. Cloud First, Burst? In the rush to cloud adoption some companies have made the decision to redesign their core system with a cloud first approach. However a cloud first approach means that the system may not work anymore on-premises after it has been redesigned, specifically if the system depends on Platform as a Service (PaaS) components (such as Azure Tables). While PaaS makes sense when your company is in a position to adopt the cloud exclusively, it can be difficult to leverage with systems that need to work in different clouds or on-premises. As a result, some companies are starting to rethink their cloud strategy by designing for on-premises first, and modify only the necessary components to burst when needed in the cloud. This generally means that the components need to work equally well in any environment, which requires leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or additional investments for PaaS applications, or both.  What’s the Problem? Although most companies can benefit from cloud computing, not all of them can clearly identify a business reason for doing so other than in very generic terms. I heard many companies claim “it’s cheaper”, or “it allows us to scale”, without any specific metric or clear strategy behind the adoption decision. Other companies have a very clear strategy behind cloud adoption and can precisely articulate business benefits, such as “we have a 500% increase in traffic twice a year, so we need to burst in the cloud to avoid doubling our network and server capacity”. Understanding the problem being solved through by adopting cloud computing can significantly help organizations determine the optimum path and timeline to adoption. Performance or Scalability? I stopped counting the number of times I heard “the cloud doesn’t scale; our database runs faster on a laptop”.  While performance and scalability are related concepts, they are nonetheless different in nature. Performance is a measure of response time under a given load (meaning with a specific number of users), while scalability is the performance curve over various loads. For example one system could see great performance with 100 users, but timeout with 1,000 users, in which case the system wouldn’t scale. However another system could have average performance with 100 users, but display the exact same performance with 1,000,000 users, in which case the system would scale. Understanding that cloud computing does not usually provide high performance, but instead provides the tools necessary to build a scalable system (usually using PaaS services such as queuing and data federation), is fundamental to proper cloud adoption. Uptime? Last but not least, you may want to read the Service Level Agreement of your cloud provider in detail if you haven’t done so. If you are expecting 99.99% uptime annually you may be in for a surprise. Depending on the component being used, there may be no associated SLA at all! Other components may be restarted at any time, or services may experience failover conditions weekly ( or more) based on current overall conditions of the cloud service provider, most of which are outside of your control. As a result, for PaaS cloud environments (and to a certain extent some IaaS systems), applications need to assume failure and gracefully retry to be successful in the cloud in order to provide service continuity to end users. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (http://www.bluesyntax.net). Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" and “PRO SQL Server 2012 Practices” from Apress, a PluralSight author, and runs the Azure Florida Association.

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• Why is the framerate (fps) capped at 60?

  - by dennmat

  ISSUE I recently moved a project from my laptop to my desktop(machine info below). On my laptop the exact same code displays the fps(and ms/f) correctly. On my desktop it does not. What I mean by this is on the laptop it will display 300 fps(for example) where on my desktop it will show only up to 60. If I add 100 objects to the game on the laptop I'll see my frame rate drop accordingly; the same test on the desktop results in no change and the frames stay at 60. It takes a lot(~300) entities before I'll see a frame drop on the desktop, then it will descend. It seems as though its "theoretical" frames would be 400 or 500 but will never actually get to that and only do 60 until there's too much to handle at 60. This 60 frame cap is coming from no where. I'm not doing any frame limiting myself. It seems like something external is limiting my loop iterations on the desktop, but for the last couple days I've been scratching my head trying to figure out how to debug this. SETUPS Desktop: Visual Studio Express 2012 Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Laptop: Visual Studio Express 2010 Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit The libraries(allegro, box2d) are the same versions on both setups. CODE Main Loop: while(!abort) { frameTime = al_get_time(); if (frameTime - lastTime >= 1.0) { lastFps = fps/(frameTime - lastTime); lastTime = frameTime; avgMspf = cumMspf/fps; cumMspf = 0.0; fps = 0; } /** DRAWING/UPDATE CODE **/ fps++; cumMspf += al_get_time() - frameTime; } Note: There is no blocking code in the loop at any point. Where I'm at My understanding of al_get_time() is that it can return different resolutions depending on the system. However the resolution is never worse than seconds, and the double is represented as [seconds].[finer-resolution] and seeing as I'm only checking for a whole second al_get_time() shouldn't be responsible. My project settings and compiler options are the same. And I promise its the same code on both machines. My googling really didn't help me much, and although technically it's not that big of a deal. I'd really like to figure this out or perhaps have it explained, whichever comes first. Even just an idea of how to go about figuring out possible causes, because I'm out of ideas. Any help at all is greatly appreciated. EDIT: Thanks All. For any others that find this to disable vSync(windows only) in opengl: First get "wglext.h". It's all over the web. Then you can use a tool like GLee or just write your own quick extensions manager like: bool WGLExtensionSupported(const char *extension_name) { PFNWGLGETEXTENSIONSSTRINGEXTPROC _wglGetExtensionsStringEXT = NULL; _wglGetExtensionsStringEXT = (PFNWGLGETEXTENSIONSSTRINGEXTPROC) wglGetProcAddress("wglGetExtensionsStringEXT"); if (strstr(_wglGetExtensionsStringEXT(), extension_name) == NULL) { return false; } return true; } and then create and setup your function pointers: PFNWGLSWAPINTERVALEXTPROC wglSwapIntervalEXT = NULL; PFNWGLGETSWAPINTERVALEXTPROC wglGetSwapIntervalEXT = NULL; if (WGLExtensionSupported("WGL_EXT_swap_control")) { // Extension is supported, init pointers. wglSwapIntervalEXT = (PFNWGLSWAPINTERVALEXTPROC) wglGetProcAddress("wglSwapIntervalEXT"); // this is another function from WGL_EXT_swap_control extension wglGetSwapIntervalEXT = (PFNWGLGETSWAPINTERVALEXTPROC) wglGetProcAddress("wglGetSwapIntervalEXT"); } Then just call wglSwapIntervalEXT(0) to disable vSync and 1 to enable vSync. I found the reason this is windows only is that openGl actually doesn't deal with anything other than rendering it leaves the rest up to the OS and Hardware. Thanks everyone saved me a lot of time!

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• When should I use a Process Model versus a Use Case?

  - by Dave Burke

  This Blog entry is a follow on to https://blogs.oracle.com/oum/entry/oum_is_business_process_and and addresses a question I sometimes get asked…..i.e. “when I am gathering requirements on a Project, should I use a Process Modeling approach, or should I use a Use Case approach?” Not surprisingly, the short answer is “it depends”! Let’s take a scenario where you are working on a Sales Force Automation project. We’ll call the process that is being implemented “Lead-to-Order”. I would typically think of this type of project as being “Process Centric”. In other words, the focus will be on orchestrating a series of human and system related tasks that ultimately deliver value to the business in a cost effective way. Put in even simpler terms……implement an automated pre-sales system. For this type of (Process Centric) project, requirements would typically be gathered through a series of Workshops where the focal point will be on creating, or confirming, the Future-State (To-Be) business process. If pre-defined “best-practice” business process models exist, then of course they could and should be used during the Workshops, but even in their absence, the focus of the Workshops will be to define the optimum series of Tasks, their connections, sequence, and dependencies that will ultimately reflect a business process that meets the needs of the business. Now let’s take another scenario. Assume you are working on a Content Management project that involves automating the creation and management of content for User Manuals, Web Sites, Social Media publications etc. Would you call this type of project “Process Centric”?.......well you could, but it might also fall into the category of complex configuration, plus some custom extensions to a standard software application (COTS). For this type of project it would certainly be worth considering using a Use Case approach in order to 1) understand the requirements, and 2) to capture the functional requirements of the custom extensions. At this point you might be asking “why couldn’t I use a Process Modeling approach for my Content Management project?” Well, of course you could, but you just need to think about which approach is the most effective. Start by analyzing the types of Tasks that will eventually be automated by the system, for example: Best Suited To? Task Name Process Model Use Case Notes Manage outbound calls Ö A series of linked human and system tasks for calling and following up with prospects Manage content revision Ö Updating the content on a website Update User Preferences Ö Updating a users display preferences Assign Lead Ö Reviewing a lead, then assigning it to a sales person Convert Lead to Quote Ö Updating the status of a lead, and then converting it to a sales order As you can see, it’s not an exact science, and either approach is viable for the Tasks listed above. However, where you have a series of interconnected Tasks or Activities, than when combined, deliver value to the business, then that would be a good indicator to lead with a Process Modeling approach. On the other hand, when the Tasks or Activities in question are more isolated and/or do not cross traditional departmental boundaries, then a Use Case approach might be worth considering. Now let’s take one final scenario….. As you captured the To-Be Process flows for the Sales Force automation project, you discover a “Gap” in terms of what the client requires, and what the standard COTS application can provide. Let’s assume that the only way forward is to develop a Custom Extension. This would now be a perfect opportunity to document the functional requirements (behind the Gap) using a Use Case approach. After all, we will be developing some new software, and one of the most effective ways to begin the Software Development Lifecycle is to follow a Use Case approach. As always, your comments are most welcome.

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• Is my class structure good enough?

  - by Rivten

  So I wanted to try out this challenge on reddit which is mostly about how you structure your data the best you can. I decided to challenge my C++ skills. Here's how I planned this. First, there's the Game class. It deals with time and is the only class main has access to. A game has a Forest. For now, this class does not have a lot of things, only a size and a Factory. Will be put in better use when it will come to SDL-stuff I guess A Factory is the thing that deals with the Game Objects (a.k.a. Trees, Lumberjack and Bears). It has a vector of all GameObjects and a queue of Events which will be managed at the end of one month. A GameObject is an abstract class which can be updated and which can notify the Event Listener The EventListener is a class which handles all the Events of a simulation. It can recieve events from a Game Object and notify the Factory if needed, the latter will manage correctly the event. So, the Tree, Lumberjack and Bear classes all inherits from GameObject. And Sapling and Elder Tree inherits from Tree. Finally, an Event is defined by an event_type enumeration (LUMBERJACK_MAWED, SAPPLING_EVOLUTION, ...) and an event_protagonists union (a GameObject or a pair of GameObject (who killed who ?)). I was quite happy at first with this because it seems quite logic and flexible. But I ended up questionning this structure. Here's why : I dislike the fact that a GameObject need to know about the Factory. Indeed, when a Bear moves somewhere, it needs to know if there's a Lumberjack ! Or it is the Factory which handles places and objects. It would be great if a GameObject could only interact with the EventListener... or maybe it's not that much of a big deal. Wouldn't it be better if I separate the Factory in three vectors ? One for each kind of GameObject. The idea would be to optimize research. If I'm looking do delete a dead lumberjack, I would only have to look in one shorter vector rather than a very long vector. Another problem arises when I want to know if there is any particular object in a given case because I have to look for all the gameObjects and see if they are at the given case. I would tend to think that the other idea would be to use a matrix but then the issue would be that I would have empty cases (and therefore unused space). I don't really know if Sapling and Elder Tree should inherit from Tree. Indeed, a Sapling is a Tree but what about its evolution ? Should I just delete the sapling and say to the factory to create a new Tree at the exact same place ? It doesn't seem natural to me to do so. How could I improve this ? Is the design of an Event quite good ? I've never used unions before in C++ but I didn't have any other ideas about what to use. Well, I hope I have been clear enough. Thank you for taking the time to help me !

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• I need help with 2D collision response (of stacking rotating polygons, with friction and gravity, for a game)

  - by Register Sole

  Hi I am looking for suggestions on how to write a collision response for game programming purpose (so not a scientific simulation). I am dealing with 2D polygons that are rotating, and I want them to be able to stack. I also want friction and gravity. I have a detection mechanism that returns the separating axis, how long the polygons are overlapping, and up to 2 points of contact. For the response, I am currently using an impulse-based response, which main idea is: find the separating axis, length of overlap, and the point of contact (if there are two, pick a random point between to simulate averaged force. i believe there are better ways than this) separate the object (modifying their positions, taking into account of their masses. i do not separate them completely though, to keep track that they are colliding to reduce jitter) calculate normal force based on the coefficient of restitution as if there is no friction. calculate friction, as if there is no normal force. I also assume that the direction of the friction is the same throughout the collision. apply the two forces (which result in a rather inaccurate result, since each force is calculated as if the other is not present. for non-rotating bodies though, this method is exact) I am aware that this method requires the coefficient of friction to be sufficiently small due to the assumption that the direction of friction stays the same in a collision. Also, the result is visually satisfying if gravity is not present. However, when there is gravity, objects on ground jitter and drift (even with zero coefficient of restitution)! It also happens for stacking objects. Larger coefficient of restitution and gravity increase the jittering. I hope you can help me with this. Some things i would like to know more about is how to handle collision with two point of contacts (how to end up having an object sitting still on the ground?), how to reduce, and prevent if possible, jitter and drift (do people use the most accurate method possible, or is there a trick to overcome this?), and how to handle multiple objects collision (for example, in the case of stacking objects, how do I check collisions between all of them and keep them all stable at every frame so they don't jitter?). A total reformulation of my algorithm is also welcomed, as long as it works. Another thing to note is that I am not making a Physics game, so I only need a visually satisfying response (though a realistic response is preferable, if it is not performance-heavy). But surely jittering and drifting objects on flat ground are not at all acceptable. In addition, I am a Physics student, so feel free to talk about impulse and whatever needed. Finally, I'm sorry for the long post. I tried to be as concise as I can. Thank you for reading it! EDIT It seems what I didn't manage to come up all this time is to separate resting contact as a class of its own and how to solve them. Currently reading the paper suggested by Jedediah. More suggestions on the topic are welcome :) CASE CLOSED After reading various papers referenced in the paper, successfully implemented simultaneous impulse method (referring to the original paper by Erin Catto, [Catt05]). Thanks maaaan!! The paper is wonderful. The current system is visibly much better than the previous. Still haven't separated resting contact as a class of its own though, which brings me to my next question. Love you all! Haha (sorry, I'm just so happy thanks to you).

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• Pass a JSON array to a WCF web service

  - by Tawani

  I am trying to pass a JSON array to a WCF service. But it doesn't seem to work. I actually pulled an array [GetStudents] out the service and sent the exact same array back to the service [SaveStudents] and nothing (empty array) was received. The JSON array is of the format: [ {"Name":"John","Age":12}, {"Name":"Jane","Age":11}, {"Name":"Bill","Age":12} ] And the contracts are of the following format: //Contracts [DataContract] public class Student{ [DataMember]public string Name { get; set; } [DataMember]public int Age{ get; set; } } [CollectionDataContract(Namespace = "")] public class Students : List<Student> { [DataMember]public Endorsements() { } [DataMember]public Endorsements(IEnumerable<Student> source) : base(source) { } } //Operations public Students GetStudents() { var result = new Students(); result.Add(new Student(){Name="John",12}); result.Add(new Student(){Name="Jane",11}); result.Add(new Student(){Name="Bill",12}); return result; } //Operations public void SaveStudents(Students list) { Console.WriteLine(list.Count); //It always returns zero } It there a particular way to send an array to a WCF REST service?

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• AWS S3 status code 403 SignatureDoesNotMatch - Check your key and signing method

  - by Matt

  i have checked a rechecked my keys and they are correct but i keep the below Exception whenever i try to upload, can anyone shed some light on this problem? 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): AmazonS3Exception: Status Code: 403, AWS Service: Amazon S3, AWS Request ID: B97CC81E13D81XXX, AWS Error Code: SignatureDoesNotMatch, AWS Error Message: The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method., S3 Extended Request ID: PPieuQpqElIizNBQPc42JwC4WnBkUciCKRT5S4HSftBraeacN8y0lKfsVP9LXXXX 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient.handleErrorResponse(AmazonHttpClient.java:659) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient.executeHelper(AmazonHttpClient.java:330) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:182) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.amazonaws.services.s3.AmazonS3Client.invoke(AmazonS3Client.java:3038) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.amazonaws.services.s3.AmazonS3Client.putObject(AmazonS3Client.java:1218) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.apprssd.capsule.S3UploaderActivity$S3PutObjectTask.doInBackground(S3UploaderActivity.java:165) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at com.apprssd.capsule.S3UploaderActivity$S3PutObjectTask.doInBackground(S3UploaderActivity.java:1) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at android.os.AsyncTask$2.call(AsyncTask.java:287) 11-01 09:21:26.331: W/System.err(13934): at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:234) 11-01 09:21:26.341: W/System.err(13934): at android.os.AsyncTask$SerialExecutor$1.run(AsyncTask.java:230) 11-01 09:21:26.341: W/System.err(13934): at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1080) 11-01 09:21:26.341: W/System.err(13934): at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:573) 11-01 09:21:26.341: W/System.err(13934): at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:841) It happens during the below. PutObjectRequest por = new PutObjectRequest( Constants.getDataBucket(), selectedZip.toString(), selectedZip); s3Client.putObject(por);

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• Mutual SSL Client Authentication

  - by nordisk

  Hi, I'm trying to achieve mutual SSL client authentication but without much success so far. Let me explain my scenario first: I have a client certificate issued by an intermediate CA whose certificate in turn was issued by a root CA (the intermediate and root CAs are within the company's network). This is the certificate I am including as part of my call to the server (using the HttpWebRequest object). The server has imported my client certificate and it is one of the certificates presented to me. An important thing to note is that the server does not trust the intermediate CA or the root for that matter. What we're trying to achieve is authentication against the certificate directly, i.e. mutual authentication using my client certificate. The error I'm getting is: "The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel." From my trace logs I also get the following: System.Net Information: 0 : [3380] SecureChannel#34868631 - We have user-provided certificates. The server has specified 2 issuer(s). Looking for certificates that match any of the issuers. System.Net Information: 0 : [3380] SecureChannel#34868631 - Left with 0 client certificates to choose from. One of the certificates presented to us from the server is the same as our client certificate but the matching between them seems to fail. It looks like it's trying to verify the issuer. Now to make things even more interesting: If the server trusts and sends back the intermediate CA then everything works fine! (This is not an option for the production environment though I'm told) Using jmeter to test the request works fine too. I can only assume that Java's SSL handshake implementation is somewhat different. So it really comes down to this: Do you need to implement mutual SSL authentication differently from normal client SSL authentication? Any ideas or comments would be greatly appreciated.

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• Is it possible for a WPF control to have an ActualWidth and ActualHeight if it has never been render

  - by DanM

  I need a Viewport3D for the sole purpose of doing geometric calculations using Petzold.Media3D.ViewportInfo. I do now want to place it in a Window. I'm creating a Viewport3D using the following code: private Viewport3D CreateViewport(MainSettings settings) { var cameraPosition = new Point3D(0, 0, settings.CameraHeight); var cameraLookDirection = new Vector3D(0, 0, -1); var cameraUpDirection = new Vector3D(0, 1, 0); var camera = new PerspectiveCamera { Position = cameraPosition, LookDirection = cameraLookDirection, UpDirection = cameraUpDirection }; var viewport = new Viewport3D { Camera = camera, Width = settings.ViewportWidth, Height = settings.ViewportHeight }; return viewport; } Later, I'm attempting to use this viewport to convert the mouse location to a 3D location using this method: public Point3D? Point2dToPoint3d(Point point) { var range = new LineRange(); var isValid = ViewportInfo.Point2DtoPoint3D(_viewport, point, out range); if (isValid) return range.PointFromZ(0); else return null; } Unfortunately, it's not working. I think the reason is that the ActualWidth and ActualHeight of the viewport and both zero (and these are read-only properties, so I can't set them manually). (I have tested the exact same with an actual rendered Viewport3D, so I know the issue is not with my converter method.) Any idea how I can get WPF to assign the ActualWidth and ActualHeight based on my Width and Height settings? I tried setting the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to Left and Top, respectively, and I also messed with the MinWidth and MinHeight, but none of these properties had any effect on the ActualWidth or ActualHeight.

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• ASP.NET MVC tries to load older version of Owin assembly

  - by d_mcg

  As a bit of context, I'm developing an ASP.NET MVC 5 application that uses OAuth-based authentication via Microsoft's OWIN implementation, for Facebook and Google only at this stage. Currently (as of v3.0.0, git-commit 4932c2f), the FacebookAuthenticationOptions and GoogleOAuth2AuthenticationOptions don't provide any property to force Facebook nor Google respectively to reauthenticate users (via appending the appropriate query string parameters) when signing in. Initially, I set out to override the following classes: FacebookAuthenticationOptions GoogleOAuth2AuthenticationOptions FacebookAuthenticationHandler (specifically AuthenticateCoreAsync()) GoogleOAuth2AuthenticationHandler (specifically AuthenticateCoreAsync()) yet discovered that the ~AuthenticationHandler classes are marked as internal. So I pulled a copy of the source for the Katana project (http://katanaproject.codeplex.com/) and modified the source accordingly. After compiling, I found that there are several dependencies that needed updating in order to use these updated assemblies (Microsoft.Owin.Security.Facebook and Microsoft.Owin.Security.Google) in the MVC project: Microsoft.Owin Microsoft.Owin.Security Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb This was done by replacing the existing project references to the 3.0.0 versions and updating those in web.config. Good news: the project compiles successfully. In debugging, I received an exception on startup: An exception of type 'System.IO.FileLoadException' occurred in [MVC web assembly].dll but was not handled in user code Additional information: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Owin.Security, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040) The underlying exception indicated that Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Owin was trying to load v2.1.0 of Microsoft.Owin.Security when calling app.UseExternalSignInCookie() from Startup.ConfigureAuth(IAppBuilder app) in Startup.Auth.cs. Unfortunately that assembly (and its other dependency, Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Owin) aren't part of the Project Katana solution, and I can't find any accessible repository for these assemblies online. Are the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity assemblies open source, like the Katana project? Is there a way to fool those assemblies to use the referenced v3.0.0 assemblies instead of v2.1.0? The /bin folder contains the 3.0.0 versions of the Owin assemblies. I've upgraded the NuGet packages for Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Owin, and this is still an issue. Any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

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