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• OS Development. Only Few Particular Questions

  - by Total Anime Immersion

  I am new to this site as a member but have consulted its answers quite a lot of times. Besides my questions regarding OS Development hasn't been answered in any forum. In OS Dev. we make a bootloader. The org point is 7C00H. Why so? Why not 0000h? What are the last two signatures in the bootloader used for? People on every forum have answered that it is important for the system to recognize it as a bootable media. But I want a specific answer. What do each of those signatures do. I have the basic concept of a kernel. Point is.. it relates to different files required in a system. It sort of binds up everything that is individually developed. Now the thing is that that I have floating ideas in my mind regarding different aspects like keyboard, mouse, etc.. how do I put them all together? Which should I start with first? If possible please provide a step by step procedure of the startups of the kernel. Suppose I have developed my language entirely in C and Assembly. Now questions is will exe files work on my system.. if it doesn't then I have to create my own files and publish them. Which is a bad idea.. next step would be for me to go for a compiler for a language which I have designed myself. Now the point is.. How do I implement the compiler into my OS? After all this my final question is that.. How do you go about multitasking and multithreading? and I don't want to use int 21h as its dos specific.. how do I go about making files, renaming them, etc. and all assembly books teach 16 but programming.. how do i go about doing 32 bit or 64 bit with the knowledge I have.. if the basics and instructions are the same.. I don't mind.. but how do i go about otherwise? Don't tell me to give up the idea because I WON'T. And don't tell me it's too complex because I have a sharp knowledge of working of a system, C, Java, Assembly, C++ and python, C#, visual basic.. and not just basics but full fledged api developments.. but I really want to go deep into the systems part.. so I want professional help.. And I have gone through many OS project files but I want help particularly from this site as there are people with knowledge depth who can guide me the right way. And please don't suggest any books above 20$ and they should be available on flipkart as amazon charges massively for shipping and I prefer free shipping from flipkart.

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• Part 9: EBS Customizations, how to track

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  In the previous blogs we were concentrating on the preparation tasks. We have defined standards, we know about the tools and techniques we will start with. Additionally, we have defined the modification strategy, and how to handle such topics best. Now we are ready to take the requirements! Such requirements coming over in spreadsheets, word files (like GAP documents), or in any other format. As we have to assign some attributes, we start numbering all that and assign a short name to each of these requirements (=CEMLI reference). We may also have already a Functional person assigned, and we might involve someone from the tech team to estimate, and we like to assign a status such as 'planned', 'estimated' etc. All these data are usually kept in spreadsheets, but I would put them into a database (yes, I am from Oracle :). If you don't have any good looking and centralized application already, please give a try with Oracle APEX. It should be up and running in a day and the imported sheets are than manageable concurrently!  For one of my clients I have created this CEMLI-DB; in between enriched with a lot of additional functionality, but initially it was just a simple centralized CEMLI tracking application. Why I am pointing out again the centralized method to manage such data? Well, your data quality will dramatically increase, if you let your project members see (also review and update) "your" data.  APEX allows you to filter, sort, print, and also export. And if you can spend some time to define proper value lists, everyone will gain from. APEX allows you to work in 'agile' mode, means you can improve your application step by step. Let's say you like to reference a document, or even upload the same, you can do that. Or, you need to classify the CEMLIs by release, just add this release field, same for business area or CEMLI type. One CEMLI record may then look like this: Prepare one or two (online) reports, to be ready to present your "workload" to the project management. Use such extracts also when you work offline (to prioritize etc.). But as soon as you are again connected, feed the data back into the central application. Note: I have combined this application with an additional issue tracker.  Here the most important element is the CEMLI reference, which acts as link to any other application (if you are not using APEX also as issue tracker :).  Please spend a minute to define such a reference (see blog Part 8: How to name Customizations).   Summary: Building the bridge from Gap analyse to the development has to be done in a controlled way. Usually the information is provided differently, but it is suggested to collect all requirements centrally. Oracle APEX is a great solution to enter and maintain such information in a structured, but flexible way. APEX helped me a lot to work with distributed development teams during the complete development cycle.

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• Ubuntu 11.04 and 10.04 hang with black screen while installing from USB disk

  - by Bill

  I've been trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 from a USB flash stick and each time I try to boot from the USB key one of two things happen: A) The screen that asks you what you would like to do (e.g. run Ubuntu from the USB key or install it) shows up and the countdown to the default option starts to count down but as soon as I either touch the keyboard (sometimes I press enter or the arrow keys to select an option) or the countdown gets to zero the screen just locks up and nothing happens no matter how long I wait. B) When I boot from the USB key the screen will flicker for a second and then go black with a flashing white underscore at the top left corner of the screen. Again it doesn't matter how long I wait, nothing happens and pressing keys doesn't do a thing. The very first time I tried to install it I got a terminal-like screen that said something about a directory called 'casper' having an error of some sort. I have tried installing from USB using both 11.04 and 10.10. I'm about to try 10.04. I have read tons of forum posts about this but so far I haven't seen anything in the solutions that apply to me. My intention is to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I must keep Windows as I am required to use Visual Studio for one of my college courses. Right now I'm using Wubi but I really want a full install. I can't use LVPM because it doesn't work with the version of Wubi I used. So now I'm thinking my best bet is to try to get a clean install working. I'd also convert Wubi to a full install too but there's no solution as far as I've read. So could someone tell me a reason why this is happening or if there's something I can do to get around the problem? I'm using a Gateway LT2802u netbook with and Intel Atom N455 processor, 1GB RAM, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 graphics card, and a 250GB HDD. I don't have anything on my current Wubi install that I can't replace so keep in mind when answering that I don't care if I lose my current settings and files from Wubi. Thanks everyone! UPDATE I just answered my own question so in case anyone else is having this same problem using similar hardware, do the following: When I first tried installing 11.04 I used the recommended universal installer tool to create the USB live/installation disk. That caused the original problem. Note that I had already downloaded the 11.04 ISO and did not use the included downloader from the USB creator. After that failed I used the same USB creator but had it download 10.10 for me. It also failed with the same issue. I repeated this process with unetbootin as well for both versions. Finally, I downloaded the Ubuntu 10.04 ISO and used the recommended USB creator once again. There was an error while creating the USB live install so I reformatted the USB key as FAT32 and tried again. It created the USB key. I then booted from the USB flash drive and selected "Install Ubuntu" (exact wording was different). It worked! It took me through the process that you see shown in pictures on the Ubuntu website. I let it create the appropriate partitions for me and it simply worked. I did get a few errors while the system tried to restart after it installed. It hung on a terminal-like screen but I pressed ENTER and it restarted. I booted into Windows 7, it checked the disks as it sensed that I messed with a partition, then it booted into Windows normally. Now I'm going to uninstall Wubi and update my new full install of Ubuntu! I'm excited to get the benefits of a full install now. So in the end, hopefully someone can learn from what I did.

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• Thoughts on Thoughts on TDD

  Brian Harry wrote a post entitled Thoughts on TDD that I thought I was going to let lie, but I find that I need to write a response. I find myself in agreement with Brian on many points in the post, but I disagree with his conclusion. Not surprisingly, I agree with the things that he likes about TDD. Focusing on the usage rather than the implementation is really important, and this is important whether you use TDD or not. And YAGNI was a big theme in my Seven Deadly Sins of Programming series. Now, on to what he doesnt like. He says that he finds it inefficient to have tests that he has to change every time he refactors. Here is where we part company. If you are having to do a lot of test rewriting (say, more than a couple of minutes work to get back to green) *often* when you are refactoring your code, I submit that either you are testing things that you dont need to test (internal details rather than external implementation), your code perhaps isnt as decoupled as it could be, or maybe you need a visit to refactorers anonymous. I also like to refactor like crazy, but as we all know, the huge downside of refactoring is that we often break things. Important things. Subtle things. Which makes refactoring risky. *Unless* we have a set of tests that have great coverage. And TDD (or Example-based Design, which I prefer as a term) gives those to us. Now, I dont know what sort of coverage Brian gets with the unit tests that he writes, but I do know that for the majority of the developers Ive worked with and I count myself in that bucket the coverage of unit tests written afterwards is considerably inferior to the coverage of unit tests that come from TDD. For me, it all comes down to the answer to the following question: How do you ensure that your code works now and will continue to work in the future? Im willing to put up with a little efficiency on the front side to get that benefit later. Its not the writing of the code thats the expensive part, its everything else that comes after. I dont think that stepping through test cases in the debugger gets you what you want. You can verify what the current behavior is, sure, and do it fairly cheaply, but you dont help the guy in the future who doesnt know what conditions were important if he has to change your code. His second part that he doesnt like backing into an architecture (go read to see what he means). Ive certainly had to work with code that was like this before, and its a nightmare the code that nobody wants to touch. But thats not at all the kind of code that you get with TDD, because if youre doing it right youre doing the write a failing tests, make it pass, refactor approach. Now, you may miss some useful refactorings and generalizations for this, but if you do, you can refactor later because you have the tests that make it safe to do so, and your code tends to be easy to refactor because the same things that make code easy to write unit tests for make it easy to refactor. I also think Brian is missing an important point. We arent all as smart as he is. Im reminded a bit of the lesson of Intentional Programming, Charles Simonyis paradigm for making programming easier. I played around with Intentional Programming when it was young, and came to the conclusion that it was a pretty good thing if you were as smart as Simonyi is, but it was pretty much a disaster if you were an average developer. In this case, TDD gives you a way to work your way into a good, flexible, and functional architecture when you dont have somebody of Brians talents to help you out. And thats a good thing.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• WebGrid Helper and Complex Types

  - by imran_ku07

      Introduction:           WebGrid helper makes it very easy to show tabular data. It was originally designed for ASP.NET Web Pages(WebMatrix) to display, edit, page and sort tabular data but you can also use this helper in ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. When using this helper, sometimes you may run into a problem if you use complex types in this helper. In this article, I will show you how you can use complex types in WebGrid helper.       Description:             Let's say you need to show the employee data and you have the following classes,   public class Employee { public string Name { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } public List<string> ContactNumbers { get; set; } } public class Address { public string City { get; set; } }               The Employee class contain a Name, an Address and list of ContactNumbers. You may think that you can easily show City in WebGrid using Address.City, but no. The WebGrid helper will throw an exception at runtime if any Address property is null in the Employee list. Also, you cannot directly show ContactNumbers property. The easiest way to show these properties is to add some additional properties,   public Address NotNullableAddress { get { return Address ?? new Address(); } } public string Contacts { get { return string.Join("; ",ContactNumbers); } }               Now you can easily use these properties in WebGrid. Here is the complete code of this example,  @functions{ public class Employee { public Employee(){ ContactNumbers = new List<string>(); } public string Name { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } public List<string> ContactNumbers { get; set; } public Address NotNullableAddress { get { return Address ?? new Address(); } } public string Contacts { get { return string.Join("; ",ContactNumbers); } } } public class Address { public string City { get; set; } } } @{ var myClasses = new List<Employee>{ new Employee { Name="A" , Address = new Address{ City="AA" }, ContactNumbers = new List<string>{"021-216452","9231425651"}}, new Employee { Name="C" , Address = new Address{ City="CC" }}, new Employee { Name="D" , ContactNumbers = new List<string>{"045-14512125","21531212121"}} }; var grid = new WebGrid(source: myClasses); } @grid.GetHtml(columns: grid.Columns( grid.Column("NotNullableAddress.City", header: "City"), grid.Column("Name"), grid.Column("Contacts")))                    Summary:           You can use WebGrid helper to show tabular data in ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and  ASP.NET Web Pages. Using this helper, you can also show complex types in the grid. In this article, I showed you how you use complex types with WebGrid helper. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.  

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• Simple task framework - building software from reusable pieces

  - by RuslanD

  I'm writing a web service with several APIs, and they will be sharing some of the implementation code. In order not to copy-paste, I would like to ideally implement each API call as a series of tasks, which are executed in a sequence determined by the business logic. One obvious question is whether that's the best strategy for code reuse, or whether I can look at it in a different way. But assuming I want to go with tasks, several issues arise: What's a good task interface to use? How do I pass data computed in one task to another task in the sequence that might need it? In the past, I've worked with task interfaces like: interface Task<T, U> { U execute(T input); } Then I also had sort of a "task context" object which had getters and setters for any kind of data my tasks needed to produce or consume, and it gets passed to all tasks. I'm aware that this suffers from a host of problems. So I wanted to figure out a better way to implement it this time around. My current idea is to have a TaskContext object which is a type-safe heterogeneous container (as described in Effective Java). Each task can ask for an item from this container (task input), or add an item to the container (task output). That way, tasks don't need to know about each other directly, and I don't have to write a class with dozens of methods for each data item. There are, however, several drawbacks: Each item in this TaskContext container should be a complex type that wraps around the actual item data. If task A uses a String for some purpose, and task B uses a String for something entirely different, then just storing a mapping between String.class and some object doesn't work for both tasks. The other reason is that I can't use that kind of container for generic collections directly, so they need to be wrapped in another object. This means that, based on how many tasks I define, I would need to also define a number of classes for the task items that may be consumed or produced, which may lead to code bloat and duplication. For instance, if a task takes some Long value as input and produces another Long value as output, I would have to have two classes that simply wrap around a Long, which IMO can spiral out of control pretty quickly as the codebase evolves. I briefly looked at workflow engine libraries, but they kind of seem like a heavy hammer for this particular nail. How would you go about writing a simple task framework with the following requirements: Tasks should be as self-contained as possible, so they can be composed in different ways to create different workflows. That being said, some tasks may perform expensive computations that are prerequisites for other tasks. We want to have a way of storing the results of intermediate computations done by tasks so that other tasks can use those results for free. The task framework should be light, i.e. growing the code doesn't involve introducing many new types just to plug into the framework.

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• Silverlight Cream for May 27, 2010 -- #871

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Max Paulousky, Jeff Wilcox, David Anson, René Schulte, Xianzhong Zhu, Jeff Handley, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, and Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: SilverLaw has a great demo at the Expression Gallery, and we're all going to look forward to the blog post explaining it: Flexible Surface Effect SilverLaw> has another use for the above in this text morphing Effect: Morphing Text Effect Matthias Shapiro contributed a chapter for a book on Visualization and it's available as a free download: Free Chapter From Beautiful Visualization Andy Beaulieu has a demo up as almost a spoiler for a future Coding4Fun app... and how cool is this: Shuffleboard: A Windows Phone 7 Sample Game From SilverlightCream.com: Separating Content and Presentation with the ContentControl Phil Middlemiss' latest is out on SilverlightShow and is all about the ContentControl and separating layout and content ... demo project source included Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications. Part 1 Max Paulousky has part one of a long series he's starting on a demo project to explain a bunch of MEF, MVVM, and WCF RIA concepts. This first one contains the overview and also discusses SEO. There is a link to the app and material in the post if you read Russian :) Updated Silverlight Unit Test Framework bits for Windows Phone and Silverlight 3 Jeff Wilcox has available updated Unit Test bits for Silverlight 3 -- read that as WP7... read the rest of the information on his post. Easily animate orientation changes for any Windows Phone application with this handy source code David Anson has some code up that you're going to want if you're programming WP7 ... just watch the video ... you'll be downloading the code just like I did :) SilverShader – Introduction to Silverlight and WPF Pixel Shaders René Schulte has a post up at Coding4Fun about PixelShaders... how to write them and an application that uses them... this is a great long tutorial... a must read. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 2 Xianzhong Zhu has part 2 of his FreeCell game development posted ... lots of detailed descriptions and code, plus all the code of course! Async Validation with RIA Services Jeff Handley has a post up that is sort of a follow-on to a year-old post on async validation with RIA services and DataForm and how it's all much easier now in SL4. Learning Blend with .toolbox (Silverlight TV #29) John Papa and Arturo Toledo discuss .toolbox in Silverlight TV #29 -- have you made yourself an avatar yet? ... well go get on-board with this great learning tool! Silverlight Out of Browser Dynamic Modules in Offline Mode OOB isn't difficult, dynamic modules can become a bit more, but what if you're OOB... ok what if you're OOB and offline? ... Jeremy Likness has a possible solution for this with an OfflineCatalog. MEFedMVVM v1.0 Explained Marlon Grech has a great into to MEFedMVVM in this post. If you're trying to get your head around MEF and MVVM in either WPF or Silverlight, here's a good starting point. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Using Live Data in Database Development Work

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk Newsletter... in which Phil Factor reacts with some exasperation when coming across a report that a majority of companies were still using financial and personal data for both developing and testing database applications. If you routinely test your development work using real production data that contains personal or financial information, you are probably being irresponsible, and at worst, risking a heavy financial penalty for your company. Surprisingly, over 80% of financial companies still do this. Plenty of data breaches and fraud have happened from the use of real data for testing, and a data breach is a nightmare for any organisation that suffers one. The cost of each data breach averages out at around $7.2 million in the US in notification, escalation, credit monitoring, fines, litigation, legal costs, and lost business due to customer churn, £1.9 million in the UK. 70% of data breaches are done from within the organisation. Real data can be exploited in a number of ways for malicious or criminal purposes. It isn't just the obvious use of items such as name and address, date of birth, social security number, and credit card and bank account numbers: Data can be exploited in many subtle ways, so there are excellent reasons to ensure that a high priority is given to the detection and prevention of any data breaches. You'll never successfully guess all the ways that real data can be exploited maliciously, or the ease with which it can be accessed. It would be silly to argue that developers never need access to a copy of the database containing live data. Developers sometimes need to track a bug that can only be replicated on the data from the live database. However, it has to be done in a very restrictive harness. The law makes no distinction between development and production databases when a data breach occurs, so the data has to be held with all appropriate security measures in place. In Europe, the use of personal data for testing requires the explicit consent of the people whose data is being held. There are federal standards such as GLBA, PCI DSS and HIPAA, and most US States have privacy legislation. The task of ensuring compliance and tight security in such circumstances is an expensive and time-consuming overhead. The developer is likely to suffer investigation if a data breach occurs, even if the company manages to stay in business. Ironically, the use of copies of live data isn't usually the most effective way to develop or test your data. Data is usually time-specific and isn't usually current by the time it is used for testing, Existing data doesn't help much for new functionality, and every time the data is refreshed from production, any test data is likely to be overwritten. Also, it is not always going to test all the 'edge' conditions that are likely to flush out bugs. You still have the task of simulating the dynamics of actual usage of the database, and here you have no alternative to creating 'spoofed' data. Because of the complexities of relational data, It used to be that there was no realistic alternative to developing and testing with live data. However, this is no longer the case. Real data can be obfuscated, or it can be created entirely from scratch. The latter process used to be impractical, now that there are plenty of third-party tools to choose from. The process of obfuscation isn't risk free. The process must access the live data, and the success of the obfuscation process has to be carefully monitored. Database data security isn't an exciting topic to you or I, but to a hacker it can be an all-consuming obsession, especially if there is financial or political gain involved. This is not the sort of adversary one would wish for and it is far better to accept, and work with, security restrictions that exist for using live data in database development work, especially when the tools exist to create large realistic database test data that can be better for several aspects of testing.

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• XNA 4.0 - Normal mapping shader - strange texture artifacts

  - by Taylor

  I recently started using custom shader. Shader can do diffuse and specular lighting and normal mapping. But normal mapping is causing really ugly artifacts (some sort of pixeling noise) for textures in greater distance. It looks like this: Image link This is HLSL code: // Matrix float4x4 World : World; float4x4 View : View; float4x4 Projection : Projection; //Textury texture2D ColorMap; sampler2D ColorMapSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <ColorMap>; MinFilter = Anisotropic; MagFilter = Linear; MipFilter = Linear; MaxAnisotropy = 16; }; texture2D NormalMap; sampler2D NormalMapSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <NormalMap>; MinFilter = Anisotropic; MagFilter = Linear; MipFilter = Linear; MaxAnisotropy = 16; }; // Light float4 AmbientColor : Color; float AmbientIntensity; float3 DiffuseDirection : LightPosition; float4 DiffuseColor : Color; float DiffuseIntensity; float4 SpecularColor : Color; float3 CameraPosition : CameraPosition; float Shininess; // The input for the VertexShader struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 Normal : NORMAL0; float3 Binormal : BINORMAL0; float3 Tangent : TANGENT0; }; // The output from the vertex shader, used for later processing struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 View : TEXCOORD1; float3x3 WorldToTangentSpace : TEXCOORD2; }; // The VertexShader. VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input, float3 Normal : NORMAL) { VertexShaderOutput output; float4 worldPosition = mul(input.Position, World); float4 viewPosition = mul(worldPosition, View); output.Position = mul(viewPosition, Projection); output.TexCoord = input.TexCoord; output.WorldToTangentSpace[0] = mul(normalize(input.Tangent), World); output.WorldToTangentSpace[1] = mul(normalize(input.Binormal), World); output.WorldToTangentSpace[2] = mul(normalize(input.Normal), World); output.View = normalize(float4(CameraPosition,1.0) - worldPosition); return output; } // The Pixel Shader float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { float4 color = tex2D(ColorMapSampler, input.TexCoord); float3 normalMap = 2.0 *(tex2D(NormalMapSampler, input.TexCoord)) - 1.0; normalMap = normalize(mul(normalMap, input.WorldToTangentSpace)); float4 normal = float4(normalMap,1.0); float4 diffuse = saturate(dot(-DiffuseDirection,normal)); float4 reflect = normalize(2*diffuse*normal-float4(DiffuseDirection,1.0)); float4 specular = pow(saturate(dot(reflect,input.View)), Shininess); return color * AmbientColor * AmbientIntensity + color * DiffuseIntensity * DiffuseColor * diffuse + color * SpecularColor * specular; } // Techniques technique Lighting { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } Any advice? Thanks!

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• Serial plans: Threshold / Parallel_degree_limit = 1

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  As a very short follow up on the previous post. So here is some more on getting a serial plan and why that happens Another reason - compared to the auto DOP is not on as we looked at in the earlier post - and often more prevalent to get a serial plan is if the plan simply does not take long enough to consider a parallel path. The resulting plan and note looks like this (note that this is a serial plan!): explain plan for select count(1) from sales; SELECT PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY()); PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Plan hash value: 672559287 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Id  | Operation            | Name  | Rows  | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |       |     1 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |     | |   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |       |     1 |            |          |       |     | |   2 |   PARTITION RANGE ALL|       |   960 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |  16 | |   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | SALES |   960 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |  16 | Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 1 because of parallel threshold 14 rows selected. The parallel threshold is referring to parallel_min_time_threshold and since I did not change the default (10s) the plan is not being considered for a parallel degree computation and is therefore staying with the serial execution. Now we go into the land of crazy: Assume I do want this DOP=1 to happen, I could set the parameter in the init.ora, but to highlight it in this case I changed it on the session: alter session set parallel_degree_limit = 1; The result I get is: ERROR: ORA-02097: parameter cannot be modified because specified value is invalid ORA-00096: invalid value 1 for parameter parallel_degree_limit, must be from among CPU IO AUTO INTEGER>=2 Which of course makes perfect sense...

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• apt-get 403 Forbidden

  - by Lerp

  I've start a new job today and I am trying to set up my machine to run through their Windows server. I've managed to get a internet connection through the server now but now I can't run apt-get update as I get a "403 Forbidden" error. This is for every repo under my source list, apart from translations(?). I do have a proxy in apt.conf, if I don't have it I get a 407 Permission Denied error. Here's my apt.conf file (I have omitted my username and password) Acquire::http::proxy "http://username:[email protected]:8080/"; Here's my sources.list #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20130213)]/ dists/precise/main/binary-i386/ #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20130213)]/ dists/precise/restricted/binary-i386/ #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20130213)]/ precise main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main I can sort-of fix this by changing all the http in sources.list to ftp but I still have issues with ppas

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• Create and Track Your Own License Keys with PowerShell

  - by BuckWoody

  SQL Server used to have  cool little tool that would let you track your licenses. Microsoft didn’t use it to limit your system or anything, it was just a place on the server where you could put that this system used this license key. I miss those days – we don’t track that any more, and I want to make sure I’m up to date on my licensing, so I made my own. Now, there are a LOT of ways you could do this. You could add an extended property in SQL Server, add a table to a tracking database, use a text file, track it somewhere else, whatever. This is just the route I chose; if you want to use some other method, feel free. Just sharing here. Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk. And this is REALLY important. I include a disclaimer at the end of my scripts, but in this case you’re modifying your registry, and that could be EXTREMELY dangerous – only do this on a test server – and I’m just showing you how I did mine. It isn’t an endorsement or anything like that, and this is a “Buck Woody” thing, NOT a Microsoft thing. See this link first, and then you can read on. OK, here’s my script: # Track your own licenses # Write a New Key to be the License Location mkdir HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck   # Write the variables - one sets the type, the other sets the number, and the last one holds the key New-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck -name "SQLServerLicenseType" -value "Processor" # Notice the Dword value here - this one is a number so it needs that. Keep this on one line! New-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck -name "SQLServerLicenseNumber" -propertytype DWord -value 4 New-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Buck -name "SQLServerLicenseKey" -value "ABCD1234"   # Read them all $LicenseKey = Get-Item HKCU:\Software\Buck $Licenses = Get-ItemProperty $LicenseKey.PSPath foreach ($License in $LicenseKey.Property) { $License + "=" + $Licenses.$License }   Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. Yes, there are always multiple ways to do things, and this script may not work in every situation, for everything. It’s just a script, people. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Love and Hate Outlook autocomplete, Outlook 2010/Exchange 2010

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  I think that almost every Exchange admin can concur with me that the Outlook autocomplete cache is one of those things you love but at the same time also hate. Users mostly love this function, except when it fails.Luckily since Outlook 2010 things got a little better and we got rid of the dreaded nk2 files.Outlook 2010 now includes a folder named "Suggested Contacts", all users you send an email to and that don't already have an contact object are saved in this suggested contacts folder.A lot of people thought this folder is also the source for the autocomplete cache, which would make it somewhat easy to manage, I wish the solution was that easy.Badly enough separate from the suggested contacts, outlook still maintains a cache for the autocomplete function. Let us say you run in to the following situation: John works for company A and is a popular contact for almost everyone in your organization.Now John quit his job at Company A and moved to Company B.Luckily John maintains your company as customer, but his email address is now changed from companyA.com to companyB.comSince you don't want to do any business with Company A anymore, you want to make sure none of your users accidentally mail to his old address.Now this is where the real fun starts, cause almost all of your 1000 users have mailed at least once with John.Resulting in the fact that every user has John most probably listed in their autocomplete cache.  I have run into sort like situations multiple times with several customers, which is always a pain.And of course this blog post is the result of one of those issues once again.I knew that with the Suggested contacts we could do more than previously, but still never spent time on it before.But today I thought lets nail this now and forever!!  Ok let's start of that things are different for every combination of outlook and exchange.I explain the procedure for Exchange 2010 SP1+ in combination with Outlook 2010.At first we want to get rid of all contact objects that contain [email protected] do this we need to be assigned to the RBAC role "Mailbox Import Export", which can be done through the Exchange Control panel.In my test environment I assigned this role to the Organization admins, but in real life you might want to add it to a custom role. Open the Exchange control panel by logging in to the ecp url, in my case https://ITFEX.itf.local/ECP, and make sure you selected your organization as management scope.Browse to Roles & Auditing, and open the properties for the organization management role group.click on the Add button to add a new role to the Organization Management role group, select the Mailbox Import Export role and click on add and OK to add it to the role.  Once you have assigned that role to your account you can open the Exchange Management Shell and execute the following command: Get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox –targetmailbox "your.account" –targetfolder searchanddelete –loglevel full –logonly –searchquery "kind:contact AND [email protected]" This command will create a list with all mailboxes and any contacts that were found with an email address that contains [email protected], this list is then posted in the mailbox you specified at your.account in the folder searchanddelete.Now examine the report that was created and posted in the mailbox to see if it matches what you think it should match.My results looked like this:  When you're confident that the search includes all references and no false positives you can execute almost the same command, but this time with an delete action instead of the logonly. Get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox –targetmailbox "your.account" –targetfolder searchanddelete –loglevel full –DeleteContent –searchquery "kind:contact AND [email protected]" Now most people would think this would remove the contact object from the suggested contacts, resulting in a removal from the autocomplete list.Sad but not true, to clean up the autocomplete list start Outlook with the command: "outlook /cleanautocompletecache" This will result in an empty cache, but luckily this is rebuild based on the suggested contacts, which now doesn't include the [email protected] contact anymore.

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• How do I get sound output on HDMI without the need to start X?

  - by Magnus Hoff

  I have a headless machine connected to my sound system, and I am using it to run a music playing daemon that I control over the network. (Among other things) However, I can't seem to be able to have sound come out of my speakers without running X. I am running pulse audio in a system wide instance and my daemon is not running within X. Nevertheless, when my daemon is playing music without me hearing it, I can fix it by running startx in an unrelated session. After X starts, I can hear the sound. The sound disappears again if I kill the X server. Interestingly/annoyingly, the sound also stops after X has been running for a few minutes. This could possibly be because of a screen saver of some sort, but I haven't been able to verify or falsify this theory. So my current workaround is to ssh into the box whenever I want music and startx, and restart it every fifteen minutes or so. I'd like to do better. I have been able to verify the following: Adjustments in alsamixer have no effect on this problem. The relevant output channel is never muted In alsamixer, I can see no difference between when the sound is working and when it isn't Nothing is muted in pactl list There is no difference in the output from pactl list between before starting X and after it's started. (Except the identifier of the pactl instance connected to pulse, which is different each time you run pactl) The user running the music daemon is a member of the groups audio, pulse and pulse-access The music daemon program does not report any error messages and acts as if it is playing the music like it should Some form of dbus daemon is running. ps aux|grep dbus reports dbus-daemon --system --fork --activation=upstart before and after I have started X Some details about my hardware: Motherboard: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AT5IONTI_DELUXE/ Sound chip: Nvidia GPU 0b HDMI/DP (from alsamixer) Using HDMI for output (Machine also has an Intel Realtek ALC887 that I am not using) Output of lsmod: Module Size Used by deflate 12617 0 zlib_deflate 27139 1 deflate ctr 13201 0 twofish_generic 16635 0 twofish_x86_64_3way 25287 0 twofish_x86_64 12907 1 twofish_x86_64_3way twofish_common 20919 3 twofish_generic,twofish_x86_64_3way,twofish_x86_64 camellia 29348 0 serpent 29125 0 blowfish_generic 12530 0 blowfish_x86_64 21466 0 blowfish_common 16739 2 blowfish_generic,blowfish_x86_64 cast5 25112 0 des_generic 21415 0 xcbc 12815 0 rmd160 16744 0 bnep 18281 2 rfcomm 47604 12 sha512_generic 12796 0 crypto_null 12918 0 parport_pc 32866 0 af_key 36389 0 ppdev 17113 0 binfmt_misc 17540 1 nfsd 281980 2 ext2 73795 1 nfs 436929 1 lockd 90326 2 nfsd,nfs fscache 61529 1 nfs auth_rpcgss 53380 2 nfsd,nfs nfs_acl 12883 2 nfsd,nfs sunrpc 255224 16 nfsd,nfs,lockd,auth_rpcgss,nfs_acl btusb 18332 2 vesafb 13844 2 pl2303 17957 1 ath3k 12961 0 bluetooth 180153 24 bnep,rfcomm,btusb,ath3k snd_hda_codec_hdmi 32474 4 nvidia 11308613 0 ftdi_sio 40679 1 usbserial 47113 6 pl2303,ftdi_sio psmouse 97485 0 snd_hda_codec_realtek 224173 1 snd_hda_intel 33719 5 snd_hda_codec 127706 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel serio_raw 13211 0 snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_hwdep 17764 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 97275 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61929 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 79041 20 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device asus_atk0110 18078 0 mac_hid 13253 0 jc42 13948 0 soundcore 15091 1 snd snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm coretemp 13554 0 i2c_i801 17570 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp r8169 62154 0 Any ideas? What does X do that's so important?

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• Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

  - by Etienne Tremblay

  I’d like to thank Packt for providing me with a review version of Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices eBook. In fairness I also know the author Peter having seen him speak at DevTeach on many occasions.  I started by looking at the table of content to see what this book was about, knowing that “best practices” is a real misnomer I wanted to see what they were.  I really like the fact that he starts the book by really saying they are not really best practices but actually recommend practices.  As a Team Foundation Server user I found that chapter 2 was more for the open source crowd and I really skimmed it.  The portion on Branching was well documented, although I’m not a fan of the testing branch myself, but the rest was right on. The section on merge remote changes (bring the outside to you) paradigm is really important and was touched on. Chapter 3 has good solid practices on low level constructs like generics and exceptions. Chapter 4 dives into architectural practices like decoupling, distributed architecture and data based architecture.  DTOs and ORMs are touched on briefly as is NoSQL. Chapter 5 is about deployment and is really a great primer on all the “packaging” technologies like Visual Studio Setup and Deployment (depreciated in 2012), Click Once and WIX the major player outside of commercial solutions.  This is a nice section on how to move from VSSD to WIX this is going to be important in the coming years due to the fact that VS 2012 doesn’t support VSSD. In chapter 6 we dive into automated testing practices, including test coverage, mocking, TDD, SpecDD and Continuous Testing.  Peter covers all those concepts really nicely albeit succinctly. Being a book on recommended practices I find this is really good. I really enjoyed chapter 7 that gave me a lot of great tips to enhance my Visual Studio “experience”.  Tips on organizing projects where good.  Also even though I knew about configurations I like that he put that in there so you can move all your settings to another machine, a lot of people don’t know about that. Quick find and Resharper are also briefly covered.  He touches on macros (depreciated in 2012).  Finally he touches on Continuous Integration a very important concept in today’s ALM landscape. Chapter 8 is all about Parallelization, threads, Async, division of labor, reactive extensions.  All those concepts are touched on and again generalized approaches to those modern problems are giving.       Chapter 9 goes into distributed apps, the most used and accepted practice in the industry for .NET projects the chapter tackles concepts like Scalability, Messaging and Cloud (the flavor of the month of distributed apps, although I think this will stick ;-)).  He also looks a protocols TCP/UDP and how to debug distributed apps.  He touches on logging and health monitoring. Chapter 10 tackles recommended practices for web services starting with implementing WCF services, which goes into all sort of goodness like how to host in IIS or self-host.  How to manual test WCF services, also a section on authentication and authorization.  ASP.NET Web services are also touched on in that chapter All in all a good read, nice tips and accepted practices.  I like the conciseness of the subjects and Peter touches on a lot of things in this book and uses a lot of the current technologies flavors to explain the concepts.   Cheers, ET

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• Some Original Expressions

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletterIn a guest editorial for the Simple-Talk Newsletter, Phil Factor wonders if we are still likely to find some more novel and unexpected ways of using the newer features of Transact SQL: or maybe in some features that have always been there! There can be a great deal of fun to be had in trying out recent features of SQL Expressions to see if  they provide new functionality.  It is surprisingly rare to find things that couldn’t be done before, but in a different   and more cumbersome way; but it is great to experiment or to read of someone else making that discovery.  One such recent feature is the ‘table value constructor’, or ‘VALUES constructor’, that managed to get into SQL Server 2008 from Standard SQL.  This allows you to create derived tables of up to 1000 rows neatly within select statements that consist of  lists of row values.  E.g. SELECT Old_Welsh, number FROM (VALUES ('Un',1),('Dou',2),('Tri',3),('Petuar',4),('Pimp',5),('Chwech',6),('Seith',7),('Wyth',8),('Nau',9),('Dec',10)) AS WelshWordsToTen (Old_Welsh, number) These values can be expressions that return single values, including, surprisingly, subqueries. You can use this device to create views, or in the USING clause of a MERGE statement. Joe Celko covered  this here and here.  It can become extraordinarily handy to use once one gets into the way of thinking in these terms, and I’ve rewritten a lot of routines to use the constructor, but the old way of using UNION can be used the same way, but is a little slower and more long-winded. The use of scalar SQL subqueries as an expression in a VALUES constructor, and then applied to a MERGE, has got me thinking. It looks very clever, but what use could one put it to? I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t be done almost as  simply in SQL Server 2000, but I’m hopeful that someone will come up with a way of solving a tricky problem, just in the same way that a freak of the XML syntax forever made the in-line  production of delimited lists from an expression easy, or that a weird XML pirouette could do an elegant  pivot-table rotation. It is in this sort of experimentation where the community of users can make a real contribution. The dissemination of techniques such as the Number, or Tally table, or the unconventional ways that the UPDATE statement can be used, has been rapid due to articles and blogs. However, there is plenty to be done to explore some of the less obvious features of Transact SQL. Even some of the features introduced into SQL Server 2000 are hardly well-known. Certain operations on data are still awkward to perform in Transact SQL, but we mustn’t, I think, be too ready to state that certain things can only be done in the application layer, or using a CLR routine. With the vast array of features in the product, and with the tools that surround it, I feel that there is generally a way of getting tricky things done. Or should we just stick to our lasts and push anything difficult out into procedural code? I’d love to know your views.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use the monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out the causes and then apply a fix (where possible) and then start the whole thing all over again? Just a crazy thought. OK, I was asked to. This is my first time looking through these servers, so here's how I'd go about using SQL Monitor to get a quick health check, sort of like checking the vitals on a patient. First time opening up our internal SQL Monitor instance and I was greeted with this: Oh my. Maybe I need to get our internal guys to read my blog. Anyway, I know that there are two servers where most of the load is. I'll drill down on the first. I'm selecting the server, not the instance, by clicking on the server name. That opens up the Global Overview page for the server. The information here much more applicable to the "oh my gosh, I have a problem now" type of monitoring. But, looking at this, I am seeing something immediately. There are four(4) drives on the system. The C:\ has an average read time of 16.9ms, more than double the others. Is that a problem? Not sure, but it's something I'll look at. It's write time is higher too. I'll keep drilling down, first, to the unclosed alerts on the server. Now things get interesting. SQL Monitor has a number of different types of alerts, some related to error states, others to service status, and then some related to performance. Guess what I'm seeing a bunch of right here: Long running queries and long job durations. If you check the dates, they're all recent, within the last 24 hours. If they had just been old, uncleared alerts, I wouldn't be that concerned. But with all these, all performance related, and all in the last 24 hours, yeah, I'm concerned. At this point, I could just start responding to the Alerts. If I click on one of the the Long-running query alerts, I'll get all kinds of cool data that can help me determine why the query ran long. But, I'm not in a reactive mode here yet. I'm still gathering data, trying to understand how the server works. I have the information that we're generating a lot of performance alerts, let's sock that away for the moment. Instead, I'm going to back up and look at the Global Overview for the SQL Instance. It shows all the databases on the server and their status. Then it shows a number of basic metrics about the SQL Server instance, again for that "what's happening now" view or things. Then, down at the bottom, there is the Top 10 expensive queries list: This is great stuff. And no, not because I can see the top queries for the last 5 minutes, but because I can adjust that out 3 days. Now I can see where some serious pain is occurring over the last few days. Databases have been blocked out to protect the guilty. That's it for the moment. I have enough knowledge of what's going on in the system that I can start to try to figure out why the system is running slowly. But, I want to look a little more at some historical data, to understand better how this server is behaving. More next time.

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• Abstracting entity caching in XNA

  - by Grofit

  I am in a situation where I am writing a framework in XNA and there will be quite a lot of static (ish) content which wont render that often. Now I am trying to take the same sort of approach I would use when doing non game development, where I don't even think about caching until I have finished my application and realise there is a performance problem and then implement a layer of caching over whatever needs it, but wrap it up so nothing is aware its happening. However in XNA the way we would usually cache would be drawing our objects to a texture and invalidating after a change occurs. So if you assume an interface like so: public interface IGameComponent { void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime); void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice); } public class ContainerComponent : IGameComponent { public IList<IGameComponent> ChildComponents { get; private set; } // Assume constructor public void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime) { // Update anything that needs it } public void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { foreach(var component in ChildComponents) { // draw every component } } } Then I was under the assumption that we just draw everything directly to the screen, then when performance becomes an issue we just add a new implementation of the above like so: public class CacheableContainerComponent : IGameComponent { private Texture2D cachedOutput; private bool hasChanged; public IList<IGameComponent> ChildComponents { get; private set; } // Assume constructor public void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime) { // Update anything that needs it // set hasChanged to true if required } public void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { if(hasChanged) { CacheComponents(graphicsDevice); } // Draw cached output } private void CacheComponents(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { // Clean up existing cache if needed var cachedOutput = new RenderTarget2D(...); graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget); foreach(var component in ChildComponents) { // draw every component } graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } } Now in this example you could inherit, but your Update may become a bit tricky then without changing your base class to alert you if you had changed, but it is up to each scenario to choose if its inheritance/implementation or composition. Also the above implementation will re-cache within the rendering cycle, which may cause performance stutters but its just an example of the scenario... Ignoring those facts as you can see that in this example you could use a cache-able component or a non cache-able one, the rest of the framework needs not know. The problem here is that if lets say this component is drawn mid way through the game rendering, other items will already be within the default drawing buffer, so me doing this would discard them, unless I set it to be persisted, which I hear is a big no no on the Xbox. So is there a way to have my cake and eat it here? One simple solution to this is make an ICacheable interface which exposes a cache method, but then to make any use of this interface you would need the rest of the framework to be cache aware, and check if it can cache, and to then do so. Which then means you are polluting and changing your main implementations to account for and deal with this cache... I am also employing Dependency Injection for alot of high level components so these new cache-able objects would be spat out from that, meaning no where in the actual game would they know they are caching... if that makes sense. Just incase anyone asked how I expected to keep it cache aware when I would need to new up a cachable entity.

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• Problem with ebay AddItem API call [migrated]

  - by user1323572

  I am totally new to any sort of API application. Right now I am creating a listing application to list items on E-bay India site. API version being used is 767, sandbox url is https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/wsapi. I have sandbox account for ebay(buyer/seller) and developer account. I am getting error saying: 1) Sales Tax / VAT was dropped from the listing as per new sales tax / VAT policy. The items will be listed successfully, you may revise the listing to specify all inclusive price. 2) You have either not registered or are having problem with your payment method registration. ItemType type = new ItemType(); type.PaymentMethods = new BuyerPaymentMethodCodeTypeCollection(); type.PaymentMethods.Add(BuyerPaymentMethodCodeType.PaisaPayAccepted); Also do I have to specify taxation for each state? For VAT and shipping details here's my snippet: private ShippingDetailsType getShippingDetails() { // Shipping details. ShippingDetailsType sd = new ShippingDetailsType(); SalesTaxType salesTax = new SalesTaxType(); ReadSettings rs = new ReadSettings(); rs.GetSettings(); salesTax.SalesTaxPercent = 12f; salesTax.SalesTaxState = "MH"; SalesTaxType s = new SalesTaxType(); salesTax.ShippingIncludedInTax = true; salesTax.ShippingIncludedInTaxSpecified = true; sd.ApplyShippingDiscount = true; AmountType at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 2.8; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; sd.InsuranceFee = at; sd.InsuranceOption = InsuranceOptionCodeType.NotOffered; sd.PaymentInstructions = "These are my instructions."; VATDetailsType vd = new VATDetailsType(); vd.BusinessSeller = false; vd.BusinessSellerSpecified = false; vd.RestrictedToBusiness = false; vd.RestrictedToBusinessSpecified = false; vd.VATID = "VATSNO1234567890"; vd.VATPercent = 12f; vd.VATPercentSpecified = true; vd.VATSite = "None"; sd.ShippingType = ShippingTypeCodeType.Flat; // ShippingServiceOptionsType st1 = new ShippingServiceOptionsType(); sd.SalesTax = salesTax; st1.ShippingService = ShippingServiceCodeType.IN_Express.ToString(); at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 50; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; st1.ShippingServiceAdditionalCost = at; at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 50; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; st1.ShippingServiceCost = at; st1.ShippingServicePriority = 1; at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 1.0; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; st1.ShippingInsuranceCost = at; sd.ShippingServiceOptions = new ShippingServiceOptionsTypeCollection(new ShippingServiceOptionsType[] { st1 }); return sd; } Thank you for you efforts.

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• What Counts For A DBA: ESP

  - by Louis Davidson

  Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often  I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with a solution and then finally just give up with the feeling that I’m not even qualified to be a data entry clerk, much less a data architect.  At this point I often take a walk (or sometimes a nap), and then it hits me. I realize that I have the answer just sitting in my brain, ready to implement.  This phenomenon is not limited to walks either; it can happen almost any time after I stop my obsession about a problem. I call this phenomena ESP (or Extra-Sensory Programming.)  Another term for this could be ‘sleeping on it’, and while the idiom tends to mean to let time pass to actively think about a problem, sleeping on a problem also lets you relax and let your brain do the work. I first noticed this back in my college days when I would play video games for hours on end. We would get stuck deep in some dungeon unable to find a way out, playing for days on end until we were beaten down tired. Once we gave up and walked away, the solution would usually be there waiting for one of us before we came back to play the next day.  Sometimes it would be in the form of a dream, and sometimes it would just be that the problem was now easy to solve when we started to play again.  While it worked great for video games, it never occurred when I studied English Literature for hours on end, or even when I worked for the same sort of frustrating hours attempting to solve a homework problem in Calculus.  I believe that the difference was that I was passionate about the video game, and certainly far less so about homework where people used the word “thou” instead of “you” or x to represent a number. This phenomenon occurs somewhat more often in my current work as a professional data programmer, because I am very passionate about SQL and love those aspects of my career choice.  Every day that I get to draw a new data model to solve a customer issue, or write a complex SELECT statement to ferret out the answer to a complex data question, is a great day. I hope it is the same for any reader of this blog.  But, unfortunately, while the day on a whole is great, a heck of a lot of noise is generated in work life. There are the typical project deadlines, along with the requisite project manager sitting on your shoulders shouting slogans to try to make you to go faster: Add in office politics, and the occasional family issues that permeate the mind, and you lose the ability to think deeply about any problem, not to mention occasionally forgetting your own name.  These office realities coupled with a difficult SQL problem staring at you from your widescreen monitor will slowly suck the life force out of your body, making it seem impossible to solve the problem This is when the walk starts; or a nap. Maybe you hide from the madness under your desk like George Costanza hides from Steinbrenner on Seinfeld.  Forget about the problem. Free your mind from the insanity of the problem and your surroundings. Then let your training and education deep in your brain take over and see if it will passively do the rest for you. If you don’t end up with a solution, the worst case scenario is that you have a bit of exercise or rest, and you won’t have heard the phrase “better is the enemy of good enough” even once…which certainly will do your brain some good. Once you stop expecting whipping your brain for information, inspiration may just strike and instead of a humdrum solution you find a solution you hadn’t even considered, almost magically. So, my beloved manager, next time you have an urgent deadline and you come across me taking a nap, creep away quietly because I’m working, doing some extra-sensory programming.

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• SSIS Technique to Remove/Skip Trailer and/or Bad Data Row in a Flat File

  - by Compudicted

  I noticed that the question on how to skip or bypass a trailer record or a badly formatted/empty row in a SSIS package keeps coming back on the MSDN SSIS Forum. I tried to figure out the reason why and after an extensive search inside the forum and outside it on the entire Web (using several search engines) I indeed found that it seems even thought there is a number of posts and articles on the topic none of them are employing the simplest and the most efficient technique. When I say efficient I mean the shortest time to solution for the fellow developers. OK, enough talk. Let’s face the problem: Typically a flat file (e.g. a comma delimited/CSV) needs to be processed (loaded into a database in most cases really). Oftentimes, such an input file is produced by some sort of an out of control, 3-rd party solution and would come in with some garbage characters and/or even malformed/miss-formatted rows. One such example could be this imaginary file: As you can see several rows have no data and there is an occasional garbage character (1, in this example on row #7). Our task is to produce a clean file that will only capture the meaningful data rows. As an aside, our output/target may be a database table, but for the purpose of this exercise we will simply re-format the source. Let’s outline our course of action to start off: Will use SSIS 2005 to create a DFT; The DFT will use a Flat File Source to our input [bad] flat file; We will use a Conditional Split to process the bad input file; and finally Dump the resulting data to a new [clean] file. Well, only four steps, let’s see if it is too much of work. 1: Start the BIDS and add a DFT to the Control Flow designer (I named it Process Dirty File DFT): 2, and 3: I had added the data viewer to just see what I am getting, alas, surprisingly the data issues were not seen it:   What really is the key in the approach it is to properly set the Conditional Split Transformation. Visually it is: and specifically its SSIS Expression LEN([After CS Column 0]) > 1 The point is to employ the right Boolean expression (yes, the Conditional Split accepts only Boolean conditions). For the sake of this post I re-named the Output Name “No Empty Rows”, but by default it will be named Case 1 (remember to drag your first column into the expression area)! You can close your Conditional Split now. The next part will be crucial – consuming the output of our Conditional Split. Last step - #4: Add a Flat File Destination or any other one you need. Click on the Conditional Split and choose the green arrow to drop onto the target. When you do so make sure you choose the No Empty Rows output and NOT the Conditional Split Default Output. Make the necessary mappings. At this point your package must look like: As the last step will run our package to examine the produced output file. F5: and… it looks great!

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• Sneak Peak: Social Developer Program at JavaOne

  - by Mike Stiles

  By guest blogger Roland Smart We're just days away from what is gunning to be the most exciting installment of OpenWorld to date, so how about an exciting sneak peak at the very first Social Developer Program? If your first thought is, "What's a social developer?" you're not alone. It’s an emerging term and one we think will gain prominence as social experiences become more prevalent in enterprise applications. For those who keep an eye on the ever-evolving Facebook platform, you'll recall that they recently rebranded their PDC (preferred developer consultant) group as the PMD (preferred marketing developer), signaling the importance of development resources inside the marketing organization to unlock the potential of social. The marketing developer they're referring to could be considered a social developer in a broader context. While it's true social has really blossomed in the marketing context and CMOs are winning more and more technical resources, social is starting to work its way more deeply into the enterprise with the help of developers that work outside marketing. Developers, like the rest of us, have fallen in "like" with social functionality and are starting to imagine how social can transform enterprise applications in the way it has consumer-facing experiences. The thesis of my presentation is that social developers will take many pages from the marketing playbook as they apply social inside the enterprise. To support this argument, lets walk through a range of enterprise applications and explore how consumer-facing social experiences might be interpreted in this context. Here's one example of how a social experience could be integrated into a sales enablement application. As a marketer, I spend a great deal of time collaborating with my sales colleagues, so I have good insight into their working process. While at Involver, we grew our sales team quickly, and it became evident some of our processes broke with scale. For example, we used to have weekly team meetings at which we'd discuss what was working and what wasn't from a messaging perspective. One aspect of these sessions focused on "objections" and "responses," where the salespeople would walk through common objections to purchasing and share appropriate responses. We tried to map each context to best answers and we'd capture these on a wiki page. As our team grew, however, participation at scale just wasn't tenable, and our wiki pages quickly lost their freshness. Imagine giving salespeople a place where they could submit common objections and responses for their colleagues to see, sort, comment on, and vote on. What you'd get is an up-to-date and relevant repository of information. And, if you supported an application like this with a social graph, it would be possible to make good recommendations to individual sales people about the objections they'd likely hear based on vertical, product, region or other graph data. Taking it even further, you could build in a badging/game element to reward those salespeople who participate the most. Both these examples are based on proven models at work inside consumer-facing applications. If you want to learn about how HR, Operations, Product Development and Customer Support can leverage social experiences, you’re welcome to join us at JavaOne or join our Social Developer Community to find some of the presentations after OpenWorld.

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• Making the most of next weeks SharePoint 2010 developer training

  - by Eric Nelson

  [you can still register if you are free on the afternoons of 9th to 11th – UK time] We have 50+ registrations with more coming in – which is fantastic. Please read on to make the most of the training. Background We have structured the training to make sure that you can still learn lots during the three days even if you do not have SharePoint 2010 installed. Additionally the course is based around a subset of the channel 9 training to allow you to easily dig deeper or look again at specific areas. Which means if you have zero time between now and next Wednesday then you are still good to go. But if you can do some pre-work you will likely get even more out of the three days. Step 1: Check out the topics and resources available on-demand The course is based around a subset of the channel 9 training to allow you to easily dig deeper or look again at specific areas. Take a lap around the SharePoint 2010 Training Course on Channel 9 Download the SharePoint Developer Training Kit Step 2: Use a pre-configured Virtual Machine which you can download (best start today – it is large!) Consider using the VM we created If you don't have access to SharePoint 2010. You will need a 64bit host OS and bare minimum of 4GB of RAM. 8GB recommended. Virtual PC can not be used with this VM – Virtual PC only supports 32bit guests. The 2010-7a Information Worker VM gives you everything you need to develop for SharePoint 2010. Watch the Video on how to use this VM Download the VM Remember you only need to download the “parts” for the 2010-7a VM. There are 3 subtly different ways of using this VM: Easiest is to follow the advice of the video and get yourself a host OS of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and simply use the VM Alternatively you can take the VHD and create a “Boot to VHD” if you have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise Edition. This works really well – especially if you are already familiar with “Boot to VHD” (This post I did will help you get started) Or you can take the VHD and use an alternative VM tool such as VirtualBox if you have a different host OS. NB: This tends to involve some work to get everything running fine. Check out parts 1 to 3 from Rolly and if you go with Virtual Box use an IDE controller not SATA. SATA will blue screen. Note in the screenshot below I also converted the vhd to a vmdk. I used the FREE Starwind Converter to do this whilst I was fighting blue screens – not sure its necessary as VirtualBox does now work with VHDs. or Step 3 – Install SharePoint 2010 on a 64bit Windows 7 or Vista Host I haven’t tried this but it is now supported. Check out MSDN. Final notes: I am in the process of securing a number of hosted VMs for ISVs directly managed by my team. Your Architect Evangelist will have details once I have them! Else we can sort out on the Wed. Regrettably I am unable to give folks 1:1 support on any issues around Boot to VHD, 3rd party VM products etc. Related Links: Check you are fully plugged into the work of my team – have you done these simple steps including joining our new LinkedIn group?

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• What Counts For a DBA: Replaceable

  - by Louis Davidson

  Replaceable is what every employee in every company instinctively strives not to be. Yet, if you’re an irreplaceable DBA, meaning that the company couldn’t find someone else who could do what you do, then you’re not doing a great job. A good DBA is replaceable. I imagine some of you are already reaching for the lighter fluid, about to set the comments section ablaze, but before you destroy a perfectly good Commodore 64, read on… Everyone is replaceable, ultimately. Anyone, anywhere, in any job, could be sitting at their desk reading this, blissfully unaware that this is to be their last day at work. Morbidly, you could be about to take your terminal breath. Ideally, it will be because another company suddenly offered you a truck full of money to take a new job, forcing you to bid a regretful farewell to your current employer (with barely a “so long suckers!” left wafting in the air as you zip out of the office like the Wile E Coyote wearing two pairs of rocket skates). I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be present at the meeting where your former work colleagues discuss your potential replacement. It is perhaps only at this point, as they struggle with the question “What kind of person do we need to replace old Wile?” that you would know your true worth in their eyes. Of course, this presupposes you need replacing. I’ve known one or two people whose absence we adequately compensated with a small rock, to keep their old chair from rolling down a slight incline in the floor. On another occasion, we bought a noise-making machine that frequently attracted attention its way, with unpleasant sounds, but never contributed anything worthwhile. These things never actually happened, of course, but you take my point: don’t confuse replaceable with expendable. Likewise, if the term “trained seal” comes up, someone they can teach to follow basic instructions and push buttons in the right order, then the replacement discussion is going to be over quickly. What, however, if your colleagues decide they’ll need a super-specialist to replace you. That’s a good thing, right? Well, usually, in my experience, no it is not. It often indicates that no one really knows what you do, or how. A typical example is the “senior” DBA who built a system just before 16-bit computing became all the rage and then settled into a long career managing it. Such systems are often central to the company’s operations and the DBA very skilled at what they do, but almost impossible to replace, because the system hasn’t evolved, and runs on processes and routines that others no longer understand or recognize. The only thing you really want to hear, at your replacement discussion, is that they need someone skilled at the fundamentals and adaptable. This means that the person they need understands that their goal is to be an excellent DBA, not a specialist in whatever the-heck the company does. Someone who understands the new versions of SQL Server and can adapt the company’s systems to the way things work today, who uses industry standard methods that any other qualified DBA/programmer can understand. More importantly, this person rarely wants to get “pigeon-holed” and so documents and shares the specialized knowledge and responsibilities with their teammates. Being replaceable doesn’t mean being “dime a dozen”. The company might need four people to take your place due to the depth of your skills, but still, they could find those replacements and those replacements could step right in using techniques that any decent DBA should know. It is a tough question to contemplate, but take some time to think about the sort of person that your colleagues would seek to replace you. If you think they would go looking for a “super-specialist” then consider urgently how you can diversify and share your knowledge, and start documenting all the processes you know as if today were your last day, because who knows, it just might be.

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• Book Review: Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide

  - by Grant Ronald

  Packt Publishing asked me to review Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide by Vinod Krishnan, so on a couple of long flights I managed to get through the book in a couple of sittings. One point to make clear before I go into the review.  Having authored "The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF", I've written a book which covers the same topic/beginner level.  I also think that its worth stating up front that I applaud anyone who has gone  through the effort of writing a technical book. So well done Vinod.  But on to the review: The book itself is a good break down of topic areas.  Vinod starts with a quick tour around the IDE, which is an important step given all the work you do will be through the IDE.  The book then goes through the general path that I tend to always teach: a quick overview demo, ADF BC, validation, binding, UI, task flows and then the various "add on" topics like security, MDS and advanced topics.  So it covers the right topics in, IMO, the right order.  I also think the writing style flows nicely as well - Its a relatively easy book to read, it doesn't get too formal and the "Have a go hero" hands on sections will be useful for many. That said, I did pick out a number of styles/themes to the writing that I found went against the idea of a beginners guide.  For example, in writing my book, I tried to carefully avoid talking about topics not yet covered or not yet relevant at that point in someone's learning.  So, if I was a new ADF developer reading this book, did I really need to know about ADFBindingFilter and DataBindings.cpx file on page 58 - I've only just learned how to do a drag and drop simple application so showing me XML configuration files relevant to JSF/ADF lifecycle is probably going to scare me off! I found this in a couple of places, for example, the security chapter starts on page 219 but by page 222 (and most of the preceding pages are hands-on steps) we're diving into the web.xml, weblogic.xml, adf-config.xml, jsp-config.xml and jazn-data.xml.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't know this, but I feel you have to get people on a strong grounding of the concepts before showing them implementation files.  If having just learned what ADF Security is will "The initialization parameter remove.anonymous.role is set to false for the JpsFilter filter as this filter is the first filter defined in the file" really going to help me? The other theme I found which I felt didn't work was that a couple of the chapters descended into a reference guide.  For example page 159 onwards basically lists UI components and their properties.  And page 87 onwards list the attributes of ADF BC in pretty much the same way as the on line help or developer guide, and I've a personal aversion to any sort of help that says pretty much what the attribute name is e.g. "Precision Rule: this option is used to set a strict precision rule", or "Property Set: this is the property set that has to be applied to the attribute". Hmmm, I think I could have worked that out myself, what I would want to know in a beginners guide are what are these for, what might I use them for...and if I don't need to use them to create an emp/dept example them maybe it’s better to leave them out. All that said, would the book help me - yes it would.  It’s obvious that Vinod knows ADF and his style is relatively easy going and the book covers all that it has to, but I think the book could have done a better job in the educational side of guiding beginners.

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