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• mySQL Optimization Suggestions

  - by Brian Schroeter

  I'm trying to optimize our mySQL configuration for our large Magento website. The reason I believe that mySQL needs to be configured further is because New Relic has shown that our SELECT queries are taking a long time (20,000+ ms) in some categories. I ran MySQLTuner 1.3.0 and got the following results... (Disclaimer: I restarted mySQL earlier after tweaking some settings, and so the results here may not be 100% accurate): >> MySQLTuner 1.3.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.5.37-35.0 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +ARCHIVE +BLACKHOLE +CSV -FEDERATED +InnoDB +MRG_MYISAM [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 7G (Tables: 332) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 213G (Tables: 8714) [--] Data in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables: 0B (Tables: 17) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 0B (Tables: 353) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 5492 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '@host5.server1.autopartsnetwork.com' has no password set. [!!] User '@localhost' has no password set. [!!] User 'root@%' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 5h 3m 4s (5M q [317.443 qps], 42K conn, TX: 18B, RX: 2B) [--] Reads / Writes: 95% / 5% [--] Total buffers: 35.5G global + 184.5M per thread (1024 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 220.0G (174% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (6K/5M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 5% (61/1024) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/3.1G [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (102M cached / 45K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 66.9% (3M cached / 5M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 3486361 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 812K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 1328 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 11% (126K on disk / 1M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (61 created / 42K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 19% (9K open / 49K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 2% (712/25K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (5M immediate / 5M locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 32.0G/213.4G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 512M) [see warning above] join_buffer_size (> 128.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 12288) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 213G) My my.cnf configuration is as follows... [client] port = 3306 [mysqld_safe] nice = 0 [mysqld] tmpdir = /var/lib/mysql/tmp user = mysql port = 3306 skip-external-locking character-set-server = utf8 collation-server = utf8_general_ci event_scheduler = 0 key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M thread_stack = 512K thread_cache_size = 512 sort_buffer_size = 24M read_buffer_size = 8M read_rnd_buffer_size = 24M join_buffer_size = 128M # for some nightly processes client sessions set the join buffer to 8 GB auto-increment-increment = 1 auto-increment-offset = 1 myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 1024 # max connect errors artificially high to support behaviors of NetScaler monitors max_connect_errors = 999999 concurrent_insert = 2 connect_timeout = 5 wait_timeout = 180 net_read_timeout = 120 net_write_timeout = 120 back_log = 128 # this table_open_cache might be too low because of MySQL bugs #16244691 and #65384) table_open_cache = 12288 tmp_table_size = 512M max_heap_table_size = 512M bulk_insert_buffer_size = 512M open-files-limit = 8192 open-files = 1024 query_cache_type = 1 # large query limit supports SOAP and REST API integrations query_cache_limit = 4M # larger than 512 MB query cache size is problematic; this is typically ~60% full query_cache_size = 512M # set to true on read slaves read_only = false slow_query_log_file = /var/log/mysql/slow.log slow_query_log = 0 long_query_time = 0.2 expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 1024M binlog_cache_size = 32K sync_binlog = 0 # SSD RAID10 technically has a write capacity of 10000 IOPS innodb_io_capacity = 400 innodb_file_per_table innodb_table_locks = true innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 30 # These servers have 80 CPU threads; match 1:1 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 innodb_commit_concurrency = 2 innodb_support_xa = true innodb_buffer_pool_size = 32G innodb_file_per_table innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_log_buffer_size = 2G skip-federated [mysqldump] quick quote-names single-transaction max_allowed_packet = 64M I have a monster of a server here to power our site because our catalog is very large (300,000 simple SKUs), and I'm just wondering if I'm missing anything that I can configure further. :-) Thanks!

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• A failed disk (Pay for professional service or SpinRite?)(new edit)

  - by huggie

  EDIT: After much negotiating and begging and seeing through promotion smoke screen, thanks to the nice representative who took my case, I now know that the engineer has already fixed my NTFS partition (I guess it might be a bad block in the partition table?). She told me that the problem was considered minor, and I should be able to boot normally and just copy stuff out. Whew..I'm glad I didn't agree to the NTD $16,000 deal. New question (should this be in a new thread?): is it safer to use the linux "dd" command or is it better to boot normally into Windows XP and just copy stuff out? EDIT2: Thanks to all the help. I give the best answer to Console as it's most directed related to my question. But many suggestion are helpful and informational. ---- ORIGINAL POST BELOW --- Hi, in my previous post (You don't need to read but it's at http://superuser.com/questions/48838/windows-xp-a-disk-read-error-occurred), I said that my hard disk was not booting and is showing "a disk read error occurred". I took it to a recovery professional. A representative responded today told me that the NTFS partitions have a "NTFS partition system crash". I have no idea what that means. The engineer handling my drive will not be available for contact till tomorrow. Now the company charges me NTD (New Taiwan Dollar) $16,000 to recover lost data, that's kind of a lot considering that my graduate student monthly stipend is currently NTD $32,000 (max. allowed by regulation, may be lower, may change depend on funding). Now I'm weighting in between the options. Option A: let the professional recovers it with the half of my monthly stipend. If file/directories I designated are not recovered I don't pay a penny. (other than the initial examination fee of NTD $1000 which I've already paid.) Option B: let me try SpinRite, if failed, back to Option A. I spoke to the representative at the company they recommended me not to handle it on my own (yeah of course that's what they all want to say, right?), and at the price tag the disk error is probably relatively minor and data recoverable. But the representative really did not have detailed information of the disk failure so I didn't take her recommendation readily. Though one thing I heed was that she said that what they would do is to duplicate the disk before attempting discovery, so there would be no data loss (Is this true? can't duplicating invoke further data loss?). That sounds very good to me. Or maybe a third option: Option C: Negotiate with them to pay them to duplicate the disk hopefully for a much smaller price tag. Let me try SpinRite, if failed, back to Option A. This is a difficult decision. Ultimately I want my data back, but if a cheaper way is available to achieve the same thing... Can operating with SpinRite also corrupt data in someway? I've no idea what happened to my drive. I'll attempt to contact the engineer and hope to get it clarified and make an edit here.

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• BIND no longer responds to AXFR Requests

  - by djsumdog

  Recently we moved our primary external DNS server. It has three caching DNS slaves in front of it provided by our ISP. They've told us they've started getting access denied requests when doing zone transfers (AXFR). If I add in my own IPs to the allow-transfer list, I also get a transfer failed when using dig with the AXFR argument. Here is what my bind configuration looks like: options { directory "/var/lib/named"; dump-file "/var/log/named_dump.db"; zone-statistics yes; statistics-file "/var/log/named.stats"; listen-on-v6 { any; }; notify-source 10.19.0.68 port 53; querylog yes; notify yes; allow-transfer { 127.0.0.1; //localhost 1.1.1.1; //public dns slave 1 2.2.2.2; //public dns slave 2 3.3.3.3; //public dns slave 3 }; also-notify { 1.1.1.1; //public dns slave 1 2.2.2.2; //public dns slave 2 3.3.3.3; //public dns slave 3 }; include "/etc/named.d/forwarders.conf"; }; logging { channel simple_log { file "/var/log/bind.log" versions 10 size 3m; severity info; print-time yes; print-severity yes; print-category yes; }; category default{ simple_log; }; channel log_zone_transfers { file "/var/log/axfr.log" versions 10 size 3m; print-time yes; print-category yes; print-severity yes; }; category xfer-out { log_zone_transfers; }; channel log_notify { file "/var/log/notify.log" versions 10 size 3m; print-time yes; print-category yes; print-severity yes; }; category notify { log_notify; }; channel queries { file "/var/log/queries.log" versions 10 size 30m; print-time yes; severity info; print-category yes; print-severity yes; }; category queries { queries; }; }; zone "." in { type hint; file "root.hint"; }; zone "localhost" in { type master; file "localhost.zone"; }; zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" in { type master; file "127.0.0.zone"; }; include "/etc/named.conf.include"; zone "example.net " { type master; file "/var/lib/named/master/example.net.hosts"; }; zone "example.com " { type master; file "/var/lib/named/master/example.com.hosts"; }; ## -- other master files -- And the errors in the xfer log look like the following: 29-Oct-2012 14:20:02.806 xfer-out: info: client 1.1.1.1#59069: bad zone transfer request: 'example.com./IN': non-authoritative zone (NOTAUTH) I've tried adding allow-transfer parameters directly on the zone files and still get failed transfers. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

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• OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Quality OCR software can often be very expensive, but you may have one already installed on your computer that you didn’t know about.  Here’s how you can use OneNote to OCR anything on your computer. OneNote is one of the overlooked gems in recent versions of Microsoft Office.  OneNote makes it simple to take notes and keep track of everything with integrated search, and offers more features than its popular competitor Evernote.  One way it is better is its high quality optical character recognition (OCR) engine.  One of Evernote’s most popular features is that you can search for anything, including text in an image, and you can easily find it.  OneNote takes this further, and instantly OCRs any text in images you add.  Then, you can use this text easily and copy it from the image.  Let’s see how this works and how you can use OneNote as the ultimate OCR. Please Note: This feature is available in OneNote 2007 and 2010.  OneNote 2007 is included with Office 2007 Home and Student, Enterprise, and Ultimate, while OneNote 2010 is included with all edition of Office 2010 except for Starter edition. OCR anything First, let’s add something to OCR into OneNote.  There are many different ways you can add items to OCR into OneNote.  Open a blank page or one you want to insert something into, and then follow these steps to add what you want into OneNote. Picture Simply drag-and-drop a picture with text into a notebook… You can insert a picture directly from OneNote as well.  In OneNote 2010, select the Insert tab, and then choose Picture. In OneNote 2007, select the Insert menu, select Picture, and then choose From File.   Screen Clipping There are many times we’d like to copy text from something we see onscreen, but there is no direct way to copy text from that thing.  For instance, you cannot copy text from the title-bar of a window, or from a flash-based online presentation.  For these cases, the Screen Clipping option is very useful.  To add a clip of anything onscreen in OneNote 2010, select the Insert tab in the ribbon and click Screen Clipping. In OneNote 2007, either click the Clip button on the toolbar or select the Insert menu and choose Screen Clipping.   Alternately, you can take a screen clipping by pressing the windows key + S. When you click Screen Clipping, OneNote will minimize, your desktop will fade lighter, and your mouse pointer will change to a plus sign.  Now, click and drag over anything you want to add to OneNote.  Here we’re selecting the title of this article. The section you selected will now show up in your OneNote notebook, complete with the date and time the clip was made. Insert a file You’re not limited to pictures; OneNote can even OCR anything in most files on your computer.  You can add files directly in OneNote 2010 by selecting File Printout in the Insert tab. In OneNote 2007, select the Insert menu and choose Files as Printout. Choose the file you want to add to OneNote in the dialog. Select Insert, and OneNote will pause momentarily as it processes the file. Now your file will show up in OneNote as a printout with a link to the original file above it. You can also send any file directly to OneNote via the OneNote virtual printer.  If you have a file open, such as a PDF, that you’d like to OCR, simply open the print dialog in that program and select the “Send to OneNote” printer. Or, if you have a scanner, you can scan documents directly into OneNote by clicking Scanner Printout in the Insert tab in OneNote 2010. In OneNote 2003, to add a scanned document select the Insert menu, select Picture, and then choose From Scanner or Camera. OCR the image, file, or screenshot you put in OneNote Now that you’ve got your stuff into OneNote, let’s put it to work.  OneNote automatically did an OCR scan on anything you inserted into OneNote.  You can check to make sure by right-clicking on any picture, screenshot, or file you inserted.  Select “Make Text in Image Searchable” and then make sure the correct language is selected. Now, you can copy text from the Picture.  Simply right-click on the picture, and select “Copy Text from Picture”. And here’s the text that OneNote found in this picture: OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010 - Windows Live Writer Not bad, huh?  Now you can paste the text from the picture into a document or anywhere you need to use the text. If you are instead copying text from a printout, it may give you the option to copy text from this page or all pages of the printout.   This works the exact same in OneNote 2007. In OneNote 2010, you can also edit the text OneNote has saved in the image from the OCR.  This way, if OneNote read something incorrectly you can change it so you can still find it when you use search in OneNote.  Additionally, you can copy only a specific portion of the text from the edit box, so it can be useful just for general copying as well.  To do this, right-click on the item and select “Edit Alt Text”. Here is the window to edit alternate text.  If you want to copy only a portion of the text, simply select it and press Ctrl+C to copy that portion. Searching OneNote’s OCR engine is very useful for finding specific pictures you have saved in OneNote.  Simply enter your search query in the search box on top right, and OneNote will automatically find all instances of that term in all of your notebooks.  Notice how it highlights the search term even in the image! This works the same in OneNote 2007.  Notice how it highlighted “How-to” in a shot of the header image in our favorite website. In Windows Vista and 7, you can even search for things OneNote OCRed from the Start Menu search.  Here the start menu search found the words “Windows Live Writer” in our OCR Test notebook in OneNote where we inserted the screen clip above. Conclusion OneNote is a very useful OCR tool, and can help you capture text from just about anything.  Plus, since you can easily search everything you have stored in OneNote, you can quickly find anything you insert anytime.  OneNote is one of the least-used Office tools, but we have found it very useful and hope you do too. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteRemove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007How To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007How To Copy Worksheets in Excel 2007 & 2010Add Page Numbers to Documents in Word 2007 & 2010 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Data Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers

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• Scan a Windows PC for Viruses from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Getting a virus is bad. Getting a virus that causes your computer to crash when you reboot is even worse. We’ll show you how to clean viruses from your computer even if you can’t boot into Windows by using a virus scanner in a Ubuntu Live CD. There are a number of virus scanners available for Ubuntu, but we’ve found that avast! is the best choice, with great detection rates and usability. Unfortunately, avast! does not have a proper 64-bit version, and forcing the install does not work properly. If you want to use avast! to scan for viruses, then ensure that you have a 32-bit Ubuntu Live CD. If you currently have a 64-bit Ubuntu Live CD on a bootable flash drive, it does not take long to wipe your flash drive and go through our guide again and select normal (32-bit) Ubuntu 9.10 instead of the x64 edition. For the purposes of fixing your Windows installation, the 64-bit Live CD will not provide any benefits. Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open up Firefox by clicking on its icon in the top panel. Navigate to http://www.avast.com/linux-home-edition. Click on the Download tab, and then click on the link to download the DEB package. Save it to the default location. While avast! is downloading, click on the link to the registration form on the download page. Fill in the registration form if you do not already have a trial license for avast!. By the time you’ve filled out the registration form, avast! will hopefully be finished downloading. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Accessories menu and clicking on Terminal. In the terminal window, type in the following commands, pressing enter after each line. cd Downloadssudo dpkg –i avast* This will install avast! on the live Ubuntu environment. To ensure that you can use the latest virus database, while still in the terminal window, type in the following command: sudo sysctl –w kernel.shmmax=128000000 Now we’re ready to open avast!. Click on Applications on the top-left corner of the screen, expand the Accessories folder, and click on the new avast! Antivirus item. You will first be greeted with a window that asks for your license key. Hopefully you’ve received it in your email by now; open the email that avast! sends you, copy the license key, and paste it in the Registration window. avast! Antivirus will open. You’ll notice that the virus database is outdated. Click on the Update database button and avast! will start downloading the latest virus database. To scan your Windows hard drive, you will need to “mount” it. While the virus database is downloading, click on Places on the top-left of your screen, and click on your Windows hard drive, if you can tell which one it is by its size. If you can’t tell which is the correct hard drive, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the right one. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label, which appears in the menu bar of the file browser. Also note that your hard drive will now appear on your desktop. By now, your virus database should be updated. At the time this article was written, the most recent version was 100404-0. In the main avast! window, click on the radio button next to Selected folders and then click on the “+” button to the right of the list box. It will open up a dialog box to browse to a location. To find your Windows hard drive, click on the “>” next to the computer icon. In the expanded list, find the folder labelled “media” and click on the “>” next to it to expand it. In this list, you should be able to find the label that corresponds to your Windows hard drive. If you want to scan a certain folder, then you can go further into this hierarchy and select that folder. However, we will scan the entire hard drive, so we’ll just press OK. Click on Start scan and avast! will start scanning your hard drive. If a virus is found, you’ll be prompted to select an action. If you know that the file is a virus, then you can Delete it, but there is the possibility of false positives, so you can also choose Move to chest to quarantine it. When avast! is done scanning, it will summarize what it found on your hard drive. You can take different actions on those files at this time by right-clicking on them and selecting the appropriate action. When you’re done, click Close. Your Windows PC is now free of viruses, in the eyes of avast!. Reboot your computer and with any luck it will now boot up! Alternatives to avast! If avast! and a liberal amount of Googling doesn’t fix your problem, it’s possible that a different virus scanner will fix your obscure issue. Here are a list of other virus scanners available for Ubuntu that are either free or offer free trials. See their support forums for help on installing these virus scanners. Avira AntiVir Personal for Linux / Solaris Panda Antivirus for Linux Installation and usage guide from Ubuntu F-PROT Antivirus for Linux ClamAV installation and usage guide from Ubuntu NOD32 Antivirus for Linux Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 Bitdefender Antivirus for Unices Conclusion Running avast! from a Ubuntu Live CD can clean the vast majority of viruses from your Windows PC. This is another reason to always have a Ubuntu Live CD ready just in case something happens to your Windows installation! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Secure Computing: Windows Live OneCareHow To Remove Antivirus Live and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareUse the Windows Key for the "Start" Menu in Ubuntu LinuxScan Files for Viruses Before You Download With Dr.WebAsk the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and Malware TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC

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• Week in Geek: USDA Chooses Microsoft for Cloud Services Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to create geeky LED holiday lights with old bottles, dig deeper in Windows Defrag via the command prompt, use Google Chrome’s drag/drop feature to upload files easier, find great gift recommendations by looking through the How-To Geek holiday gift guide, and have fun adding Merry Christmas fonts to our computers. Photo by ntr23. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week, so we have extra news link goodness with information that is good for you to know. USDA making the move to Microsoft The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that it has chosen Microsoft to host things like e-mail, instant messaging, and collaboration through the software giant’s Business Productivity Online Suite. Google says it was cut off from USDA project bid Google is claiming that it was not given a chance to bid on a cloud-computing project for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for which the contract was awarded to rival Microsoft. Apache is being forced into a Java Fork When Oracle rolled over Apache and Google’s objections to its Java plans in December, the scene was set for Apache to leave and, eventually, force a Java code fork. Tumblr explains daylong outage After experiencing an outage that started on Sunday afternoon and stretched through most of the day yesterday, Tumblr has explained what happened. Google demos Chrome OS, launches pilot program During a press briefing this week in San Francisco, Google launched the Chrome application store and demonstrated Chrome OS, its browser-centric netbook operating system. Don’t expect Spotify in U.S. this holiday season As of last week, Spotify had yet to sign a single licensing deal with a major label, after spending more than a year negotiating, multiple music sources told CNET. December 2010 Patch Tuesday will come with most bulletins ever According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue 17 Security Bulletins addressing 40 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, December 14. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day. Hacker plants back door in Symbian firmware Indian hacker Atul Alex has had a look at the firmware for Symbian S60 smartphones and come up with a back door for it. PC quarantines raise tough complexities The concept of quarantining PCs to prevent widespread infection is “interesting, but difficult to implement, with far too many problems”, said security experts. Symantec: DDoS attacks hard to defend It has surfaced that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Visa and MasterCard Web sites on Wednesday were carried out by a toolkit known as low orbit ion cannon (LOIC). Web Sockets and the risks of unfinished standards Enthusiasm for a promising new standard called Web Sockets has quickly cooled in some quarters as a potential security problem led some browser makers to hastily postpone support. Internet Explorer 9 to get tracking protection Microsoft is making changes to Internet Explorer 9’s security features that will better enable users to keep sites from tracking their activity across browsing sessions. NASA sold PCs with sensitive data NASA failed to remove sensitive data from computers that it sold, according to an audit report released this week. Cybercrooks create fake Amazon receipts The bad guys have created yet another online scam, this one involving fake Amazon receipts. World of Warcraft character move fees waived Until December 22, Blizzard will allow free realm transfers from 25 highly populated servers to alleviate log-in queues or performance issues. (The free transfers are one-way and one-time only.) SpaceX Dragon reaches orbit atop a Falcon with a fiery tail The Space Exploration Technologies corporation has become the first nongovernmental entity to put a vehicle into low Earth orbit. Geek Video of the Week If birds have wings, then why are the Angry Birds using slingshots? Photo by Dorkly Bits. Wait… Birds have Wings, Why are the Angry Ones Using Slingshots? Sysadmin Geek Tips How To Setup Email Alerts on Linux Using Gmail or SMTP Linux machines may require administrative intervention in countless ways, but without manually logging into them how would you know about it? Here’s how to setup emails to get notified when your machines want some tender love and attention. Random TinyHacker Links Red Panda Webcam Support Firefox and the Knoxville Zoo’s Red Panda program. Christmas Icons (Icons we like) Superb set of holiday icons by lgp85 at deviantArt. Download the .zip and use as .png or convert to .ico at Convertico.com or with tiny app Imagicon. Super User Questions Enjoy reading the great answers to this week’s popular questions from Super User Useful USB boot disks? DVD/CD burning .zip: is it more reliable, faster, longer lasting to burn a zip of files rather than the files as a folder? What are other ways to backup my files if I do not have an external drive? Anti virus what is the difference between these all? How can I block all Facebook elements/content? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a busy week between work and preparing for the holidays? Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles of the week. 20 Windows Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? How to Use and Customize Google Chrome Web Apps One Year Ago on How-To Geek This week’s batch of retro geeky goodness is all about customizing Windows 7. ClassicShell Adds Classic Start Menu and Explorer Features to Windows 7 Get an Aero-Styled Classic Start Menu in Windows 7 Customize the Windows 7 Logon Screen Get the Classic Style Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7 How To Enable Check Boxes for Items In Windows 7 The Geek Note We would like you to join us in welcoming Jason Fitzpatrick to the writing staff here at How-To Geek. He started with us this past week, so take some time to read through his articles about the Wii, Kindle, & PlayStation 2 Peripherals and leave a friendly comment to say “Hi”! Got a great tip to share? Make sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by real00. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

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• Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• C# 4: The Curious ConcurrentDictionary

  - by James Michael Hare

  In my previous post (here) I did a comparison of the new ConcurrentQueue versus the old standard of a System.Collections.Generic Queue with simple locking.  The results were exactly what I would have hoped, that the ConcurrentQueue was faster with multi-threading for most all situations.  In addition, concurrent collections have the added benefit that you can enumerate them even if they're being modified. So I set out to see what the improvements would be for the ConcurrentDictionary, would it have the same performance benefits as the ConcurrentQueue did?  Well, after running some tests and multiple tweaks and tunes, I have good and bad news. But first, let's look at the tests.  Obviously there's many things we can do with a dictionary.  One of the most notable uses, of course, in a multi-threaded environment is for a small, local in-memory cache.  So I set about to do a very simple simulation of a cache where I would create a test class that I'll just call an Accessor.  This accessor will attempt to look up a key in the dictionary, and if the key exists, it stops (i.e. a cache "hit").  However, if the lookup fails, it will then try to add the key and value to the dictionary (i.e. a cache "miss").  So here's the Accessor that will run the tests: 1: internal class Accessor 2: { 3: public int Hits { get; set; } 4: public int Misses { get; set; } 5: public Func<int, string> GetDelegate { get; set; } 6: public Action<int, string> AddDelegate { get; set; } 7: public int Iterations { get; set; } 8: public int MaxRange { get; set; } 9: public int Seed { get; set; } 10:  11: public void Access() 12: { 13: var randomGenerator = new Random(Seed); 14:  15: for (int i=0; i<Iterations; i++) 16: { 17: // give a wide spread so will have some duplicates and some unique 18: var target = randomGenerator.Next(1, MaxRange); 19:  20: // attempt to grab the item from the cache 21: var result = GetDelegate(target); 22:  23: // if the item doesn't exist, add it 24: if(result == null) 25: { 26: AddDelegate(target, target.ToString()); 27: Misses++; 28: } 29: else 30: { 31: Hits++; 32: } 33: } 34: } 35: } Note that so I could test different implementations, I defined a GetDelegate and AddDelegate that will call the appropriate dictionary methods to add or retrieve items in the cache using various techniques. So let's examine the three techniques I decided to test: Dictionary with mutex - Just your standard generic Dictionary with a simple lock construct on an internal object. Dictionary with ReaderWriterLockSlim - Same Dictionary, but now using a lock designed to let multiple readers access simultaneously and then locked when a writer needs access. ConcurrentDictionary - The new ConcurrentDictionary from System.Collections.Concurrent that is supposed to be optimized to allow multiple threads to access safely. So the approach to each of these is also fairly straight-forward.  Let's look at the GetDelegate and AddDelegate implementations for the Dictionary with mutex lock: 1: var addDelegate = (key,val) => 2: { 3: lock (_mutex) 4: { 5: _dictionary[key] = val; 6: } 7: }; 8: var getDelegate = (key) => 9: { 10: lock (_mutex) 11: { 12: string val; 13: return _dictionary.TryGetValue(key, out val) ? val : null; 14: } 15: }; Nothing new or fancy here, just your basic lock on a private object and then query/insert into the Dictionary. Now, for the Dictionary with ReadWriteLockSlim it's a little more complex: 1: var addDelegate = (key,val) => 2: { 3: _readerWriterLock.EnterWriteLock(); 4: _dictionary[key] = val; 5: _readerWriterLock.ExitWriteLock(); 6: }; 7: var getDelegate = (key) => 8: { 9: string val; 10: _readerWriterLock.EnterReadLock(); 11: if(!_dictionary.TryGetValue(key, out val)) 12: { 13: val = null; 14: } 15: _readerWriterLock.ExitReadLock(); 16: return val; 17: }; And finally, the ConcurrentDictionary, which since it does all it's own concurrency control, is remarkably elegant and simple: 1: var addDelegate = (key,val) => 2: { 3: _concurrentDictionary[key] = val; 4: }; 5: var getDelegate = (key) => 6: { 7: string s; 8: return _concurrentDictionary.TryGetValue(key, out s) ? s : null; 9: };                    Then, I set up a test harness that would simply ask the user for the number of concurrent Accessors to attempt to Access the cache (as specified in Accessor.Access() above) and then let them fly and see how long it took them all to complete.  Each of these tests was run with 10,000,000 cache accesses divided among the available Accessor instances.  All times are in milliseconds. 1: Dictionary with Mutex Locking 2: --------------------------------------------------- 3: Accessors Mostly Misses Mostly Hits 4: 1 7916 3285 5: 10 8293 3481 6: 100 8799 3532 7: 1000 8815 3584 8:  9:  10: Dictionary with ReaderWriterLockSlim Locking 11: --------------------------------------------------- 12: Accessors Mostly Misses Mostly Hits 13: 1 8445 3624 14: 10 11002 4119 15: 100 11076 3992 16: 1000 14794 4861 17:  18:  19: Concurrent Dictionary 20: --------------------------------------------------- 21: Accessors Mostly Misses Mostly Hits 22: 1 17443 3726 23: 10 14181 1897 24: 100 15141 1994 25: 1000 17209 2128 The first test I did across the board is the Mostly Misses category.  The mostly misses (more adds because data requested was not in the dictionary) shows an interesting trend.  In both cases the Dictionary with the simple mutex lock is much faster, and the ConcurrentDictionary is the slowest solution.  But this got me thinking, and a little research seemed to confirm it, maybe the ConcurrentDictionary is more optimized to concurrent "gets" than "adds".  So since the ratio of misses to hits were 2 to 1, I decided to reverse that and see the results. So I tweaked the data so that the number of keys were much smaller than the number of iterations to give me about a 2 to 1 ration of hits to misses (twice as likely to already find the item in the cache than to need to add it).  And yes, indeed here we see that the ConcurrentDictionary is indeed faster than the standard Dictionary here.  I have a strong feeling that as the ration of hits-to-misses gets higher and higher these number gets even better as well.  This makes sense since the ConcurrentDictionary is read-optimized. Also note that I tried the tests with capacity and concurrency hints on the ConcurrentDictionary but saw very little improvement, I think this is largely because on the 10,000,000 hit test it quickly ramped up to the correct capacity and concurrency and thus the impact was limited to the first few milliseconds of the run. So what does this tell us?  Well, as in all things, ConcurrentDictionary is not a panacea.  It won't solve all your woes and it shouldn't be the only Dictionary you ever use.  So when should we use each? Use System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary when: You need a single-threaded Dictionary (no locking needed). You need a multi-threaded Dictionary that is loaded only once at creation and never modified (no locking needed). You need a multi-threaded Dictionary to store items where writes are far more prevalent than reads (locking needed). And use System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentDictionary when: You need a multi-threaded Dictionary where the writes are far more prevalent than reads. You need to be able to iterate over the collection without locking it even if its being modified. Both Dictionaries have their strong suits, I have a feeling this is just one where you need to know from design what you hope to use it for and make your decision based on that criteria.

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• DropDownList and SelectListItem Array Item Updates in MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  So I ran into an interesting behavior today as I deployed my first MVC 4 app tonight. I have a list form that has a filter drop down that allows selection of categories. This list is static and rarely changes so rather than loading these items from the database each time I load the items once and then cache the actual SelectListItem[] array in a static property. However, when we put the site online tonight we immediately noticed that the drop down list was coming up with pre-set values that randomly changed. Didn't take me long to trace this back to the cached list of SelectListItem[]. Clearly the list was getting updated - apparently through the model binding process in the selection postback. To clarify the scenario here's the drop down list definition in the Razor View:@Html.DropDownListFor(mod => mod.QueryParameters.Category, Model.CategoryList, "All Categories") where Model.CategoryList gets set with:[HttpPost] [CompressContent] public ActionResult List(MessageListViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); busEntry entryBus = new busEntry(); var entries = entryBus.GetEntryList(model.QueryParameters); model.Entries = entries; model.DisplayMode = ApplicationDisplayModes.Standard; model.CategoryList = AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList(); return View(model); } The AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList() method gets the cached list or loads the list on the first access. The code to load up the list is housed in a Web utility class. The method looks like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; lock (_SyncLock) { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; var catBus = new busCategory(); var categories = catBus.GetCategories().ToList(); // Turn list into a SelectItem list var catList= categories .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Text = cat.Name, Value = cat.Id.ToString() }) .ToList(); catList.Insert(0, new SelectListItem() { Value = ((int)SpecialCategories.AllCategoriesButRealEstate).ToString(), Text = "All Categories except Real Estate" }); catList.Insert(1, new SelectListItem() { Value = "-1", Text = "--------------------------------" }); _CategoryList = catList.ToArray(); } return _CategoryList; } private static SelectListItem[] _CategoryList ; This seemed normal enough to me - I've been doing stuff like this forever caching smallish lists in memory to avoid an extra trip to the database. This list is used in various places throughout the application - for the list display and also when adding new items and setting up for notifications etc.. Watch that ModelBinder! However, it turns out that this code is clearly causing a problem. It appears that the model binder on the [HttpPost] method is actually updating the list that's bound to and changing the actual entry item in the list and setting its selected value. If you look at the code above I'm not setting the SelectListItem.Selected value anywhere - the only place this value can get set is through ModelBinding. Sure enough when stepping through the code I see that when an item is selected the actual model - model.CategoryList[x].Selected - reflects that. This is bad on several levels: First it's obviously affecting the application behavior - nobody wants to see their drop down list values jump all over the place randomly. But it's also a problem because the array is getting updated by multiple ASP.NET threads which likely would lead to odd crashes from time to time. Not good! In retrospect the modelbinding behavior makes perfect sense. The actual items and the Selected property is the ModelBinder's way of keeping track of one or more selected values. So while I assumed the list to be read-only, the ModelBinder is actually updating it on a post back producing the rather surprising results. Totally missed this during testing and is another one of those little - "Did you know?" moments. So, is there a way around this? Yes but it's maybe not quite obvious. I can't change the behavior of the ModelBinder, but I can certainly change the way that the list is generated. Rather than returning the cached list, I can return a brand new cloned list from the cached items like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) { // Have to create new instances via projection // to avoid ModelBinding updates to affect this // globally return _CategoryList .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Value = cat.Value, Text = cat.Text }) .ToArray(); } …}  The key is that newly created instances of SelectListItems are returned not just filtered instances of the original list. The key here is 'new instances' so that the ModelBinding updates do not update the actual static instance. The code above uses LINQ and a projection into new SelectListItem instances to create this array of fresh instances. And this code works correctly - no more cross-talk between users. Unfortunately this code is also less efficient - it has to reselect the items and uses extra memory for the new array. Knowing what I know now I probably would have not cached the list and just take the hit to read from the database. If there is even a possibility of thread clashes I'm very wary of creating code like this. But since the method already exists and handles this load in one place this fix was easy enough to put in. Live and learn. It's little things like this that can cause some interesting head scratchers sometimes…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing  .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html  What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US?   Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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• Errors trying to run MongoDB

  - by SomeKittens

  I'm running Ubuntu Server 12.04 (32 bit) on an old (1998) computer. Everything's working fine until I try and start MongoDB. somekittens@DLserver01:~$ mongo MongoDB shell version: 2.2.2 connecting to: test Sun Dec 16 22:47:50 Error: couldn't connect to server 127.0.0.1:27017 src/mongo/shell/mongo.js:91 exception: connect failed Googling the error lead me to all sorts of "repair" options, none of which fixed anything. I've also removed MongoDB and installed it again (using apt-get, have not built from source). Mongo's log shows the following error: Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 warning: 32-bit servers don't have journaling enabled by default. Please use --journal if you want durability. Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=758 port=27017 dbpath=/var/lib/mongodb 32-bit host=DLserver01 Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] ** NOTE: when using MongoDB 32 bit, you are limited to about 2 gigabytes of data Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] ** see http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] ** with --journal, the limit is lower Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] db version v2.2.2, pdfile version 4.5 Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] git version: d1b43b61a5308c4ad0679d34b262c5af9d664267 Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] build info: Linux domU-12-31-39-01-70-B4 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Feb 15 12:39:36 EST 2008 i686 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_49 Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] options: { config: "/etc/mongodb.conf", dbpath: "/var/lib/mongodb", logappend: "true", logpath: "/var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log" } Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] Unable to check for journal files due to: boost::filesystem::basic_directory_iterator constructor: No such file or directory: "/var/lib/mongodb/journal" ************** Unclean shutdown detected. Please visit http://dochub.mongodb.org/core/repair for recovery instructions. ************* Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] exception in initAndListen: 12596 old lock file, terminating Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 dbexit: Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close listening sockets... Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to flush diaglog... Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close sockets... Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] shutdown: waiting for fs preallocator... Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] shutdown: closing all files... Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 [initandlisten] closeAllFiles() finished Thu Dec 13 18:36:32 dbexit: really exiting now Running through the recovery instructions lead to the following adventure: somekittens@DLserver01:/var/log/mongodb$ mongod --repair Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 warning: 32-bit servers don't have journaling enabled by default. Please use --journal if you want durability. Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=1887 port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 32-bit host=DLserver01 Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] ** NOTE: when using MongoDB 32 bit, you are limited to about 2 gigabytes of data Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] ** see http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] ** with --journal, the limit is lower Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] db version v2.2.2, pdfile version 4.5 Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] git version: d1b43b61a5308c4ad0679d34b262c5af9d664267 Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] build info: Linux domU-12-31-39-01-70-B4 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Feb 15 12:39:36 EST 2008 i686 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_49 Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] options: { repair: true } Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] exception in initAndListen: 10296 ********************************************************************* ERROR: dbpath (/data/db/) does not exist. Create this directory or give existing directory in --dbpath. See http://dochub.mongodb.org/core/startingandstoppingmongo ********************************************************************* , terminating Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 dbexit: Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close listening sockets... Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to flush diaglog... Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close sockets... Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] shutdown: waiting for fs preallocator... Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] shutdown: closing all files... Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 [initandlisten] closeAllFiles() finished Sun Dec 16 22:42:54 dbexit: really exiting now somekittens@DLserver01:/var/log/mongodb$ sudo mkdir /data somekittens@DLserver01:/var/log/mongodb$ sudo mkdir /data/db somekittens@DLserver01:/var/log/mongodb$ mongod --repair Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 warning: 32-bit servers don't have journaling enabled by default. Please use --journal if you want durability. Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=1909 port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 32-bit host=DLserver01 Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] ** NOTE: when using MongoDB 32 bit, you are limited to about 2 gigabytes of data Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] ** see http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] ** with --journal, the limit is lower Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] db version v2.2.2, pdfile version 4.5 Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] git version: d1b43b61a5308c4ad0679d34b262c5af9d664267 Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] build info: Linux domU-12-31-39-01-70-B4 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Feb 15 12:39:36 EST 2008 i686 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_49 Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] options: { repair: true } Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] exception in initAndListen: 10309 Unable to create/open lock file: /data/db/mongod.lock errno:13 Permission denied Is a mongod instance already running?, terminating Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 dbexit: Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close listening sockets... Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to flush diaglog... Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close sockets... Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] shutdown: waiting for fs preallocator... Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] shutdown: closing all files... Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] closeAllFiles() finished Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] shutdown: removing fs lock... Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 [initandlisten] couldn't remove fs lock errno:9 Bad file descriptor Sun Dec 16 22:43:51 dbexit: really exiting now somekittens@DLserver01:/var/log/mongodb$ service mongodb stop stop: Unknown instance: somekittens@DLserver01:/var/log/mongodb$ sudo mongod --repair Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 warning: 32-bit servers don't have journaling enabled by default. Please use --journal if you want durability. Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=1921 port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 32-bit host=DLserver01 Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] ** NOTE: when using MongoDB 32 bit, you are limited to about 2 gigabytes of data Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] ** see http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] ** with --journal, the limit is lower Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] db version v2.2.2, pdfile version 4.5 Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] git version: d1b43b61a5308c4ad0679d34b262c5af9d664267 Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] build info: Linux domU-12-31-39-01-70-B4 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Feb 15 12:39:36 EST 2008 i686 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_49 Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] options: { repair: true } Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] Unable to check for journal files due to: boost::filesystem::basic_directory_iterator constructor: No such file or directory: "/data/db/journal" Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] finished checking dbs Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 dbexit: Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close listening sockets... Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to flush diaglog... Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] shutdown: going to close sockets... Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] shutdown: waiting for fs preallocator... Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] shutdown: closing all files... Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] closeAllFiles() finished Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 [initandlisten] shutdown: removing fs lock... Sun Dec 16 22:45:04 dbexit: really exiting now Which didn't change anything. What can I do to resolve this? It's an old computer (640MB RAM, single-core P2). Could that be causing it?

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• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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• TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

  If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does.   --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement for .NET 4.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the betas for .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 and Windows 8 shipping many people will be installing .NET 4.5 and hacking away on it. There are a number of great enhancements that are fairly transparent, but it's important to understand what .NET 4.5 actually is in terms of the CLR running on your machine. When .NET 4.5 is installed it effectively replaces .NET 4.0 on the machine. .NET 4.0 gets overwritten by a new version of .NET 4.5 which - according to Microsoft - is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible. While 100% backwards compatible sounds great, we all know that 100% is a hard number to hit, and even the aforementioned blog post at the Microsoft site acknowledges this. But there's so much more than backwards compatibility that makes this awkward at best and confusing at worst. What does ‘Replacement’ mean? When you install .NET 4.5 your .NET 4.0 assemblies in the \Windows\.NET Framework\V4.0.30319 are overwritten with a new set of assemblies. You end up with overwritten assemblies as well as a bunch of new ones (like the new System.Net.Http assemblies for example). The following screen shot demonstrates system.dll on my test machine (left) running .NET 4.5 on the right and my production laptop running stock .NET 4.0 (right):   Clearly they are different files with a difference in file sizes (interesting that the 4.5 version is actually smaller). That’s not all. If you actually query the runtime version when .NET 4.5 is installed with with Environment.Version you still get: 4.0.30319 If you open the properties of System.dll assembly in .NET 4.5 you'll also see: Notice that the file version is also left at 4.0.xxx. There are differences in build numbers: .NET 4.0 shows 261 and the current .NET 4.5 beta build is 17379. I suppose you can use assume a build number greater than 17000 is .NET 4.5, but that's pretty hokey to say the least. There’s no easy or obvious way to tell whether you are running on 4.0 or 4.5 – to the application they appear to be the same runtime version. And that is what Microsoft intends here. .NET 4.5 is intended as an in-place upgrade. Compile to 4.5 run on 4.0 – not quite! You can compile an application for .NET 4.5 and run it on the 4.0 runtime – that is until you hit a new feature that doesn’t exist on 4.0. At which point the app bombs at runtime. Say you write some code that is mostly .NET 4.0, but only has a few of the new features of .NET 4.5 like aync/await buried deep in the bowels of the application where it only fires occasionally. .NET will happily start your application and run everything 4.0 fine, until it hits that 4.5 code – and then crash unceremoniously at runtime. Oh joy! You can .NET 4.0 applications on .NET 4.5 of course and that should work without much fanfare. Different than .NET 3.0/3.5 Note that this in-place replacement is very different from the side by side installs of .NET 2.0 and 3.0/3.5 which all ran on the 2.0 version of the CLR. The two 3.x versions were basically library enhancements on top of the core .NET 2.0 runtime. Both versions ran under the .NET 2.0 runtime which wasn’t changed (other than for security patches and bug fixes) for the whole 3.x cycle. The 4.5 update instead completely replaces the .NET 4.0 runtime and leaves the actual version number set at v4.0.30319. When you build a new project with Visual Studio 2011, you can still target .NET 4.0 or you can target .NET 4.5. But you are in effect referencing the same set of assemblies for both regardless which version you use. What's different is the compiler used to compile and link your code so compiling with .NET 4.0 gives you just the subset of the functionality that is available in .NET 4.0, but when you use the 4.5 compiler you get the full functionality of what’s actually available in the assemblies and extra libraries. It doesn’t look like you will be able to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop .NET 4.5 applications. Good news – Bad news Microsoft is trying hard to experiment with every possible permutation of releasing new versions of the .NET framework apparently. No two updates have been the same. Clearly updating to a full new version of .NET (ie. .NET 2.0, 4.0 and at some point 5.0 runtimes) has its own set of challenges, but doing an in-place update of the runtime and then not even providing a good way to tell which version is installed is pretty whacky even by Microsoft’s standards. Especially given that .NET 4.5 includes a fairly significant update with all the aysnc functionality baked into the runtime. Most of the IO APIs have been updated to support task based async operation which significantly affects many existing APIs. To make things worse .NET 4.5 will be the initial version of .NET that ships with Windows 8 so it will be with us for a long time to come unless Microsoft finally decides to push .NET versions onto Windows machines as part of system upgrades (which currently doesn’t happen). This is the same story we had when Vista launched with .NET 3.0 which was a minor version that quickly was replaced by 3.5 which was more long lived and practical. People had enough problems dealing with the confusing versioning of the 3.x versions which ran on .NET 2.0. I can’t count the amount support calls and questions I’ve fielded because people couldn’t find a .NET 3.5 entry in the IIS version dialog. The same is likely to happen with .NET 4.5. It’s all well and good when we know that .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement, but administrators and IT folks not intimately familiar with .NET are unlikely to understand this nuance and end up thoroughly confused which version is installed. It’s hard for me to see any upside to an in-place update and I haven’t really seen a good explanation of why this approach was decided on. Sure if the version stays the same existing assembly bindings don’t break so applications can stay running through an update. I suppose this is useful for some component vendors and strongly signed assemblies in corporate environments. But seriously, if you are going to throw .NET 4.5 into the mix, who won’t be recompiling all code and thoroughly test that code to work on .NET 4.5? A recompile requirement doesn’t seem that serious in light of a major version upgrade.  Resources http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2011/09/26/compatibility-of-net-framework-4-5.aspx http://www.devproconnections.com/article/net-framework/net-framework-45-versioning-faces-problems-141160© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Building Great-Looking, Usable Apps: A two-day workshop applying Oracle’s best UX practices in ADF

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceI have been with Oracle for more than 12 years. It is a company that has granted me extraordinary creative freedom to help deliver compelling experiences for customers.I am beyond proud to talk about one of the experiences we just took for a test drive. Recently, we delivered a first-of-its-kind, three-team collaboration, train-the-trainer event in Reading, U.K., on building great-looking, usable apps based on Oracle Fusion Applications -- using the ADF tool kit. A new kind of workshopKevin Li, Platform Product Director, asked the Oracle Applications User Experience VP, Jeremy Ashley, if the team had anything to help partners and customers build applications that looked like Fusion. He was receiving this request from European partners and customers.Some quick conversations ensued, and the idea for the workshop was born: We would conduct an experiment.  We would work with feedback from the key Platform Technology Solutions (PTS) trainers under Andre Pavanello, Director, Platform Technology Solutions, in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We would partner with the ADF team lead by Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, title> and leverage the Applications UX expertise in Ashley’s team.The goal: Create a pilot workshop that in two days would explain to an ADF developer how to leverage the next-generation user experience best-practices developed for Fusion Apps. Why? Customers who need integrations with Oracle Fusion Applications, who are looking for custom applications that need to co-exist with Fusion, or who quite simply want a next-generation design for a custom app, need their solutions to reflect the next-generation research and design.Building an event for an ADF developerThe biggest hurdle was figuring out where to start.  How far into user experience country do you take an ADF developer? How far into ADF do you need to go if you are a UX professional?After some time in the UX kitchen, the workshop recipe looked like this: Mix equal parts: Fusion user experience design principles and functional design patterns The art and science behind UX How to wireframe designs that you can build in Fusion How to translate those designs into an ADF application Ultan O’Broin, Director of Global User Experience, explaining the trouble ticket wireframe design exerciseLynn Munsinger, Senior Group Product Manager, explaining the follow-on trouble ticket ADF coding exercise For spice, add:•    Debra Lilley, Fujitsu and ACE director, showcasing some of the latest ADF design work in the new face of Fusion Applications •    Partner show-and-tell of example apps they have built with FMW and ADF that are dynamic, beautiful, and interactive.Debra Lilley, Oracle ACE Director and Fujitsu Fusion Champion on the new face of Fusion built with ADF and Fusion extensibility with composers as a window into “the possible”?The taste testThis first go-round of the workshop was aimed squarely at ADF developers and partners.  We were privileged to have participation and feedback from:•    Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger S. A., Denmark•    John Sim, Fishbowl Solutions, UK•    Josef Huber, Primus Delphi Group, Munich•    Thaddaus Weindl, Primus Delphi, Group , Munich•    Praveen Pillalamarri, EiS Technologies, Bangalore•    Balaji Kamepalli, EiS Technologies, Bangalore•    Plinio Arbizu, Services & Processes Solutions S. A., Mexico•    Yannick Ongena, infoMENTUM, UK•    Jakub Ciszek, infoMENTUM, UK•    Mauro Flores, infoMENTUM, UK•    Matteo Formica, infoMENTUM, UKRichard Bingham, Oracle, Mauro Flores and Matteo Formica, infoMENTUMWhy is this so exciting?  Oracle has invested heavily in the research and development of the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. This investment has been and continues to be applied across the product lines. Now, we finally get to teach customers and partners how to take advantage of this investment for custom solutions.This event was a pilot to test-drive the content, as well as a train-the-trainer event that our EMEA colleagues will be using with partners who want to build with Fusion Apps design patterns.What did attendees think?"I liked most the science stuff, like eye-tracking, design patterns and best-practice (color, contrast),” Josef Huber said. “It was a very good introduction to UI design, and most developers and project managers are very bad in that.  So this course would be good for all developers and even project managers." Team Anonymous: John Sim, Fishbowl Solutions, Flavius Sana, Oracle, Josef Huber, infoMENTUM, Mireille Duroussaud, Oracle. Winners of the wireframing design exercise.  Sten Vesterli, of Scott/Tiger, said he attended to learn techniques he could use in his own projects. He wants to ensure that his applications better meet the needs of his users, and he said sessions during the workshop on user interface design and wireframing were most useful to him.  “Go to this event to learn the art and science of good user interfaces from people who really know how to do it,” he said.Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger, Angelo Santagata, Oracle Plinio Arbizu said the workshop fulfilled his goals, thanks to the recommendations given in how to design user interfaces to facilitate the adoption of applications among the final users. “The workshop combined these recommendations with an exercise that improved the technical comprehension, permitting the usage of JDeveloper to set forth our solutions,” he said. He added: “The first session that I really enjoyed was the five Fusion design principles. It was incredible to discover how these simple principles were included in an inherit manner in Fusion Applications, and I had been using many of them applying only ADF components.  Another topic that I enjoyed a lot was the eight recommendations about the visual design of UIs. The issues that were raised in that lesson are unknown to the developers and of great value to achieve an attractive presentation layer to the end users.  Participate in this workshop, and include these usability features in your projects and in this manner not only to facilitate and improve the user productivity, but also to distinguish you as a professional who takes advantage fully of the functionalities offered by Oracle technology. Praveen Pillalamarri came to the workshop to learn about the difficulties faced in UI and UX development, and how this can be resolved with the help of ADF.  He also appreciated the opportunity to talk with other individuals who came to the workshop. Pillalmarri said, “The way we looked at things in terms of work and projects were sharpened.  UI and UX design knowledge shared by you was quite interesting, especially the minute things which we ignored in the UI or UX design.” Plinio Arbizu, Services & Processes Solutions S. A., Richard Bingham, Oracle, Balaji Kamepalli, & Praveen Pillalamarri, EiS TechnologiesReady to spread the wordIn EMEA, Oracle customers and partners have access to three world-class trainers via Platform Technology Solutions: Mireille Duroussaud, Flavius Sana, and Angelo Santagata. Contact Andre Pavanello if you like to experience this workshop firsthand, or you have customers or partners who would benefit from the training.We are looking to bring the event to the U.S. in spring 2013. If you have interest in this kind of a workshop, leave a comment below. For those who want to follow the action, join the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group run by Oracle’s Chris Muir. Ask questions and continue with the conversation in this forum, or check blogs.oracle.com/usableapps for topics emerging from the workshop.

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• New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output in ASP.NET 4 (and ASP.NET MVC 2)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the nineteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers a small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax. HTML Encoding Cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML encoding attacks are two of the most common security issues that plague web-sites and applications.  They occur when hackers find a way to inject client-side script or HTML markup into web-pages that are then viewed by other visitors to a site.  This can be used to both vandalize a site, as well as enable hackers to run client-script code that steals cookie data and/or exploits a user’s identity on a site to do bad things. One way to help mitigate against cross-site scripting attacks is to make sure that rendered output is HTML encoded within a page.  This helps ensures that any content that might have been input/modified by an end-user cannot be output back onto a page containing tags like <script> or <img> elements.  ASP.NET applications (especially those using ASP.NET MVC) often rely on using <%= %> code-nugget expressions to render output.  Developers today often use the Server.HtmlEncode() or HttpUtility.Encode() helper methods within these expressions to HTML encode the output before it is rendered.  This can be done using code like below: While this works fine, there are two downsides of it: It is a little verbose Developers often forget to call the HtmlEncode method New <%: %> Code Nugget Syntax With ASP.NET 4 we are introducing a new code expression syntax (<%:  %>) that renders output like <%= %> blocks do – but which also automatically HTML encodes it before doing so.  This eliminates the need to explicitly HTML encode content like we did in the example above.  Instead you can just write the more concise code below to accomplish the same thing: We chose the <%: %> syntax so that it would be easy to quickly replace existing instances of <%= %> code blocks.  It also enables you to easily search your code-base for <%= %> elements to find and verify any cases where you are not using HTML encoding within your application to ensure that you have the correct behavior. Avoiding Double Encoding While HTML encoding content is often a good best practice, there are times when the content you are outputting is meant to be HTML or is already encoded – in which case you don’t want to HTML encode it again.  ASP.NET 4 introduces a new IHtmlString interface (along with a concrete implementation: HtmlString) that you can implement on types to indicate that its value is already properly encoded (or otherwise examined) for displaying as HTML, and that therefore the value should not be HTML-encoded again.  The <%: %> code-nugget syntax checks for the presence of the IHtmlString interface and will not HTML encode the output of the code expression if its value implements this interface.  This allows developers to avoid having to decide on a per-case basis whether to use <%= %> or <%: %> code-nuggets.  Instead you can always use <%: %> code nuggets, and then have any properties or data-types that are already HTML encoded implement the IHtmlString interface. Using ASP.NET MVC HTML Helper Methods with <%: %> For a practical example of where this HTML encoding escape mechanism is useful, consider scenarios where you use HTML helper methods with ASP.NET MVC.  These helper methods typically return HTML.  For example: the Html.TextBox() helper method returns markup like <input type=”text”/>.  With ASP.NET MVC 2 these helper methods now by default return HtmlString types – which indicates that the returned string content is safe for rendering and should not be encoded by <%: %> nuggets.  This allows you to use these methods within both <%= %> code nugget blocks: As well as within <%: %> code nugget blocks: In both cases above the HTML content returned from the helper method will be rendered to the client as HTML – and the <%: %> code nugget will avoid double-encoding it. This enables you to default to always using <%: %> code nuggets instead of <%= %> code blocks within your applications.  If you want to be really hardcore you can even create a build rule that searches your application looking for <%= %> usages and flags any cases it finds as an error to enforce that HTML encoding always takes place. Scaffolding ASP.NET MVC 2 Views When you use VS 2010 (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express) you’ll find that the views that are scaffolded using the “Add View” dialog now by default always use <%: %> blocks when outputting any content.  For example, below I’ve scaffolded a simple “Edit” view for an article object.  Note the three usages of <%: %> code nuggets for the label, textbox, and validation message (all output with HTML helper methods): Summary The new <%: %> syntax provides a concise way to automatically HTML encode content and then render it as output.  It allows you to make your code a little less verbose, and to easily check/verify that you are always HTML encoding content throughout your site.  This can help protect your applications against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks.  Hope this helps, Scott

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• Big Data – Is Big Data Relevant to me? – Big Data Questionnaires – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions of SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I think the series from Pinal is a good one for anyone planning to start on Big Data journey from the basics. In my daily customer interactions this buzz of “Big Data” always comes up, I react generally saying – “Sir, do you really have a ‘Big Data’ problem or do you have a big Data problem?” Generally, there is a silence in the air when I ask this question. Data is everywhere in organizations – be it big data, small data, all data and for few it is bad data which is same as no data :). Wow, don’t discount me as someone who opposes “Big Data”, I am a big supporter as much as I am a critic of the abuse of this term by the people. In this post, I wanted to let my mind flow so that you can also think in the direction I want you to see these concepts. In any case, this is not an exhaustive dump of what is in my mind – but you will surely get the drift how I am going to question Big Data terms from customers!!! Is Big Data Relevant to me? Many of my customers talk to me like blank whiteboard with no idea – “why Big Data”. They want to jump into the bandwagon of technology and they want to decipher insights from their unexplored data a.k.a. unstructured data with structured data. So what are these industry scenario’s that come to mind? Here are some of them: Financials Fraud detection: Banks and Credit cards are monitoring your spending habits on real-time basis. Customer Segmentation: applies in every industry from Banking to Retail to Aviation to Utility and others where they deal with end customer who consume their products and services. Customer Sentiment Analysis: Responding to negative brand perception on social or amplify the positive perception. Sales and Marketing Campaign: Understand the impact and get closer to customer delight. Call Center Analysis: attempt to take unstructured voice recordings and analyze them for content and sentiment. Medical Reduce Re-admissions: How to build a proactive follow-up engagements with patients. Patient Monitoring: How to track Inpatient, Out-Patient, Emergency Visits, Intensive Care Units etc. Preventive Care: Disease identification and Risk stratification is a very crucial business function for medical. Claims fraud detection: There is no precise dollars that one can put here, but this is a big thing for the medical field. Retail Customer Sentiment Analysis, Customer Care Centers, Campaign Management. Supply Chain Analysis: Every sensors and RFID data can be tracked for warehouse space optimization. Location based marketing: Based on where a check-in happens retail stores can be optimize their marketing. Telecom Price optimization and Plans, Finding Customer churn, Customer loyalty programs Call Detail Record (CDR) Analysis, Network optimizations, User Location analysis Customer Behavior Analysis Insurance Fraud Detection & Analysis, Pricing based on customer Sentiment Analysis, Loyalty Management Agents Analysis, Customer Value Management This list can go on to other areas like Utility, Manufacturing, Travel, ITES etc. So as you can see, there are obviously interesting use cases for each of these industry verticals. These are just representative list. Where to start? A lot of times I try to quiz customers on a number of dimensions before starting a Big Data conversation. Are you getting the data you need the way you want it and in a timely manner? Can you get in and analyze the data you need? How quickly is IT to respond to your BI Requests? How easily can you get at the data that you need to run your business/department/project? How are you currently measuring your business? Can you get the data you need to react WITHIN THE QUARTER to impact behaviors to meet your numbers or is it always “rear-view mirror?” How are you measuring: The Brand Customer Sentiment Your Competition Your Pricing Your performance Supply Chain Efficiencies Predictive product / service positioning What are your key challenges of driving collaboration across your global business?  What the challenges in innovation? What challenges are you facing in getting more information out of your data? Note: Garbage-in is Garbage-out. Hold good for all reporting / analytics requirements Big Data POCs? A number of customers get into the realm of setting a small team to work on Big Data – well it is a great start from an understanding point of view, but I tend to ask a number of other questions to such customers. Some of these common questions are: To what degree is your advanced analytics (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and classification) paired with your Big Data’s efforts? Do you have dedicated resources exploring the possibilities of advanced analytics in Big Data for your business line? Do you plan to employ machine learning technology while doing Advanced Analytics? How is Social Media being monitored in your organization? What is your ability to scale in terms of storage and processing power? Do you have a system in place to sort incoming data in near real time by potential value, data quality, and use frequency? Do you use event-driven architecture to manage incoming data? Do you have specialized data services that can accommodate different formats, security, and the management requirements of multiple data sources? Is your organization currently using or considering in-memory analytics? To what degree are you able to correlate data from your Big Data infrastructure with that from your enterprise data warehouse? Have you extended the role of Data Stewards to include ownership of big data components? Do you prioritize data quality based on the source system (that is Facebook/Twitter data has lower quality thresholds than radio frequency identification (RFID) for a tracking system)? Do your retention policies consider the different legal responsibilities for storing Big Data for a specific amount of time? Do Data Scientists work in close collaboration with Data Stewards to ensure data quality? How is access to attributes of Big Data being given out in the organization? Are roles related to Big Data (Advanced Analyst, Data Scientist) clearly defined? How involved is risk management in the Big Data governance process? Is there a set of documented policies regarding Big Data governance? Is there an enforcement mechanism or approach to ensure that policies are followed? Who is the key sponsor for your Big Data governance program? (The CIO is best) Do you have defined policies surrounding the use of social media data for potential employees and customers, as well as the use of customer Geo-location data? How accessible are complex analytic routines to your user base? What is the level of involvement with outside vendors and third parties in regard to the planning and execution of Big Data projects? What programming technologies are utilized by your data warehouse/BI staff when working with Big Data? These are some of the important questions I ask each customer who is actively evaluating Big Data trends for their organizations. These questions give you a sense of direction where to start, what to use, how to secure, how to analyze and more. Sign off Any Big data is analysis is incomplete without a compelling story. The best way to understand this is to watch Hans Rosling – Gapminder (2:17 to 6:06) videos about the third world myths. Don’t get overwhelmed with the Big Data buzz word, the destination to what your data speaks is important. In this blog post, we did not particularly look at any Big Data technologies. This is a set of questionnaire one needs to keep in mind as they embark their journey of Big Data. I did write some of the basics in my blog: Big Data – Big Hype yet Big Opportunity. Do let me know if these questions make sense?  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Flashing your Windows Phone Dummies

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then? I want Windows Mobile 6.5.5 now!   I’m an early adopter. If there is a new version of something then that’s the version I want. As long as you accept that you are using something on a “let the early adopter beware” and accept that there may be bugs, sometimes serious crippling bugs the go for it. Note that I won't be responsible if you end up bricking your phone, unlocking or flashing your radio or ROM can be risky. If you follow the instructions then you should be fine, I've flashed my phones (SPV, M300, M1000, M2000, M3100, TyTN, TyTN 2, HD2) hundreds of times without any problems! I have been using Windows Mobile 6.5.5 before it was called 6.5.5 and for long enough that I don’t even remember when I first started using it. I was using it on my HTC TyTN 2 before I got an HD2 a couple of months before Christmas, and the first custom ROM’s for the HD2 were a couple of months after that. I always update to the latest ROM that I like, and occasionally I go back to the stock ROM’s to have a look see, but I am always disappointed. Terms: Soft Reset: Same as pulling out the battery, but is like a reboot for your phone Hard Reset: Reinstalls the Operating system from the Image that is stored on it ROM: This is Image that is loaded onto your phone and it is used to reinstall your phone whenever you do a “hard reset”. Stock ROM: A ROM from the original vendor… So HTC Cook a ROM: Referring to Cooking a ROM is the process a ROM developer goes through to take all of the parts (OS, Drivers and Applications) that make up a running phone and compiling them into a ROM. ROM Kitchen: A place where you get an SDK and all the component parts of the phone: OD, Drivers and Application. There are usually lots of Tools for making it easier to compile and build the image. Flashing: The process of updating one of the layers of your phone with a new layer Bricked: This is what happens when flashing goes wrong. Your phone is now good for only one thing… stopping paper blowing away in a windy place. You can “cook” you own ROM using one of the many good “ROM Kitchens” or you can use a ROM built and tested by someone else. I have cooked my own ROM before, and while the tutorials are good, it is a lot of hassle. You can only Flash new ROM’s that are specifically for your phone only so find a ROM for your phone and XDA Developers is the best place to look. It has a forum based structure and you can find your phone quite easily. XDA Developer Forum Installing a new ROM does have its risks. In the past there have been stories about phones being “bricked” but I have not heard of a bricked phone for quite some years. if you follow the instructions carefully you should not have any problems. note: Most of the tools are written by people for whom English is not their first language to you will need concentrate hard to understand some of the instructions. Have you ever read a manual that was just literally translated from another language? Enough said… There are a number of layers on your phone that you will need to know about: SPL: This is the lowest level, like a BIOS on a PC and is the Operating Systems gateway to the hardware Radio: I think of this as the hardware drivers, and you will need a different Radio for CDMA than GSM networks ROM: This is like your Windows CD, but it is stored internally to the Phone. Flashing your phone consists of replacing one Image with another and then wiping your phone and automatically reinstall from the Image. Sometimes when you download an Image wither it is for a Radio or for ROM you only get a file called *.nbh. What do you do with this? Well you need an RUU application to push that Image to your phone. The RUU’s are different per phone, but there is a CustomRUU for the HD2 that will update your phone with any *.nbh placed in the same directory. Download and Instructions for CustomRUU #1 Flash HardSPL An SPL is kind of like a BIOS, and the default one has checks to make sure that you are only installing a signed ROM. This would prevent you from installing one that comes from any other source but the vendor. NOTE: Installing a HARD SPL invalidates your warranty so remember to Flash your phone with a “stock” vendor ROM before trying to send your phone in for repairs. Is the warranty reinstated when you go back to a stock ROM? I don’t know… Updating your SPL to a HardSPL effectively unlocks your phone so you can install anything you like. I would recommend the HardSPL2. Download and Instructions for HardSPL2 #2 Task29 One of the problems that has been seen on the HD2 when flashing new ROM’s is that things are left over from the old ROM. For a while the recommendation was to Flash a stock ROM first, but some clever cookies have come up with “Task29” which formats your phone first. After running this your phone will be blank and will only boot to the white HTC logo and no further. You should follow the instructions and reboot (remove battery) and hold down the “volume down” button while turning you HD2 on to enter the bootloader. From here you can run CustomRUU once the USB message appears. Download and Instructions for Task29 #2 Flash Radio You may need to play around with this one, there is no good and bad version and the latest is not always the best. You know that annoying thing when you hit “end call” on your phone and nothing happens? Well that's down to the Radio. Get this version right for you and you may even be able to make calls. From a Windows Mobile as well Download There are no instructions here, but they are the same as th ROM, but you use this *.nbh file. #3 Flash ROM If you have gotten this far then you are probably a pro by now Just download the latest ROM below and Flash to your phone. I have been really impressed by the Artemis line of ROM’s but it is no way the only choice. I like this one as the developer builds them as close to the stock ROM as possible while updating to the latest of everything. Download and Instructions for  Artemis HD2 vXX Conclusion While updating your ROM is not for the faint hearted it provides more options than the Stock ROM’s and quicker feature updates than waiting… Technorati Tags: WM6

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• Box2D Joints in entity components system

  - by Johnmph

  I search a way to have Box2D joints in an entity component system, here is what i found : 1) Having the joints in Box2D/Body component as parameters, we have a joint array with an ID by joint and having in the other body component the same joint ID, like in this example : Entity1 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters), Joints => { Joint1 => (joint parameters), others joints... } } // Joint ID = Joint1 Entity2 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters), Joints => { Joint1 => (joint parameters), others joints... } } // Same joint ID than in Entity1 There are 3 problems with this solution : The first problem is the implementation of this solution, we must manage the joints ID to create joints and to know between which bodies they are connected. The second problem is the parameters of joint, where are they got ? on the Entity1 or Entity2 ? If they are the same parameters for the joint, there is no problem but if they are differents ? The third problem is that we can't limit number of bodies to 2 by joint (which is mandatory), a joint can only link 2 bodies, in this solution, nothing prevents to create more than 2 entities with for each a body component with the same joint ID, in this case, how we know the 2 bodies to joint and what to do with others bodies ? 2) Same solution than the first solution but by having entities ID instead of Joint ID, like in this example : Entity1 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters), Joints => { Entity2 => (joint parameters), others joints... } } Entity2 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters), Joints => { Entity1 => (joint parameters), others joints... } } With this solution, we fix the first problem of the first solution but we have always the two others problems. 3) Having a Box2D/Joint component which is inserted in the entities which contains the bodies to joint (we share the same joint component between entities with bodies to joint), like in this example : Entity1 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } - Box2D/Joint component { Joint => (Joint parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity2 Entity2 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } - Box2D/Joint component { Joint => (joint parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity1 There are 2 problems with this solution : The first problem is the same problem than in solution 1 and 2 : We can't limit number of bodies to 2 by joint (which is mandatory), a joint can only link 2 bodies, in this solution, nothing prevents to create more than 2 entities with for each a body component and the shared joint component, in this case, how we know the 2 bodies to joint and what to do with others bodies ? The second problem is that we can have only one joint by body because entity components system allows to have only one component of same type in an entity. So we can't put two Joint components in the same entity. 4) Having a Box2D/Joint component which is inserted in the entity which contains the first body component to joint and which has an entity ID parameter (this entity contains the second body to joint), like in this example : Entity1 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } - Box2D/Joint component { Entity2 => (Joint parameters) } // Entity2 is the entity ID which contains the other body to joint, the first body being in this entity Entity2 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } There are exactly the same problems that in the third solution, the only difference is that we can have two differents joints by entity instead of one (by putting one joint component in an entity and another joint component in another entity, each joint referencing to the other entity). 5) Having a Box2D/Joint component which take in parameter the two entities ID which contains the bodies to joint, this component can be inserted in any entity, like in this example : Entity1 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } Entity2 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } Entity3 - Box2D/Joint component { Joint => (Body1 => Entity1, Body2 => Entity2, others parameters of joint) } // Entity1 is the ID of the entity which have the first body to joint and Entity2 is the ID of the entity which have the second body to joint (This component can be in any entity, that doesn't matter) With this solution, we fix the problem of the body limitation by joint, we can only have two bodies per joint, which is correct. And we are not limited by number of joints per body, because we can create an another Box2D/Joint component, referencing to Entity1 and Entity2 and put this component in a new entity. The problem of this solution is : What happens if we change the Body1 or Body2 parameter of Joint component at runtime ? We need to add code to sync the Body1/Body2 parameters changes with the real joint object. 6) Same as solution 3 but in a better way : Having a Box2D/Joint component Box2D/Joint which is inserted in the entities which contains the bodies to joint, we share the same joint component between these entities BUT the difference is that we create a new entity to link the body component with the joint component, like in this example : Entity1 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity3 Entity2 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity4 Entity3 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity1 - Box2D/Joint component { Joint => (joint parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity4 Entity4 - Box2D/Body component { Body => (body parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity2 - Box2D/Joint component { Joint => (joint parameters) } // Shared, same as in Entity3 With this solution, we fix the second problem of the solution 3, because we can create an Entity5 which will have the shared body component of Entity1 and an another joint component so we are no longer limited in the joint number per body. But the first problem of solution 3 remains, because we can't limit the number of entities which have the shared joint component. To resolve this problem, we can add a way to limit the number of share of a component, so for the Joint component, we limit the number of share to 2, because we can only joint 2 bodies per joint. This solution would be perfect because there is no need to add code to sync changes like in the solution 5 because we are notified by the entity components system when components / entities are added to/removed from the system. But there is a conception problem : How to know easily and quickly between which bodies the joint operates ? Because, there is no way to find easily an entity with a component instance. My question is : Which solution is the best ? Is there any other better solutions ? Sorry for the long text and my bad english.

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• SQL SERVER – Step by Step Guide to Beginning Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 – Introduction to DQS

  - by pinaldave

  Data Quality Services is a very important concept of SQL Server. I have recently started to explore the same and I am really learning some good concepts. Here are two very important blog posts which one should go over before continuing this blog post. Installing Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 Connecting Error to Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 This article is introduction to Data Quality Services for beginners. We will be using an Excel file Click on the image to enlarge the it. In the first article we learned to install DQS. In this article we will see how we can learn about building Knowledge Base and using it to help us identify the quality of the data as well help correct the bad quality of the data. Here are the two very important steps we will be learning in this tutorial. Building a New Knowledge Base  Creating a New Data Quality Project Let us start the building the Knowledge Base. Click on New Knowledge Base. In our project we will be using the Excel as a knowledge base. Here is the Excel which we will be using. There are two columns. One is Colors and another is Shade. They are independent columns and not related to each other. The point which I am trying to show is that in Column A there are unique data and in Column B there are duplicate records. Clicking on New Knowledge Base will bring up the following screen. Enter the name of the new knowledge base. Clicking NEXT will bring up following screen where it will allow to select the EXCE file and it will also let users select the source column. I have selected Colors and Shade both as a source column. Creating a domain is very important. Here you can create a unique domain or domain which is compositely build from Colors and Shade. As this is the first example, I will create unique domain – for Colors I will create domain Colors and for Shade I will create domain Shade. Here is the screen which will demonstrate how the screen will look after creating domains. Clicking NEXT it will bring you to following screen where you can do the data discovery. Clicking on the START will start the processing of the source data provided. Pre-processed data will show various information related to the source data. In our case it shows that Colors column have unique data whereas Shade have non-unique data and unique data rows are only two. In the next screen you can actually add more rows as well see the frequency of the data as the values are listed unique. Clicking next will publish the knowledge base which is just created. Now the knowledge base is created. We will try to take any random data and attempt to do DQS implementation over it. I am using another excel sheet here for simplicity purpose. In reality you can easily use SQL Server table for the same. Click on New Data Quality Project to see start DQS Project. In the next screen it will ask which knowledge base to use. We will be using our Colors knowledge base which we have recently created. In the Colors knowledge base we had two columns – 1) Colors and 2) Shade. In our case we will be using both of the mappings here. User can select one or multiple column mapping over here. Now the most important phase of the complete project. Click on Start and it will make the cleaning process and shows various results. In our case there were two columns to be processed and it completed the task with necessary information. It demonstrated that in Colors columns it has not corrected any value by itself but in Shade value there is a suggestion it has. We can train the DQS to correct values but let us keep that subject for future blog posts. Now click next and keep the domain Colors selected left side. It will demonstrate that there are two incorrect columns which it needs to be corrected. Here is the place where once corrected value will be auto-corrected in future. I manually corrected the value here and clicked on Approve radio buttons. As soon as I click on Approve buttons the rows will be disappeared from this tab and will move to Corrected Tab. If I had rejected tab it would have moved the rows to Invalid tab as well. In this screen you can see how the corrected 2 rows are demonstrated. You can click on Correct tab and see previously validated 6 rows which passed the DQS process. Now let us click on the Shade domain on the left side of the screen. This domain shows very interesting details as there DQS system guessed the correct answer as Dark with the confidence level of 77%. It is quite a high confidence level and manual observation also demonstrate that Dark is the correct answer. I clicked on Approve and the row moved to corrected tab. On the next screen DQS shows the summary of all the activities. It also demonstrates how the correction of the quality of the data was performed. The user can explore their data to a SQL Server Table, CSV file or Excel. The user also has an option to either explore data and all the associated cleansing info or data only. I will select Data only for demonstration purpose. Clicking explore will generate the files. Let us open the generated file. It will look as following and it looks pretty complete and corrected. Well, we have successfully completed DQS Process. The process is indeed very easy. I suggest you try this out yourself and you will find it very easy to learn. In future we will go over advanced concepts. Are you using this feature on your production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with your environment and business need. It will be indeed interesting to see where it is implemented. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Data Quality Services, DQS

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• TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs.  So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts.  Preparing for Travel   When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need.  Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled.  For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there.  I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around.  Packing  Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the  clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take.  For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide.  For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard.  If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag.  Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water.  At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else.  I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change.  Working While Away  While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well.  I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it.  So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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• How to deal with a poor team leader and a tester manager from hell? [closed]

  - by Google

  Let me begin by explaining my situation and give a little context to the situation. My company has around 15 developers but we're split up on two different areas. We have a fresh product team and the old product team. The old product team does mostly bug fixes/maintenance and a feature here and there. The fresh product had never been released and was new from the ground up. I am on the fresh product team. The team consists of three developers (myself, another developer and a senior developer). The senior is also our team leader. Our roles are as follows: Myself: building the administration client as well as build/release stuff Other dev: building the primary client Team lead: building the server In addition to the dev team, we interact with the test manager often. By "we" I mean me since I do the build stuff and give him the builds to test. Trial 1: The other developer on my team and I have both tried to talk to our manager about our team leader. About two weeks before release we went in his office and had a closed door meeting before our team lead got to work. We expressed our concerns about the product, its release date and our team leader. We expressed our team leader had a "rosey" image of the product's state. Our manager seemed to listen to what we said and thanked us for taking the initiative to speak with him about it. He got us an extra two weeks before release. The situation with the leader didn't change. In fact, it got a little worse. While we were using the two weeks to fix issues he was slacking off quite a bit. Just to name a few things, he installed Windows 8 on his dev machine during this time (claimed him machine was broke), he wrote a plugin for our office messenger that turned turned messages into speech, and one time when I went in his office he was making a 3D model in Blender (for "fun"). He felt the product was "pretty good" and ready for release. During this time I dealt with the test manager on a daily basis. Every bug or issue that popped up he would pretty much attack me personally (regardless of which component the bug was in). The test manager would often push his "views" of what needed to be done with the product. He virtually ordered me to change text on our installer and to add features to the installer and administration client. I tried to express how his suggestions were "valid ideas" but it was too close to release to do those kinds of things and to make matters worse, our technical writer had already finished documentation and such a change would not only affect the dev team but would affect the technical writer and marketing as well. I expressed I wasn't going to make those changes without marketing's consent as well as the technical writer and my manager's. He pretty much said I don't care about the product and said I don't do my job. I would like to take a moment to say I take my job seriously and I do my best. I am the kind of person that goes to work 30-40 mins early and usually leaves 30 minutes later than everyone else. Saying I don't care or do my job is just insulting. His "attacks" on me grew from day to day. Every bug that popped up he would usually comment on in some manner that jabbed me and the other developer. "Oh that bug! Yeah that should have been fixed by now, figures! If someone would do their job!" and other similar kinds of comments. Keep in mind 8 out of 10 bugs were in the server and had nothing to do with me and the other developer. That didn't seem to matter.. On one occasion they got pretty bad and we almost got into a yelling match so I decided to stop talking to him all together. I carried all communication through office email (with my manager cc'd). He never attacked me via email. He still attempted to get aggressive with me in person but I completely ignore him and my only response to any question is, "Ask my team leader." or "Ask a product manager." The product launched after our two week extension. Trial 2: The day after the product launch our team leader went on vacation (thanks....). At this time we got a lot of questions from the tech support... major issues with the product. All of these issues were bugs marked "resolved" by our lovely team leader (a typical situation that often popped up). This is where we currently are. The other developer has been with the company for about three years (I've been there only five months) and told me he was going to speak with our manager alone and hoped it would help get our concerns across a little better in a one-on-one. He spoke with the manager and directly addressed all of our concerns regarding our team leader and the test manager giving us (mostly me) hell. Our manager basically said he understood how hard we work and said he noticed it and there's no doubt about it. He said he spoke with the test manager about his temper. Regarding the team leader, he didn't say a whole lot. He suggested we sit down with the team leader and address our concerns (isn't that the manager's job?). We're still waiting to see if anything has changed but we doubt it. What can we do next? 1) Talk to the team leader (may stress relationship and make work awkward) I admit the team leader is generally a nice guy. He is just a horrible leader and working closely with him is painful. I still don't believe bringing this directly to the team leader would help at all and may negatively impact the situation. 2) I could quit. Other than this situation the job is pretty fantastic. I really like my other coworkers and we have quite a bit of freedom. 3) I could take the situation with the team leader to one of the owners. I would then be throwing my manager under the bus. 4) I could take the situation with the test manager to HR. Any suggestions? Comments?

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

  - by AjarnMark

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

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• Best of Breed vs. Suite – Oracle’s SaaS Delivers Both

  - by yaldahhakim

  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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The debate of which is better: “best of breed” business applications vs. an integrated suite is certainly not a new conversation. This has been argued between IT vendors and CIOs for years. It’s also important to clarify that “best of breed” does not necessarily translate into being the richest functionality; rather it’s often about just having the best fit solution to solve a specific business problem or need. So what does cloud have to do with the niche vs. suite debate? Consuming business applications in a cloud or SaaS deployment model can change the best of breed vs. suite discussion - if the cloud is done right. It’s having your cake and eating it too only better: you don’t have to gather all the ingredients or wait to bake your cake, and you can adjust how big of slice you take. Before you eat, it’s worth pausing to recall much of what we learned about IT over the last decade. These basic IT principles still hold true even though the financial model has changed from buying to renting. In other words, what’s under the technology hood still matters. Architecture and development methodologies like building an application based on open standards so it works with other systems - is still important. Data and information silos, complex integrations, and proprietary technologies that lock you in, are still bad. While some may argue that IT no longer matters with cloud, the opposite is actually true. If anything cloud can help return IT back to its rightful place as key strategic asset vs. a liability on the balance sheet. The “I” in CIO was never meant to stand for “integration” yet it’s amazing how much time and money is poured into these types of initiatives for most organizations each year. Rather the “I” needs to stand for “innovation”. This is where Oracle SaaS can uniquely help. Oracle’s application strategy has not really changed over the years. It’s always been about bringing the best and richest functionality across the enterprise to our customers while leveraging a common, standards-based, and enterprise-grade platform. So not jut best fit, but the best capabilities based on the input of thousands of enterprise customers across the globe. Oracle invests billions in R&D every year to add new capabilities to the broadest cloud portfolio in the industry, spanning across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. And where it makes sense, Oracle combines key strategic acquisitions to complement organic functionality. The result is best of breed delivered in a suite. Again this is not something new. The game changer now with cloud is that it impacts HOW Oracle customers adopt the richest, most modern applications across the business – and continue on getting it. Consuming oracle applications in the cloud means you can adopt new capabilities and updates very quickly and easily. There’s no hardware to buy or software to manage. Oracle does it for you. Low upfront costs and an OpEx financial model is the easy part. Oracle Cloud Applications take it a big step further. For organizations that demand having the latest and richest functionality and accelerating the time to value from their IT investment, Oracle Cloud is the right path. It’s about holistically changing the “hows” and the “whys” of the organization by leveraging transformational innovations like social, mobile, and big data in a consistent and more powerful way. Not just about sales force automation or talent management. These technologies should impact all parts of the company and Oracle Cloud is the enterprise-grade delivery vehicle. Oracle SaaS helps break down barriers of adoption and is eases the headache of upgrades, investing in new supporting hardware, or adding internal expertise to manage it all. With Oracle Cloud, customers can get best of breed capabilities in either a full suite model or a la carte. And because it’s entirely built on open standards, it’s built to co-exist with existing IT investments. Updates can be automatic or delayed based on a customer’s requirements. And it’s complete – a full suite of cross pillar functionality. Even better, if you don’t like it, need more or less, just turn the dial up or down. Just like your utility bill, you pay for what you use, and can consume more or less power whenever you need it. Lower cost, lower investment risk, without compromising on functionality, security, or performance. Technology still matters in the cloud. So our cloud customers also like that when they adopt our cloud applications, they also get the best underlying technology, from the middleware and database platform down to infrastructure and Oracle’s engineered systems. Therefore it’s not just the greatest and latest in application functionality, but everything underneath that makes it work is also the latest and greatest. The best of breed technology stack powering best of breed business applications, and all delivered in a subscription based model. The best of both worlds. Yep, that’s the idea.

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