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  • Trying to Build a Worldclass Website on a Budget? No Problem, Here's How

    New businesses often find themselves needing to develop a website on a tight budget. Now you could argue this is a false economy but in the present economic climate it's a simple fact of life that money is tight and other things take priority. Thankfully creating a low budget site that looks anything but cheap is perfectly feasible using powerful free web development tools and this article will show you how.

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  • Practically Cloudy: SQL Server Disaster Recovery to Microsoft Azure - Backups

    In the first in a series on the practicalities of using the Microsoft Azure Platform for the SQL Server professional, Buck Woody shows that, whatever your version of SQL Server, there is a way of storing offsite backups in the cloud. Can 41,000 DBAs really be wrong? Join 41,000 other DBAs who are following the new series from the DBA Team: the 5 Worst Days in a DBA’s Life. Part 3, As Corrupt As It Gets, is out now – read it here.

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  • Seeing Popular Tweets on Twitter Part 1

    Social networking sites have given a new life to the offspring of search engine optimization, that is to say, social media optimization and social media marketing. One of the recent entrants in the field of social media marketing is twitter. The search results shown on Twitter help SEO professionals in properly executing the search engine optimization process on the website.

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  • laptop motherboard "shorts" when connected to adapter

    - by Bash
    Disclaimer: I'm sort of a noob, and this is a long post. Thank you all in advance! summary: completely dead laptop with no signs of life whatsoever (suddenly, for no apparent reason) Here's the deal: Lenovo Y470 (only a few months old with no water or shock damage). It stopped working suddenly (no lights, no sound, even when connecting adapter with or without battery). I tried a different adapter (same electrical rating), but no luck. I disassembled the thing completely, and tried plugging in the adapter and looking for signs of life with all different combinations of components installed (tried all combinations of RAM, CPU, USB power cords, screen, etc plugged in). no luck. Then, I noticed (as I was plugging in the adapter to try for the millionth time) that there was a "spark" for an instant when I first connect the adapter to the power jack. The adapter's LED would then flash (indicating it isn't working or charging). So, I thought the power jack has a short of some sort (due to bad soldering or something). Scanned virtually every single component on the motherboard, and tested the power jack connections with a multimeter. No shorts or damage to anything on the entire motherboard. Now I'm thinking I need to replace the motherboard. But, my actual question: What does this "shorting" when connecting the adapter signify? (btw, the voltage across the power connections and current through it drop to virtually zero when the adapter is connected and "sparks", and they stay that way). The bewildering thing is that there are no damaged components, and the voltage across adapter terminals returns to normal after I disconnect it (so it's not damaged). Please take a look at the pictures (of the motherboard's power connection and nearby components) and see if I'm missing something completely obvious... Links to pictures and laptop and motherboard model: pictures on DropBox Motherboard model: LA-6881P Laptop model: Lenovo IdeaPad Y470

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  • What is the collaborative screen shot/diagramming application recently featured on Hacker News and p

    - by wonsungi
    A few days ago, I saw this video for a screen capture application. I'm pretty sure I followed a link from Hacker News, possibly to a Life Hacker article. The video was very short, but demonstrated how the application could be used: The application was basically a movable/resize-able view port with a button. When the button is pressed, the contents of the view port are saved to an image (basically a screen capture.) The interesting thing is what you could do after that point. One of the specific examples from the video browsed to Google maps street view, grabbed a photo of an intersection, then scribbled notes about where to meet and where the restaurant was in colored "marker." Another example shown was grabbing a house layout from from CAD tool, then scribbling notes on it. The last part of the video showed several possible uses being scrolled through the application's view port. Now, it seemed it was very easy to share these images with other people because there was some type of integration, either with their own site and/or common social websites/chat services. The application was shown running on both Windows and Mac. edit: I think there was an iPhone app, as well. Anyone know what this application is? I tried searching Google, Hacker News, and Life Hacker already. It is not Jing.

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  • Strange ASP.NET Queue Performance Counters Behavior?

    - by LemurTech
    We have an ASP.NET 2.0 site running in classic mode. I am seeing very strange behavior in the performance counter values. Perhaps these are bugs (I've been all over Google trying to verify this, without much luck), or perhaps it is just my inexperience with monitoring these things. This PerfMon graph (http://imgur.com/Jv5io5J) represents a load test where I add up to 350 virtual users to the site, at a rate of about 1/sec, performing relatively simple page browsing. At the end of the test, I gradually taper off the number of users. This is a 4 CPU server. Machine.config settings for are at the defaults. The solid blue line is ASP.NET Apps v2.x\Requests Executing for the application in question. The profile makes perfect sense, with a quick ramp-up to 32 executing requests (minWorkerThreads x 4CPUs), followed by a slower ramp-up to 48 ((maxWorkerThreads - minWorkerThreads) x 4CPUs). The solid yellow line is ASP.NET v2.x\Requests Queued. Again, this makes sense: after the initial 32 request threads are activated, the queue begins to build as new thread initialization can't keep pace with incoming requests. But as executing requests reaches its highest possible value of 48, the counter for ASP.NET Apps v2.x\Requests Queued (green solid line) suddenly springs to life and maintains step with the yellow counter. As far as I can tell, and with no other apps running on the server, these two counters should have had the same values from the start. One other odd thing: The counter for ASP.NET v2.x\Request Wait Time (dotted yellow line) also does not spring to life until executing requests reaches 48. Shouldn't I be seeing values here from the moment ASP.NET v2.x\Requests Queued begins to build? And likewise, why would ASP.NET Apps v2.x\Request Execution Time (dotted blue) increase significantly only after that peak of 48 is reached? Shouldn't it ramp-up gradually along with queued requests?

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  • How to Change the Kerberos Default Ticket Lifetime

    - by user40497
    Our KDC servers are running either Ubuntu Dapper (2.6.15-28) or Hardy (2.6.24-19). The Kerberos software is the MIT implementation of Kerberos 5. By default, a Kerberos ticket lasts for 10 hours. However, we'd like to increase it a bit (e.g. 14 hours) to suit our needs better. I had done the following but the ticket lifetime still stays at 10 hours: 1) On all the KDC servers, set the following parameter under [realms] in /etc/krb5kdc/kdc.conf and restarted the KDC daemon: max_life = 14h 0m 0s 2) Via "kadmin", changed the "maxlife" for a test principal via "modprinc -maxlife 14hours ". "getprinc " shows that the maximum ticket life is indeed 14 hours: Maximum ticket life: 0 days 14:00:00 3) On a Kerberos client machine, set the following parameters under [libdefaults], [realms], [domain_realm], and [login] in /etc/krb5.conf (everywhere basically since nothing I tried had worked): ticket_lifetime = 13hrs default_lifetime = 13hrs With the above settings, I suppose that the ticket lifetime would be capped at 13 hours. When I do "k5start -l 14h -t ", I see that the end time for the "renew until" line is now 14 hours from the starting time: Valid starting Expires Service principal 04/13/10 16:42:05 04/14/10 02:42:05 krbtgt/@ renew until 04/14/10 06:42:03 "-l 13h" would make the end time in the "renew until" line 13 hours after the starting time. However, the ticket still expires in 10 hours (04/13 16:42:05 - 014/14 02:42:05). Am I not changing the right configuration file(s)/parameter(s), not specifying the right option when obtaining a Kerberos ticket, or something else? Any feedback is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

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  • How harmful is a hard disk spin cycle?

    - by Gilles
    It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy. The topic has been discussed before: Is turning off hard disks harmful? What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives? Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics. Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down? ¹ But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the one published study on the topic shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.

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  • How harmful is a hard disk spin cycle?

    - by Gilles
    It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy. The topic has been discussed before: Is turning off hard disks harmful? What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives? Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics. Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down? ¹ But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the one published study on the topic shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.

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  • Is my laptop battery dead?

    - by Josh
    Recently my laptop battery will get extremely hot (definitely hotter than it should get) when I charge it. After that I usually end up removing it once it's fully charged to let it cool down, which takes a couple hours... Question is, is my battery dead? My last battery I had that died just ended up lasting 2 - 3 minutes on battery, no weird heat issues. And is there any way to possibly fix this? Probably not but I won't be able to get a replacement anytime soon. UPDATE: A few days ago when this happened and it cooled down, assuming it was fully charged, I ran my laptop on battery, and the battery life lasted about 10 minutes and then the laptop shutdown. I then plugged it in later and charged it back up, and for a while I had a orange light blinking on my laptop - which I assumed meant the battery was dead, especially since I got 10 minutes battery life. Then today, I turned my laptop on and was surprised to see that the battery was at 20% and charging (it's been plugged in since the incident above, so it should have been fully charged when I shut it off) I let it charge up, and as usual it got pretty hot around the time it was fully charged. So I turned my laptop off and pulled the battery out to let it cool down Now the thing is, just now I tried running it on battery, and it's been going for an hour now... so maybe its not dead? (also the orange light is no longer blinking...) Thanks in advance if anyone knows whats going on, and how to fix it, if its fixable =] EDIT: Some info if it helps... my laptop is about 2 years ago, and it's an Asus K50ID. I know laptop batteries usually don't last more than a year but I'm trying to keep this one going for as long as I can.

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  • Redis as substitution for Memcache

    - by Boban P.
    We have distributed web app, and for now, as session handler, we use two separate instances of memcache in redundancy, so everything that is written in one memcache is also written in other. Memcache is fairly easy to install, use, and maintain but we have one problem: if one memcache fail, everything is fine, php comunicate with other instance which has all data (although, half of connections have a delay because they try to use failed one, wait a little, and then contact other memcache). When failed instance comes back to life again, it starts up empty. If established session request data from that instance, session fails, and user logs out, and that happens to half of users.So, we are thinking about to switch to redis for session handling, and maybe keep memcache for cache only. My questions are: If we setup redis instances as master-slave, and if master fails, can sentinel promote slave as new master and when old master comes back to life, will it stay as slave or not? Is redis call malloc at startup to allocate part of memory, like memcache or varnish, or it calls malloc for every key inserted? And what are pros and cons of that?

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  • Windows 7 boot problem on a Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m 9450HAG

    - by Matt Taylor
    I recently did a full upgrade of Windows 7 on my Thinkpad. Everything worked fine after up until the second reboot (the first reboot after some updates installed worked OK). At second reboot time the system would just black screen before the Windows logo appears. Disk/wireless/power/battery lights are all lit and the disk light is active (flickering). However, if I remove my battery and boot with just power it boots fine and quickly, and everything is OK. Any help on why this won't boot with battery plugged in is greatly appreciated. I need to take this battery out on the road/trains, etc. A little more detail on this story. The battery I had inserted when doing the (failed) boot was a long life battery. I have not tried inserting this battery when Windows is logged in. I have another (normal life) battery that I have charged up within Windows. It has just got to 100% and I am about to reboot with it in. I am using the Lenovo power manager to diagnose the battery - all seems OK. I will report back shortly as to the outcome. OK, so I chose the reboot option from within Windows, the machine seemed to shutdown okay, but then stalled. It didn't turn off completely and didn't reboot, but just sat, with the fan humming, somewhere in between! I had to hold the power button in for a few seconds until the fan stopped and then hit the power button again to boot the machine from fresh. One good thing, with this battery (the normal one) it booted into Windows 7 the first time with a battery! So, now I have rebooting issues. I have 3 errors in the event log: A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the lxdxCATSCustConnectService service to connect. The lxdxCATSCustConnectService service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion. The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: cdrom Any thoughts?

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  • Syncing Multiple Google Calendars and with Outlook and Android

    - by Fred Thomas
    Perhaps this is a multipart question, but I deal with a lot of calendars in my life, and want to know if there is some way to sync them all together, and maintain appropriate privacy. So I have a family calendar that my ex and I maintain for kid events, and I have a personal calendar for my own life, and I have an Outlook work calendar, for work. Ideally I'd look at my calendar on my Android phone. Is it possible to sync them all together? Is it possible for there to be one calendar to rule them all on my phone, but have the other calendars blank out spaces that are from other calendars, but only show the blanked out without the details. (I don't want my date with Miss Hottie to appear that way on the family calendar, and I probably don't want my visit to the proctologist to appear in the corporate exchange server.) Are there tools available to do this? Bonus question, can I do the same with my to do lists? Double bouns question -- how can I solve world hunger and help us to all live together in peace? :-)

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  • Xmonad on windows laptop

    - by Kevin L.
    I'm a Linux developer in the market for a laptop. 90% of my time is spent in Emacs, the terminal, and Google Chrome, and I want to use them within the excellent Xmonad tiling windows manager. Given these constraints, I can only see two options: Run Linux on a laptop Run Windows on the laptop, and spend all of my time working within a Linux VM. Years of experience suggest that the first option will take many frustrating hours and probably be suboptimal w.r.t. battery life, wifi, and fn keys like screen brightness or audio adjustment. For the second option, what would be the ideal setup? I've had a lot of luck with Cooperative Linux on my Samsung NC-10 netbook (Windows XP), but I would have to setup the X11 server myself. What about using VirtualBox (which includes the guest VM's GUI)? Has anyone tried this? Hardware-wise, I'm looking for something in the "Macbook Air killer" category; Samsung Series 9 laptop, Lenovo IdeaPad U300s, &c. (i.e., matte screen, 5h+ battery life, 3ish pound weight). Price is not a consideration; any suggestions?

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  • Linux Mint Constantly freezing on Dell XPS L502X

    - by Josh
    I recently partitioned my hard drive to dual boot the existing Windows 7 with Linux Mint because I am tired of using Windows, especially the lack of terminal. I want to eventually remove Windows 7 and just run it from a VM within Linux Mint, but I want to make sure that I like the Mint before going all in. I ran Linux Mint on a VM inside Windows for a while, enjoyed it, and never had any issues with it. Since installing on my hard drive it has started freezing every 5-10 minutes, and the only way to get it back is to either power down, or close the lid and reopen once it sleeps. I've also tried running Ubuntu on dual boot in the past, and while it never froze, the battery life was terrible, and the fan was constantly running. I'm experiencing the same battery/fan problem with Mint, which doesn't make sense to me, as Linux should be lighter on the CPU than windows. If I had to guess I'd say it's probably a driver thing, with my video card or fan or something. My battery life in Windows is ~2 hours and its about 40 minutes in Linux. At this point, that is even if my laptop doesn't freeze before then. On a less important note, I also have an intel Centrino 6150 WiMax card that I'd like to be able to use, but that won't register on the Linux system either. I have tried downloading drivers for both of these, but neither have solved my problems. I'm definitely getting frustrated and am getting close to giving up on Linux even though I dread working on a Windows machine.

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  • what languages are used in AI research today?

    - by aaa
    hi. I am currently dabbling in expert systems, emacs lisp, and reading up about artificial intelligence. Traditionally, artificial intelligence is associated with LISP and expert systems with CLIPS. However, I have noticed in computational sciences how much Python is being used. What about the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning? is it still been dominated by LISP? how much is python being used in AI? are any of the newer functional languages, clojure for example, being used in research? in the area of expert systems, which shells are most used/popular today? are there any interesting developments language wise which you know of? Thanks a lot

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  • Criteria to Evaluate Business Rules Engines

    - by flybywire
    We are shopping for Business Rules Engines. We want to make our core application customizable to different customers with slightly different requirements. The people who would actually do the customizations are analysts. I.e. non-programmers who are technically skilled (usually have a degree in sciences). What are the criteria to evaluate business rules engines? Are there open source and comercial ones? What are your experiences in ease of use, documentation, support, price, etc. Our app is in Java.

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  • While programming, what to do when facing with a seemingly unsolvable situation with a time limit?

    - by Ersan Tasan
    This is not a technical question, but rather a social and methodical one. I am a computer sciences student and I usually have really tough programming assignments. I don`t know if it is only happening to me but sometimes, particularly when deadline is approaching, i find myself in a harsh situation. I cannot find my mistake in the code or come up with a another great idea. Then boredom comes in and the problem begins to seem unsolvable. I know there are more-than-great professional coders here. I would like to learn their ideas to cope with this situation. Is it better to focus on something else for a while and try again or try harder and harder and look for the solution on the net etc...

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  • Productivity Tips

    - by Brian T. Jackett
    A few months ago during my first end of year review at Microsoft I was doing an assessment of my year.  One of my personal goals to come out of this reflection was to improve my personal productivity.  While I hear many people say “I wish I had more hours in the day so that I could get more done” I feel like that is the wrong approach.  There is an inherent assumption that you are being productive with your time that you already have and thus more time would allow you to be as productive given more time.    Instead of wishing I could add more hours to the day I’ve begun adopting a number of processes or behavior changes in my personal life to make better use of my time with the goal of improving productivity.  The areas of focus are as follows: Focus Processes Tools Personal health Email Note: A number of these topics have spawned from reading Scott Hanselman’s blog posts on productivity, reading of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and discussions with friends and coworkers who had great insights into this topic.   Focus Pre-reading / viewing: Overcome your work addiction Millennials paralyzed by choice Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (Scott Hanselman video)    I highly recommend Scott Hanselman’s video above and this post before continuing with this article.  It is well worth the 40+ mins price of admission for the video and couple minutes for article.  One key takeaway for me was listing out my activities in an average week and realizing which ones held little or no value to me.  We all have a finite amount of time to work each day.  Do you know how much time and effort you spend on various aspects of your life (family, friends, religion, work, personal happiness, etc.)?  Do your actions and commitments reflect your priorities?    The biggest time consumers with little value for me were time spent on social media services (Twitter and Facebook), playing an MMO video game, and watching TV.  I still check up on Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft internal chat forums, and other services to keep contact with others but I’ve reduced that time significantly.  As for TV I’ve cut the cord and no longer subscribe to cable TV.  Instead I use Netflix, RedBox, and over the air channels but again with reduced time consumption.  With the time I’ve freed up I’m back to working out 2-3 times a week and reading 4 nights a week (both of which I had been neglecting previously).  I’ll mention a few tools for helping measure your time in the Tools section.   Processes    Do not multi-task.  I’ll say it again.  Do not multi-task.  There is no such thing as multi tasking.  The human brain is optimized to work on one thing at a time.  When you are “multi-tasking” you are really doing 2 or more things at less than 100%, usually by a wide margin.  I take pride in my work and when I’m doing something less than 100% the results typically degrade rapidly.    Now there are some ways of bending the rules of physics for this one.  There is the notion of getting a double amount of work done in the same timeframe.  Some examples would be listening to podcasts / watching a movie while working out, using a treadmill as your work desk, or reading while in the bathroom.    Personally I’ve found good results in combining one task that does not require focus (making dinner, playing certain video games, working out) and one task that does (watching a movie, listening to podcasts).  I believe this is related to me being a visual and kinesthetic (using my hands or actually doing it) learner.  I’m terrible with auditory learning.  My fiance and I joke that sometimes we talk and talk to each other but never really hear each other.   Goals / Tasks    Goals can give us direction in life and a sense of accomplishment when we complete them.  Goals can also overwhelm us and give us a sense of failure when we don’t complete them.  I propose that you shift your perspective and not dwell on all of the things that you haven’t gotten done, but focus instead on regularly setting measureable goals that are within reason of accomplishing.    At the end of each time frame have a retrospective to review your progress.  Do not feel guilty about what you did not accomplish.  Feel proud of what you did accomplish and readjust your goals for the next time frame to more attainable goals.  Here is a sample schedule I’ve seen proposed by some.  I have not consistently set goals for each timeframe, but I do typically set 3 small goals a day (this blog post is #2 for today). Each day set 3 small goals Each week set 3 medium goals Each month set 1 large goal Each year set 2 very large goals   Tools    Tools are an extension of our human body.  They help us extend beyond what we can physically and mentally do.  Below are some tools I use almost daily or have found useful as of late. Disclaimer: I am not getting endorsed to promote any of these products.  I just happen to like them and find them useful. Instapaper – Save internet links for reading later.  There are many tools like this but I’ve found this to be a great one.  There is even a “read it later” JavaScript button you can add to your browser so when you navigate to a site it will then add this to your list. Stacks for Instapaper – A Windows Phone 7 app for reading my Instapaper articles on the go.  It does require a subscription to Instapaper (nominal $3 every three months) but is easily worth the cost.  Alternatively you can set up your Kindle to sync with Instapaper easily but I haven’t done so. SlapDash Podcast – Apps for Windows Phone and  Windows 8 (possibly other platforms) to sync podcast viewing / listening across multiple devices.  Now that I have my Surface RT device (which I love) this is making my consumption easier to manage. Feed Reader – Simple Windows 8 app for quickly catching up on my RSS feeds.  I used to have hundreds of unread items all the time.  Now I’m down to 20-50 regularly and it is much easier and faster to consume on my Surface RT.  There is also a free version (which I use) and I can’t see much different between the free and paid versions currently. Rescue Time – Have you ever wondered how much time you’ve spent on websites vs. email vs. “doing work”?  This service tracks your computer actions and then lets you report on them.  This can help you quantitatively identify areas where your actions are not in line with your priorities. PowerShell – Windows automation tool.  It is now built into every client and server OS.  This tool has saved me days (and I mean the full 24 hrs worth) of time and effort in the past year alone.  If you haven’t started learning PowerShell and you administrating any Windows OS or server product you need to start today. Various blogging tools – I wrote a post a couple years ago called How I Blog about my blogging process and tools used.  Almost all of it still applies today.   Personal Health    Some of these may be common sense or debatable, but I’ve found them to help prioritize my daily activities. Get plenty of sleep on a regular basis.  Sacrificing sleep too many nights a week negatively impacts your cognition, attitude, and overall health. Exercise at least three days.  Exercise could be lifting weights, taking the stairs up multiple flights of stairs, walking for 20 mins, or a number of other "non-traditional” activities.  I find that regular exercise helps with sleep and improves my overall attitude. Eat a well balanced diet.  Too much sugar, caffeine, junk food, etc. are not good for your body.  This is not a matter of losing weight but taking care of your body and helping you perform at your peak potential.   Email    Email can be one of the biggest time consumers (i.e. waster) if you aren’t careful. Time box your email usage.  Set a meeting invite for yourself if necessary to limit how much time you spend checking email. Use rules to prioritize your email.  Email from external customers, my manager, or include me directly on the To line go into my inbox.  Everything else goes a level down and I have 30+ rules to further sort it, mostly distribution lists. Use keyboard shortcuts (when available).  I use Outlook for my primary email and am constantly hitting Alt + S to send, Ctrl + 1 for my inbox, Ctrl + 2 for my calendar, Space / Tab / Shift + Tab to mark items as read, and a number of other useful commands.  Learn them and you’ll see your speed getting through emails increase. Keep emails short.  No one Few people like reading through long emails.  The first line should state exactly why you are sending the email followed by a 3-4 lines to support it.  Anything longer might be better suited as a phone call or in person discussion.   Conclusion    In this post I walked through various tips and tricks I’ve found for improving personal productivity.  It is a mix of re-focusing on the things that matter, using tools to assist in your efforts, and cutting out actions that are not aligned with your priorities.  I originally had a whole section on keyboard shortcuts, but with my recent purchase of the Surface RT I’m finding that touch gestures have replaced numerous keyboard commands that I used to need.  I see a big future in touch enabled devices.  Hopefully some of these tips help you out.  If you have any tools, tips, or ideas you would like to share feel free to add in the comments section.         -Frog Out   Links Scott Hanselman Productivity posts http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Productivity Overcome your work addiction http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2012/05/overcome-your-work-addiction.html?awid=5512355740280659420-3271   Millennials paralyzed by choice http://priyaparker.com/blog/millennials-paralyzed-by-choice   Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (video) http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgnoreVideoOfScottHanselmansPersonalProductivityTips.aspx   Cutting the cord – Jeff Blankenburg http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2011/04/06/cutting-the-cord/   Building a sitting standing desk – Eric Harlan http://www.ericharlan.com/Everything_Else/building-a-sitting-standing-desk-a229.html   Instapaper http://www.instapaper.com/u   Stacks for Instapaper http://www.stacksforinstapaper.com/   Slapdash Podcast Windows Phone -  http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/slapdash-podcasts/90e8b121-080b-e011-9264-00237de2db9e Windows 8 - http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/slapdash-podcasts/0c62e66a-f2e4-4403-af88-3430a821741e/m/ROW   Feed Reader http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/feed-reader/d03199c9-8e08-469a-bda1-7963099840cc/m/ROW   Rescue Time http://www.rescuetime.com/   PowerShell Script Center http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/bb410849.aspx

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 04, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 04, 2010New ProjectsAcPrac: A educational program designed to run on Windows. It is fully customizable. It is developed in C# 2008.argo: Linguistic Tool Camelot: A simple utility for testing cross site data queries in SharePointdelta: Delta is a difference tool for large files. Delta will have several clients, including AJAX and Silverlight. You can view differences in a scroll...EF Dorsal: A dorsal spine for Entity Framework based project. This code generator provides a powerfull Business Layer with almost all high important best p...Excel formatting: Excel formatting projectEyes Recognition: eye recognitionGameOfLife: The Game of Life is a the best example of a cellular automaton. It's developed in C#, SilverLight.GKO Libraries: .NET tool libraries written in C# that we have used in our projectsHello Demo: A simple Hello World application, used to demonstrate access to CodePlex using Team Explorerjog.Portal: jogportal lays the foundation for an extensible portal solution leveraging the latest technology including linq and silver lightKM Brasil: k-meleon, km, gecko, brasil, browser, web, web browser, navegador, navegação, kmeleon, k meleonLost in Translation: Ever find yourself in a foreign country eager (or clueless) to what is written on a shop sign or restaurant menu? With your trusty phone, its came...Machine Learning for .NET: Machine Learning Library for .NET. Initial inclusions will be binary and multi-class classification as well as standard clustering algorithms.Maito: Iron Kingdoms Name GeneratorManPowerEngine: ManPowerEngine is a Silverlight 2D Game Engine. It has an game application framework and supports game object hierarchy management, 2D physics simu...Marvin's Arena: Marvin's Arena is a free and entertaining programming game. The game is designed to easily learn programming in any .NET compatible language. It is...MultiMediaPlayer: 整合我们的内容NCacheD - A Simple Distributed .NET Cache using the TPL and WCF: NCacheD is a simple distributed cache system written in .NET. NCacheD offers functionality similar to that of MemcacheD but scaled back. NCacheD ...NDAP: OPeNDAP is a client/server system for making local scientific data accessible to remote locations without regard to the local or remote storage for...Open Guide CMS: Open Guide makes your traveling through city more adventurous, mode educational and more funny. You can support us by lines of code, by interesti...Rollback - A social backup tool.: Rollback is a simple and intuitive social backup application. You can create multiple backup jobs with a few mouse clicks and even schedule it to ...sELedit: An editor for elements.data file of the popular MMORPG Perfect World.SharePoint Theme Applicator: SharePoint Theme Applicator will give SharePoint administrators the ability to apply a theme accross a whole web application (i.e. apply a theme to...sPATCH: ! sPATCH - Perfect World Client Autopatcher This beta patcher is an alternative to the default perfect world patcher. It offers easy client patc...Wiggle: A-life investigation. Let's make little squirmies!WPFSLBlendModeFx: A blend mode library for WPF & Silverlight.休息提醒: 程序员们，尤其是像我这样对程序痴狂的程序员们。一旦研究起自己感兴趣的程序时，觉得上厕所都是浪费时间。 这个程序是在设定的时间后锁定计算机或关闭显示器，从而从某种程度强迫程序员们去休息New ReleasesAMFParser: 1.1.0: Add handling of DSK object when using BlazeDS Add handling of string references Add handling of DateTime values Correct handling of Double values B...Camelot: Camelot 0.1 Alpha: Early release: 1) Query by content type, optionally list or base template 2) Query by list or base templateDictionary Translator for Umbraco: Dictionary Translator 1.1: This is a minor release that fixes a bug that Thomas Hohler found on the first day of release This package is to be used with the ASP.NET open sou...Dynamic Configuration: Sample Application Release 1: These binaries demonstrate the effect of using DynamicConfigurationManager. The source-code for these binaries is available in the 'Source Code' t...EF Dorsal: EFDorsal v0.3b: Second real version. This version add suport to types and entity sets in tree-view.Enterprise Library Extensions: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the package. The release will contain one feature only, as being able to deploy the project itself it the milestone ...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.0.4 beta 2 Released: Hi, Today’s release contains fix for the following issues: * In WPF application chart was throwing exception as VisualStateGroup was not foun...GameOfLife: Game of life: First release of the game. PublishedGameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0 release 2.: Fixes crashing bugs from the first release. To use: 1. Install SQL Server Express 2005 http://www.microsoft.com/Sqlserver/2005/en/us/express-down....Marvin's Arena: Version 0.0.5.0: Code Editor (development of robots without Visual Studio - no debugging) * Rounds * 3D Battle Engine: Skybox * 3D Battle Engine: Robot...Morphfolia - ASP.NET CMS and Framework: Morphfolia v2.4.1.1: Morphfolia v2.4.1.1 - New Release Includes: Better support for browsers other than IE (Chrome, Firefox, Safari - all tested on Windows) Supports ...NCacheD - A Simple Distributed .NET Cache using the TPL and WCF: NCacheD Version 1: Getting Started To get up and running, open two instances of Visual Studio 2010. In one window open the NCacheD client solution and then open the ...Papercut: Papercut 2010-3-3: This release includes a few bug fixes and updates, several of which were contributed patches (thanks!). Feature: Added support for embedded images...PE-file Reader Writer API (PERWAPI): PERWAPI-1.1.4: Perwapi version 1.1.4 is the complete distribution package. It contains Binary files, pdb files and xml files for the PERWAPI and SymbolRW compone...Prolog.NET: Prolog.NET 1.0 Beta 1.2: Installer includes: primary Prolog.NET assembly Prolog.NET Workbench PrologTest console application all required dependencies Beta 1.2 in...Protoforma | Tactica Adversa: Skilful 0.2.4.320: BetaRoTwee: RoTwee 6.1.0.0: 16604 "Post playing tune feature" is added. Using this new feature, you can tweet tune playing in iTunes. 16625 Error processing for network error...sELedit: sELedit v1.0: -SharePoint 2007 Deployment Wizard: Support for SharePoint Server and Foundation 2010: This release encompasses the supported install paths for the default install of SPS 2010 (the 14 hive). All three versions are now supported (60 h...SharePoint Theme Applicator: SharePoint Theme Applicator: SharePoint Theme Applicator was built using C# and WPF, it includes the following features: Provides the total number of site collections in the g...Shinkansen: compress, crunch, combine, and cache JavaScript and CSS: Shinkansen 1.0.0.030310: Build 1.0.0.030310, binaries onlysPATCH: sPatcher v0.8: sPatch - Server Example *Contains a sample Patch that "downgrades" PWI 1.4.2 Client to an 1.3.6 ClientTFS Code Comment Checking Policy (CCCP): CCCP 3.0 for VSTS 2008 SP1: This release includes NRefactory 3.2.0.5571 and is built against VSTS 2008 SP1 (.NET 3.5 is required). New: horizontal scrollbar in listboxes for ...TortoiseHg: Beta for TortoiseHg 1.0 (0.9.31254): Please backup your user Mercurial.ini file and then uninstall any 0.9.X release before installing Use the x86 msi file for 32 bit platforms and th...TwitEclipseAPI: TwitEclipseAPI 0.9: 0.9 Release of TwitEclipseAPI Moved API calls to the api.Twitter.com URL. Moved API calls to the versioning API. Now uses the increased Rate Limit...TwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: TwitterVB-2.3: Patch 5151: Added BlockedUsers function to get a page other then the first Patch 5420: The ListMembers function will now return more then just th...休息提醒: 初始版本: 初始版本Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Microsoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMost Active ProjectsRawrBlogEngine.NETMapWindow GISpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMDT Web FrontEndsvn2tfsDiffPlex - a .NET Diff GeneratorIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFarseer Physics Engine

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  • Lightning talk: Coderetreat

    - by Michael Williamson
    In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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