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• ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

  - by ToStringTheory

  One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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• UK Oracle User Group Event: Trends in Identity Management

  - by B Shashikumar

  As threat levels rise and new technologies such as cloud and mobile computing gain widespread acceptance, security is occupying more and more mindshare among IT executives. To help prepare for the rapidly changing security landscape, the Oracle UK User Group community and our partners at Enline/SENA have put together an User Group event in London on Apr 19 where you can learn more from your industry peers about upcoming trends in identity management. Here are some of the key trends in identity management and security that we predicted at the beginning of last year and look how they have turned out so far. You have to admit that we have a pretty good track record when it comes to forecasting trends in identity management and security. Threat levels will grow—and there will be more serious breaches:   We have since witnessed breaches of high value targets like RSA and Epsilon. Most organizations have not done enough to protect against insider threats. Organizations need to look for security solutions to stop user access to applications based on real-time patterns of fraud and for situations in which employees change roles or employment status within a company. Cloud computing will continue to grow—and require new security solutions: Cloud computing has since exploded into a dominant secular trend in the industry. Cloud computing continues to present many opportunities like low upfront costs, rapid deployment etc. But Cloud computing also increases policy fragmentation and reduces visibility and control. So organizations require solutions that bridge the security gap between the enterprise and cloud applications to reduce fragmentation and increase control. Mobile devices will challenge traditional security solutions: Since that time, we have witnessed proliferation of mobile devices—combined with increasing numbers of employees bringing their own devices to work (BYOD) — these trends continue to dissolve the traditional boundaries of the enterprise. This in turn, requires a holistic approach within an organization that combines strong authentication and fraud protection, externalization of entitlements, and centralized management across multiple applications—and open standards to make all that possible.  Security platforms will continue to converge: As organizations move increasingly toward vendor consolidation, security solutions are also evolving. Next-generation identity management platforms have best-of-breed features, and must also remain open and flexible to remain viable. As a result, developers need products such as the Oracle Access Management Suite in order to efficiently and reliably build identity and access management into applications—without requiring security experts. Organizations will increasingly pursue "business-centric compliance.": Privacy and security regulations have continued to increase. So businesses are increasingly look for solutions that combine strong security and compliance management tools with business ready experience for faster, lower-cost implementations.  If you'd like to hear more about the top trends in identity management and learn how to empower yourself, then join us for the Oracle UK User Group on Thu Apr 19 in London where Oracle and Enline/SENA product experts will come together to share security trends, best practices, and solutions for your business. Register Here.

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• How do we provide valid time estimates during Sprint Planning without doing "too much" design?

  - by Michael Edenfield

  My team is getting up to speed with Scrum, but most of us are more familiar with non-agile or "pseudo-"agile methodologies. The part that is the biggest hurdle for us is running an efficient Sprint Planning meeting where we break our backlog items into tasks, and estimate hours. (I'm using the terminology from the VS2010 Scrum Template; apologies if I use the wrong word somewhere.) When we try to figure out how long a task is going to take, we often fall into the trap of designing the feature at the code level -- table layout, interfaces, etc -- in order to figure out how long that's going to take. I'm pretty sure this is not the appropriate place to be doing that kind of design. We should be scheduling tasks for these design meetings during the sprint. However, we are having trouble figuring out how else to come up with meaningful estimates for the tasks. Are there any practical habits/techniques/etc. for making a judgement call about how long a feature is going to take, without knowing how you plan to implement it? If our time estimates are going to change significantly once the design has been completed, how can we properly budget our Sprint backlog ahead of time? EDIT: Just to clarify, since some of the comments/answers are very valid but I think addressing the wrong question. We know that what we're doing is not right, and that we should be building time into the sprint for this design. Conceptually all of the developers understand that. We also also bringing in a team member with Scrum experience to keep us on track if we start going off into the weeds. The problem is that, without going through this design process, we are finding it difficult to provide concrete time estimates for anything. We are constantly saying things like "well if we design it this way it might take 8 hours but if we end up having to do this other way instead that will take about 32 but it might not be as bad once we start trying to write it...". I also assume that this process will get better once we have some historical velocity to work from, but many of the technologies and architectural patterns we are using are new to us. But if potentially-wildly-wrong estimates are just a natural part of adapting this process then we will just need to recondition ourselves to accept that :)

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• More on Map Testing

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I have been chatting with Maurice den Heijer recently about his codeplex project for the BizTalk Map Testing Framework (http://mtf.codeplex.com/). Some of you may remember the article I did for BizTalk 2009 and 2006 about how to test maps but with Maurice's project he is effectively looking at how to improve productivity and quality by building some useful testing features within the framework to simplify the process of testing maps. As part of our discussion we realized that we both had slightly different approaches to how we validate the output from the map. Put simple Maurice does some xpath validation of the data in various nodes where as my approach for most standard cases is to use serialization to allow you to validate the output using normal MSTest assertions. I'm not really going to go into the pro's and con's of each approach because I think there is a place for both and also I'm sure others have various approaches which work too. What would be great is for the map testing framework to provide support for different ways of testing which can cover everything from simple cases to some very specialized scenarios. So as agreed with Maurice I have done the sample which I will talk about in the rest of this article to show how we can use the serialization approach to create and compare the input and output from a map in normal development testing. Prerequisites One of the common patterns I usually implement when developing BizTalk solutions is to use xsd.exe to create .net classes for most of the schemas used within the solution. In the testing pattern I will take advantage of these .net classes. The Map In this sample the map we will use is very simple and just concatenates some data from the input message to the output message. Hopefully the below picture illustrates this well. The Test In the test I'm basically taking the following actions: Use the .net class generated from the schema to create an input message for the map Serialize the input object to a file Run the map from .net using the standard BizTalk test method which was generated for running the map Deserialize the output file from the map execution to a .net class representing the output schema Use MsTest assertions to validate things about the output message The below picture shows this: As you can see the code for this is pretty simple and it's all strongly typed which means changes to my schema which can affect the tests can be easily picked up as compilation errors. I can then chose to have one test which validates most of the output from the map, or to have many specific tests covering individual scenarios within the map. Summary Hopefully this post illustrates a powerful yet simple way of effectively testing many BizTalk mapping scenarios. I will probably have more conversations with Maurice about these approaches and perhaps some of the above will be included in the mapping test framework.   The sample can be downloaded from here: http://cid-983a58358c675769.office.live.com/self.aspx/Blog%20Samples/More%20Map%20Testing/MapTestSample.zip

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• Notes on implementing Visual Studio 2010 Navigate To

  - by cyberycon

  One of the many neat functions added to Visual Studio in VS 2010 was the Navigate To feature. You can find it by clicking Edit, Navigate To, or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl, (yes, that's control plus the comma key). This pops up the Navigate To dialog that looks like this: As you type, Navigate To starts searching through a number of different search providers for your term. The entries in the list change as you type, with most providers doing some kind of fuzzy or at least substring matching. If you have C#, C++ or Visual Basic projects in your solution, all symbols defined in those projects are searched. There's also a file search provider, which displays all matching filenames from projects in the current solution as well. And, if you have a Visual Studio package of your own, you can implement a provider too. Micro Focus (where I work) provide the Visual COBOL language inside Visual Studio (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ef9bc810-c133-4581-9429-b01420a9ea40 ), and we wanted to provide this functionality too. This post provides some notes on the things I discovered mainly through trial and error, but also with some kind help from devs inside Microsoft. The expectation of Navigate To is that it searches across the whole solution, not just the current project. So in our case, we wanted to search for all COBOL symbols inside all of our Visual COBOL projects inside the solution. So first of all, here's the Microsoft documentation on Navigate To: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee844862.aspx . It's the reference information on the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.NavigateTo.Interfaces Namespace, and it lists all the interfaces you will need to implement to create your own Navigate To provider. Navigate To uses Visual Studio's latest mechanism for integrating external functionality and services, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). MEF components don't require any registration with COM or any other registry entries to be found by Visual Studio. Visual Studio looks in several well-known locations for manifest files (extension.vsixmanifest). It then uses reflection to scan for MEF attributes on classes in the assembly to determine which functionality the assembly provides. MEF itself is actually part of the .NET framework, and you can learn more about it here: http://mef.codeplex.com/. To get started with Visual Studio and MEF you could do worse than look at some of the editor examples on the VSX page http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsx . I've also written a small application to help with switching between development and production MEF assemblies, which you can find on Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MEF_Switch.aspx. The Navigate To interfaces Back to Navigate To, and summarizing the MSDN reference documentation, you need to implement the following interfaces: INavigateToItemProviderFactoryThis is Visual Studio's entry point to your Navigate To implementation, and you must decorate your implementation with the following MEF export attribute: [Export(typeof(INavigateToItemProviderFactory))]  INavigateToItemProvider Your INavigateToItemProviderFactory needs to return your implementation of INavigateToItemProvider. This class implements StartSearch() and StopSearch(). StartSearch() is the guts of your provider, and we'll come back to it in a minute. This object also needs to implement IDisposeable(). INavigateToItemDisplayFactory Your INavigateToItemProvider hands back NavigateToItems to the NavigateTo framework. But to give you good control over what appears in the NavigateTo dialog box, these items will be handed back to your INavigateToItemDisplayFactory, which must create objects implementing INavigateToItemDisplay  INavigateToItemDisplay Each of these objects represents one result in the Navigate To dialog box. As well as providing the description and name of the item, this object also has a NavigateTo() method that should be capable of displaying the item in an editor when invoked. Carrying out the search The lifecycle of your INavigateToItemProvider is the same as that of the Navigate To dialog. This dialog is modal, which makes your implementation a little easier because you know that the user can't be changing things in editors and the IDE while this dialog is up. But the Navigate To dialog DOES NOT run on the main UI thread of the IDE – so you need to be aware of that if you want to interact with editors or other parts of the IDE UI. When the user invokes the Navigate To dialog, your INavigateToItemProvider gets sent a TryCreateNavigateToItemProvider() message. Instantiate your INavigateToItemProvider and hand this back. The sequence diagram below shows what happens next. Your INavigateToItemProvider will get called with StartSearch(), and passed an INavigateToCallback. StartSearch() is an asynchronous request – you must return from this method as soon as possible, and conduct your search on a separate thread. For each match to the search term, instantiate a NavigateToItem object and send it to INavigateToCallback.AddItem(). But as the user types in the Search Terms field, NavigateTo will invoke your StartSearch() method repeatedly with the changing search term. When you receive the next StartSearch() message, you have to abandon your current search, and start a new one. You can't rely on receiving a StopSearch() message every time. Finally, when the Navigate To dialog box is closed by the user, you will get a Dispose() message – that's your cue to abandon any uncompleted searches, and dispose any resources you might be using as part of your search. While you conduct your search invoke INavigateToCallback.ReportProgress() occasionally to provide feedback about how close you are to completing the search. There does not appear to be any particular requirement to how often you invoke ReportProgress(), and you report your progress as the ratio of two integers. In my implementation I report progress in terms of the number of symbols I've searched over the total number of symbols in my dictionary, and send a progress report every 16 symbols. Displaying the Results The Navigate to framework invokes INavigateToItemDisplayProvider.CreateItemDisplay() once for each result you passed to the INavigateToCallback. CreateItemDisplay() is passed the NavigateToItem you handed to the callback, and must return an INavigateToItemDisplay object. NavigateToItem is a sealed class which has a few properties, including the name of the symbol. It also has a Tag property, of type object. This enables you to stash away all the information you will need to create your INavigateToItemDisplay, which must implement an INavigateTo() method to display a symbol in an editor IDE when the user double-clicks an entry in the Navigate To dialog box. Since the tag is of type object, it is up to you, the implementor, to decide what kind of object you store in here, and how it enables the retrieval of other information which is not included in the NavigateToItem properties. Some of the INavigateToItemDisplay properties are self-explanatory, but a couple of them are less obvious: Additional informationThe string you return here is displayed inside brackets on the same line as the Name property. In English locales, Visual Studio includes the preposition "of". If you look at the first line in the Navigate To screenshot at the top of this article, Book_WebRole.Default is the additional information for textBookAuthor, and is the namespace qualified type name the symbol appears in. For procedural COBOL code we display the Program Id as the additional information DescriptionItemsYou can use this property to return any textual description you want about the item currently selected. You return a collection of DescriptionItem objects, each of which has a category and description collection of DescriptionRun objects. A DescriptionRun enables you to specify some text, and optional formatting, so you have some control over the appearance of the displayed text. The DescriptionItems property is displayed at the bottom of the Navigate To dialog box, with the Categories on the left and the Descriptions on the right. The Visual COBOL implementation uses it to display more information about the location of an item, making it easier for the user to know disambiguate duplicate names (something there can be a lot of in large COBOL applications). Summary I hope this article is useful for anyone implementing Navigate To. It is a fantastic navigation feature that Microsoft have added to Visual Studio, but at the moment there still don't seem to be any examples on how to implement it, and the reference information on MSDN is a little brief for anyone attempting an implementation.

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• Think Before You Leap - Life is Dangerous for Change Agents

  - by technodrone

  So you want to introduce agile methods to your team... The following are some "lessons learned" when from someone who advocated agile/scrum to a group that was not ready for it. "Change agents, in my experience, face negative consequences. Sometimes, most of the time at the beginning, it's painful. This is the question you might have to ask yourself. Do you want to be a developer in scrum project or do you want be a scrum master managing the process? I think with proper mentoring/training, you can become good scrum master. But is that what you want? if yes, you can go ahead, take the training. if you want to be a developer, you may not need to be certified  as scrum master. You can just pick up from a book such as Mike Cohn new book Succeeding with Agile, I am reading it now. It's good. In my experience, I did waste my resources by trying to change the culture. It cost me lot. Instead, I should have focused on technical practices that are core to agile. Then look for teams that are good at agile. I would have saved lot of energy, and time. Try baby steps first yourself in the company, and next with the team, starting with technical practices like writing unit tests, SOLID principles, patterns, refactoring, continuous integration, pairing, and peer code reviews. These have inherent pull that can bring collaboration from a team.  Once you see team adaption in core practices, then you can introduce scrum concepts like user stories/task board etc.  This idea of Leading by example seems to be working for most of the agile folks. You can pitch core practices to the manager, and the team, and start showing them how you are doing.  You can put a road map for agile adaption and you can pitch to your manager. I would include need for scrum master training as part of the road map. " I thought about his advice for a couple of weeks and read about the pitfalls of technical debt and the team not having prior awareness of agile methods. The more I read and think about it the more I think he was right.  What do you think?

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• Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

  - by Christian P

  I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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• JavaOne 2012: Camel, Twitter, Coherence, Wicket and GlassFish

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Before joining Oracle as Product Manager for WebLogic and GlassFish for Latin America, at the beggining of this year I proposed two talks to JavaOne USA that I had been presenting in Brazil for quite a while. One of them I presented last year at ApacheCon in Vancouver, Canada as well in JavaOne Brazil. In June I got the news that they were accepted as Alternate Sessions. Surprisingly enough, few weeks later and at the same time I joined Oracle, I received the news that they were officially accepted and put on schedule. Tomorrow I'll be flying to San Francisco, to my first JavaOne in the United States, and I wanted to share with you what I'm going to present there. My two sessions are these ones: Wed, 10/03, 4:30pm - CON2989 Leverage Enterprise Integration Patterns with Apache Camel and TwitterOn this one, you will be introducted to the Apache Camel framework that I had been talking about in Brazil at conferences, before joining Oracle, and to a component I contributed to integrate with Twitter. Also, you will have a preview of a new component I've been working on to integrate Camel with the Oracle Coherence distributed cache. Thu, 10/04, 3:30pm - CON3395 How Scala, Wicket, and Java EE Can Improve Web DevelopmentThis one I've been working on for quite a while. It was based on an idea to have an architecture that could be as agile as frameworks and technologies such as Ruby on Rails, PHP or Python, for rapid web development. You will be introduced to the Apache Wicket framework, another Apache project I enjoy working with and gave lots of talks at Brazilian conferences, including JavaOne Brazil, JustJava, QCon SP, and The Developers Conference. You will also be introduced to the Scala language and how to create nice DSLs to boost productiveness. And last but not least, the Java EE 6 platform, that offers an awesome improvement from previous versions with its CDI, JPA, EJB3 and JAX-RS features for web development. Other events I will be participating during my stay in SF: Geeks Bike Ride GlassFish Community Event GlassFish and Friends Party    If you have any other event to suggest, please do suggest! It's my first JavaOne and I'm really looking forward to enjoying everything. See you guys in a few days!!

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• Portable class libraries and fetching JSON

  - by Jeff

  After much delay, we finally have the Windows Phone 8 SDK to go along with the Windows 8 Store SDK, or whatever ridiculous name they’re giving it these days. (Seriously… that no one could come up with a suitable replacement for “metro” is disappointing in an otherwise exciting set of product launches.) One of the neat-o things is the potential for code reuse, particularly across Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps. This is accomplished in part with portable class libraries, which allow you to share code between different types of projects. With some other techniques and quasi-hacks, you can share some amount of code, and I saw it mentioned in one of the Build videos that they’re seeing as much as 70% code reuse. Not bad. However, I’ve already hit a super annoying snag. It appears that the HttpClient class, with its idiot-proof async goodness, is not included in the Windows Phone 8 class libraries. Shock, gasp, horror, disappointment, etc. The delay in releasing it already caused dismay among developers, and I’m sure this won’t help. So I started refactoring some code I already had for a Windows 8 Store app (ugh) to accommodate the use of HttpWebRequest instead. I haven’t tried it in a Windows Phone 8 project beyond compiling, but it appears to work. I used this StackOverflow answer as a starting point since it’s been a long time since I used HttpWebRequest, and keep in mind that it has no exception handling. It needs refinement. The goal here is to new up the client, and call a method that returns some deserialized JSON objects from the Intertubes. Adding facilities for headers or cookies is probably a good next step. You need to use NuGet for a Json.NET reference. So here’s the start: using System.Net; using System.Threading.Tasks; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; namespace MahProject {     public class ServiceClient<T> where T : class     {         public ServiceClient(string url)         {             _url = url;         }         private readonly string _url;         public async Task<T> GetResult()         {             var response = await MakeAsyncRequest(_url);             var result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(response);             return result;         }         public static Task<string> MakeAsyncRequest(string url)         {             var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);             request.ContentType = "application/json";             Task<WebResponse> task = Task.Factory.FromAsync(                 request.BeginGetResponse,                 asyncResult => request.EndGetResponse(asyncResult),                 null);             return task.ContinueWith(t => ReadStreamFromResponse(t.Result));         }         private static string ReadStreamFromResponse(WebResponse response)         {             using (var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())                 using (var reader = new StreamReader(responseStream))                 {                     var content = reader.ReadToEnd();                     return content;                 }         }     } } Calling it in some kind of repository class may look like this, if you wanted to return an array of Park objects (Park model class omitted because it doesn’t matter): public class ParkRepo {     public async Task<Park[]> GetAllParks()     {         var client = new ServiceClient<Park[]>(http://superfoo/endpoint);         return await client.GetResult();     } } And then from inside your WP8 or W8S app (see what I did there?), when you load state or do some kind of UI event handler (making sure the method uses the async keyword): var parkRepo = new ParkRepo(); var results = await parkRepo.GetAllParks(); // bind results to some UI or observable collection or something Hopefully this saves you a little time.

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• PASS Summit for SQL Starters

  - by Davide Mauri

  I’ve received a buch of emails from PASS Summit “First Timers” that are also somehow new to SQL Server (for “somehow” I mean people with less than 6 month experience but with some basic knowledge of SQL Server engine) or are catching up from SQL Server 2000. The common question regards the session one should not miss to have a broad view of the entire SQL Server platform have some insight into some specific areas of SQL Server Given that I’m on (semi-)vacantion and that I have more free time (not true, I have to prepare slides & demos for several conferences, PASS Summit  - Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 - and PASS 24H - Agile Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2012 - among them…but let’s pretend it to be true), I’ve decided to make a post to answer to this common questions. Of course this is my personal point of view and given the fact that the number and quality of session that will be delivered at PASS Summit is so high that is very difficoult to make a choice, fell free to jump into the discussion and leave your feedback or – even better – answer with another post. I’m sure it will be very helpful to all the SQL Server beginners out there. I’ve imposed to myself to choose 6 session at maximum for each Track. Why 6? Because it’s the maximum number of session you can follow in one day, and given that all the session will be on the Summit DVD, they are the answer to the following question: “If I have one day to spend in training, which session I should watch?”. Of course a Summit is not like a Course so a lot of very basics concept of well-established technologies won’t be found here. Analysis Services, Integration Services, MDX are not part of the Summit this time (at least for the basic part of them). Enough with that, let’s start with the session list ideal to have a good Overview of all the SQL Server Platform: Geospatial Data Types in SQL Server 2012 Inside Unstructured Data: SQL Server 2012 FileTable and Semantic Search XQuery and XML in SQL Server: Common Problems and Best Practice Solutions Microsoft's Big Play for Big Data Dashboards: When to Choose Which MSBI Tool Microsoft BI End-User Tools 360° for what concern Database Development, I recommend the following sessions Understanding Transaction Isolation Levels What to Look for in Execution Plans Improve Query Performance by Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing A Window into Your Data: Using SQL Window Functions Practical Uses and Optimization of New T-SQL Features in SQL Server 2012 Taking MERGE Beyond the Basics For Business Intelligence Information Delivery Analyzing SSAS Data with Excel Building Compelling Power View Reports Managed Self-Service BI PowerPivot 101  SharePoint for Business Intelligence The Best Microsoft BI Tools You've Never Heard Of and for Business Intelligence Architecture & Development BI Power Hour Building a Tabular Model Database Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS SSIS Design Patterns Storing Columnstore Indexes Hadoop and Its Ecosystem Components in Action Beside the listed sessions, First Timers should also take a look the the page PASS set up for them: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Connect/FirstTimers.aspx See you at PASS Summit!

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• Key Promoter for NetBeans

  - by Geertjan

  Whenever a menu item or toolbar button is clicked, it would be handy if NetBeans were to tell you 'hey, did you know, you can actually do this via the following keyboard shortcut', if a keyboard shortcut exists for the invoked action. After all, ultimately, a lot of developers would like to do everything with the keyboard and a key promoter feature of this kind is a helpful tool in learning the keyboard shortcuts related to the menu items and toolbar buttons you're clicking with your mouse. Above, you see the balloon message that appears for each menu item and toolbar button that you click and, below, you can see a list of all the actions that have been logged in the Notifications window. That happens automatically when an action is invoked (assuming the plugin described in this blog entry is installed), showing the display name of the action, together with the keyboard shortcut, which is presented as a hyperlink which, when clicked, re-invokes the action (which might not always be relevant, especially for context-sensitive actions, though for others it is quite useful, e.g., reopen the New Project wizard). And here's all the code. Notice that I'm hooking into the 'uigestures' functionality, which was suggested by Tim Boudreau, and I have added my own handler, which was suggested by Jaroslav Tulach, which gets a specific parameter from each new log entry handled by the 'org.netbeans.ui.actions' logger, makes sure that the parameter actually is an action, and then gets the relevant info from the action, if the relevant info exists: @OnShowingpublic class Startable implements Runnable {    @Override    public void run() {        Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("org.netbeans.ui.actions");        logger.addHandler(new StreamHandler() {            @Override            public void publish(LogRecord record) {                Object[] parameters = record.getParameters();                if (parameters[2] instanceof Action) {                    Action a = (Action) parameters[2];                    JMenuItem menu = new JMenuItem();                    Mnemonics.setLocalizedText(                            menu,                             a.getValue(Action.NAME).toString());                    String name = menu.getText();                    if (a.getValue(Action.ACCELERATOR_KEY) != null) {                        String accelerator = a.getValue(Action.ACCELERATOR_KEY).toString();                        NotificationDisplayer.getDefault().notify(                                name,                                 new ImageIcon("/org/nb/kp/car.png"),                                 accelerator,                                 new ActionListener() {                            @Override                            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {                                a.actionPerformed(e);                            }                        });                    }                }            }        });    }} Indeed, inspired by the Key Promoter in IntelliJ IDEA. Interested in trying it out? If there's interest in it, I'll put it in the NetBeans Plugin Portal.

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• In-Store Tracking Gets a Little Harder

  - by David Dorf

  Remember how Nordstrom was tracking shopper movements within their stores using the unique number, called a MAC, emitted by the WiFi radio in smartphones?  The phones didn't need to connect to the network, only have their WiFi enabled, as most people do by default.  They did this, presumably, to track shoppers' path to purchase and better understand traffic patterns.  Although there were signs explaining this at the entrances, people didn't like the notion of being tracked.  (Nevermind that there are cameras in the ceiling watching them.)  Nordstrom stopped the program. To address this concern the Future of Privacy, a Washington think tank, created Smart Store Privacy, a do-not-track service that allows consumers to register their MAC address in much the same way people register their phone numbers in the national do-not-call list.  A group of companies agreed to respect consumers' wishes and ignore smartphones listed in the database.  The database includes Bluetooth identifiers as well.  Of course you could simply turn your bluetooth and WiFi off when shopping as well. Most know that Apple prefers to use BLE beacons to contact and track smartphones within their stores.  This feature extends the typical online experience to also work in physical stores.  By identifying themselves, shoppers can expect a more tailored shopping experience much like what we've come to expect from Amazon's website, with product recommendations and offers that are (usually) relevant. But the upcoming release of iOS8 is purported to have a new feature that randomizes the WiFi MAC address of smartphones during the "probing" phase.  That is, before connecting to the WiFi network, a random MAC number is used so as to keep the smartphone's real MAC address secret.  Unless you actually connect to the store's WiFi, they won't recognize the MAC address. The details on this are still sketchy, but if the random MAC is consistent for a short period, retailers will still be able to track movements anonymously, but they won't recognize repeat visitors.  That may be sufficient for traffic analytics, but it will stymie target marketing.  In the case of marketing, using iBeacons with opt-in permission from consumers will be the way forward. There is always a battle between utility and privacy, so I expect many more changes in this area.  Incidentally, if you'd like to see where beacons are being used this site tracks them around the world.

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• WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear WebLogic partner community member Happy Birthday to our WebLogic partner Community! We launched the community a year ago, it is growing fast with almost 1,000 members and with a significant impact in our business. The WebLogic partner revenue grew significant last fiscal year. I would like to thank you for your contribution. It is indeed a great opportunity for your WebLogic service revenue, like consulting, implementation or training. There will be thousands of opportunities at our joint customer base, like iAs to WebLogic migration, J2EE platform consolidation or private clouds. We will continue to highlight these opportunities in our newsletter and offer you campaign kits. Please feel free to let us know if you are interested. I would also recommend you to give us your feedback in our WebLogic Partner Community Survey 2012! Your feedback is very important for us. We continue to offer free WebLogic 12c Bootcamps across Europe. Please make sure you register asap for your local training! In addition to this we plan to offer Exalogic 2.01 Bootcamp. If you are interested to attend it then please add your details to our wiki. Our ExaLogic kit is updated with ExaLogic 2.01 ppt & training & Installation check-list & tips & Web tier roadmap. In case you want to learn more about ExaLogic, please visit Qualogy virtual demo center. We have not only released the latest version of Tuxedo 12c but Andrejus also made a Performance Audit Tool - Runtime Diagnosis for ADF Applications which is available now. We uploaded the latest WebLogic 12c and Glassfish ppt presentation for your customer meetings to the WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required). Are you ready and prepared for Oracle Open World 2012? Make sure you read our tips and enjoy the conference! WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference is a wonderful online overview. Make sure you do not miss it! If you want to try WebLogic why not in the Oracle Cloud - Java Cloud Service. Our Java Guru Adam Bien published a new book Real World Java EE Patterns. If you use Java on your machine, Please make sure that you update your Java SE. Jürgen Kress Oracle WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/WebLogicnewsSeptember2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the WebLogic Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic Community newsletter,newsletter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• How quickly to leave contract-to-hire gig where you don't want to be hired? [closed]

  - by nono

  So you move to a big new city with tons of software development opportunity, having taken a six month contract-to-hire job. The company treats you really well and has a good team and work environment. However, the recruiter assured you when offering the gig that it would be a good position in which you can advance your learning from more senior developers (a primary concern of yours) but you're starting to realize that a job recruiter isn't going to understand that the team in question isn't very up on modern software practices (you start to sympathize with this guy and read his post over and over again: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1586166/career-killer-nhibernate-oop-design-patterns-domain-driven-design-test-driv) and that much of the company's software is very old and very very poorly architected, and the company (like so many others) seems to be only concerned with continually extending the software without investing in any structural improvements. You're absolutely dismayed at how long it takes your team (including) to fulfill simple feature requests (maybe 500-1000% longer than with better designed software that you've worked on in the past), but no one else there seems to think anything of it. You find that the work and the company's business are intensely uninteresting to you, but due to the convoluted design of their various software systems, fulfilling the work will require as much mental engagement as any other development position. You feel a bit naive about not having asked the right questions during your interview process, and for not having anticipated that your team at your former podunk company might possibly be light-years ahead of any team in Big Shiny City, but you know you don't want to stay at this place, and (were it not for your personal, after-hours studying and personal programming efforts) fear that you might actually give a worse interview after completing your 6 months than you did when you started at the place. You read about how hard of a time local companies are having filling their positions with qualified software development candidates. You read all sorts of fabulous sounding job postings online and feel like you're really missing out. In spite of the comfortable environment you feel like you would willingly accept a somewhat more demanding or aggressive lifestyle to feel like you are learning and progressing and producing something meaningful. My questions are: how quickly do you leave and how do you go about giving a polite reason for departing? The contract is written to allow them to "can" you and to allow you to leave with 2 weeks notice. Do you ethically owe the 6 months? Upon taking the position, the company told you they were not interested in candidates who were intending to only stay for 6 months and then leave (you were not intending to bail after 6 months, at that time), so perhaps they might be fine if you split now, knowing that you don't want to stick around for the full time hire?

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• Make a lives display in HUD, Flash AS3 (not text!)

  - by user40404

  I've been searching the internet all day and I can't find the answer I'm looking for. In my HUD I want to use orange dots to represent lives. The user starts off with 5 lives and every time they die, I want a dot to be removed. Pretty straight forward. So far my idea is to make a movie clip that has the five dots in a line. There would be 5 frames on the timeline (because after the last life it goes to a game over screen right away). I would have a variable set up to store the number of lives and a function to keep track of lives. So every hit of an obstacle would result in livesCounter--;. Then I would set up something like this: switch(livesCounter){ case 5: livesDisplay.gotoAndPlay(1); break; case 4: livesDisplay.gotoAndPlay(2); break; case 3: livesDisplay.gotoAndPlay(3); break; case 2: livesDisplay.gotoAndPlay(4); break; case 1: livesDisplay.gotoAndPlay(5); break; } I feel like there has to be an easier way to do this where I could just have a movie clip of a single orange dot that I could replicate across an x value based on the number of lives. Maybe the dots would be stored in an array? When the user loses a life, a dot on the right end of the line is removed. So in the end the counter would look like this: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (last life lost results in the end game screen) EDIT: code based on suggestions by Zhafur and Arthur Wolf White package { import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.events.*; import flash.ui.Multitouch; import flash.ui.MultitouchInputMode; import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.text.*; import flash.utils.getTimer; public class CollisionMouse extends MovieClip{ public var mySprite:Sprite = new Sprite(); Multitouch.inputMode = MultitouchInputMode.TOUCH_POINT; public var replacement:newSprite = new newSprite; public var score:int = 0; public var obstScore:int = -50; public var targetScore:int = 200; public var startTime:uint = 0; public var gameTime:uint; public var pauseScreen:PauseScreen = new PauseScreen(); public var hitTarget:Boolean = false; public var hitObj:Boolean = false; public var currLevel:Number = 1; public var heroLives:int = 5; public var life:Sprite; public function CollisionMouse() { mySprite.graphics.beginFill(0xff0000); mySprite.graphics.drawRect(0,0,40,40); addChild(mySprite); mySprite.x = 200; mySprite.y = 200; pauseScreen.x = stage.width/2; pauseScreen.y = stage.height/2; life = new Sprite(); life.x = 210; stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE,followMouse); /*mySprite.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH_END, onTouchEnd);*/ //checkLevel(); timeCheck(); trackLives(); } public function timeCheck(){ addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, showTime); } public function showTime(e:Event) { gameTime = getTimer()-startTime; rm1_mc.timeDisplay.text = clockTime(gameTime); rm1_mc.livesDisplay.text = String(heroLives); } public function clockTime(ms:int) { var seconds:int = Math.floor(ms/1000); var minutes:int = Math.floor(seconds/60); seconds -= minutes*60; var timeString:String = minutes+":"+String(seconds+100).substr(1,2); return timeString; } public function trackLives(){ for(var i:int=0; i<heroLives; i++){ life.graphics.lineStyle(1, 0xff9900); life.graphics.beginFill(0xff9900, 1); life.graphics.drawCircle(i*15, 45, 6); life.graphics.endFill(); addChild(life); } } function followMouse(e:MouseEvent){ mySprite.x=mouseX; mySprite.y=mouseY; trackCollisions(); } function trackCollisions(){ if(mySprite.hitTestObject(rm1_mc.obst1) || mySprite.hitTestObject(rm1_mc.obst2)){ hitObjects(); } else if(mySprite.hitTestObject(rm1_mc.target_mc)){ hitTarg(); } } function hitObjects(){ addChild(replacement); mySprite.x ^= replacement.x; replacement.x ^= mySprite.x; mySprite.x ^= replacement.x; mySprite.y ^= replacement.y; replacement.y ^= mySprite.y; mySprite.y ^= replacement.y; stage.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, followMouse); removeChild(mySprite); hitObj = true; checkScore(); } function hitTarg(){ addChild(replacement); mySprite.x ^= replacement.x; replacement.x ^= mySprite.x; mySprite.x ^= replacement.x; mySprite.y ^= replacement.y; replacement.y ^= mySprite.y; mySprite.y ^= replacement.y; stage.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, followMouse); removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, showTime); removeChild(mySprite); hitTarget = true; currLevel++; checkScore(); } function checkScore(){ if(hitObj){ score += obstScore; heroLives--; removeChild(life); } else if(hitTarget){ score += targetScore; } rm1_mc.scoreDisplay.text = String(score); rm1_mc.livesDisplay.text = String(heroLives); trackLives(); } } }

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• MVC Can the model know ANYTHING about the view?

  - by AwDogsGo2Heaven

  I'm working on a game, and without getting into any details I am using MVC "patterns", "rules" or whatever you want to call it to make the game. The view includes everything needed to draw things on the screen, the controller passes input to the model. And the Model contains game logic. Here's my problem, the game is being made for mobile devices that vary in screen sizes. I feel my model needs to know the view size so it can appropriately adjust for it. I've thought about it for a while I could put all the adjustments in the view, but it just seems inefficient to translate the model positioning to the view's needed positioning every time. If the model knows the size it only needed to adjust itself once. So my question is can I pass the view size to the model without 'breaking' MVC? I feel personally they are still decoupled this way because a size is just a number, I could still change the view any time as long as it has a size. But I wanted to get a community response on this because I haven't seen many discussions of MVC being used in a game. (And to be clear I don't want an answer of why I shouldn't use it in a game, but do I break MVC by letting it know the view's size) EDIT - More details on the game's needs and why I wanted to pass the view. Some objects positions need to be set relative to the edge of the screen (such as UI elements) so that they appear relatively in the same place. Sprite sizes are not stretched if the window size is wider such as an IPhone 5 screen. They will just be placed relatively to the screen edge. .If I gave it to the view to handle this, I will need a flag saying that this element is positioned say x number of pixels from TOP BOTTOM RIGHT LEFT. Then allow the view to draw it with that information. Its acceptable, I just wanted to know if there was a better way while still being MVC because it seems this way will be repeating a logic over and over, where as if I knew the view size in the model, I could convert all the relative positions into absolute positions in one run, but with this I have to convert on every update to the screen.

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• Why do AWS spot-instance prices spike above the "on demand" pricing?

  - by Laykes

  Amazon Pricing on Spot Instance Inconsistencies This is something which will be best explained through screenshots of a historical chart of instance pricings. If you look at a lot of the instance prices for spot instances, you will notice regular patterns of spikes. See here: As you can see, the price for this compute medium instance, regularly spikes above the on demand price. A c1.medium instance (on demand), would only cost $0.186 per hour. But for a period of a few weeks, in zone B, the price would regularly spike to $1.20. This is some 6 times the actual on demand price. It's also not isolated. If you look at zone-b again for small instances, there is a similar, spike frequently. Which goes 4x the on demand pricing. Does anyone know why this happens? Here are a few suggestions Someone entered $1.2 instead of $0.12 (I would discount this since it happened 20 times over the space of 3 weeks). Amazon regularly artifically inflate their prices by bidding on their own instances to get the most bang for their buck. (I would discount this since it would be ridiculous and bad business) Some company launched 1000 servers at once, and wants to make sure that they all launch. (I would discount this since they would presumably launch them at a price which would be below the minimum on demand price. Why would you pay above on demand for a single server?). It's a bug in their reporting?

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• How to write re-usable puppet definitions?

  - by Oliver Probst

  I'd like to write a puppet manifest to install and configure an application on target servers. Parts of this manifest shall be re-usable. Thus I used define for defining my re-usable functionality. Doing so, I've always the problem that there are parts of the definition which are not re-usable. A simple example is a bunch of configuration files to be created. These file must be placed in the same directory. This directory must be created only once. Example: nodes.pp node 'myNode.in.a.domain' { mymodule::addconfig {'configfile1.xml': param => 'somevalue', } mymodule::addconfig {'configfile2.xml': param => 'someothervalue', } } mymodule.pp define mymodule::addconfig ($param) { $config_dir = "/the/directory/" #ensure that directory exits: file { $config_dir: ensure => directory, } #create the configuration file: file { $name: path => "${config_dir}/${name}" content => template('a_template.erb'), require => File[$config_dir], } } This example will fail, because now the resource file {$config_dir: is defined twice. As far as I understood, it is required to extract these parts into a class. Then it looks like this: nodes.pp node 'myNode.in.a.domain' { class { 'mymodule::createConfigurationDirectory': } mymodule::addconfig {'configfile1.xml': param => 'somevalue', require => Class ['mymodule::createConfigurationDirectory'], } mymodule::addconfig {'configfile2.xml': param => 'someothervalue', require => Class ['mymodule::createConfigurationDirectory'], } } But this makes my interface hard use. Every user of my module has to know, that there is a class which is additionally required. For this simple use case the additional class might be acceptable. But with growing module complexity (lots of definitions) I'm a bit afraid of confusing the modules user. So I'd like to know is there a better way to handle this dependencies. Ideally, classes like createConfigurationDirectory are hidden from the user of the modules api. Or are there some other "Best Practices"/Patterns handling such dependencies?

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• USB device goes to "Unknown device" randomly

  - by ILovePaperTowels

  We have a kiosk that uses a bio scanner from m2sys (usb device). It scans your palm to recognize you. Every so often, maybe 1-3 times a day, the bio scanner will become an unknown device. We are unable to see any patterns or commonalities. When we unplug and plug it back in, it becomes available again. We have custom software that uses the bio scanner's software to communicate with it. We've added a crap load of logging on everything but there doesn't seem to be any pattern of when the thing shuts off. We have these devices deployed to multiple locations (100+) and they are all seeing the issues but we can not reproduce it here, at the main office. I've evaluated the software and I don't see anything. I'm thinking it's a driver or hardware issue (but we can't reproduce the issues here in the main office) or maybe environmental interference of some sort like from scan guns, automatic doors, microwaves or something else. Any ideas would be welcome. I'm looking for possible causes of the usb device becoming unknown or ways to figure out what the cause is. no other usb devices have this issue, only the scanner We've contacted the manufacturer and they blame our software We're getting help from Microsoft, but they haven't found anything OS is embedded XP http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein-reader.htm

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• Lose internet connection, yet online games continue

  - by Mike

  For the past week or so, my internet connection has been anything but stable. Restarting my modem/router always fixes the problems, but since it has occurred so often, I'm noticing confusing patterns which I was hoping someone could help answer. My internet connection kicks out about 4-5 times a day. The sure-fire way to fix it is to restart my all-in-one modem/router. Sometimes I can diagnose the problem on my laptop which resets my wireless network adapter and fixes the problem, but not always. If that doesn't fix the problem, it usually reports that the connection between the modem and internet is the problem which requires a restart of the router. The odd thing which baffles me is that my connection is supposedly lost such that no browsers can connect to sites, yet things like online games still continue to play without issue. How is this possible? I thought maybe the game was running locally on my PC but that couldn't be the answer because I was still getting messages from other players. So my real question is: How can my internet browsers (firefox, chrome, even IE) lose connection to the internet, but other applications like online games not? Am I actually losing connection or am I mistaken? Edit: I'd also like to add that netflix on my PS3 which is directly connected to the same access point will also lose connection. So internet browsers and netflix lose their internet connection while online games continue without an issue.

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• How to Load Balance 2 Internet Connections on a Windows 7 machine?

  - by Jimmy Chandra

  It's sort of related to this particular question, but that one is on Mac. I am looking for similar solution on Windows 7. I have 2 network connections: (Connection A) Wireless terminal connecting to ISP A (3G / EVDO internet provider) (Connection B) Broadband wired connection connecting to ISP B (Cable internet provider) Both has access to the internet. When I try connecting to a website and checking the networking tab on my Task Manager, I only see the network traffic being routed to only Connection A. Is there a way to make the computer to utilize both network (in a sense using all the bandwidth available from both the Cable ISP and the 3G / EVDO ISP) at the same time? If so, what do I need to do to set this up ... on Windows 7? Here is a bit more info on my network connections (ipconfig /all): PPP adapter Wireless Terminal: IPv4: aa.bb.ccc.ddd(preferred) Subnet mask: 255.255.255.255 Default Gateway: 0.0.0.0 DNS: aa.ee.f.ggg aa.ee.f.hhh Primary Wins: jjj.ii.k.l Secondary Wins: jjj.ii.k.m Ethernet adapter LAN: IPv4: 192.168.1.100 (connected to a router by wired that itself connect to a cable modem) subnet mask: 255.255.255.0 Default gateway: 192.168.1.1 (the wireless router) DHCP: 192.168.1.1 (the wireless router) DNS: xxx.yy.zz.ww rr.sss.t.uuu For my own privacy, I don't believe the actual number matters, the patterns are representative of the ip numbering scheme...

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• Sometimes, Synaptics Touchpad Tends Cursor to Top-Right Corner

  - by John Chadwick

  This has been a reoccurring issue for me, pretty much since I've owned this laptop (an ASUS G60JX.) Sometimes, the cursor will stop working properly and instead tend toward the top right of the screen. Basically, sometime into my usage (maybe after a couple hours) the touchpad will inevitably begin to malfunction, where it has confusing patterns of pushing the mouse cursor toward the top right of the screen. In addition, certain features (like momentum) seem to quit working entirely. It makes using the cursor extremely difficult. I've been having this issue across very many drivers. Pretty much as soon as multitouch came into the mix, although I don't believe multitouch has anything to do with it. It appears that, in the state of malfunction, it doesn't matter how you touch the touchpad, but where you touch it. Certain regions do not seem to trigger the cursor to move to the top right corner. In fact, no specific region seems to, but some areas do so more often than others. The issue can be resolved temporarily by putting the computer into sleep mode and awakening it. I have found no way to recreate this success without sleeping the computer or rebooting. Disabling and re-enabling the touchpad device does not do anything to resolve the problem. This issue does not affect my WACOM tablet nor any USB mice, and can be resolved (not to my satisfactory) by uninstalling the touchpad drivers. I'm looking for a solution, or at least a workaround that doesn't require sleep mode.

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• Screen Flickering: Hardware or Software?

  - by Wesley

  I have a Samsung N120 netbook (upgraded to 2GB DDR2 RAM) and there has been a screen flickering issue for some time now. However, I have not been able to accurately determine whether it is a software or hardware issue. Here are some of the symptoms: The flicker is white-colored and shows up as vertical lines. Flickering or not, there may be occasionally some random blue patterns (no image distortion) The screen tends to flicker more when the screen is not tilted back all the way. When tilting the screen back and forth, the screen will usually flicker. Some images on the screen may randomly distort without full-on flickering. The screen will flicker only on certain websites, but not on others. A certain part of a webpage may constantly be distorted randomly, even when scrolling. While flickering, the mouse will not move though I'm moving my finger along the touchpad. A connected external monitor does not have any problems. The flickering is completely random and does not seem to follow any CPU/GPU usage trends. Flickering usually gets worse when the screen brightness is turned higher. There will be flickering on battery and while plugged in. Search up "Samsung N120 - Screen Flickering" on YouTube for an idea of what the flickering looks like. However, there is no visible distortions and the flickering seems to stop when the screen has dimmed. Since the problems started, I tried formatting and using Windows 7, then formatted again and went back to Windows XP. The screen was also replaced sometime during this past summer. The uninstallation of the Samsung Battery Manager (on the original install of XP) seemed to reduce the flicker partially, but eventually got worse. So, what could possibly be the problem?

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• Why does this rsnapshot exclude not work?

  - by bstpierre

  Rsnapshot passes excludes directly to rsync, but rsync's behavior appears inconsistent. I've simplified my rsnapshot backup test to the following directory tree (this tree will be backed up): gorilla:~# find /tmp/snaptest -exec file {} \; /tmp/snaptest: directory /tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS: directory /tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/xyz: directory /tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/xyz/testing: ASCII text /tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/bar: ASCII text /tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/foo: ASCII text /tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS.txt: ASCII text My config file: config_version 1.2 snapshot_root /tmp/backup-media no_create_root 1 cmd_cp /bin/cp cmd_rm /bin/rm cmd_rsync /usr/bin/rsync cmd_ssh /usr/bin/ssh cmd_logger /usr/bin/logger cmd_du /usr/bin/du interval hourly 6 interval daily 7 interval weekly 4 interval monthly 3 verbose 3 loglevel 3 logfile /media/maxtor-one-touch/rsnapshot.log lockfile /media/maxtor-one-touch/backups/.rsnapshot.pid rsync_short_args -a rsync_long_args --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded exclude "SKIPTHIS/**" link_dest 1 backup /tmp/snaptest snaptest The result: gorilla:~# rsnapshot -c /tmp/snaptest.conf hourly echo 12638 > /media/maxtor-one-touch/backups/.rsnapshot.pid mkdir -m 0755 -p /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/ /usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \ --exclude="SKIPTHIS/**" /tmp/snaptest \ /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest touch /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/ rm -f /media/maxtor-one-touch/backups/.rsnapshot.pid gorilla:~# find /tmp/backup-media/ -exec file {} \; /tmp/backup-media/: directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0: directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest: directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp: sticky directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest: directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS: directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/xyz: directory /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/xyz/testing: ASCII text /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/bar: ASCII text /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS/foo: ASCII text /tmp/backup-media/hourly.0/snaptest/tmp/snaptest/SKIPTHIS.txt: ASCII text My confusion stems from the fact that if I copy-paste the rsync command echoed by rsnapshot, the SKIPTHIS directory is excluded! (I've tested with various other SKIPTHIS patterns with the same results.) Any idea what's going on?

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• How can I format an SD card with a more robust Linux-usable filesystem with a specific cluster size for better write performace?

  - by Harvey

  Goal: microSD card formatted... for best write performance for use only with embedded Linux for better reliability (random power failures may occur) using an 64kB cluster size I'm using an 8GB microSD card for data storage inside an embedded Linux/ARM device. The SD card is not removable. I've been using ext3 instead of the pre-installed FAT32 because it seems to better handle random power failures during writes. However, I kept noticing that my write performance is always best with the pre-installed FAT32 from Kingston. If I reformat the card with FAT32, the performance still suffers. After browsing wikipedia, I stumbled upon the following comment saying that some cards are optimized for specific cluster sizes. In my case, the Kingston comes pre-formatted for an 64kB cluster size. Risks of reformatting Reformatting an SD card with a different file system, or even with the same one, may make the card slower, or shorten its lifespan. Some cards use wear leveling, in which frequently modified blocks are mapped to different portions of memory at different times, and some wear-leveling algorithms are designed for the access patterns typical of the file allocation table on a FAT16 or FAT32 device.[60] In addition, the preformatted file system may use a cluster size that matches the erase region of the physical memory on the card; reformatting may change the cluster size and make writes less efficient.

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