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  • The Changing Face of PASS

    - by Bill Graziano
    I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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  • My computer freezes irregularly

    - by Manhim
    My computer started to freeze at irregular times for 3 weeks now. Please note that this question change with each things that i try. (For additional details) What happens My computer freezes, the video stops. (No graphic glitches, it just stops) Sound keeps playing up to some time (Usually 10-30 seconds) then stops playing. Sometimes, randomly, the screen on my G-15 keyboard flickers and I see caracters not at the right places. Usually happens for about 1-2 seconds and a bit before my computer freezes. I have to keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds to shut my computer down. I still hear my hard drives and fans working. Sometimes it works with no problems for a full day, some other times it just keeps freezing each time I restart my computer and I have to leave it for the rest of the day. Sometimes my mouse freezes for a fraction of a second (Like 0.01 to 0.2 seconds) quite randomly, usually before it freezes. No errors spotted by the "Action center" unlike when I had problems with my last video card on this system (Driver errors). My G-15 LCD screen also freezes. Sometimes my G-15 LCD screen flickers and caracters gets caried around temporary under heavy load. Now, most of the times, the BIOS hard disks boot order gets reversed for some reason and I have to put it to the right one and save each times I boot. (Might be unrelated, not sure, but it first started yesterday) Sometimes the BIOS doesn't detect my 750GB hard drive plugged in SATA1. What I did so far I have had similar problems in the past and I had changed my hard drive (It was faulty), so I tested my software RAID-0 array and it was faulty so I changed it. (I reinstalled Windows 7 with this part). I also tested with unplugging my secondary hard drive. My CPU was running at about 100 degree Celsius, I removed the dust between the fans and the heatsink and it's now between 45-55. I ran a CPU stress-test and it didn't freeze during the tests (using Prime95 on all cores) Ran a memory test (using memtest86+) for a single pass and there were no errors. Ran a GPU stress test with ati-tools and furmark and it didn't freeze during the tests. (No artefacts either) I had troubles with my graphic card when I got it, but I think that it got fixed with a driver update. I checked the voltages in my BIOS setup and they all seemed ok (±0.2 I think). I have ran on the computer without problems with Fedora 15 on an external hard drive (Appart that it couldn't load Gnome 3 and was reverting to Gnome 2, didn't want to install drivers since I use it on multiple computers) I used it to backup my files from the raid array to my 1TB hard drive for the reinstallation of Windows. (So the crashes only happenned on Windows) [The external hard drive is plugged directly on a SATA port] I contacted EVGA (My graphic card vendor) and pointed them on this question, I'm looking for an answer. Ran sensors on Fedora 15 and got this output: http://pastebin.com/0BHJnAvu Ran 6 short different CPU stress test on Fedora 15 (Haven't found any complete stress testers for Linux) and it didn't crash. Changed the thermal paste to some Artic Silver 5 for my CPU and stress tested the CPU, temperature was at 50 idle, then 64 highest and slowly went down to 62 during the test. Ran some stress testing with a temporary graphic card and it went ok. Ran furmark stress test with my original graphic card and it freezed again. GPU had a temp of 74C, a CPU temp of 58C and a mobo temp of 40C or 45C (Dunno which one it is from SpeedFan). Ran a furmark stress test and a CPU stress test at the same time, results: http://pastebin.com/2t6PLpdJ I have been using my computer without stressing it for about 2 hours now and no crashes yet. I also have disabled the AMD Cool'n'quiet function on the BIOS for a more regular power to the CPU. When I ran Furmark without C'n'q my computer didn't freeze but I had a "Driver Kernel Error" that have recovered (And Furmark crashed) all that while running a CPU stress test. The computer eventually frozed without me being at it, but this time my screen just went on sleep and I couldn't wake it. Using the stability tester in nTune my computer freezed again (In the same manner as before). I notived that Speedfan gives me a -12V of -16.97V and a -5V of -8.78V. I wonder if these numbers are reliable and if they are good or bad. I have swapped my G-15 with another basic USB keyboard (HP) and I have ran furmark for about 10 minutes with a CPU stability test running each 60 seconds for 30 seconds and my computer haven't crashed yet. Ran some more extended tests without my G-15 and it freezed like it usually do. Removed the nForce Hard disk controler. Disabled command queuing in the NVIDIA nForce SATA Controller for both port 0 and port 1 (Errors from the logs) Used CPUID HwMonitor, here are the voltages: http://pastebin.com/dfM7p4jV Changed some configurations in the motherboard BIOS: Disabled PEG Link Mode, Changed AI Tuning to Standard, Disabled the 1394 Controller, Disabled HD Audio, Disabled JMicron RAID controller and Disabled SATA Raid. When it happens When I play video games (Mostly) When I play flash games (Second most) When I'm looking at my desktop background (It rarely happens when I have a window open, but it does, sometimes) When my Graphic card and my CPU are stressed. Sometimes when my Graphic card is stressed. Never happenned while stressing only the CPU. Sometimes when my CPU is stressed. Specs Windows Seven x64 Home Premium Motherboard: M2N-SLI Deluxe CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 x2 @ 2.6GHz Memory: Kingston 4x2GB Dual Channel (Pretty basic memory sticks) Hard drives: Was 2x250GB (Western digital caviar) in raid-0 + 1TB (WD caviar black), I replaced the raid array with a 750GB (WD caviar black) [Yes I removed the array from the raid configurations] 750W Power supply No overcloking. Ever. There have been some power-downs like 4-5 weeks ago, but the problem didn't start immediately after. (I wasn't home, so my computer got shut-down) Event logs (Warnings, errors and critical errors) for the last 24 hours: http://pastebin.com/Bvvk31T7 My current to-try list Reinstall the drivers and software 1 by 1 and do extensive stress testing between each. Update the BIOS firmware to the most recent stable one. Change my motherboard. Status updates Keeping only the last 3 (28/06 04pm) More stress testing and still pass the tests. (28/06 03pm) Been stress testing for 10 minute straight now and 5 minutes with both CPU and GPU being stressed at the same time. (28/06 03pm) Stress-testing right now, so far no problems. A little hope Tests with Furmark and Prime95. Testing Windows bare-bone: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing an Anti-virus and some software, restarting computer. Testing with Anti-virus and some software (No drivers installed): 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing audio drivers, restarting computer. Testing with the audio drivers: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing the latest graphic drivers from EVGA's website (without 3d vision since I don't use it), restarting computer. Testing with the graphic drivers: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Configuring Windows to my liking and installing more softwares. In this situation, how can I successfully pin-point the current hardware problem? (If it's a hardware problem) Because I don't really have the budget to just forget and replace everything. I also don't really have hardware to test-replace current hardware.

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  • NFS issue brings down entire vSphere ESX estate

    - by growse
    I experienced an odd issue this morning where an NFS issue appeared to have taken down the majority of my VMs hosted on a small vSphere 5.0 estate. The infrastructure itself is 4x IBM HS21 blades running around 20 VMs. The storage is provided by a single HP X1600 array with attached D2700 chassis running Solaris 11. There's a couple of storage pools on this which are exposed over NFS for the storage of the VM files, and some iSCSI LUNs for things like MSCS shared disks. Normally, this is pretty stable, but I appreciate the lack of resiliancy in having a single X1600 doing all the storage. This morning, in the logs of each ESX host, at around 0521 GMT I saw a lot of entries like this: 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4cf9a8 3 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4dc9e8 3 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4d3fa8 3 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4de0a8 3 [....] 2011-11-30T06:16:07.042Z cpu0:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:17:01.459Z cpu2:4011)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:25:17.887Z cpu3:2051)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4c2b28 3 2011-11-30T06:27:16.063Z cpu3:4011)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000a4d8928 again 2011-11-30T06:35:30.827Z cpu1:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /tank/ISO, mounted as 5acdbb3e-410e56e3-0000-000000000000 ("ISO (1)") 2011-11-30T06:36:37.953Z cpu6:2054)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /tank/ISO, mounted as 5acdbb3e-410e56e3-0000-000000000000 ("ISO (1)") 2011-11-30T06:40:08.242Z cpu6:2054)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4c3e68 3 2011-11-30T06:40:34.647Z cpu3:2051)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000a4d8928 again 2011-11-30T06:44:42.663Z cpu1:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:44:53.973Z cpu0:4011)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:51:28.296Z cpu5:2058)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000ae3c528 3 2011-11-30T06:51:44.024Z cpu4:2052)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000ae3b8e8 again 2011-11-30T06:56:30.758Z cpu4:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:56:53.389Z cpu7:2055)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T07:01:50.350Z cpu6:2054)ScsiDeviceIO: 2316: Cmd(0x41240072bc80) 0x12, CmdSN 0x9803 to dev "naa.600508e000000000505c16815a36c50d" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0. 2011-11-30T07:03:48.449Z cpu3:2051)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000ae46b68 3 2011-11-30T07:03:57.318Z cpu4:4009)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000ae48228 again (I've put a complete dump from one of the hosts on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/Vn60wgTt) When I got in the office at 9am, I saw various failures and alarms and troubleshooted the issue. It turned out that pretty much all of the VMs were inaccessible, and that the ESX hosts either were describing each VM as 'powered off', 'powered on', or 'unavailable'. The VMs described as 'powered on' where not in any way reachable or responding to pings, so this may be lies. There's absolutely no indication on the X1600 that anything was awry, and nothing on the switches to indicate any loss of connectivity. I only managed to resolve the issue by rebooting the ESX hosts in turn. I have a number of questions: What the hell happened? If this was a temporary NFS failure, why did it put the ESX hosts into a state from which a reboot was the only recovery? In the future, when the NFS server goes a little off-piste, what would be the best approach to add some resilience? I've been looking at budgeting for next year and potentially have budget to purchase another X1600/D2700/disks, would an identical mirrored disk setup help to mitigate these sorts of failures automatically? Edit (Added requested details) To expand with some details as requested: The X1600 has 12x 1TB disks lumped together in mirrored pairs as tank, and the D2700 (connected with a mini SAS cable) has 12x 300GB 10k SAS disks lumped together in mirrored pairs as sastank zpool status pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors pool: sastank state: ONLINE scan: scrub repaired 0 in 74h21m with 0 errors on Wed Nov 30 02:51:58 2011 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM sastank ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t14d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t15d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t16d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t17d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t18d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t19d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-3 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t20d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t21d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-4 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t22d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t23d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-5 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t24d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t25d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors pool: tank state: ONLINE scan: scrub repaired 0 in 17h28m with 0 errors on Mon Nov 28 17:58:19 2011 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM tank ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-3 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t9d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-4 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t10d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t11d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-5 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t12d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t13d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors The filesystem exposed over NFS for the primary datastore is sastank/VMStorage zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool 45.1G 13.4G 92.5K /rpool rpool/ROOT 2.28G 13.4G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/solaris 2.28G 13.4G 2.19G / rpool/dump 15.0G 13.4G 15.0G - rpool/export 11.9G 13.4G 32K /export rpool/export/home 11.9G 13.4G 32K /export/home rpool/export/home/andrew 11.9G 13.4G 11.9G /export/home/andrew rpool/swap 15.9G 29.2G 123M - sastank 1.08T 536G 33K /sastank sastank/VMStorage 1.01T 536G 1.01T /sastank/VMStorage sastank/comstar 71.7G 536G 31K /sastank/comstar sastank/comstar/sql_tempdb 6.31G 536G 6.31G - sastank/comstar/sql_tx_data 65.4G 536G 65.4G - tank 4.79T 578G 42K /tank tank/FTP 269G 578G 269G /tank/FTP tank/ISO 28.8G 578G 25.9G /tank/ISO tank/backupstage 2.64T 578G 2.49T /tank/backupstage tank/cifs 301G 578G 297G /tank/cifs tank/comstar 1.54T 578G 31K /tank/comstar tank/comstar/msdtc 1.07G 579G 32.8M - tank/comstar/quorum 577M 578G 47.9M - tank/comstar/sqldata 1.54T 886G 304G - tank/comstar/vsphere_lun 2.09G 580G 22.2M - tank/mcs-asset-repository 7.01M 578G 6.99M /tank/mcs-asset-repository tank/mscs-quorum 55K 578G 36K /tank/mscs-quorum tank/sccm 16.1G 578G 12.8G /tank/sccm As for the networking, all connections between the X1600, the Blades and the switch are either LACP or Etherchannel bonded 2x 1Gbit links. Switch is a single Cisco 3750. Storage traffic sits on its own VLAN segregated from VM machine traffic.

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  • Network throughput issue (ARP-related)

    - by Joel Coel
    The small college where I work is having some very strange network issues. I'm looking for any advice or ideas here. We were fine over the summer, but the trouble began few days after students returned to campus in force for the fall term. Symptoms The main symptom is that internet access will work, but it's very slow... often to the point of timeouts. As an example, a typical result from Speedtest.net will return .4Mbps download, but allow 3 to 8 Mbps upload speed. Lesser symptoms may include severely limited performance transferring data to and from our file server, or even in some cases the inability to log in to the computer (cannot reach the domain controller). The issue crosses multiple vlans, and has effected devices on nearly every vlan we operate. The issue does not impact all machines on the network. An unaffected machine will typically see at least 11Mbps download from speedtest.net, and perhaps much more depending on larger campus traffic patterns at the time. There is one variation on the larger issue. We have one vlan where users were unable to log into nearly all of the machines at all. IT staff would log in using a local administrator account (or in some cases cached credentials), and from there a release/renew or pinging the gateway would allow the machine to work... for a while. Complicating this issue is that this vlan covers our computer labs, which use software called Deep Freeze to completely reset the hard drives after a reboot. It could just the same issue manifesting differently because of stale data on machines that have not permanently altered low-level info for weeks. We were able to solve this, however, by creating a new vlan and moving the labs over to the new vlan wholesale. Instigations Eventually we noticed that the effected machines all had recent dhcp leases. We can predict when a machine will become "slow" by watching when a dhcp lease comes up for renewal. We played with setting the lease time very short for a test vlan, but all that did was remove our ability to predict when the machine would become slow. Machines with static IPs have pretty much always worked normally. Manually releasing/renewing an address will never cause a machine to become slow. In fact, in some cases this process has fixed a machine in that state. Most of the time, though, it doesn't help. We also noticed that mobile machines like laptops are likely to become slow when they cross to new vlans. Wireless on campus is divided up into "zones", where each zone maps to a small set of buildings. Moving to a new building can place you in a zone, thereby causing you to get a new address. A machine resuming from sleep mode is also very likely to be slow. Mitigations Sometimes, but not always, clearing the arp cache on an effected machine will allow it to work normally again. As already mentioned, releasing/renewing a local machine's IP address can fix that machine, but it's not guaranteed. Pinging the default gateway can also sometimes help with a slow machine. What seems to help most to mitigate the issue is clearing the arp cache on our core layer-3 switch. This switch is used for our dhcp system as the default gateway on all vlans, and it handles inter-vlan routing. The model is a 3Com 4900SX. To try to mitigate the issue, we have the cache timeout set on the switch all the way down to the lowest possible time, but it hasn't helped. I also put together a script that runs every few minutes to automatically connect to the switch and reset the cache. Unfortunately, this does not always work, and can even cause some machines to end up in the slow state for a short time (though these seem to correct themselves after a few minutes). We currently have a scheduled job that runs every 10 minutes to force the core switch to clear it's ARP cache, but this is far from perfect or desirable. Reproduction We now have a test machine that we can force into the slow state at will. It is connected to a switch with ports set up for each of our vlans. We make the machine slow by connecting to different vlans, and after a new connection or two it will be slow. It's also worth noting in this section that this has happened before at the start of prior terms, but in the past the problem has gone away on it's own after a few days. It solved itself before we had a chance to do much diagnostic work... hence why we've allowed it to drag so long into the term this time 'round; the expectation was this would be a short-lived situation. Other Factors It's worth mentioning that we have had about half a dozen switches just outright fail over the last year. These are mainly 2003/2004-era 3Coms (mostly 4200's) that were all put in at about the same time. They should still be covered under warranty, buy HP has made getting service somewhat difficult. Mostly in power supplies that have failed, but in a couple cases we have used a power supply from a switch with a failed mainboard to bring a switch with a failed power supply back to life. We do have UPS devices on all but three of four switches now, but that was not the case when I started two and a half years ago. Severe budget constraints (we were on the Dept. of Ed's financially challenged institutions list a couple years back) have forced me to look to the likes of Netgear and TrendNet for replacements, but so far these low-end models seem to be holding their own. It's also worth mentioning that the big change on our network this summer was migrating from a single cross-campus wireless SSID to the zoned approach mentioned earlier. I don't think this is the source of the issue, as like I've said: we've seen this before. However, it's possible this is exacerbating the issue, and may be much of the reason it's been so hard to isolate. Diagnosis At first it seemed clear to us, given the timing and persistent nature of the problem, that the source of the issue was an infected (or malicious) student machine doing ARP cache poisoning. However, repeated attempts to isolate the source have failed. Those attempts include numerous wireshark packet traces, and even taking entire buildings offline for brief periods. We have not been able even to find a smoking gun bad ARP entry. My current best guess is an overloaded or failing core switch, but I'm not sure on how to test for this, and the cost of replacing it blindly is steep. Again, any ideas appreciated.

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  • Problem Using POI To Set CellStyleProperty With HSSFCellUtil

    - by Alvin Sim
    I have a Java class which uses Apache POI to generate reports in Excel. When I run the Java class from my IDE or command prompt, I only see warning messages from LOG4J as below: log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.apache.commons.beanutils.converters.BooleanConverter). log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly. log4j:WARN See http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/faq.html#noconfig for more info. Despite the warning messages, the report was generated successfully. But when I run it from my web app, which uses JSP and submits the form to a Servlet which calls the Java class, the Java class seems to have problems setting the style properties to the cell. Below are the Java code and also the stack trace. I'm testing this on a Standalone OC4J and the IDE which I'm using is Oracle's JDeveloper. And the Java JDK is 1.4.2. I've been looking high and low the whole day yesterday but can't seem to find out why. Code: region = new Region(1, (short) 1, 5, (short)2); sheet.addMergedRegion(region); HSSFRegionUtil.setBorderBottom( (short) 1, region, sheet, workBook ); Stack trace: 10/06/07 16:03:17 SvltRptProcessor ACTION=print_to_file RPT_CLASSNAME=com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt DES_TYPE=file DES_FORMAT=xls 10/06/07 16:03:17 rptFilename=/oracle/reports//20100607_160317_BP_DailySalesBudgetByPmgrp_OPR.xls 10/06/07 16:03:17 ReportRunner printToFile execute -> com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt 10/06/07 16:03:17 enter daily sales budget excel rpt -----> print() 10/06/07 16:03:18 Tutalii: C:\oc4j10gmy\j2ee\home\applib\poi-2.5.1.jar archive 10/06/07 16:03:19 org.apache.commons.logging.LogConfigurationException: org.apache.commons.logging.LogConfigurationException: No suitable Log constructor 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.newInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:509) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:285) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:255) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory.getLog(LogFactory.java:381) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.ConvertUtilsBean.<init>(ConvertUtilsBean.java:157) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtilsBean.<init>(BeanUtilsBean.java:117) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtilsBean$1.initialValue(BeanUtilsBean.java:68) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.ContextClassLoaderLocal.get(ContextClassLoaderLocal.java:153) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtilsBean.getInstance(BeanUtilsBean.java:80) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtilsBean.getInstance(PropertyUtilsBean.java:114) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.describe(PropertyUtils.java:209) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.contrib.HSSFCellUtil.setCellStyleProperty(HSSFCellUtil.java:174) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.contrib.HSSFRegionUtil. setBorderBottom(HSSFRegionUtil.java:153) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.setRegion(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:773) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.createHdr(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:308) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.start(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:272) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.print(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:222) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.servlet.RPT.ReportRunner.printToFile(ReportRunner.java:601) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.servlet.RPT.ReportRunner.doPrint(ReportRunner.java:302) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at com.servlet.RPT.ReportRunner.run(ReportRunner.java:270) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) 10/06/07 16:03:19 Caused by: org.apache.commons.logging.LogConfigurationException: No suitable Log constructor 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getLogConstructor(LogFactoryImpl.java:420) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.newInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:502) 10/06/07 16:03:19 ... 20 more 10/06/07 16:03:19 Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/log4j/Category 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredConstructors0(Native Method) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredConstructors(Class. java:2389) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.Class.getConstructor0(Class.java:2699) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.Class.getConstructor(Class.java:1657) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getLogConstructor(LogFactoryImpl.java:417) 10/06/07 16:03:19 ... 21 more 10/06/07 16:03:19 Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.log4j. Category 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202 ) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java :190) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) 10/06/07 16:03:19 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248) 10/06/07 16:03:19 ... 26 more org.apache.commons.lang.exception.NestableException: Couldn't setCellStyleProperty. at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.contrib.HSSFCellUtil.setCellStyleProperty(HSSFCellUtil.java:209) at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.contrib.HSSFRegionUtil.setBorderBottom(HSSFRegionUtil.java:153) at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.setRegion(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:773) at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.createHdr(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:308) at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.start(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:272) at com.reports.BP.DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.print(DailySalesBudgetExcelRpt.java:222) at com.servlet.RPT.ReportRunner.printToFile(ReportRunner.java:601) at com.servlet.RPT.ReportRunner.doPrint(ReportRunner.java:302) at com.servlet.RPT.ReportRunner.run(ReportRunner.java:270) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Caused by: org.apache.commons.logging.LogConfigurationException: org.apache.commons.logging.LogConfigurationException: No suitable Log constructor at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.newInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:509) at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:285) at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getInstance(LogFactoryImpl.java:255) at org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory.getLog(LogFactory.java:381) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.ConvertUtilsBean.<init>(ConvertUtilsBean.java:157) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtilsBean.<init>(BeanUtilsBean.java:117) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtilsBean$1.initialValue(BeanUtilsBean.java:68) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.ContextClassLoaderLocal.get(ContextClassLoaderLocal.java:153) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtilsBean.getInstance(BeanUtilsBean.java:80) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtilsBean.getInstance(PropertyUtilsBean.java:114) at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.describe(PropertyUtils.java:209) at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.contrib.HSSFCellUtil.setCellStyleProperty(HSSFCellUtil.java:174) ... 9 more Caused by: org.apache.commons.logging.LogConfigurationException: No suitable Log constructor at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getLogConstructor(LogFactoryImpl.java:420) at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.newInstance(LogFactory Impl.java:502) ... 20 more Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/log4j/Category at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredConstructors0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredConstructors(Class.java:2389) at java.lang.Class.getConstructor0(Class.java:2699) at java.lang.Class.getConstructor(Class.java:1657) at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl.getLogConstructor(LogFactoryImpl.java:417) ... 21 more Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.log4j.Category at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248) ... 26 more

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  • Android: Strange out of memory issue

    - by Chrispix
    I am not sure where to start to explain this one. I have a list view with a couple image buttons on each row. When you click the list row, it launches a new activity. If you review some of my other posts, I have had to build my own tabs because of an issue w/ the camera layout. The activity that gets launched for result is a map. If I click on my button to launch the image preview (load an image off the sd card) the application returns from the activity back to the listview activity to the result handler to relaunch my new activity which is nothing more than an image widget. So here is the issue, the image preview on the list view is being done w/ the cursor & listadapter. This makes it pretty simple, but I am not sure how I can put a resized (i.e. smaller bit size not pixel) image as the src for the imgbutton on the fly. So I just resized the image that came off the phone camera. The issue is that I get an out of memory error when it tries to go back and re-launch the 2nd activity. ** My question : is there a way I can build the list adapter easily row by row, where I can resize on the fly (bit wise)? - this would be preferable as I also need to make some changes to the properties of the widgets/elements in each row as I am unable to select a row w/ touch screen b/c of focus issue. (I can use roller ball). ** I know I can do an out of band resize and save of my image, but that is not really what I want to do, but some sample code for that would be nice if that is your suggestion. As soon as I disabled the image on the listview it worked fine again. FYI : This is how I was doing it : String[] from = new String[] { DBHelper.KEY_BUSINESSNAME, DBHelper.KEY_ADDRESS, DBHelper.KEY_CITY, DBHelper.KEY_GPSLONG, DBHelper.KEY_GPSLAT, DBHelper.KEY_IMAGEFILENAME + ""}; to = new int[] { R.id.businessname, R.id.address, R.id.city, R.id.gpslong, R.id.gpslat, R.id.imagefilename }; notes = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.notes_row, c, from, to); setListAdapter(notes); Where R.id.imagefilename is a ButtonImage Here is my LogCat 01-25 05:05:49.877: ERROR/dalvikvm-heap(3896): 6291456-byte external allocation too large for this process. 01-25 05:05:49.877: ERROR/(3896): VM won't let us allocate 6291456 bytes 01-25 05:05:49.877: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): Uncaught handler: thread main exiting due to uncaught exception 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.nativeDecodeStream(Native Method) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeStream(BitmapFactory.java:304) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeFile(BitmapFactory.java:149) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeFile(BitmapFactory.java:174) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.drawable.Drawable.createFromPath(Drawable.java:729) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ImageView.resolveUri(ImageView.java:484) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ImageView.setImageURI(ImageView.java:281) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.SimpleCursorAdapter.setViewImage(SimpleCursorAdapter.java:183) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.SimpleCursorAdapter.bindView(SimpleCursorAdapter.java:129) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.CursorAdapter.getView(CursorAdapter.java:150) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.AbsListView.obtainView(AbsListView.java:1057) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ListView.makeAndAddView(ListView.java:1616) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ListView.fillSpecific(ListView.java:1177) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ListView.layoutChildren(ListView.java:1454) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.AbsListView.onLayout(AbsListView.java:937) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1119) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutHorizontal(LinearLayout.java:1108) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:922) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:294) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1119) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutVertical(LinearLayout.java:999) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:920) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:294) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:771) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1103) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:88) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3742) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:515) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:739) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:497) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 01-25 05:10:01.127: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3943): ERROR: thread attach failed I also have a new error when displaying an image : 01-25 22:13:18.594: DEBUG/skia(4204): xxxxxxxxxxx jpeg error 20 Improper call to JPEG library in state %d 01-25 22:13:18.604: INFO/System.out(4204): resolveUri failed on bad bitmap uri: 01-25 22:13:18.694: ERROR/dalvikvm-heap(4204): 6291456-byte external allocation too large for this process. 01-25 22:13:18.694: ERROR/(4204): VM won't let us allocate 6291456 bytes 01-25 22:13:18.694: DEBUG/skia(4204): xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx allocPixelRef failed

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  • Scrum in 5 Minutes

    - by Stephen.Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to explain the basic concepts of Scrum in less than five minutes. You learn how Scrum can help a team of developers to successfully complete a complex software project. Product Backlog and the Product Owner Imagine that you are part of a team which needs to create a new website – for example, an e-commerce website. You have an overwhelming amount of work to do. You need to build (or possibly buy) a shopping cart, install an SSL certificate, create a product catalog, create a Facebook page, and at least a hundred other things that you have not thought of yet. According to Scrum, the first thing you should do is create a list. Place the highest priority items at the top of the list and the lower priority items lower in the list. For example, creating the shopping cart and buying the domain name might be high priority items and creating a Facebook page might be a lower priority item. In Scrum, this list is called the Product Backlog. How do you prioritize the items in the Product Backlog? Different stakeholders in the project might have different priorities. Gary, your division VP, thinks that it is crucial that the e-commerce site has a mobile app. Sally, your direct manager, thinks taking advantage of new HTML5 features is much more important. Multiple people are pulling you in different directions. According to Scrum, it is important that you always designate one person, and only one person, as the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the person who decides what items should be added to the Product Backlog and the priority of the items in the Product Backlog. The Product Owner could be the customer who is paying the bills, the project manager who is responsible for delivering the project, or a customer representative. The critical point is that the Product Owner must always be a single person and that single person has absolute authority over the Product Backlog. Sprints and the Sprint Backlog So now the developer team has a prioritized list of items and they can start work. The team starts implementing the first item in the Backlog — the shopping cart — and the team is making good progress. Unfortunately, however, half-way through the work of implementing the shopping cart, the Product Owner changes his mind. The Product Owner decides that it is much more important to create the product catalog before the shopping cart. With some frustration, the team switches their developmental efforts to focus on implementing the product catalog. However, part way through completing this work, once again the Product Owner changes his mind about the highest priority item. Getting work done when priorities are constantly shifting is frustrating for the developer team and it results in lower productivity. At the same time, however, the Product Owner needs to have absolute authority over the priority of the items which need to get done. Scrum solves this conflict with the concept of Sprints. In Scrum, a developer team works in Sprints. At the beginning of a Sprint the developers and the Product Owner agree on the items from the backlog which they will complete during the Sprint. This subset of items from the Product Backlog becomes the Sprint Backlog. During the Sprint, the Product Owner is not allowed to change the items in the Sprint Backlog. In other words, the Product Owner cannot shift priorities on the developer team during the Sprint. Different teams use Sprints of different lengths such as one month Sprints, two-week Sprints, and one week Sprints. For high-stress, time critical projects, teams typically choose shorter sprints such as one week sprints. For more mature projects, longer one month sprints might be more appropriate. A team can pick whatever Sprint length makes sense for them just as long as the team is consistent. You should pick a Sprint length and stick with it. Daily Scrum During a Sprint, the developer team needs to have meetings to coordinate their work on completing the items in the Sprint Backlog. For example, the team needs to discuss who is working on what and whether any blocking issues have been discovered. Developers hate meetings (well, sane developers hate meetings). Meetings take developers away from their work of actually implementing stuff as opposed to talking about implementing stuff. However, a developer team which never has meetings and never coordinates their work also has problems. For example, Fred might get stuck on a programming problem for days and never reach out for help even though Tom (who sits in the cubicle next to him) has already solved the very same problem. Or, both Ted and Fred might have started working on the same item from the Sprint Backlog at the same time. In Scrum, these conflicting needs – limiting meetings but enabling team coordination – are resolved with the idea of the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a meeting for coordinating the work of the developer team which happens once a day. To keep the meeting short, each developer answers only the following three questions: 1. What have you done since yesterday? 2. What do you plan to do today? 3. Any impediments in your way? During the Daily Scrum, developers are not allowed to talk about issues with their cat, do demos of their latest work, or tell heroic stories of programming problems overcome. The meeting must be kept short — typically about 15 minutes. Issues which come up during the Daily Scrum should be discussed in separate meetings which do not involve the whole developer team. Stories and Tasks Items in the Product or Sprint Backlog – such as building a shopping cart or creating a Facebook page – are often referred to as User Stories or Stories. The Stories are created by the Product Owner and should represent some business need. Unlike the Product Owner, the developer team needs to think about how a Story should be implemented. At the beginning of a Sprint, the developer team takes the Stories from the Sprint Backlog and breaks the stories into tasks. For example, the developer team might take the Create a Shopping Cart story and break it into the following tasks: · Enable users to add and remote items from shopping cart · Persist the shopping cart to database between visits · Redirect user to checkout page when Checkout button is clicked During the Daily Scrum, members of the developer team volunteer to complete the tasks required to implement the next Story in the Sprint Backlog. When a developer talks about what he did yesterday or plans to do tomorrow then the developer should be referring to a task. Stories are owned by the Product Owner and a story is all about business value. In contrast, the tasks are owned by the developer team and a task is all about implementation details. A story might take several days or weeks to complete. A task is something which a developer can complete in less than a day. Some teams get lazy about breaking stories into tasks. Neglecting to break stories into tasks can lead to “Never Ending Stories” If you don’t break a story into tasks, then you can’t know how much of a story has actually been completed because you don’t have a clear idea about the implementation steps required to complete the story. Scrumboard During the Daily Scrum, the developer team uses a Scrumboard to coordinate their work. A Scrumboard contains a list of the stories for the current Sprint, the tasks associated with each Story, and the state of each task. The developer team uses the Scrumboard so everyone on the team can see, at a glance, what everyone is working on. As a developer works on a task, the task moves from state to state and the state of the task is updated on the Scrumboard. Common task states are ToDo, In Progress, and Done. Some teams include additional task states such as Needs Review or Needs Testing. Some teams use a physical Scrumboard. In that case, you use index cards to represent the stories and the tasks and you tack the index cards onto a physical board. Using a physical Scrumboard has several disadvantages. A physical Scrumboard does not work well with a distributed team – for example, it is hard to share the same physical Scrumboard between Boston and Seattle. Also, generating reports from a physical Scrumboard is more difficult than generating reports from an online Scrumboard. Estimating Stories and Tasks Stakeholders in a project, the people investing in a project, need to have an idea of how a project is progressing and when the project will be completed. For example, if you are investing in creating an e-commerce site, you need to know when the site can be launched. It is not enough to just say that “the project will be done when it is done” because the stakeholders almost certainly have a limited budget to devote to the project. The people investing in the project cannot determine the business value of the project unless they can have an estimate of how long it will take to complete the project. Developers hate to give estimates. The reason that developers hate to give estimates is that the estimates are almost always completely made up. For example, you really don’t know how long it takes to build a shopping cart until you finish building a shopping cart, and at that point, the estimate is no longer useful. The problem is that writing code is much more like Finding a Cure for Cancer than Building a Brick Wall. Building a brick wall is very straightforward. After you learn how to add one brick to a wall, you understand everything that is involved in adding a brick to a wall. There is no additional research required and no surprises. If, on the other hand, I assembled a team of scientists and asked them to find a cure for cancer, and estimate exactly how long it will take, they would have no idea. The problem is that there are too many unknowns. I don’t know how to cure cancer, I need to do a lot of research here, so I cannot even begin to estimate how long it will take. So developers hate to provide estimates, but the Product Owner and other product stakeholders, have a legitimate need for estimates. Scrum resolves this conflict by using the idea of Story Points. Different teams use different units to represent Story Points. For example, some teams use shirt sizes such as Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large. Some teams prefer to use Coffee Cup sizes such as Tall, Short, and Grande. Finally, some teams like to use numbers from the Fibonacci series. These alternative units are converted into a Story Point value. Regardless of the type of unit which you use to represent Story Points, the goal is the same. Instead of attempting to estimate a Story in hours (which is doomed to failure), you use a much less fine-grained measure of work. A developer team is much more likely to be able to estimate that a Story is Small or X-Large than the exact number of hours required to complete the story. So you can think of Story Points as a compromise between the needs of the Product Owner and the developer team. When a Sprint starts, the developer team devotes more time to thinking about the Stories in a Sprint and the developer team breaks the Stories into Tasks. In Scrum, you estimate the work required to complete a Story by using Story Points and you estimate the work required to complete a task by using hours. The difference between Stories and Tasks is that you don’t create a task until you are just about ready to start working on a task. A task is something that you should be able to create within a day, so you have a much better chance of providing an accurate estimate of the work required to complete a task than a story. Burndown Charts In Scrum, you use Burndown charts to represent the remaining work on a project. You use Release Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a project and you use Sprint Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a particular Sprint. You create a Release Burndown chart by calculating the remaining number of uncompleted Story Points for the entire Product Backlog every day. The vertical axis represents Story Points and the horizontal axis represents time. A Sprint Burndown chart is similar to a Release Burndown chart, but it focuses on the remaining work for a particular Sprint. There are two different types of Sprint Burndown charts. You can either represent the remaining work in a Sprint with Story Points or with task hours (the following image, taken from Wikipedia, uses hours). When each Product Backlog Story is completed, the Release Burndown chart slopes down. When each Story or task is completed, the Sprint Burndown chart slopes down. Burndown charts typically do not always slope down over time. As new work is added to the Product Backlog, the Release Burndown chart slopes up. If new tasks are discovered during a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart will also slope up. The purpose of a Burndown chart is to give you a way to track team progress over time. If, halfway through a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart is still climbing a hill then you know that you are in trouble. Team Velocity Stakeholders in a project always want more work done faster. For example, the Product Owner for the e-commerce site wants the website to launch before tomorrow. Developers tend to be overly optimistic. Rarely do developers acknowledge the physical limitations of reality. So Project stakeholders and the developer team often collude to delude themselves about how much work can be done and how quickly. Too many software projects begin in a state of optimism and end in frustration as deadlines zoom by. In Scrum, this problem is overcome by calculating a number called the Team Velocity. The Team Velocity is a measure of the average number of Story Points which a team has completed in previous Sprints. Knowing the Team Velocity is important during the Sprint Planning meeting when the Product Owner and the developer team work together to determine the number of stories which can be completed in the next Sprint. If you know the Team Velocity then you can avoid committing to do more work than the team has been able to accomplish in the past, and your team is much more likely to complete all of the work required for the next Sprint. Scrum Master There are three roles in Scrum: the Product Owner, the developer team, and the Scrum Master. I’v e already discussed the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the one and only person who maintains the Product Backlog and prioritizes the stories. I’ve also described the role of the developer team. The members of the developer team do the work of implementing the stories by breaking the stories into tasks. The final role, which I have not discussed, is the role of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the team is following the Scrum process. For example, the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure that there is a Daily Scrum meeting and that everyone answers the standard three questions. The Scrum Master is also responsible for removing (non-technical) impediments which the team might encounter. For example, if the team cannot start work until everyone installs the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio then the Scrum Master has the responsibility of working with management to get the latest version of Visual Studio as quickly as possible. The Scrum Master can be a member of the developer team. Furthermore, different people can take on the role of the Scrum Master over time. The Scrum Master, however, cannot be the same person as the Product Owner. Using SonicAgile SonicAgile (SonicAgile.com) is an online tool which you can use to manage your projects using Scrum. You can use the SonicAgile Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of stories. You can estimate the size of the Stories using different Story Point units such as Shirt Sizes and Coffee Cup sizes. You can use SonicAgile during the Sprint Planning meeting to select the Stories that you want to complete during a particular Sprint. You can configure Sprints to be any length of time. SonicAgile calculates Team Velocity automatically and displays a warning when you add too many stories to a Sprint. In other words, it warns you when it thinks you are overcommitting in a Sprint. SonicAgile also includes a Scrumboard which displays the list of Stories selected for a Sprint and the tasks associated with each story. You can drag tasks from one task state to another. Finally, SonicAgile enables you to generate Release Burndown and Sprint Burndown charts. You can use these charts to view the progress of your team. To learn more about SonicAgile, visit SonicAgile.com. Summary In this post, I described many of the basic concepts of Scrum. You learned how a Product Owner uses a Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of tasks. I explained why work is completed in Sprints so the developer team can be more productive. I also explained how a developer team uses the daily scrum to coordinate their work. You learned how the developer team uses a Scrumboard to see, at a glance, who is working on what and the state of each task. I also discussed Burndown charts. You learned how you can use both Release and Sprint Burndown charts to track team progress in completing a project. Finally, I described the crucial role of the Scrum Master – the person who is responsible for ensuring that the rules of Scrum are being followed. My goal was not to describe all of the concepts of Scrum. This post was intended to be an introductory overview. For a comprehensive explanation of Scrum, I recommend reading Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X/ref=la_B001H6ODMC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345224000&sr=1-1

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • How to use data of one table in 'where' clause of another table?

    - by sahar
    hello, i need ur help guys..i m making website for 'home docor ideas'..i have a log in form(login-form.php) in which when 'log in' and 'password' is inserted,after verification through login-execute.php, redirected to viewOrder.php where user can view all of the orders ordered by clients.. all is fine up till here.. but what i want is,when user get logged in ,he view only that order which is ordered by him not all customer's orders.. two tables are there in database: members and order_insert.. in 'members' table, login and password is stored and in 'order_insert',orders of customers is stored.. codes of these three pages is as follows.. ......................... login-form.php ......................... <form id="loginForm" name="loginForm" method="post" action="login-exec.php"> <table width="300" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td width="112"><b>Login</b></td> <td width="188"><input name="login" type="text" class="textfield" id="login" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td><b>Password</b></td> <td><input name="password" type="password" class="textfield" id="password" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> <td><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Login" /></td> </tr> </table> </form> ......................... login-execute.php ......................... <?php //Start session session_start(); //Include database connection details require_once('config.php'); //Array to store validation errors $errmsg_arr = array(); //Validation error flag $errflag = false; //Connect to mysql server $link = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD); if(!$link) { die('Failed to connect to server: ' . mysql_error()); } //Select database $db = mysql_select_db(DB_DATABASE); if(!$db) { die("Unable to select database"); } //Function to sanitize values received from the form. Prevents SQL injection function clean($str) { $str = @trim($str); if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) { $str = stripslashes($str); } return mysql_real_escape_string($str); } //Sanitize the POST values $login = clean($_POST['login']); $password = clean($_POST['password']); //Input Validations if($login == '') { $errmsg_arr[] = 'Login ID missing'; $errflag = true; } if($password == '') { $errmsg_arr[] = 'Password missing'; $errflag = true; } //If there are input validations, redirect back to the login form if($errflag) { $_SESSION['ERRMSG_ARR'] = $errmsg_arr; session_write_close(); header("location: login-form.php"); exit(); } //Create query $qry="SELECT * FROM members WHERE login='$login' AND passwd='".md5($_POST['password'])."'"; $result=mysql_query($qry); //Check whether the query was successful or not if($result) { if(mysql_num_rows($result) == 1) { //Login Successful session_regenerate_id(); $member = mysql_fetch_assoc($result); $_SESSION['SESS_MEMBER_ID'] = $member['member_id']; $_SESSION['SESS_FIRST_NAME'] = $member['firstname']; $_SESSION['SESS_LAST_NAME'] = $member['lastname']; session_write_close(); header("location: viewOrder.php"); exit(); }else { //Login failed header("location: login-failed.php"); exit(); } }else { die("Query failed"); } ?> ............................. viewOrder.php .............................. <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" > <? $host="localhost"; // Host name $username="root"; // Mysql username $password=""; // Mysql password $db_name="mydatabase"; // Database name $tbl_name="order_insert"; // Table name $tbl_name2="members"; // connect to server and databases mysql_connect("$host", "$username", "$password")or die("cannot connect"); mysql_select_db("$db_name")or die("cannot select DB"); $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $tbl_name "); print "<center>"; $output .= "<table width=1100 border=1 bordercolor=black>"; $output .= "<tr align=center><td>ID</td><td>First Name</td><td>Last Name</td><td>E Mail</td><td> City </td><td> Country </td><td> Phone</td><td>Decoration Type</td><td>Service Description</td><td>Budget</td><td>Update</td><td>Delete</td></tr>"; $output .= "<th></th><th></th>"; $output .= "</tr>\n\n"; while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){ $output .= "<tr>\n"; foreach ($row as $col=>$val){ $output .= " <td>$val</td>\n"; } // end foreach $keyVal = $row["id"]; $output .= "<td><a href='update.php?ID=$row[orderId]' >Update </a></td>"; $output .= "<td><a href='delete.php?ID=$row[orderId]' >Delete </a></td>"; $output .= "</tr>\n\n"; }// end while $output .= "</table></center>"; print "$output"; ?>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br> <br> <center><table > <tr><td> <form action="home.php"><font color="#FF0000"><input type="submit" name="btn" style="color:#CC0000" value="<--Back" ></font></form></td></tr></table></center> </body> </html> ..... your help and suggestions will be appreciated

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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • Agile Development

    - by James Oloo Onyango
    Alot of literature has and is being written about agile developement and its surrounding philosophies. In my quest to find the best way to express the importance of agile methodologies, i have found Robert C. Martin's "A Satire Of Two Companies" to be both the most concise and thorough! Enjoy the read! Rufus Inc Project Kick Off Your name is Bob. The date is January 3, 2001, and your head still aches from the recent millennial revelry. You are sitting in a conference room with several managers and a group of your peers. You are a project team leader. Your boss is there, and he has brought along all of his team leaders. His boss called the meeting. "We have a new project to develop," says your boss's boss. Call him BB. The points in his hair are so long that they scrape the ceiling. Your boss's points are just starting to grow, but he eagerly awaits the day when he can leave Brylcream stains on the acoustic tiles. BB describes the essence of the new market they have identified and the product they want to develop to exploit this market. "We must have this new project up and working by fourth quarter October 1," BB demands. "Nothing is of higher priority, so we are cancelling your current project." The reaction in the room is stunned silence. Months of work are simply going to be thrown away. Slowly, a murmur of objection begins to circulate around the conference table.   His points give off an evil green glow as BB meets the eyes of everyone in the room. One by one, that insidious stare reduces each attendee to quivering lumps of protoplasm. It is clear that he will brook no discussion on this matter. Once silence has been restored, BB says, "We need to begin immediately. How long will it take you to do the analysis?" You raise your hand. Your boss tries to stop you, but his spitwad misses you and you are unaware of his efforts.   "Sir, we can't tell you how long the analysis will take until we have some requirements." "The requirements document won't be ready for 3 or 4 weeks," BB says, his points vibrating with frustration. "So, pretend that you have the requirements in front of you now. How long will you require for analysis?" No one breathes. Everyone looks around to see whether anyone has some idea. "If analysis goes beyond April 1, we have a problem. Can you finish the analysis by then?" Your boss visibly gathers his courage: "We'll find a way, sir!" His points grow 3 mm, and your headache increases by two Tylenol. "Good." BB smiles. "Now, how long will it take to do the design?" "Sir," you say. Your boss visibly pales. He is clearly worried that his 3 mms are at risk. "Without an analysis, it will not be possible to tell you how long design will take." BB's expression shifts beyond austere.   "PRETEND you have the analysis already!" he says, while fixing you with his vacant, beady little eyes. "How long will it take you to do the design?" Two Tylenol are not going to cut it. Your boss, in a desperate attempt to save his new growth, babbles: "Well, sir, with only six months left to complete the project, design had better take no longer than 3 months."   "I'm glad you agree, Smithers!" BB says, beaming. Your boss relaxes. He knows his points are secure. After a while, he starts lightly humming the Brylcream jingle. BB continues, "So, analysis will be complete by April 1, design will be complete by July 1, and that gives you 3 months to implement the project. This meeting is an example of how well our new consensus and empowerment policies are working. Now, get out there and start working. I'll expect to see TQM plans and QIT assignments on my desk by next week. Oh, and don't forget that your crossfunctional team meetings and reports will be needed for next month's quality audit." "Forget the Tylenol," you think to yourself as you return to your cubicle. "I need bourbon."   Visibly excited, your boss comes over to you and says, "Gosh, what a great meeting. I think we're really going to do some world shaking with this project." You nod in agreement, too disgusted to do anything else. "Oh," your boss continues, "I almost forgot." He hands you a 30-page document. "Remember that the SEI is coming to do an evaluation next week. This is the evaluation guide. You need to read through it, memorize it, and then shred it. It tells you how to answer any questions that the SEI auditors ask you. It also tells you what parts of the building you are allowed to take them to and what parts to avoid. We are determined to be a CMM level 3 organization by June!"   You and your peers start working on the analysis of the new project. This is difficult because you have no requirements. But from the 10-minute introduction given by BB on that fateful morning, you have some idea of what the product is supposed to do.   Corporate process demands that you begin by creating a use case document. You and your team begin enumerating use cases and drawing oval and stick diagrams. Philosophical debates break out among the team members. There is disagreement as to whether certain use cases should be connected with <<extends>> or <<includes>> relationships. Competing models are created, but nobody knows how to evaluate them. The debate continues, effectively paralyzing progress.   After a week, somebody finds the iceberg.com Web site, which recommends disposing entirely of <<extends>> and <<includes>> and replacing them with <<precedes>> and <<uses>>. The documents on this Web site, authored by Don Sengroiux, describes a method known as stalwart-analysis, which claims to be a step-by-step method for translating use cases into design diagrams. More competing use case models are created using this new scheme, but again, people can't agree on how to evaluate them. The thrashing continues. More and more, the use case meetings are driven by emotion rather than by reason. If it weren't for the fact that you don't have requirements, you'd be pretty upset by the lack of progress you are making. The requirements document arrives on February 15. And then again on February 20, 25, and every week thereafter. Each new version contradicts the previous one. Clearly, the marketing folks who are writing the requirements, empowered though they might be, are not finding consensus.   At the same time, several new competing use case templates have been proposed by the various team members. Each template presents its own particularly creative way of delaying progress. The debates rage on. On March 1, Prudence Putrigence, the process proctor, succeeds in integrating all the competing use case forms and templates into a single, all-encompassing form. Just the blank form is 15 pages long. She has managed to include every field that appeared on all the competing templates. She also presents a 159- page document describing how to fill out the use case form. All current use cases must be rewritten according to the new standard.   You marvel to yourself that it now requires 15 pages of fill-in-the-blank and essay questions to answer the question: What should the system do when the user presses Return? The corporate process (authored by L. E. Ott, famed author of "Holistic Analysis: A Progressive Dialectic for Software Engineers") insists that you discover all primary use cases, 87 percent of all secondary use cases, and 36.274 percent of all tertiary use cases before you can complete analysis and enter the design phase. You have no idea what a tertiary use case is. So in an attempt to meet this requirement, you try to get your use case document reviewed by the marketing department, which you hope will know what a tertiary use case is.   Unfortunately, the marketing folks are too busy with sales support to talk to you. Indeed, since the project started, you have not been able to get a single meeting with marketing, which has provided a never-ending stream of changing and contradictory requirements documents.   While one team has been spinning endlessly on the use case document, another team has been working out the domain model. Endless variations of UML documents are pouring out of this team. Every week, the model is reworked.   The team members can't decide whether to use <<interfaces>> or <<types>> in the model. A huge disagreement has been raging on the proper syntax and application of OCL. Others on the team just got back from a 5-day class on catabolism, and have been producing incredibly detailed and arcane diagrams that nobody else can fathom.   On March 27, with one week to go before analysis is to be complete, you have produced a sea of documents and diagrams but are no closer to a cogent analysis of the problem than you were on January 3. **** And then, a miracle happens.   **** On Saturday, April 1, you check your e-mail from home. You see a memo from your boss to BB. It states unequivocally that you are done with the analysis! You phone your boss and complain. "How could you have told BB that we were done with the analysis?" "Have you looked at a calendar lately?" he responds. "It's April 1!" The irony of that date does not escape you. "But we have so much more to think about. So much more to analyze! We haven't even decided whether to use <<extends>> or <<precedes>>!" "Where is your evidence that you are not done?" inquires your boss, impatiently. "Whaaa . . . ." But he cuts you off. "Analysis can go on forever; it has to be stopped at some point. And since this is the date it was scheduled to stop, it has been stopped. Now, on Monday, I want you to gather up all existing analysis materials and put them into a public folder. Release that folder to Prudence so that she can log it in the CM system by Monday afternoon. Then get busy and start designing."   As you hang up the phone, you begin to consider the benefits of keeping a bottle of bourbon in your bottom desk drawer. They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the analysis phase. BB gave a colon-stirring speech on empowerment. And your boss, another 3 mm taller, congratulated his team on the incredible show of unity and teamwork. Finally, the CIO takes the stage to tell everyone that the SEI audit went very well and to thank everyone for studying and shredding the evaluation guides that were passed out. Level 3 now seems assured and will be awarded by June. (Scuttlebutt has it that managers at the level of BB and above are to receive significant bonuses once the SEI awards level 3.)   As the weeks flow by, you and your team work on the design of the system. Of course, you find that the analysis that the design is supposedly based on is flawedno, useless; no, worse than useless. But when you tell your boss that you need to go back and work some more on the analysis to shore up its weaker sections, he simply states, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   So, you and your team hack the design as best you can, unsure of whether the requirements have been properly analyzed. Of course, it really doesn't matter much, since the requirements document is still thrashing with weekly revisions, and the marketing department still refuses to meet with you.     The design is a nightmare. Your boss recently misread a book named The Finish Line in which the author, Mark DeThomaso, blithely suggested that design documents should be taken down to code-level detail. "If we are going to be working at that level of detail," you ask, "why don't we simply write the code instead?" "Because then you wouldn't be designing, of course. And the only allowable activity in the design phase is design!" "Besides," he continues, "we have just purchased a companywide license for Dandelion! This tool enables 'Round the Horn Engineering!' You are to transfer all design diagrams into this tool. It will automatically generate our code for us! It will also keep the design diagrams in sync with the code!" Your boss hands you a brightly colored shrinkwrapped box containing the Dandelion distribution. You accept it numbly and shuffle off to your cubicle. Twelve hours, eight crashes, one disk reformatting, and eight shots of 151 later, you finally have the tool installed on your server. You consider the week your team will lose while attending Dandelion training. Then you smile and think, "Any week I'm not here is a good week." Design diagram after design diagram is created by your team. Dandelion makes it very difficult to draw these diagrams. There are dozens and dozens of deeply nested dialog boxes with funny text fields and check boxes that must all be filled in correctly. And then there's the problem of moving classes between packages. At first, these diagram are driven from the use cases. But the requirements are changing so often that the use cases rapidly become meaningless. Debates rage about whether VISITOR or DECORATOR design patterns should be used. One developer refuses to use VISITOR in any form, claiming that it's not a properly object-oriented construct. Someone refuses to use multiple inheritance, since it is the spawn of the devil. Review meetings rapidly degenerate into debates about the meaning of object orientation, the definition of analysis versus design, or when to use aggregation versus association. Midway through the design cycle, the marketing folks announce that they have rethought the focus of the system. Their new requirements document is completely restructured. They have eliminated several major feature areas and replaced them with feature areas that they anticipate customer surveys will show to be more appropriate. You tell your boss that these changes mean that you need to reanalyze and redesign much of the system. But he says, "The analysis phase is system. But he says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   You suggest that it might be better to create a simple prototype to show to the marketing folks and even some potential customers. But your boss says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it." Hack, hack, hack, hack. You try to create some kind of a design document that might reflect the new requirements documents. However, the revolution of the requirements has not caused them to stop thrashing. Indeed, if anything, the wild oscillations of the requirements document have only increased in frequency and amplitude.   You slog your way through them.   On June 15, the Dandelion database gets corrupted. Apparently, the corruption has been progressive. Small errors in the DB accumulated over the months into bigger and bigger errors. Eventually, the CASE tool just stopped working. Of course, the slowly encroaching corruption is present on all the backups. Calls to the Dandelion technical support line go unanswered for several days. Finally, you receive a brief e-mail from Dandelion, informing you that this is a known problem and that the solution is to purchase the new version, which they promise will be ready some time next quarter, and then reenter all the diagrams by hand.   ****   Then, on July 1 another miracle happens! You are done with the design!   Rather than go to your boss and complain, you stock your middle desk drawer with some vodka.   **** They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the design phase and their graduation to CMM level 3. This time, you find BB's speech so stirring that you have to use the restroom before it begins. New banners and plaques are all over your workplace. They show pictures of eagles and mountain climbers, and they talk about teamwork and empowerment. They read better after a few scotches. That reminds you that you need to clear out your file cabinet to make room for the brandy. You and your team begin to code. But you rapidly discover that the design is lacking in some significant areas. Actually, it's lacking any significance at all. You convene a design session in one of the conference rooms to try to work through some of the nastier problems. But your boss catches you at it and disbands the meeting, saying, "The design phase is over. The only allowable activity is coding. Now get back to it."   ****   The code generated by Dandelion is really hideous. It turns out that you and your team were using association and aggregation the wrong way, after all. All the generated code has to be edited to correct these flaws. Editing this code is extremely difficult because it has been instrumented with ugly comment blocks that have special syntax that Dandelion needs in order to keep the diagrams in sync with the code. If you accidentally alter one of these comments, the diagrams will be regenerated incorrectly. It turns out that "Round the Horn Engineering" requires an awful lot of effort. The more you try to keep the code compatible with Dandelion, the more errors Dandelion generates. In the end, you give up and decide to keep the diagrams up to date manually. A second later, you decide that there's no point in keeping the diagrams up to date at all. Besides, who has time?   Your boss hires a consultant to build tools to count the number of lines of code that are being produced. He puts a big thermometer graph on the wall with the number 1,000,000 on the top. Every day, he extends the red line to show how many lines have been added. Three days after the thermometer appears on the wall, your boss stops you in the hall. "That graph isn't growing quickly enough. We need to have a million lines done by October 1." "We aren't even sh-sh-sure that the proshect will require a m-million linezh," you blather. "We have to have a million lines done by October 1," your boss reiterates. His points have grown again, and the Grecian formula he uses on them creates an aura of authority and competence. "Are you sure your comment blocks are big enough?" Then, in a flash of managerial insight, he says, "I have it! I want you to institute a new policy among the engineers. No line of code is to be longer than 20 characters. Any such line must be split into two or more preferably more. All existing code needs to be reworked to this standard. That'll get our line count up!"   You decide not to tell him that this will require two unscheduled work months. You decide not to tell him anything at all. You decide that intravenous injections of pure ethanol are the only solution. You make the appropriate arrangements. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. You and your team madly code away. By August 1, your boss, frowning at the thermometer on the wall, institutes a mandatory 50-hour workweek.   Hack, hack, hack, and hack. By September 1st, the thermometer is at 1.2 million lines and your boss asks you to write a report describing why you exceeded the coding budget by 20 percent. He institutes mandatory Saturdays and demands that the project be brought back down to a million lines. You start a campaign of remerging lines. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. Tempers are flaring; people are quitting; QA is raining trouble reports down on you. Customers are demanding installation and user manuals; salespeople are demanding advance demonstrations for special customers; the requirements document is still thrashing, the marketing folks are complaining that the product isn't anything like they specified, and the liquor store won't accept your credit card anymore. Something has to give.    On September 15, BB calls a meeting. As he enters the room, his points are emitting clouds of steam. When he speaks, the bass overtones of his carefully manicured voice cause the pit of your stomach to roll over. "The QA manager has told me that this project has less than 50 percent of the required features implemented. He has also informed me that the system crashes all the time, yields wrong results, and is hideously slow. He has also complained that he cannot keep up with the continuous train of daily releases, each more buggy than the last!" He stops for a few seconds, visibly trying to compose himself. "The QA manager estimates that, at this rate of development, we won't be able to ship the product until December!" Actually, you think it's more like March, but you don't say anything. "December!" BB roars with such derision that people duck their heads as though he were pointing an assault rifle at them. "December is absolutely out of the question. Team leaders, I want new estimates on my desk in the morning. I am hereby mandating 65-hour work weeks until this project is complete. And it better be complete by November 1."   As he leaves the conference room, he is heard to mutter: "Empowermentbah!" * * * Your boss is bald; his points are mounted on BB's wall. The fluorescent lights reflecting off his pate momentarily dazzle you. "Do you have anything to drink?" he asks. Having just finished your last bottle of Boone's Farm, you pull a bottle of Thunderbird from your bookshelf and pour it into his coffee mug. "What's it going to take to get this project done? " he asks. "We need to freeze the requirements, analyze them, design them, and then implement them," you say callously. "By November 1?" your boss exclaims incredulously. "No way! Just get back to coding the damned thing." He storms out, scratching his vacant head.   A few days later, you find that your boss has been transferred to the corporate research division. Turnover has skyrocketed. Customers, informed at the last minute that their orders cannot be fulfilled on time, have begun to cancel their orders. Marketing is re-evaluating whether this product aligns with the overall goals of the company. Memos fly, heads roll, policies change, and things are, overall, pretty grim. Finally, by March, after far too many sixty-five hour weeks, a very shaky version of the software is ready. In the field, bug-discovery rates are high, and the technical support staff are at their wits' end, trying to cope with the complaints and demands of the irate customers. Nobody is happy.   In April, BB decides to buy his way out of the problem by licensing a product produced by Rupert Industries and redistributing it. The customers are mollified, the marketing folks are smug, and you are laid off.     Rupert Industries: Project Alpha   Your name is Robert. The date is January 3, 2001. The quiet hours spent with your family this holiday have left you refreshed and ready for work. You are sitting in a conference room with your team of professionals. The manager of the division called the meeting. "We have some ideas for a new project," says the division manager. Call him Russ. He is a high-strung British chap with more energy than a fusion reactor. He is ambitious and driven but understands the value of a team. Russ describes the essence of the new market opportunity the company has identified and introduces you to Jane, the marketing manager, who is responsible for defining the products that will address it. Addressing you, Jane says, "We'd like to start defining our first product offering as soon as possible. When can you and your team meet with me?" You reply, "We'll be done with the current iteration of our project this Friday. We can spare a few hours for you between now and then. After that, we'll take a few people from the team and dedicate them to you. We'll begin hiring their replacements and the new people for your team immediately." "Great," says Russ, "but I want you to understand that it is critical that we have something to exhibit at the trade show coming up this July. If we can't be there with something significant, we'll lose the opportunity."   "I understand," you reply. "I don't yet know what it is that you have in mind, but I'm sure we can have something by July. I just can't tell you what that something will be right now. In any case, you and Jane are going to have complete control over what we developers do, so you can rest assured that by July, you'll have the most important things that can be accomplished in that time ready to exhibit."   Russ nods in satisfaction. He knows how this works. Your team has always kept him advised and allowed him to steer their development. He has the utmost confidence that your team will work on the most important things first and will produce a high-quality product.   * * *   "So, Robert," says Jane at their first meeting, "How does your team feel about being split up?" "We'll miss working with each other," you answer, "but some of us were getting pretty tired of that last project and are looking forward to a change. So, what are you people cooking up?" Jane beams. "You know how much trouble our customers currently have . . ." And she spends a half hour or so describing the problem and possible solution. "OK, wait a second" you respond. "I need to be clear about this." And so you and Jane talk about how this system might work. Some of her ideas aren't fully formed. You suggest possible solutions. She likes some of them. You continue discussing.   During the discussion, as each new topic is addressed, Jane writes user story cards. Each card represents something that the new system has to do. The cards accumulate on the table and are spread out in front of you. Both you and Jane point at them, pick them up, and make notes on them as you discuss the stories. The cards are powerful mnemonic devices that you can use to represent complex ideas that are barely formed.   At the end of the meeting, you say, "OK, I've got a general idea of what you want. I'm going to talk to the team about it. I imagine they'll want to run some experiments with various database structures and presentation formats. Next time we meet, it'll be as a group, and we'll start identifying the most important features of the system."   A week later, your nascent team meets with Jane. They spread the existing user story cards out on the table and begin to get into some of the details of the system. The meeting is very dynamic. Jane presents the stories in the order of their importance. There is much discussion about each one. The developers are concerned about keeping the stories small enough to estimate and test. So they continually ask Jane to split one story into several smaller stories. Jane is concerned that each story have a clear business value and priority, so as she splits them, she makes sure that this stays true.   The stories accumulate on the table. Jane writes them, but the developers make notes on them as needed. Nobody tries to capture everything that is said; the cards are not meant to capture everything but are simply reminders of the conversation.   As the developers become more comfortable with the stories, they begin writing estimates on them. These estimates are crude and budgetary, but they give Jane an idea of what the story will cost.   At the end of the meeting, it is clear that many more stories could be discussed. It is also clear that the most important stories have been addressed and that they represent several months worth of work. Jane closes the meeting by taking the cards with her and promising to have a proposal for the first release in the morning.   * * *   The next morning, you reconvene the meeting. Jane chooses five cards and places them on the table. "According to your estimates, these cards represent about one perfect team-week's worth of work. The last iteration of the previous project managed to get one perfect team-week done in 3 real weeks. If we can get these five stories done in 3 weeks, we'll be able to demonstrate them to Russ. That will make him feel very comfortable about our progress." Jane is pushing it. The sheepish look on her face lets you know that she knows it too. You reply, "Jane, this is a new team, working on a new project. It's a bit presumptuous to expect that our velocity will be the same as the previous team's. However, I met with the team yesterday afternoon, and we all agreed that our initial velocity should, in fact, be set to one perfectweek for every 3 real-weeks. So you've lucked out on this one." "Just remember," you continue, "that the story estimates and the story velocity are very tentative at this point. We'll learn more when we plan the iteration and even more when we implement it."   Jane looks over her glasses at you as if to say "Who's the boss around here, anyway?" and then smiles and says, "Yeah, don't worry. I know the drill by now."Jane then puts 15 more cards on the table. She says, "If we can get all these cards done by the end of March, we can turn the system over to our beta test customers. And we'll get good feedback from them."   You reply, "OK, so we've got our first iteration defined, and we have the stories for the next three iterations after that. These four iterations will make our first release."   "So," says Jane, can you really do these five stories in the next 3 weeks?" "I don't know for sure, Jane," you reply. "Let's break them down into tasks and see what we get."   So Jane, you, and your team spend the next several hours taking each of the five stories that Jane chose for the first iteration and breaking them down into small tasks. The developers quickly realize that some of the tasks can be shared between stories and that other tasks have commonalities that can probably be taken advantage of. It is clear that potential designs are popping into the developers' heads. From time to time, they form little discussion knots and scribble UML diagrams on some cards.   Soon, the whiteboard is filled with the tasks that, once completed, will implement the five stories for this iteration. You start the sign-up process by saying, "OK, let's sign up for these tasks." "I'll take the initial database generation." Says Pete. "That's what I did on the last project, and this doesn't look very different. I estimate it at two of my perfect workdays." "OK, well, then, I'll take the login screen," says Joe. "Aw, darn," says Elaine, the junior member of the team, "I've never done a GUI, and kinda wanted to try that one."   "Ah, the impatience of youth," Joe says sagely, with a wink in your direction. "You can assist me with it, young Jedi." To Jane: "I think it'll take me about three of my perfect workdays."   One by one, the developers sign up for tasks and estimate them in terms of their own perfect workdays. Both you and Jane know that it is best to let the developers volunteer for tasks than to assign the tasks to them. You also know full well that you daren't challenge any of the developers' estimates. You know these people, and you trust them. You know that they are going to do the very best they can.   The developers know that they can't sign up for more perfect workdays than they finished in the last iteration they worked on. Once each developer has filled his or her schedule for the iteration, they stop signing up for tasks.   Eventually, all the developers have stopped signing up for tasks. But, of course, tasks are still left on the board.   "I was worried that that might happen," you say, "OK, there's only one thing to do, Jane. We've got too much to do in this iteration. What stories or tasks can we remove?" Jane sighs. She knows that this is the only option. Working overtime at the beginning of a project is insane, and projects where she's tried it have not fared well.   So Jane starts to remove the least-important functionality. "Well, we really don't need the login screen just yet. We can simply start the system in the logged-in state." "Rats!" cries Elaine. "I really wanted to do that." "Patience, grasshopper." says Joe. "Those who wait for the bees to leave the hive will not have lips too swollen to relish the honey." Elaine looks confused. Everyone looks confused. "So . . .," Jane continues, "I think we can also do away with . . ." And so, bit by bit, the list of tasks shrinks. Developers who lose a task sign up for one of the remaining ones.   The negotiation is not painless. Several times, Jane exhibits obvious frustration and impatience. Once, when tensions are especially high, Elaine volunteers, "I'll work extra hard to make up some of the missing time." You are about to correct her when, fortunately, Joe looks her in the eye and says, "When once you proceed down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."   In the end, an iteration acceptable to Jane is reached. It's not what Jane wanted. Indeed, it is significantly less. But it's something the team feels that can be achieved in the next 3 weeks.   And, after all, it still addresses the most important things that Jane wanted in the iteration. "So, Jane," you say when things had quieted down a bit, "when can we expect acceptance tests from you?" Jane sighs. This is the other side of the coin. For every story the development team implements,   Jane must supply a suite of acceptance tests that prove that it works. And the team needs these long before the end of the iteration, since they will certainly point out differences in the way Jane and the developers imagine the system's behaviour.   "I'll get you some example test scripts today," Jane promises. "I'll add to them every day after that. You'll have the entire suite by the middle of the iteration."   * * *   The iteration begins on Monday morning with a flurry of Class, Responsibilities, Collaborators sessions. By midmorning, all the developers have assembled into pairs and are rapidly coding away. "And now, my young apprentice," Joe says to Elaine, "you shall learn the mysteries of test-first design!"   "Wow, that sounds pretty rad," Elaine replies. "How do you do it?" Joe beams. It's clear that he has been anticipating this moment. "OK, what does the code do right now?" "Huh?" replied Elaine, "It doesn't do anything at all; there is no code."   "So, consider our task; can you think of something the code should do?" "Sure," Elaine said with youthful assurance, "First, it should connect to the database." "And thereupon, what must needs be required to connecteth the database?" "You sure talk weird," laughed Elaine. "I think we'd have to get the database object from some registry and call the Connect() method. "Ah, astute young wizard. Thou perceives correctly that we requireth an object within which we can cacheth the database object." "Is 'cacheth' really a word?" "It is when I say it! So, what test can we write that we know the database registry should pass?" Elaine sighs. She knows she'll just have to play along. "We should be able to create a database object and pass it to the registry in a Store() method. And then we should be able to pull it out of the registry with a Get() method and make sure it's the same object." "Oh, well said, my prepubescent sprite!" "Hay!" "So, now, let's write a test function that proves your case." "But shouldn't we write the database object and registry object first?" "Ah, you've much to learn, my young impatient one. Just write the test first." "But it won't even compile!" "Are you sure? What if it did?" "Uh . . ." "Just write the test, Elaine. Trust me." And so Joe, Elaine, and all the other developers began to code their tasks, one test case at a time. The room in which they worked was abuzz with the conversations between the pairs. The murmur was punctuated by an occasional high five when a pair managed to finish a task or a difficult test case.   As development proceeded, the developers changed partners once or twice a day. Each developer got to see what all the others were doing, and so knowledge of the code spread generally throughout the team.   Whenever a pair finished something significant whether a whole task or simply an important part of a task they integrated what they had with the rest of the system. Thus, the code base grew daily, and integration difficulties were minimized.   The developers communicated with Jane on a daily basis. They'd go to her whenever they had a question about the functionality of the system or the interpretation of an acceptance test case.   Jane, good as her word, supplied the team with a steady stream of acceptance test scripts. The team read these carefully and thereby gained a much better understanding of what Jane expected the system to do. By the beginning of the second week, there was enough functionality to demonstrate to Jane. She watched eagerly as the demonstration passed test case after test case. "This is really cool," Jane said as the demonstration finally ended. "But this doesn't seem like one-third of the tasks. Is your velocity slower than anticipated?"   You grimace. You'd been waiting for a good time to mention this to Jane but now she was forcing the issue. "Yes, unfortunately, we are going more slowly than we had expected. The new application server we are using is turning out to be a pain to configure. Also, it takes forever to reboot, and we have to reboot it whenever we make even the slightest change to its configuration."   Jane eyes you with suspicion. The stress of last Monday's negotiations had still not entirely dissipated. She says, "And what does this mean to our schedule? We can't slip it again, we just can't. Russ will have a fit! He'll haul us all into the woodshed and ream us some new ones."   You look Jane right in the eyes. There's no pleasant way to give someone news like this. So you just blurt out, "Look, if things keep going like they're going, we're not going to be done with everything by next Friday. Now it's possible that we'll figure out a way to go faster. But, frankly, I wouldn't depend on that. You should start thinking about one or two tasks that could be removed from the iteration without ruining the demonstration for Russ. Come hell or high water, we are going to give that demonstration on Friday, and I don't think you want us to choose which tasks to omit."   "Aw forchrisakes!" Jane barely manages to stifle yelling that last word as she stalks away, shaking her head. Not for the first time, you say to yourself, "Nobody ever promised me project management would be easy." You are pretty sure it won't be the last time, either.   Actually, things went a bit better than you had hoped. The team did, in fact, have to drop one task from the iteration, but Jane had chosen wisely, and the demonstration for Russ went without a hitch. Russ was not impressed with the progress, but neither was he dismayed. He simply said, "This is pretty good. But remember, we have to be able to demonstrate this system at the trade show in July, and at this rate, it doesn't look like you'll have all that much to show." Jane, whose attitude had improved dramatically with the completion of the iteration, responded to Russ by saying, "Russ, this team is working hard, and well. When July comes around, I am confident that we'll have something significant to demonstrate. It won't be everything, and some of it may be smoke and mirrors, but we'll have something."   Painful though the last iteration was, it had calibrated your velocity numbers. The next iteration went much better. Not because your team got more done than in the last iteration but simply because the team didn't have to remove any tasks or stories in the middle of the iteration.   By the start of the fourth iteration, a natural rhythm has been established. Jane, you, and the team know exactly what to expect from one another. The team is running hard, but the pace is sustainable. You are confident that the team can keep up this pace for a year or more.   The number of surprises in the schedule diminishes to near zero; however, the number of surprises in the requirements does not. Jane and Russ frequently look over the growing system and make recommendations or changes to the existing functionality. But all parties realize that these changes take time and must be scheduled. So the changes do not cause anyone's expectations to be violated. In March, there is a major demonstration of the system to the board of directors. The system is very limited and is not yet in a form good enough to take to the trade show, but progress is steady, and the board is reasonably impressed.   The second release goes even more smoothly than the first. By now, the team has figured out a way to automate Jane's acceptance test scripts. The team has also refactored the design of the system to the point that it is really easy to add new features and change old ones. The second release was done by the end of June and was taken to the trade show. It had less in it than Jane and Russ would have liked, but it did demonstrate the most important features of the system. Although customers at the trade show noticed that certain features were missing, they were very impressed overall. You, Russ, and Jane all returned from the trade show with smiles on your faces. You all felt as though this project was a winner.   Indeed, many months later, you are contacted by Rufus Inc. That company had been working on a system like this for its internal operations. Rufus has canceled the development of that system after a death-march project and is negotiating to license your technology for its environment.   Indeed, things are looking up!

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  • Inserting THEAD element into embedded HTML using jQuery

    - by robalot
    I'm trying to use jQuery to insert HTML into a table element. I've been messing variations of the selector (below) with no luck. Can someone help me? My Selector: $j('#ctl00_body_gridData_dom').children('table:first').append("<thead><tr><td colspan='6'>&nbsp;</td><td align='center' colspan='7'>EM SPECS</td><td align='center' colspan='7'>FISH</td><td colspan='11'>&nbsp;</td></tr></thead>"); Here's what I am trying to do... I want to insert this: <thead> <tr> <td colspan="6"> &nbsp; </td> <td align="center" colspan="7"> EM SPECS </td> <td align="center" colspan="7"> FISH </td> <td colspan="11"> &nbsp; </td> </tr> </thead> The sample below is what I want the end result to look like... So It Looks Like This: Jquery Event Pool <table id="ctl00_body_gridData" style="width: 2000px; -moz-user-select: none;" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td id="ctl00_body_gridData_dom" class="GridData" style="vertical-align: top; height: 245px;" valign="top"> <table style="width: 100%;" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <thead> <tr> <td colspan="6"> &nbsp; </td> <td align="center" colspan="7"> EM SPECS </td> <td align="center" colspan="7"> FISH </td> <td colspan="11"> &nbsp; </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr id="ctl00_body_gridData_top_head" class="headerlineGrid"> <td width="16"> <div style="width: 16px;"></div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,4,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,4,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,0,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,4,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,4,0)" style="width: 89px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 89px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Work<br>Package</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,6,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,6,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,1,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,6,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,6,0)" style="width: 62px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 62px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Work<br>Order</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,9,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,9,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,2,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,9,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,9,0)" style="width: 66px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 66px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> FCR<br>Group</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,12,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,12,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,3,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,12,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,12,0)" style="width: 105px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 105px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center">Contractor</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,15,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,15,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,4,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,15,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,15,0)" style="width: 159px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 159px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Capital/Expense<br>Group</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,19,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,19,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,5,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,19,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,19,0)" style="width: 99px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 99px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center">Cost Type</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,20,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,20,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,6,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,20,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,20,0)" style="width: 81px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 81px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Commit<br>Dollars</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,21,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,21,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,7,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,21,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,21,0)" style="width: 81px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 81px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Commit<br>Hours</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,22,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,22,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,8,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,22,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,22,0)" style="width: 86px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 86px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Commit<br>Quantity</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,23,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,23,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,9,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,23,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,23,0)" style="width: 76px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 76px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Control<br>Budget</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,24,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,24,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,10,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,24,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,24,0)" style="width: 46px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 46px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center">FTC</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,25,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,25,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,11,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,25,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,25,0)" style="width: 88px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 88px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Total<br>Forecast</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,26,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,26,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,12,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,26,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,26,0)" style="width: 50px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 50px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Ctr<br>COB</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,27,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,27,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,13,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,27,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,27,0)" style="width: 49px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 49px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Ctr<br>CCB</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,28,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,28,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,14,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,28,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,28,0)" style="width: 81px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 81px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Ctr<br> Commit<br>$</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,29,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,29,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,15,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,29,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,29,0)" style="width: 81px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 81px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Ctr<br> Commit<br>Hours</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,30,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,30,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,16,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,30,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,30,0)" style="width: 86px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 86px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Ctr<br> Commit<br>Quantity</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,31,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,31,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,17,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,31,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,31,0)" style="width: 95px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 95px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Ctr<br>% Compl.</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> <td onclick="ctl00_body_gridData.ClickHandler(event,this,32,0)" ondblclick="ctl00_body_gridData.DblClickHandler(event,null,32,0)" onmousemove="ctl00_body_gridData.MoveHandler(event,this,18,0)" onmouseover="ctl00_body_gridData.OverHandler(event,this,0)" onmouseout="ctl00_body_gridData.OutHandler(event,this,0)" onmousedown="ctl00_body_gridData.DownHandler(event,this,32,0)" onmouseup="ctl00_body_gridData.UpHandler(event,this,32,0)" style="width: 105px;" class="HeadingCell" align="center"> <div style="text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 105px;"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="white-space: nowrap; text-align: center;" class="HeadingCellText" align="center"> Contractor<br>CFTC</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td id="ctl00_body_gridData_expcolgrp_0" width="16" align="center"></td> <td class="GroupHeading" colspan="20"> FCR<br>Group: Engineering</td> </tr> <tr> <td id="ctl00_body_gridData_expcolgrp_1" width="16" align="center"></td> <td class="GroupHeading" colspan="20"> FCR<br>Group: Pipe</td> </tr> <tr> <td id="ctl00_body_gridData_expcolgrp_2" width="16" align="center"></td> <td class="GroupHeading" colspan="20"> FCR<br>Group: Concrete</td> </tr> <tr> <td id="ctl00_body_gridData_expcolgrp_3" width="16" align="center"></td> <td class="GroupHeading" colspan="20"> FCR<br>Group: Insulation</td> </tr> <tr> <td id="ctl00_body_gridData_expcolgrp_4" width="16" align="center"></td> <td class="GroupHeading" colspan="20"> FCR<br>Group: Buildings</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </body> </html>

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