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  • WIX Installing an EXE after Msi install finishes.

    - by Chris
    Hi, I have created an MSI package which when finishes runs an exe. <Package InstallerVersion="200" Compressed="yes" /> <Media Id="1" Cabinet="media1.cab" EmbedCab="yes" /> <Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir"> <Directory Id="ProgramFilesFolder"> <Directory Id="INSTALLLOCATION" Name="Installer Example"> <Component Id="VSTOR30.EXE" Guid="4fb0aee7-ec5b-4179-8938-a2be4df8ca0e"> <File Id="VSTOR30.EXE" Source="C:\Projects\InstallationTarget\ExampleInstaller\VSTOR30.EXE" KeyPath="yes" Checksum="yes" /> </Component> </Directory> </Directory> </Directory> <Feature Id="ProductFeature" Title="Installation Target" Level="1"> <ComponentRef Id="VSTOR30.EXE" /> </Feature> <InstallExecuteSequence> <Custom Action="RunEXE" After="InstallFinalize">NOT Installed</Custom> </InstallExecuteSequence> <CustomAction Id="RunEXE" FileKey="VSTOR30.EXE" ExeCommand="[#VSTOR30.EXE]" Execute="immediate" Return="asyncNoWait"> </CustomAction> <UI /> The MSI installs but the EXE is not run. I am calling it after Install Finalize and checking the install sequence in ORCA shows that it is being called at the correct time. I need deploy this through group policy software installation which uses a silent install without inputs. If i use a custom UI and run the EXE in the exit dialog <UI> <UIRef Id="WixUI_Minimal" /> <Publish Dialog="ExitDialog" Control="Finish" Event="DoAction" Value="LaunchApplication">WIXUI_EXITDIALOGOPTIONALCHECKBOX = 1 and NOT Installed</Publish> </UI> <Property Id="WIXUI_EXITDIALOGOPTIONALCHECKBOXTEXT" Value="RunEXE" /> <!-- Step 3: Include the custom action --> <Property Id="WixShellExecTarget" Value="[#VSTOR30.exe]" /> <CustomAction Id="RunEXE" BinaryKey="WixCA" DllEntry="WixShellExec" Impersonate="yes" /> Then i can install the software after the msi has finished running, however when putting this group policy the EXE doesn't install. Is there anything i am missing? Chris

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  • Getting results in a result set from dynamic SQL in Oracle

    - by msorens
    This question is similar to a couple others I have found on StackOverflow, but the differences are signficant enough to me to warrant a new question, so here it is: I want to obtain a result set from dynamic SQL in Oracle and then display it as a result set in a SqlDeveloper-like tool, just as if I had executed the dynamic SQL statement directly. This is straightforward in SQL Server, so to be concrete, here is an example from SQL Server that returns a result set in SQL Server Management Studio or Query Explorer: EXEC sp_executesql N'select * from countries' Or more properly: DECLARE @stmt nvarchar(100) SET @stmt = N'select * from countries' EXEC sp_executesql @stmt The question "How to return a resultset / cursor from a Oracle PL/SQL anonymous block that executes Dynamic SQL?" addresses the first half of the problem--executing dynamic SQL into a cursor. The question "How to make Oracle procedure return result sets" provides a similar answer. Web search has revealed many variations of the same theme, all addressing just the first half of my question. I found this post explaining how to do it in SqlDeveloper, but that uses a bit of functionality of SqlDeveloper. I am actually using a custom query tool so I need the solution to be self-contained in the SQL code. This custom query tool similarly does not have the capability to show output of print (dbms_output.put_line) statements; it only displays result sets. Here is yet one more possible avenue using 'execute immediate...bulk collect', but this example again renders the results with a loop of dbms_output.put_line statements. This link attempts to address the topic but the question never quite got answered there either. Assuming this is possible, I will add one more condition: I would like to do this without having to define a function or procedure (due to limited DB permissions). That is, I would like to execute a self-contained PL/SQL block containing dynamic SQL and return a result set in SqlDeveloper or a similar tool. So to summarize: I want to execute an arbitrary SQL statement (hence dynamic SQL). The platform is Oracle. The solution must be a PL/SQL block with no procedures or functions. The output must be generated as a canonical result set; no print statements. The output must render as a result set in SqlDeveloper without using any SqlDeveloper special functionality. Any suggestions?

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  • Using Effect For Fog of War

    - by Qua
    I'm trying to apply fog of war to areas on the screen not currently visible to the player. I do this by rendering the game content in one RenderTarget and the the fog of war into another, and then I merge them with an effect file that takes the color from the game RenderTarget and the alpha from the fog of war render target. The FOW RenderTarget is black where the FOW appears, and white where it doesn't. This does work, but it colors the fog of war (the unrevealed locations) white instead of the intended color of black. Before applying the effect I clear the backbuffer of the device to white. When I try to clear it to black, non of the fog of war appears at all, which I assume is a product of alpha blending with black. It works for all other colors, however - giving the resulting screen a tint of that color. How do I archieve a black fog while still being able to do alpha blending between the two render targets? The rendering code for applying the FOW: private RenderTarget2D mainTarget; private RenderTarget2D lightTarget; private void CombineRenderTargetsAndDraw() { batch.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); batch.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.White); fogOfWar.Parameters["LightsTexture"].SetValue(lightTarget); batch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.AlphaBlend); fogOfWar.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); batch.Draw( mainTarget, new Rectangle(0, 0, batch.GraphicsDevice.PresentationParameters.BackBufferWidth, batch.GraphicsDevice.PresentationParameters.BackBufferHeight), Color.White ); batch.End(); } The effect file I'm using to apply the FOW: texture LightsTexture; sampler ColorSampler : register(s0); sampler LightsSampler = sampler_state{ Texture = <LightsTexture>; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0; }; float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { float2 tex = input.TexCoord; float4 color = tex2D(ColorSampler, tex); float4 alpha = tex2D(LightsSampler, tex); return float4(color.r, color.g, color.b, alpha.r); } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } }

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  • System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses("")

    - by dbasnett
    Yesterday s**ked, and today ain't (sic) looking better. I have an application I have been working on and it can be slow to start when my ISP is down because of DNS. My ISP was down for 3 hours yesterday, so I didn't think much about this piece of code I had added, until I found that it is always slow to start. This code is supposed to return your IP address and my reading of the link suggests that should be immediate, but it isn't, at least on my machine. Oh, and yesterday before the internet went down, I upgraded (oymoron) to XP SP3, and have had other problems. So my questions / request: 1. Am I doing this right? 2. If you run this on your machine does it take 39 seconds to return your IP address? It does on mine. One other note, I did a packet capture and the first request did NOT go on the wire, but the second did, and was answered quickly. So the question is what happened in XP SP3 that I am missing, besides a brain. One last note. If I resolve a FQDN all is well. Public Class Form1 'http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.dns.gethostaddresses.aspx ' 'excerpt 'The GetHostAddresses method queries a DNS server 'for the IP addresses associated with a host name. ' 'If hostNameOrAddress is an IP address, this address 'is returned without querying the DNS server. ' 'When an empty string is passed as the host name, 'this method returns the IPv4 addresses of the local host Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, _ ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click Dim stpw As New Stopwatch stpw.Reset() stpw.Start() 'originally Dns.GetHostEntry, but slow also Dim myIPs() As System.Net.IPAddress = System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses("") stpw.Stop() Debug.WriteLine("'" & stpw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds) If myIPs.Length > 0 Then Debug.WriteLine("'" & myIPs(0).ToString) 'debug '39.8990525 '192.168.1.2 stpw.Reset() stpw.Start() 'originally Dns.GetHostEntry, but slow also myIPs = System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses("www.vbforums.com") stpw.Stop() Debug.WriteLine("'" & stpw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds) If myIPs.Length > 0 Then Debug.WriteLine("'" & myIPs(0).ToString) 'debug '0.042212 '63.236.73.220 End Sub End Class

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  • how to use a tree data structure in C#

    - by matti
    I found an implementation for a tree at this SO question. Unfortunately I don't know how to use it. Also I made a change to it since LinkedList does not have Add method: delegate void TreeVisitor<T>(T nodeData); class NTree<T> { T data; List<NTree<T>> children; public NTree(T data) { this.data = data; children = new List<NTree<T>>(); } public void AddChild(T data) { children.Add(new NTree<T>(data)); } public NTree<T> GetChild(int i) { return children[i]; } public void Traverse(NTree<T> node, TreeVisitor<T> visitor) { visitor(node.data); foreach (NTree<T> kid in node.children) Traverse(kid, visitor); } } I have class named tTable and I want to store it's children and their grandchildren (...) in this tree. My need is to find immediate children and not traverse entire tree. I also might need to find children with some criteria. Let's say tTable has only name and I want to find children with names matching some criteria. tTables constructor gives name a value according to int-value (somehow). How do I use Traverse (write delegate) if I have code like this; int i = 0; Dictionary<string, NTree<tTable>> tableTreeByRootTableName = new Dictionary<string, NTree<tTable>>(); tTable aTable = new tTable(i++); tableTreeByRootTableName[aTable.Name] = new NTree(aTable); tableTreeByRootTableName[aTable.Name].AddChild(new tTable(i++)); tableTreeByRootTableName[aTable.Name].AddChild(new tTable(i++)); tableTreeByRootTableName[aTable.Name].GetChild(1).AddChild(new tTable(i++));

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  • WiX custom action with DTF... quite confused...

    - by Joshua
    Okay, I have decided the only way I can do what I want to do with WiX (thanks to an old installer I didn't write that I now have to upgrade) is with some CUSTOM ACTIONS. Basically, I need to back up a file before the RemoveExistingProducts and restore that file again after RemoveExistingProducts. I think this is what's called a "type 2 custom action." The sequencing I think I understand, however, what I don't understand is first of all how I pass data to my C# action (the directory the file is in from the WiX) and how to reference my C# (DTF?) action with the Binary and CustomAction tags. Also, does all this need to be in a tag? All the examples show it that way. Here is what I have so far in the .WXS file... <Binary Id="backupSettingsAction.dll" SourceFile="backupSettingsAction.CA.dll"/> <CustomAction Id="BackupSettingsAction" BinaryKey="backupSettingsAction.dll" DllEntry="CustomAction" Execute="immediate" /> <InstallExecuteSequence> <Custom Action="backupSettingsAction.dll" Before="InstallInitialize"/> <RemoveExistingProducts After="InstallFinalize" /> <Custom Action="restoreSettingsAction.dll" After="RemoveExistingFiles"/> </InstallExecuteSequence> The file I need to back up is a settings file from the previous install (which needs to remain intact), it is located in the directory: <Directory Id="CommonAppDataFolder" Name="CommonAppData"> <Directory Id="CommonAppDataPathways" Name="Pathways" /> </Directory> And even has a Component tag for it, though I need to back the file up that exists already: <Component Id="Settings" Guid="A3513208-4F12-4496-B609-197812B4A953" NeverOverwrite="yes" > <File Id="settingsXml" ShortName="SETTINGS.XML" Name="Settings.xml" DiskId="1" Source="\\fileserver\Release\Pathways\Dependencies\Settings\settings.xml" Vital="yes" /> </Component> And this is referencing the C# file that Visual Studio (2005) created for me: namespace backupSettingsAction { public class CustomActions { [CustomAction] public static ActionResult CustomAction1(Session session) { session.Log("backing up settings file"); //do I hardcode the directory and name of the file in here, or can I pass them in? return ActionResult.Success; } } } Any help is greatly apprecaited. Thank you!

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  • Autocomplete server-side implementation

    - by toluju
    What is a fast and efficient way to implement the server-side component for an autocomplete feature in an html input box? I am writing a service to autocomplete user queries in our web interface's main search box, and the completions are displayed in an ajax-powered dropdown. The data we are running queries against is simply a large table of concepts our system knows about, which matches roughly with the set of wikipedia page titles. For this service obviously speed is of utmost importance, as responsiveness of the web page is important to the user experience. The current implementation simply loads all concepts into memory in a sorted set, and performs a simple log(n) lookup on a user keystroke. The tailset is then used to provide additional matches beyond the closest match. The problem with this solution is that it does not scale. It currently is running up against the VM heap space limit (I've set -Xmx2g, which is about the most we can push on our 32 bit machines), and this prevents us from expanding our concept table or adding more functionality. Switching to 64-bit VMs on machines with more memory isn't an immediate option. I've been hesitant to start working on a disk-based solution as I am concerned that disk seek time will kill performance. Are there possible solutions that will let me scale better, either entirely in memory or with some fast disk-backed implementations? Edits: @Gandalf: For our use case it is important the the autocompletion is comprehensive and isn't just extra help for the user. As for what we are completing, it is a list of concept-type pairs. For example, possible entries are [("Microsoft", "Software Company"), ("Jeff Atwood", "Programmer"), ("StackOverflow.com", "Website")]. We are using Lucene for the full search once a user selects an item from the autocomplete list, but I am not yet sure Lucene would work well for the autocomplete itself. @Glen: No databases are being used here. When I'm talking about a table I just mean the structured representation of my data. @Jason Day: My original implementation to this problem was to use a Trie, but the memory bloat with that was actually worse than the sorted set due to needing a large number of object references. I'll read on the ternary search trees to see if it could be of use.

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  • a4j:support within a rich:modalPanel

    - by Andy Deighton
    Hi all, I've hit a wall. I know the a4j and rich tags pretty well (I use Seam 2.2.0 and Richfaces 3.3.1). However, I'm trying to do something quite simple, but in a rich:modalPanel. It seems that rich:modalPanels do not allow Ajax events to be fired. Here's a simple breakdown: I have a h:selectOneMenu with some items in it and whose value is attached to a backing bean. Attached to that h:selectOneMenu is a a4j:support tag so that whenever the change event is fired, the backing bean should get updated. Truly simple stuff eh? However, when this h:selectOneMenu is in a rich:modalPanel the onchange event doesn't update the backing bean until the rich:modalPanel closes. I can confirm this because I'm running it in Eclipse debug mode and I have a breakpoint on the setter of the property that's hooked up to the h:selectOneMenu. This is driving me mad! This is vanilla stuff for Ajax, but rich:modalPanels don't seem to allow it. So, the question is: can I do Ajax stuff within a rich:modalPanel? I'm basically trying to use the rich:modalPanel as a form (I've tried a4j:form and h:form to no avail) that reacts to changes to the drop down (e.g. when the user changes the drop down, a certain part of the form should get reRendered). Am I trying to do something that's not possible? Here's a simplified version of the modalPanel: <rich:modalPanel id="quickAddPanel"> <div> <a4j:form id="quickAddPaymentForm" ajaxSubmit="true"> <s:decorate id="paymentTypeDecorator"> <a4j:region> <h:selectOneMenu id="paymentType" required="true" value="#{backingBean.paymentType}" tabindex="1"> <s:selectItems label="#{type.description}" noSelectionLabel="Please select..." value="#{incomingPaymentTypes}" var="type"/> <s:convertEnum/> <a4j:support ajaxSingle="true" event="onchange" eventsQueue="paymentQueue" immediate="true" limitToList="true" reRender="paymentTypeDecorator, paymentDetailsOutputPanel, quickAddPaymentForm"/> </h:selectOneMenu> </a4j:region> </s:decorate> </fieldset> <fieldset class="standard-form"> <div class="form-title">Payment details</div> <a4j:outputPanel id="paymentDetailsOutputPanel"> <h:outputText value="This should change whenever dropdown changes: #{backingBean.paymentType}"/> </a4j:outputPanel> </fieldset> </a4j:form> </div> </rich:modalPanel> Regards, Andy

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  • dynamic module creation

    - by intuited
    I'd like to dynamically create a module from a dictionary, and I'm wondering if adding an element to sys.modules is really the best way to do this. EG context = { a: 1, b: 2 } import types test_context_module = types.ModuleType('TestContext', 'Module created to provide a context for tests') test_context_module.__dict__.update(context) import sys sys.modules['TestContext'] = test_context_module My immediate goal in this regard is to be able to provide a context for timing test execution: import timeit timeit.Timer('a + b', 'from TestContext import *') It seems that there are other ways to do this, since the Timer constructor takes objects as well as strings. I'm still interested in learning how to do this though, since a) it has other potential applications; and b) I'm not sure exactly how to use objects with the Timer constructor; doing so may prove to be less appropriate than this approach in some circumstances. EDITS/REVELATIONS/PHOOEYS/EUREKAE: I've realized that the example code relating to running timing tests won't actually work, because import * only works at the module level, and the context in which that statement is executed is that of a function in the testit module. In other words, the globals dictionary used when executing that code is that of main, since that's where I was when I wrote the code in the interactive shell. So that rationale for figuring this out is a bit botched, but it's still a valid question. I've discovered that the code run in the first set of examples has the undesirable effect that the namespace in which the newly created module's code executes is that of the module in which it was declared, not its own module. This is like way weird, and could lead to all sorts of unexpected rattlesnakeic sketchiness. So I'm pretty sure that this is not how this sort of thing is meant to be done, if it is in fact something that the Guido doth shine upon. The similar-but-subtly-different case of dynamically loading a module from a file that is not in python's include path is quite easily accomplished using imp.load_source('NewModuleName', 'path/to/module/module_to_load.py'). This does load the module into sys.modules. However this doesn't really answer my question, because really, what if you're running python on an embedded platform with no filesystem? I'm battling a considerable case of information overload at the moment, so I could be mistaken, but there doesn't seem to be anything in the imp module that's capable of this. But the question, essentially, at this point is how to set the global (ie module) context for an object. Maybe I should ask that more specifically? And at a larger scope, how to get Python to do this while shoehorning objects into a given module?

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  • Persistent (purely functional) Red-Black trees on disk performance

    - by Waneck
    I'm studying the best data structures to implement a simple open-source object temporal database, and currently I'm very fond of using Persistent Red-Black trees to do it. My main reasons for using persistent data structures is first of all to minimize the use of locks, so the database can be as parallel as possible. Also it will be easier to implement ACID transactions and even being able to abstract the database to work in parallel on a cluster of some kind. The great thing of this approach is that it makes possible implementing temporal databases almost for free. And this is something quite nice to have, specially for web and for data analysis (e.g. trends). All of this is very cool, but I'm a little suspicious about the overall performance of using a persistent data structure on disk. Even though there are some very fast disks available today, and all writes can be done asynchronously, so a response is always immediate, I don't want to build all application under a false premise, only to realize it isn't really a good way to do it. Here's my line of thought: - Since all writes are done asynchronously, and using a persistent data structure will enable not to invalidate the previous - and currently valid - structure, the write time isn't really a bottleneck. - There are some literature on structures like this that are exactly for disk usage. But it seems to me that these techniques will add more read overhead to achieve faster writes. But I think that exactly the opposite is preferable. Also many of these techniques really do end up with a multi-versioned trees, but they aren't strictly immutable, which is something very crucial to justify the persistent overhead. - I know there still will have to be some kind of locking when appending values to the database, and I also know there should be a good garbage collecting logic if not all versions are to be maintained (otherwise the file size will surely rise dramatically). Also a delta compression system could be thought about. - Of all search trees structures, I really think Red-Blacks are the most close to what I need, since they offer the least number of rotations. But there are some possible pitfalls along the way: - Asynchronous writes -could- affect applications that need the data in real time. But I don't think that is the case with web applications, most of the time. Also when real-time data is needed, another solutions could be devised, like a check-in/check-out system of specific data that will need to be worked on a more real-time manner. - Also they could lead to some commit conflicts, though I fail to think of a good example of when it could happen. Also commit conflicts can occur in normal RDBMS, if two threads are working with the same data, right? - The overhead of having an immutable interface like this will grow exponentially and everything is doomed to fail soon, so this all is a bad idea. Any thoughts? Thanks! edit: There seems to be a misunderstanding of what a persistent data structure is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure

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  • Is it possible to create a C++ factory system that can create an instance of any "registered" object

    - by chrensli
    Hello, I've spent my entire day researching this topic, so it is with some scattered knowledge on the topic that i come to you with this inquiry. Please allow me to describe what I am attempting to accomplish, and maybe you can either suggest a solution to the immediate question, or another way to tackle the problem entirely. I am trying to mimic something related to how XAML files work in WPF, where you are essentially instantiating an object tree from an XML definition. If this is incorrect, please inform. This issue is otherwise unrelated to WPF, C#, or anything managed - I solely mention it because it is a similar concept.. So, I've created an XML parser class already, and generated a node tree based on ObjectNode objects. ObjectNode objects hold a string value called type, and they have an std::vector of child ObjectNode objects. The next step is to instantiate a tree of objects based on the data in the ObjectNode tree. This intermediate ObjectNode tree is needed because the same ObjectNode tree might be instantiated multiple times or delayed as needed. The tree of objects that is being created is such that the nodes in the tree are descendants of a common base class, which for now we can refer to as MyBase. Leaf nodes can be of any type, not necessarily derived from MyBase. To make this more challenging, I will not know what types of MyBase derived objects might be involved, so I need to allow for new types to be registered with the factory. I am aware of boost's factory. Their docs have an interesting little design paragraph on this page: o We may want a factory that takes some arguments that are forwarded to the constructor, o we will probably want to use smart pointers, o we may want several member functions to create different kinds of objects, o we might not necessarily need a polymorphic base class for the objects, o as we will see, we do not need a factory base class at all, o we might want to just call the constructor - without #new# to create an object on the stack, and o finally we might want to use customized memory management. I might not be understanding this all correctly, but that seems to state that what I'm trying to do can be accomplished with boost's factory. But all the examples I've located, seem to describe factories where all objects are derived from a base type. Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time!

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  • The big last_insert_id() problem, again.

    - by wretrOvian
    Note - this follows my question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2983685/jdbc-does-the-connection-break-if-i-lose-reference-to-the-connection-object Now i have a created a class so i can deal with JDBC easily for the rest of my code - public class Functions { private String DB_SERVER = ""; private String DB_NAME = "test"; private String DB_USERNAME = "root"; private String DB_PASSWORD = "password"; public Connection con; public PreparedStatement ps; public ResultSet rs; public ResultSetMetaData rsmd; public void connect() throws java.io.FileNotFoundException, java.io.IOException, SQLException, Exception { String[] dbParms = Parameters.load(); DB_SERVER = dbParms[0]; DB_NAME = dbParms[1]; DB_USERNAME = dbParms[2]; DB_PASSWORD = dbParms[3]; // Connect. Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver").newInstance(); con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://" + DB_SERVER + "/" + DB_NAME, DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD); } public void disconnect() throws SQLException { // Close. con.close(); } } As seen Parameters.load() refreshes the connection parameters from a file every-time, so that any changes to the same may be applied on the next immediate connection. An example of this class in action - public static void add(String NAME) throws java.io.FileNotFoundException, java.io.IOException, SQLException, Exception { Functions dbf = new Functions(); dbf.connect(); String query = "INSERT INTO " + TABLE_NAME + "(" + "NAME" + ") VALUES(?)"; PreparedStatement ps = dbf.con.prepareStatement(query); ps.setString(1, NAME); ps.executeUpdate(); dbf.disconnect(); } Now here is the problem - for adding a record to the table above, the add() method will open a connection, add the record - and then call disconnect() . What if i want to get the ID of the inserted record after i call add() -like this : Department.add("new dept"); int ID = getlastID(); Isn't it possible that another add() was called between those two statements?

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  • Abstract class and an inheritor: is it possible to factorize .parent() here?

    - by fge
    Here are what I think are the relevant parts of the code of these two classes. First, TreePointer (original source here): public abstract class TreePointer<T extends TreeNode> implements Iterable<TokenResolver<T>> { //... /** * What this tree can see as a missing node (may be {@code null}) */ private final T missing; /** * The list of token resolvers */ protected final List<TokenResolver<T>> tokenResolvers; /** * Main protected constructor * * <p>This constructor makes an immutable copy of the list it receives as * an argument.</p> * * @param missing the representation of a missing node (may be null) * @param tokenResolvers the list of reference token resolvers */ protected TreePointer(final T missing, final List<TokenResolver<T>> tokenResolvers) { this.missing = missing; this.tokenResolvers = ImmutableList.copyOf(tokenResolvers); } /** * Alternate constructor * * <p>This is the same as calling {@link #TreePointer(TreeNode, List)} with * {@code null} as the missing node.</p> * * @param tokenResolvers the list of token resolvers */ protected TreePointer(final List<TokenResolver<T>> tokenResolvers) { this(null, tokenResolvers); } //... /** * Tell whether this pointer is empty * * @return true if the reference token list is empty */ public final boolean isEmpty() { return tokenResolvers.isEmpty(); } @Override public final Iterator<TokenResolver<T>> iterator() { return tokenResolvers.iterator(); } // .equals(), .hashCode(), .toString() follow } Then, JsonPointer, which contains this .parent() method which I'd like to factorize here (original source here: public final class JsonPointer extends TreePointer<JsonNode> { /** * The empty JSON Pointer */ private static final JsonPointer EMPTY = new JsonPointer(ImmutableList.<TokenResolver<JsonNode>>of()); /** * Return an empty JSON Pointer * * @return an empty, statically allocated JSON Pointer */ public static JsonPointer empty() { return EMPTY; } //... /** * Return the immediate parent of this JSON Pointer * * <p>The parent of the empty pointer is itself.</p> * * @return a new JSON Pointer representing the parent of the current one */ public JsonPointer parent() { final int size = tokenResolvers.size(); return size <= 1 ? EMPTY : new JsonPointer(tokenResolvers.subList(0, size - 1)); } // ... } As mentioned in the subject, the problem I have here is with JsonPointer's .parent() method. In fact, the logic behind this method applies to TreeNode all the same, and therefore to its future implementations. Except that I have to use a constructor, and of course such a constructor is implementation dependent :/ Is there a way to make that .parent() method available to each and every implementation of TreeNode or is it just a pipe dream?

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  • Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite Now Available

    - by chung.wu
    Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite is now available. The management suite combines features that were available in the standalone Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle's market leading real user monitoring and configuration management capabilities to provide the most complete solution for managing E-Business Suite applications. The features that were available in the standalone management packs are now packaged into Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in 4.0, which is now fully certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control. This latest plug-in extends Grid Control with E-Business Suite specific management capabilities and features enhanced change management support. In addition, this latest release of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite also includes numerous real user monitoring improvements. General Enhancements This new release of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite offers the following key capabilities: Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Support: All components of the management suite are certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control. Built-in Diagnostic Ability: This release has numerous major enhancements that provide the necessary intelligence to determine if the product has been installed and configured correctly. There are diagnostics for Discovery, Cloning, and User Monitoring that will validate if the appropriate patches, privileges, setups, and profile options have been configured. This feature improves the setup and configuration time to be up and operational. Lifecycle Automation Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite provides a centralized view to monitor and orchestrate changes (both functional and technical) across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems. In this latest release, it provides even more control and flexibility in managing Oracle E-Business Suite changes.Change Management: Built-in Diagnostic Ability: This latest release has numerous major enhancements that provide the necessary intelligence to determine if the product has been installed and configured correctly. There are diagnostics for Customization Manager, Patch Manager, and Setup Manager that will validate if the appropriate patches, privileges, setups, and profile options have been configured. Enhancing the setup time and configuration time to be up and operational. Customization Manager: Multi-Node Custom Application Registration: This feature automates the process of registering and validating custom products/applications on every node in a multi-node EBS system. Public/Private File Source Mappings and E-Business Suite Mappings: File Source Mappings & E-Business Suite Mappings can be created and marked as public or private. Only the creator/owner can define/edit his/her own mappings. Users can use public mappings, but cannot edit or change settings. Test Checkout Command for Versions: This feature allows you to test/verify checkout commands at the version level within the File Source Mapping page. Prerequisite Patch Validation: You can specify prerequisite patches for Customization packages and for Release 12 Oracle E-Business Suite packages. Destination Path Population: You can now automatically populate the Destination Path for common file types during package construction. OAF File Type Support: Ability to package Oracle Application Framework (OAF) customizations and deploy them across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Extended PLL Support: Ability to distinguish between different types of PLLs (that is, Report and Forms PLL files). Providing better granularity when managing PLL objects. Enhanced Standard Checker: Provides greater and more comprehensive list of coding standards that are verified during the package build process (for example, File Driver exceptions, Java checks, XML checks, SQL checks, etc.) HTML Package Readme: The package Readme is in HTML format and includes the file listing. Advanced Package Search Capabilities: The ability to utilize more criteria within the advanced search package (that is, Public, Last Updated by, Files Source Mapping, and E-Business Suite Mapping). Enhanced Package Build Notifications: More detailed information on the results of a package build process. Better, more detailed troubleshooting guidance in the event of build failures. Patch Manager:Staged Patches: Ability to run Patch Manager with no external internet access. Customer can download Oracle E-Business Suite patches into a shared location for Patch Manager to access and apply. Supports highly secured production environments that prohibit external internet connections. Support for Superseded Patches: Automatic check for superseded patches. Allows users to easily add superseded patches into the Patch Run. More comprehensive and correct Patch Runs. Removes many manual and laborious tasks, frees up Apps DBAs for higher value-added tasks. Automatic Primary Node Identification: Users can now specify which is the "primary node" (that is, which node hosts the Shared APPL_TOP) during the Patch Run interview process, available for Release 12 only. Setup Manager:Preview Extract Results: Ability to execute an extract in "proof mode", and examine the query results, to determine accuracy. Used in conjunction with the "where" clause in Advanced Filtering. This feature can provide better and more accurate fine tuning of extracts. Use Uploaded Extracts in New Projects: Ability to incorporate uploaded extracts in new projects via new LOV fields in package construction. Leverages the Setup Manager repository to access extracts that have been uploaded. Allows customer to reuse uploaded extracts to provision new instances. Re-use Existing (that is, historical) Extracts in New Projects: Ability to incorporate existing extracts in new projects via new LOV fields in package construction. Leverages the Setup Manager repository to access point-in-time extracts (snapshots) of configuration data. Allows customer to reuse existing extracts to provision new instances. Allows comparative historical reporting of identical APIs, executed at different times. Support for BR100 formats: Setup Manager can now automatically produce reports in the BR100 format. Native support for industry standard formats. Concurrent Manager API Support: General Foundation now provides an API for management of "Concurrent Manager" configuration data. Ability to migrate Concurrent Managers from one instance to another. Complete the setup once and never again; no need to redefine the Concurrent Managers. User Experience Management Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite includes comprehensive capabilities for user experience management, supporting both real user and synthetic transaction based user monitoring techniques. This latest release of the management suite include numerous improvements in real user monitoring support. KPI Reporting: Configurable decimal precision for reporting of KPI and SLA values. By default, this is two decimal places. KPI numerator and denominator information. It is now possible to view KPI numerator and denominator information, and to have it available for export. Content Messages Processing: The application content message facility has been extended to distinguish between notifications and errors. In addition, it is now possible to specify matching rules that can be used to refine a selected content message specification. Note this is only available for XPath-based (not literal) message contents. Data Export: The Enriched data export facility has been significantly enhanced to provide improved performance and accessibility. Data is no longer stored within XML-based files, but is now stored within the Reporter database. However, it is possible to configure an alternative database for its storage. Access to the export data is through SQL. With this enhancement, it is now more easy than ever to use tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to analyze correlated data collected from real user monitoring and business data sources. SNMP Traps for System Events: Previously, the SNMP notification facility was only available for KPI alerting. It has now been extended to support the generation of SNMP traps for system events, to provide external health monitoring of the RUEI system processes. Performance Improvements: Enhanced dashboard performance. The dashboard facility has been enhanced to support the parallel loading of items. In the case of dashboards containing large numbers of items, this can result in a significant performance improvement. Initial period selection within Data Browser and reports. The User Preferences facility has been extended to allow you to specify the initial period selection when first entering the Data Browser or reports facility. The default is the last hour. Performance improvement when querying the all sessions group. Technical Prerequisites, Download and Installation Instructions The Linux version of the plug-in is available for immediate download from Oracle Technology Network or Oracle eDelivery. For specific information regarding technical prerequisites, product download and installation, please refer to My Oracle Support note 1224313.1. The following certifications are in progress: * Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (9, 10) * HP-UX Itanium (11.23, 11.31) * HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) (11.23, 11.31) * IBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit) (5.3, 6.1)

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  • ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF

    - by oazabir
    ParallelWork is an open source free helper class that lets you run multiple work in parallel threads, get success, failure and progress update on the WPF UI thread, wait for work to complete, abort all work (in case of shutdown), queue work to run after certain time, chain parallel work one after another. It’s more convenient than using .NET’s BackgroundWorker because you don’t have to declare one component per work, nor do you need to declare event handlers to receive notification and carry additional data through private variables. You can safely pass objects produced from different thread to the success callback. Moreover, you can wait for work to complete before you do certain operation and you can abort all parallel work while they are in-flight. If you are building highly responsive WPF UI where you have to carry out multiple job in parallel yet want full control over those parallel jobs completion and cancellation, then the ParallelWork library is the right solution for you. I am using the ParallelWork library in my PlantUmlEditor project, which is a free open source UML editor built on WPF. You can see some realistic use of the ParallelWork library there. Moreover, the test project comes with 400 lines of Behavior Driven Development flavored tests, that confirms it really does what it says it does. The source code of the library is part of the “Utilities” project in PlantUmlEditor source code hosted at Google Code. The library comes in two flavors, one is the ParallelWork static class, which has a collection of static methods that you can call. Another is the Start class, which is a fluent wrapper over the ParallelWork class to make it more readable and aesthetically pleasing code. ParallelWork allows you to start work immediately on separate thread or you can queue a work to start after some duration. You can start an immediate work in a new thread using the following methods: void StartNow(Action doWork, Action onComplete) void StartNow(Action doWork, Action onComplete, Action<Exception> failed) For example, ParallelWork.StartNow(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }, () => { workEndedAt = DateTime.Now; }); Or you can use the fluent way Start.Work: Start.Work(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }) .OnComplete(() => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }) .Run(); Besides simple execution of work on a parallel thread, you can have the parallel thread produce some object and then pass it to the success callback by using these overloads: void StartNow<T>(Func<T> doWork, Action<T> onComplete) void StartNow<T>(Func<T> doWork, Action<T> onComplete, Action<Exception> fail) For example, ParallelWork.StartNow<Dictionary<string, string>>( () => { test = new Dictionary<string,string>(); test.Add("test", "test"); return test; }, (result) => { Assert.True(result.ContainsKey("test")); }); Or, the fluent way: Start<Dictionary<string, string>>.Work(() => { test = new Dictionary<string, string>(); test.Add("test", "test"); return test; }) .OnComplete((result) => { Assert.True(result.ContainsKey("test")); }) .Run(); You can also start a work to happen after some time using these methods: DispatcherTimer StartAfter(Action onComplete, TimeSpan duration) DispatcherTimer StartAfter(Action doWork,Action onComplete,TimeSpan duration) You can use this to perform some timed operation on the UI thread, as well as perform some operation in separate thread after some time. ParallelWork.StartAfter( () => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }, () => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }, waitDuration); Or, the fluent way: Start.Work(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }) .OnComplete(() => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }) .RunAfter(waitDuration);   There are several overloads of these functions to have a exception callback for handling exceptions or get progress update from background thread while work is in progress. For example, I use it in my PlantUmlEditor to perform background update of the application. // Check if there's a newer version of the app Start<bool>.Work(() => { return UpdateChecker.HasUpdate(Settings.Default.DownloadUrl); }) .OnComplete((hasUpdate) => { if (hasUpdate) { if (MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), "There's a newer version available. Do you want to download and install?", "New version available", MessageBoxButton.YesNo, MessageBoxImage.Information) == MessageBoxResult.Yes) { ParallelWork.StartNow(() => { var tempPath = System.IO.Path.Combine( Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), Settings.Default.SetupExeName); UpdateChecker.DownloadLatestUpdate(Settings.Default.DownloadUrl, tempPath); }, () => { }, (x) => { MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), "Download failed. When you run next time, it will try downloading again.", "Download failed", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Warning); }); } } }) .OnException((x) => { MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), x.Message, "Download failed", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Exclamation); }); The above code shows you how to get exception callbacks on the UI thread so that you can take necessary actions on the UI. Moreover, it shows how you can chain two parallel works to happen one after another. Sometimes you want to do some parallel work when user does some activity on the UI. For example, you might want to save file in an editor while user is typing every 10 second. In such case, you need to make sure you don’t start another parallel work every 10 seconds while a work is already queued. You need to make sure you start a new work only when there’s no other background work going on. Here’s how you can do it: private void ContentEditor_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!ParallelWork.IsAnyWorkRunning()) { ParallelWork.StartAfter(SaveAndRefreshDiagram, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10)); } } If you want to shutdown your application and want to make sure no parallel work is going on, then you can call the StopAll() method. ParallelWork.StopAll(); If you want to wait for parallel works to complete without a timeout, then you can call the WaitForAllWork(TimeSpan timeout). It will block the current thread until the all parallel work completes or the timeout period elapses. result = ParallelWork.WaitForAllWork(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); The result is true, if all parallel work completed. If it’s false, then the timeout period elapsed and all parallel work did not complete. For details how this library is built and how it works, please read the following codeproject article: ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/parallelwork.aspx If you like the article, please vote for me.

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  • Using a "white list" for extracting terms for Text Mining

    - by [email protected]
    In Part 1 of my post on "Generating cluster names from a document clustering model" (part 1, part 2, part 3), I showed how to build a clustering model from text documents using Oracle Data Miner, which automates preparing data for text mining. In this process we specified a custom stoplist and lexer and relied on Oracle Text to identify important terms.  However, there is an alternative approach, the white list, which uses a thesaurus object with the Oracle Text CTXRULE index to allow you to specify the important terms. INTRODUCTIONA stoplist is used to exclude, i.e., black list, specific words in your documents from being indexed. For example, words like a, if, and, or, and but normally add no value when text mining. Other words can also be excluded if they do not help to differentiate documents, e.g., the word Oracle is ubiquitous in the Oracle product literature. One problem with stoplists is determining which words to specify. This usually requires inspecting the terms that are extracted, manually identifying which ones you don't want, and then re-indexing the documents to determine if you missed any. Since a corpus of documents could contain thousands of words, this could be a tedious exercise. Moreover, since every word is considered as an individual token, a term excluded in one context may be needed to help identify a term in another context. For example, in our Oracle product literature example, the words "Oracle Data Mining" taken individually are not particular helpful. The term "Oracle" may be found in nearly all documents, as with the term "Data." The term "Mining" is more unique, but could also refer to the Mining industry. If we exclude "Oracle" and "Data" by specifying them in the stoplist, we lose valuable information. But it we include them, they may introduce too much noise. Still, when you have a broad vocabulary or don't have a list of specific terms of interest, you rely on the text engine to identify important terms, often by computing the term frequency - inverse document frequency metric. (This is effectively a weight associated with each term indicating its relative importance in a document within a collection of documents. We'll revisit this later.) The results using this technique is often quite valuable. As noted above, an alternative to the subtractive nature of the stoplist is to specify a white list, or a list of terms--perhaps multi-word--that we want to extract and use for data mining. The obvious downside to this approach is the need to specify the set of terms of interest. However, this may not be as daunting a task as it seems. For example, in a given domain (Oracle product literature), there is often a recognized glossary, or a list of keywords and phrases (Oracle product names, industry names, product categories, etc.). Being able to identify multi-word terms, e.g., "Oracle Data Mining" or "Customer Relationship Management" as a single token can greatly increase the quality of the data mining results. The remainder of this post and subsequent posts will focus on how to produce a dataset that contains white list terms, suitable for mining. CREATING A WHITE LIST We'll leverage the thesaurus capability of Oracle Text. Using a thesaurus, we create a set of rules that are in effect our mapping from single and multi-word terms to the tokens used to represent those terms. For example, "Oracle Data Mining" becomes "ORACLEDATAMINING." First, we'll create and populate a mapping table called my_term_token_map. All text has been converted to upper case and values in the TERM column are intended to be mapped to the token in the TOKEN column. TERM                                TOKEN DATA MINING                         DATAMINING ORACLE DATA MINING                  ORACLEDATAMINING 11G                                 ORACLE11G JAVA                                JAVA CRM                                 CRM CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT    CRM ... Next, we'll create a thesaurus object my_thesaurus and a rules table my_thesaurus_rules: CTX_THES.CREATE_THESAURUS('my_thesaurus', FALSE); CREATE TABLE my_thesaurus_rules (main_term     VARCHAR2(100),                                  query_string  VARCHAR2(400)); We next populate the thesaurus object and rules table using the term token map. A cursor is defined over my_term_token_map. As we iterate over  the rows, we insert a synonym relationship 'SYN' into the thesaurus. We also insert into the table my_thesaurus_rules the main term, and the corresponding query string, which specifies synonyms for the token in the thesaurus. DECLARE   cursor c2 is     select token, term     from my_term_token_map; BEGIN   for r_c2 in c2 loop     CTX_THES.CREATE_RELATION('my_thesaurus',r_c2.token,'SYN',r_c2.term);     EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'insert into my_thesaurus_rules values                        (:1,''SYN(' || r_c2.token || ', my_thesaurus)'')'     using r_c2.token;   end loop; END; We are effectively inserting the token to return and the corresponding query that will look up synonyms in our thesaurus into the my_thesaurus_rules table, for example:     'ORACLEDATAMINING'        SYN ('ORACLEDATAMINING', my_thesaurus)At this point, we create a CTXRULE index on the my_thesaurus_rules table: create index my_thesaurus_rules_idx on        my_thesaurus_rules(query_string)        indextype is ctxsys.ctxrule; In my next post, this index will be used to extract the tokens that match each of the rules specified. We'll then compute the tf-idf weights for each of the terms and create a nested table suitable for mining.

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  • SQL SERVER – Shrinking Database is Bad – Increases Fragmentation – Reduces Performance

    - by pinaldave
    Earlier, I had written two articles related to Shrinking Database. I wrote about why Shrinking Database is not good. SQL SERVER – SHRINKDATABASE For Every Database in the SQL Server SQL SERVER – What the Business Says Is Not What the Business Wants I received many comments on Why Database Shrinking is bad. Today we will go over a very interesting example that I have created for the same. Here are the quick steps of the example. Create a test database Create two tables and populate with data Check the size of both the tables Size of database is very low Check the Fragmentation of one table Fragmentation will be very low Truncate another table Check the size of the table Check the fragmentation of the one table Fragmentation will be very low SHRINK Database Check the size of the table Check the fragmentation of the one table Fragmentation will be very HIGH REBUILD index on one table Check the size of the table Size of database is very HIGH Check the fragmentation of the one table Fragmentation will be very low Here is the script for the same. USE MASTER GO CREATE DATABASE ShrinkIsBed GO USE ShrinkIsBed GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Create FirstTable CREATE TABLE FirstTable (ID INT, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), City VARCHAR(100)) GO -- Create Clustered Index on ID CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_FirstTable_ID] ON FirstTable ( [ID] ASC ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create SecondTable CREATE TABLE SecondTable (ID INT, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), City VARCHAR(100)) GO -- Create Clustered Index on ID CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_SecondTable_ID] ON SecondTable ( [ID] ASC ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Insert One Hundred Thousand Records INSERT INTO FirstTable (ID,FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 100000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name) RowID, 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Insert One Hundred Thousand Records INSERT INTO SecondTable (ID,FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 100000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name) RowID, 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Check Fragmentations in the database SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent, fragment_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID('SecondTable'), NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') GO Let us check the table size and fragmentation. Now let us TRUNCATE the table and check the size and Fragmentation. USE MASTER GO CREATE DATABASE ShrinkIsBed GO USE ShrinkIsBed GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Create FirstTable CREATE TABLE FirstTable (ID INT, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), City VARCHAR(100)) GO -- Create Clustered Index on ID CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_FirstTable_ID] ON FirstTable ( [ID] ASC ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create SecondTable CREATE TABLE SecondTable (ID INT, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), City VARCHAR(100)) GO -- Create Clustered Index on ID CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_SecondTable_ID] ON SecondTable ( [ID] ASC ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Insert One Hundred Thousand Records INSERT INTO FirstTable (ID,FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 100000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name) RowID, 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Insert One Hundred Thousand Records INSERT INTO SecondTable (ID,FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 100000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name) RowID, 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Check Fragmentations in the database SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent, fragment_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID('SecondTable'), NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') GO You can clearly see that after TRUNCATE, the size of the database is not reduced and it is still the same as before TRUNCATE operation. After the Shrinking database operation, we were able to reduce the size of the database. If you notice the fragmentation, it is considerably high. The major problem with the Shrink operation is that it increases fragmentation of the database to very high value. Higher fragmentation reduces the performance of the database as reading from that particular table becomes very expensive. One of the ways to reduce the fragmentation is to rebuild index on the database. Let us rebuild the index and observe fragmentation and database size. -- Rebuild Index on FirstTable ALTER INDEX IX_SecondTable_ID ON SecondTable REBUILD GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Check Fragmentations in the database SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent, fragment_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID('SecondTable'), NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') GO You can notice that after rebuilding, Fragmentation reduces to a very low value (almost same to original value); however the database size increases way higher than the original. Before rebuilding, the size of the database was 5 MB, and after rebuilding, it is around 20 MB. Regular rebuilding the index is rebuild in the same user database where the index is placed. This usually increases the size of the database. Look at irony of the Shrinking database. One person shrinks the database to gain space (thinking it will help performance), which leads to increase in fragmentation (reducing performance). To reduce the fragmentation, one rebuilds index, which leads to size of the database to increase way more than the original size of the database (before shrinking). Well, by Shrinking, one did not gain what he was looking for usually. Rebuild indexing is not the best suggestion as that will create database grow again. I have always remembered the excellent post from Paul Randal regarding Shrinking the database is bad. I suggest every one to read that for accuracy and interesting conversation. Let us run following script where we Shrink the database and REORGANIZE. -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Check Fragmentations in the database SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent, fragment_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID('SecondTable'), NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') GO -- Shrink the Database DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (ShrinkIsBed); GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Check Fragmentations in the database SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent, fragment_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID('SecondTable'), NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') GO -- Rebuild Index on FirstTable ALTER INDEX IX_SecondTable_ID ON SecondTable REORGANIZE GO -- Name of the Database and Size SELECT name, (size*8) Size_KB FROM sys.database_files GO -- Check Fragmentations in the database SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent, fragment_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID('SecondTable'), NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') GO You can see that REORGANIZE does not increase the size of the database or remove the fragmentation. Again, I no way suggest that REORGANIZE is the solution over here. This is purely observation using demo. Read the blog post of Paul Randal. Following script will clean up the database -- Clean up USE MASTER GO ALTER DATABASE ShrinkIsBed SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE GO DROP DATABASE ShrinkIsBed GO There are few valid cases of the Shrinking database as well, but that is not covered in this blog post. We will cover that area some other time in future. Additionally, one can rebuild index in the tempdb as well, and we will also talk about the same in future. Brent has written a good summary blog post as well. Are you Shrinking your database? Well, when are you going to stop Shrinking it? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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  • RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0

    - by Rick Strahl
    There’s been a change in the way the ValidateRequest attribute on WebForms works in ASP.NET 4.0. I noticed this today while updating a post on my WebLog all of which contain raw HTML and so all pretty much trigger request validation. I recently upgraded this app from ASP.NET 2.0 to 4.0 and it’s now failing to update posts. At first this was difficult to track down because of custom error handling in my app – the custom error handler traps the exception and logs it with only basic error information so the full detail of the error was initially hidden. After some more experimentation in development mode the error that occurs is the typical ASP.NET validate request error (‘A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detetected…’) which looks like this in ASP.NET 4.0: At first when I got this I was real perplexed as I didn’t read the entire error message and because my page does have: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NewEntry.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebLog.NewEntry" MasterPageFile="~/App_Templates/Standard/AdminMaster.master" ValidateRequest="false" EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewState="false" %> WTF? ValidateRequest would seem like it should be enough, but alas in ASP.NET 4.0 apparently that setting alone is no longer enough. Reading the fine print in the error explains that you need to explicitly set the requestValidationMode for the application back to V2.0 in web.config: <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" /> Kudos for the ASP.NET team for putting up a nice error message that tells me how to fix this problem, but excuse me why the heck would you change this behavior to require an explicit override to an optional and by default disabled page level switch? You’ve just made a relatively simple fix to a solution a nasty morass of hard to discover configuration settings??? The original way this worked was perfectly discoverable via attributes in the page. Now you can set this setting in the page and get completely unexpected behavior and you are required to set what effectively amounts to a backwards compatibility flag in the configuration file. It turns out the real reason for the .config flag is that the request validation behavior has moved from WebForms pipeline down into the entire ASP.NET/IIS request pipeline and is now applied against all requests. Here’s what the breaking changes page from Microsoft says about it: The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET pages (.aspx files and their class files) and only when those pages were executing. In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.config file: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors. Ok, so ValidateRequest of the form still works as it always has but it’s actually the ASP.NET Event Pipeline, not WebForms that’s throwing the above exception as request validation is applied to every request that hits the pipeline. Creating the runtime override removes the HttpRuntime checking and restores the WebForms only behavior. That fixes my immediate problem but still leaves me wondering especially given the vague wording of the above explanation. One thing that’s missing in the description is above is one important detail: The request validation is applied only to application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST content not to all inbound POST data. When I first read this this freaked me out because it sounds like literally ANY request hitting the pipeline is affected. To make sure this is not really so I created a quick handler: public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World <hr>" + context.Request.Form.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } and called it with Fiddler by posting some XML to the handler using a default form-urlencoded POST content type: and sure enough – hitting the handler also causes the request validation error and 500 server response. Changing the content type to text/xml effectively fixes the problem however, bypassing the request validation filter so Web Services/AJAX handlers and custom modules/handlers that implement custom protocols aren’t affected as long as they work with special input content types. It also looks that multipart encoding does not trigger event validation of the runtime either so this request also works fine: POST http://rasnote/weblog/handler1.ashx HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------7cf2a327f01ae User-Agent: West Wind Internet Protocols 5.53 Host: rasnote Content-Length: 40 Pragma: no-cache <xml>asdasd</xml>--------7cf2a327f01ae *That* probably should trigger event validation – since it is a potential HTML form submission, but it doesn’t. New Runtime Feature, Global Scope Only? Ok, so request validation is now a runtime feature but sadly it’s a feature that’s scoped to the ASP.NET Runtime – effective scope to the entire running application/app domain. You can still manually force validation using Request.ValidateInput() which gives you the option to do this in code, but that realistically will only work with the requestValidationMode set to V2.0 as well since the 4.0 mode auto-fires before code ever gets a chance to intercept the call. Given all that, the new setting in ASP.NET 4.0 seems to limit options and makes things more difficult and less flexible. Of course Microsoft gets to say ASP.NET is more secure by default because of it but what good is that if you have to turn off this flag the very first time you need to allow one single request that bypasses request validation??? This is really shortsighted design… <sigh>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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  • Coming to OpenWorld? A must attend session…

    - by Ruma Sanyal
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE NTT Docomo, Inc. is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} One of the most important of NTT Docomo’s systems is ALADIN, which is a nationwide operating system shared with its eight regional subsidiaries. ALADIN has five primary functions: customer management, phone number management, information processing and storage, sales information management, and credit investigation. To enhance cost efficiency and help ensure stable operation of ALADIN, NTT Docomo has employed Oracle WebLogic Server as a new application platform. Further information on this can be found here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Last year at OpenWorld, NTT Docomo was honored as an Innovation Award Winner for: · Implementing real time sales and contract management system enabling all services requested by customers for immediate activations before customer leaves the Docomo store · A robust disaster recovery strategy, room to grow the business, and ability to move custom Java development to a platform with built in standards - WebLogic · Better performance, better reliability, better stability, and smooth migration v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet This Year's Most Impressive Innovators! This year we continue to honor customers for their most innovative and cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Join us in celebrating award recipients’ great achievements and commitment to innovation.   Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Innovators Session ID: CON7029 Tuesday September 30, 2014 @ 5-5:45 pm (PST) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts  YBCA Theater (next to Moscone North) 700 Howard St., San Francisco, CA, 94103 /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Feedback Filtration&ndash;Processing Negative Comments for Positive Gains

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    After doing 7 conferences, 5 code camps, and countless user group events, I feel that this is a post I need to write. I actually toyed with other names for this post, however those names would just lend itself to the type of behaviour I want people to avoid – the reactionary, emotional response that speaks to some deeper issue beyond immediate facts and context. Humans are incredibly complex creatures. We’re also emotional, which serves us well in certain situations but can hinder us in others. Those of us in leadership build up a thick skin because we tend to encounter those reactionary, emotional responses more often, and we’re held to a higher standard because of our positions. While we could react with emotion ourselves, as the saying goes – fighting fire with fire just makes a bigger fire. So in this post I’ll share my thought process for dealing with negative feedback/comments and how you can still get value from them. The Thought Process Let’s take a real-world example. This week I held the Prairie IT Pro & Dev Con event. We’ve gotten a lot of session feedback already, most of it overwhelmingly positive. But some not so much – and some to an extreme I rarely see but isn’t entirely surprising to me. So here’s the example from a person we’ll refer to as Mr. Horrible: How was the speaker? Horrible! Worst speaker ever! Did the session meet your expectations? Hard to tell, speaker ruined it. Other Comments: DO NOT bring this speaker back! He was at this conference last year and I hoped enough negative feedback would have taught you to not bring him back...obviously not...I will not return to this conference next year if this speaker is brought back. Now those are very strong words. “Worst speaker ever!” “Speaker ruined it” “I will not return to this conference next year if the speaker is brought back”. The speakers I invite to speak at my conference are not just presenters but friends and colleagues. When I see this, my initial reaction is of course very emotional: I get defensive, I get angry, I get offended. So that’s where the process kicks in. Step 1 – Take a Deep Breath Take a deep breath, calm down, and walk away from the keyboard. I didn’t do that recently during an email convo between some colleagues and it ended up in my reacting emotionally on Twitter – did I mention those colleagues follow my Twitter feed? Yes, I ate some crow. Ok, now that we’re calm, let’s move on to step 2. Step 2 – Strip off the Emotion We need to take off the emotion that people wrap their words in and identify the root issues. For instance, if I see: “I hated this session, the presenter was horrible! He spoke so fast I couldn’t make out what he was saying!” then I drop off the personal emoting (“I hated…”) and the personal attack (“the presenter was horrible”) and focus on the real issue this person had – that the speaker was talking too fast. Now we have a root cause of the displeasure. However, we’re also dealing with humans who are all very different. Before I call up the speaker to talk about his speaking pace, I need to do some other things first. Back to our Mr. Horrible example, I don’t really have much to go on. There’s no details of how the speaker “ruined” the session or why he’s the “worst speaker ever”. In this case, the next step is crucial. Step 3 – Validate the Feedback When I tell people that we really like getting feedback for the sessions, I really really mean it. Not just because we want to hear what individuals have to say but also because we want to know what the group thought. When a piece of negative feedback comes in, I validate it against the group. So with the speaker Mr. Horrible commented on, I go to the feedback and look at other people’s responses: 2 x Excellent 1 x Alright 1 x Not Great 1 x Horrible (our feedback guy) That’s interesting, it’s a bit all over the board. If we look at the comments more we find that the people who rated the speaker excellent liked the presentation style and found the content valuable. The one guy who said “Not Great” even commented that there wasn’t anything really wrong with the presentation, he just wasn’t excited about it. In that light, I can try to make a few assumptions: - Mr. Horrible didn’t like the speakers presentation style - Mr. Horrible was expecting something else that wasn’t communicated properly in the session description - Mr. Horrible, for whatever reason, just didn’t like this presenter Now if the feedback was overwhelmingly negative, there’s a different pattern – one that validates the negative feedback. Regardless, I never take something at face value. Even if I see really good feedback, I never get too happy until I see that there’s a group trend towards the positive. Step 4 – Action Plan Once I’ve validated the feedback, then I need to come up with an action plan around it. Let’s go back to the other example I gave – the one with the speaker going too fast. I went and looked at the feedback and sure enough, other people commented that the speaker had spoken too quickly. Now I can go back to the speaker and let him know so he can get better. But what if nobody else complained about it? I’d still mention it to the speaker, but obviously one person’s opinion needs to be weighed as such. When we did PrDC Winnipeg in 2011, I surveyed the attendees about the food. Everyone raved about it…except one person. Am I going to change the menu next time for that one person while everyone else loved it? Of course not. There’s a saying – A sure way to fail is to try to please everyone. Let’s look at the Mr. Horrible example. What can I communicate to the speaker with such limited information provided in the feedback from Mr. Horrible? Well looking at the groups feedback, I can make a few suggestions: - Ensure that people understand in the session description the style of the talk - Ensure that people understand the level of detail/complexity of the talk and what prerequisite knowledge they should have I’m looking at it as possibly Mr. Horrible assumed a much more advanced talk and was disappointed, while the positive feedback by people who – from their comments – suggested this was all new to them, were thrilled with the session level. Step 5 – Follow Up For some feedback, I follow up personally. Especially with negative or constructive feedback, its important to let the person know you heard them and are making changes because of their comments. Even if their comments were emotionally charged and overtly negative, it’s still important to reach out personally and professionally. When you remove the emotion, negative comments can be the best feedback you get. Also, people have bad days. We’ve all had one of “those days” where we talked more sternly than normal to someone, or got angry at something we’d normally shrug off. We have various stresses in our lives and sometimes they seep out in odd ways. I always try to give some benefit of the doubt, and re-evaluate my view of the person after they’ve responded to my communication. But, there is such a thing as garbage feedback. What Mr. Horrible wrote is garbage. It’s mean spirited. It’s hateful. It provides nothing constructive at all. And a tell-tale sign that feedback is garbage – the person didn’t leave their name even though there was a field for it. Step 6 – Delete It Feedback must be processed in its raw form, and the end products should drive improvements. But once you’ve figured out what those things are, you shouldn’t leave raw feedback lying around. They are snapshots in time that taken alone can be damaging. Also, you should never rest on past praise. In a future blog post, I’m going to talk about how we can provide great feedback that, even when its critical, can still be constructive.

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  • techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

    - by Adam M.
    I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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  • A faulty Caviar Blue hard drive?

    - by Glister
    We have a small "homemade" server running fully updated Debian Wheezy (amd64). One hard drive installed: WDC WD6400AAKS. The motherboard is ASUS M4N68T V2. The usual load: CPU: an average of 20% Each week about 50GB of additional space is occupied. About 47GB of uploaded files and 3GB of MySQL data. I'm afraid that the hard drive may be about to fail. I saw Pre-fail on few places when I ran: root@SERVER:/tmp# smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-4-amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Blue Serial ATA Device Model: WDC WD6400AAKS-XXXXXXX Serial Number: WD-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee XXXXXXXXXXXXX Firmware Version: 01.03B01 User Capacity: 640,135,028,736 bytes [640 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Mon Oct 28 18:55:27 2013 UTC SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x85) Offline data collection activity was aborted by an interrupting command from host. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 247) Self-test routine in progress... 70% of test remaining. Total time to complete Offline data collection: (11580) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 136) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x303f) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 157 146 021 Pre-fail Always - 5108 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2968 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 051 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 079 079 000 Old_age Always - 15445 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 051 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 051 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2950 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 426 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 2968 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 111 095 000 Old_age Always - 36 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 160 000 Old_age Always - 21716 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 051 Old_age Offline - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 15444 - Error SMART Read Selective Self-Test Log failed: scsi error aborted command Smartctl: SMART Selective Self Test Log Read Failed root@SERVER:/tmp# In one tutorial I read that the pre-fail is a an indication of coming failure, in another tutorial I read that it is not true. Can you guys help me decode the output of smartctl? It would be also nice to share suggestions what should I do if I want to ensure data integrity (about 50GB of new data each week, up to 2TB for the whole period I'm interested in). Maybe I will go with 2x2TB Caviar Black in RAID4?

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  • How you can extend Tasklists in Fusion Applications

    - by Elie Wazen
    In this post we describe the process of modifying and extending a Tasklist available in the Regional Area of a Fusion Applications UI Shell. This is particularly useful to Customers who would like to expose Setup Tasks (generally available in the Fusion Setup Manager application) in the various functional pillars workareas. Oracle Composer, the tool used to implement such extensions allows changes to be made at runtime. The example provided in this document is for an Oracle Fusion Financials page. Let us examine the case of a customer role who requires access to both, a workarea and its associated functional tasks, and to an FSM (setup) task.  Both of these tasks represent ADF Taskflows but each is accessible from a different page.  We will show how an FSM task is added to a Functional tasklist and made accessible to a user from within a single workarea, eliminating the need to navigate between the FSM application and the Functional workarea where transactions are conducted. In general, tasks in Fusion Applications are grouped in two ways: Setup tasks are grouped in tasklists available to implementers in the Functional Setup Manager (FSM). These Tasks are accessed by implementation users and in general do not represent daily operational tasks that fit into a functional business process and were consequently included in the FSM application. For these tasks, the primary organizing principle is precedence between tasks. If task "Manage Suppliers" has prerequisites, those tasks must precede it in a tasklist. Task Lists are organized to efficiently implement an offering. Tasks frequently performed as part of business process flows are made available as links in the tasklist of their corresponding menu workarea. The primary organizing principle in the menu and task pane entries is to group tasks that are generally accessed together. Customizing a tasklist thus becomes required for business scenarios where a task packaged under FSM as a setup task, is for a particular customer a regular maintenance task that is accessed for record updates or creation as part of normal operational activities and where the frequency of this access merits the inclusion of that task in the related operational tasklist A user with the role of maintaining Journals in General Ledger is also responsible for maintaining Chart of Accounts Mappings.  In the Fusion Financials Product Family, Manage Journals is a task available from within the Journals Menu whereas Chart of Accounts Mapping is available via FSM under the Define Chart of Accounts tasklist Figure 1. The Manage Chart of Accounts Mapping Task in FSM Figure 2. The Manage Journals Task in the Task Pane of the Journals Workarea Our goal is to simplify cross task navigation and allow the user to access both tasks from a single tasklist on a single page without having to navigate to FSM for the Mapping task and to the Journals workarea for the Manage task. To accomplish that, we use Oracle Composer to customize  the Journals tasklist by adding to it the Mapping task. Identify the Taskflow name and path of the FSM Task The first step in our process is to identify the underlying taskflow for the Manage Chart of Accounts Mappings task. We select to Setup and Maintenance from the Navigator to launch the FSM Application, and we query the task from Manage Tasklists and Tasks Figure 3. Task Details including Taskflow path The Manage Chart of Accounts Mapping Task Taskflow is: /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/generalLedger/sharedSetup/coaMappings/ui/flow /CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow.xml#CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow We copy that value and use it later as a parameter to our new task in the customized Journals Tasklist. Customize the Journals Page A user with Administration privileges can start the run time customization directly from the Administration Menu of the Global Area.  This customization is done at the Site level and once implemented becomes available to all users with access to the Journals Workarea. Figure 4.  Customization Menu The Oracle Composer Window is displayed in the same browser and the Hierarchy of the page component is displayed and available for modification. Figure 5.  Oracle Composer In the composer Window select the PanelFormLayout node and click on the Edit Button.  Note that the selected component is simultaneously highlighted in the lower pane in the browser. In the Properties popup window, select the Tasks List and Task Properties Tab, where the user finds the hierarchy of the Tasklist and is able to Edit nodes or create new ones. src="https://blogs.oracle.com/FunctionalArchitecture/resource/TL5.jpg" Figure 6.  The Tasklist in edit mode Add a Child Task to the Tasklist In the Edit Window the user will now create a child node at the desired level in the hierarchy by selecting the immediate parent node and clicking on the insert node button.  This process requires four values to be set as described in Table 1 below. Parameter Value How to Determine the Value Focus View Id /JournalEntryPage This is the Focus View ID of the UI Shell where the Tasklist we want to customize is.  A simple way to determine this value is to copy it from any of the Standard tasks on the Tasklist Label COA Mapping This is the Display name of the Task as it will appear in the Tasklist Task Type dynamicMain If the value is dynamicMain, the page contains a new link in the Regional Area. When you click the link, a new tab with the loaded task opens Taskflowid /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/generalLedger/sharedSetup/ coaMappings/ui/flow/ CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow.xml#CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow This is the Taskflow path we retrieved from the Task Definition in FSM earlier in the process Table 1.  Parameters and Values for the Task to be added to the customized Tasklist Figure 7.   The parameters window of the newly added Task   Access the FSM Task from the Journals Workarea Once the FSM task is added and its parameters defined, the user saves the record, closes the Composer making the new task immediately available to users with access to the Journals workarea (Refer to Figure 8 below). Figure 8.   The COA Mapping Task is now visible and can be invoked from the Journals Workarea   Additional Considerations If a Task Flow is part of a product that is deployed on the same app server as the Tasklist workarea then that task flow can be added to a customized tasklist in that workarea. Otherwise that task flow can be invoked from its parent product’s workarea tasklist by selecting that workarea from the Navigator menu. For Example The following Taskflows  belong respectively to the Subledger Accounting, and to the General Ledger Products.  /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/subledgerAccounting/accountingMethodSetup/mappingSets/ui/flow/MappingSetFlow.xml#MappingSetFlow /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/generalLedger/sharedSetup/coaMappings/ui/flow/CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow.xml#CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow Since both the Subledger Accounting and General Ledger products are part of the LedgerApp J2EE Applicaton and are both deployed on the General Ledger Cluster Server (Figure 8 below), the user can add both of the above taskflows to the  tasklist in the  /JournalEntryPage FocusVIewID Workarea. Note:  both FSM Taskflows and Functional Taskflows can be added to the Tasklists as described in this document Figure 8.   The Topology of the Fusion Financials Product Family. Note that SubLedger Accounting and General Ledger are both deployed on the Ledger App Conclusion In this document we have shown how an administrative user can edit the Tasklist in the Regional Area of a Fusion Apps page using Oracle Composer. This is useful for cases where tasks packaged in different workareas are frequently accessed by the same user. By making these tasks available from the same page, we minimize the number of steps in the navigation the user has to do to perform their transactions and queries in Fusion Apps.  The example explained above showed that tasks classified as Setup tasks, meaning made accessible to implementation users from the FSM module can be added to the workarea of their respective Fusion application. This eliminates the need to navigate to FSM to access tasks that are both setup and regular maintenance tasks. References Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5) Part Number E16691-02 (Section 3.2) Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.4) Part Number E15524-05

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  • Mac OS X 10.8 VPN Server: Bypass VPN for LAN traffic (routing LAN traffic to secondary connection)

    - by Dan Robson
    I have somewhat of an odd setup for a VPN server with OS X Mountain Lion. It's essentially being used as a bridge to bypass my company's firewall to our extranet connection - certain things our team needs to do require unfettered access to the outside, and changing IT policies to allow traffic through the main firewall is just not an option. The extranet connection is provided through a Wireless-N router (let's call it Wi-Fi X). My Mac Mini server is configured with the connection to this router as the primary connection, thus unfettered access to the internet via the router. Connections to this device on the immediate subnet are possible through the LAN port, but outside the subnet things are less reliable. I was able to configure the VPN server to provide IP addresses to clients in the 192.168.11.150-192.168.11.200 range using both PPTP and L2TP, and I'm able to connect to the extranet through the VPN using the standard Mac OS X VPN client in System Preferences, however unsurprisingly, a local address (let's call it internal.company.com) returns nothing. I tried to bypass the limitation of the VPN Server by setting up Routes in the VPN settings. Our company uses 13.x.x.x for all internal traffic, instead of 10.x.x.x, so the routing table looked something like this: IP Address ---------- Subnet Mask ---------- Configuration 0.0.0.0 248.0.0.0 Private 8.0.0.0 252.0.0.0 Private 12.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 Private 13.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 Public 14.0.0.0 254.0.0.0 Private 16.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 Private 32.0.0.0 224.0.0.0 Private 64.0.0.0 192.0.0.0 Private 128.0.0.0 128.0.0.0 Private I was under the impression that if nothing was entered here, all traffic was routed through the VPN. With something entered, only traffic specifically marked to go through the VPN would go through the VPN, and all other traffic would be up to the client to access using its own default connection. This is why I had to specifically mark every subnet except 13.x.x.x as Private. My suspicion is that since I can't reach the VPN server from outside the local subnet, it's not making a connection to the main DNS server and thus can't be reached on the larger network. I'm thinking that entering hostnames like internal.company.com aren't kicked back to the client to resolve, because the server has no idea that the IP address falls in the public range, since I suspect (probably should ping test it but don't have access to it right now) that it can't reach the DNS server to find out anything about that hostname. It seems to me that all my options for resolving this all boil down to the same type of solution: Figure out how to reach the DNS with the secondary connection on the server. I'm thinking that if I'm able to do [something] to get my server to recognize that it should also check my local gateway (let's say Server IP == 13.100.100.50 and Gateway IP == 13.100.100.1). From there Gateway IP can tell me to go find DNS Server at 13.1.1.1 and give me information about my internal network. I'm very confused about this path -- really not sure if I'm even making sense. I thought about trying to do this client side, but that doesn't make sense either, since that would add time to each and every client side setup. Plus, it just seems more logical to solve it on the server - I could either get rid of my routing table altogether or keep it - I think the only difference would be that internal traffic would also go through the server - probably an unnecessary burden on it. Any help out there? Or am I in over my head? Forward proxy or transparent proxy is also an option for me, although I have no idea how to set either of those up. (I know, Google is my friend.)

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  • smartctl -t long isn't finishing

    - by xenoterracide
    I been running smartctl -t long on a drive for about 2 days now and it seems to be stalled at 10%. short and conveyance both passed. I have to send 1 of 2 drives purchased back I found badblocks with badblocks (none on this drive and I'ts made over a pass already). I'm just wondering if I should be concerned about this. smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Serial Number: WD-WMAV51582123 Firmware Version: 80.00A80 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Mon May 10 22:19:52 2010 EDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 241) Self-test routine in progress... 10% of test remaining. Total time to complete Offline data collection: (20100) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 231) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x3031) SCT Status supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 2 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 131 131 021 Pre-fail Always - 6408 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 12 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 148 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 10 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 7 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 174 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 106 102 000 Old_age Always - 41 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Conveyance offline Completed without error 00% 99 - # 2 Extended offline Interrupted (host reset) 10% 30 - # 3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

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