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• Review&ndash;Build Android and iOS apps in Visual Studio with Nomad

  - by Bill Osuch

  Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions (such as camera and GPS) through the PhoneGap library, UI libraries such as jQuery mobile allow you to create an impressive UI with minimal work. Nomad is still in an early access beta stage, so the documentation is a bit sparse. In fact, the only documentation is a simple series of steps on how to install the plug-in, set up a project, build and deploy it. You're going to want to be a least a little familiar with the PhoneGap library and jQuery mobile to really tap into the power of this. The sample project included with the download shows you just how simple it is to create projects in Visual Studio. The sample solution comes with an index.html file containing the HTML5 code, the Cordova (PhoneGap) library, jQuery libraries, and a JQuery style sheet: The html file is pretty straightforward. If you haven't experimented with JQuery mobile before, some of the attributes (such as data-role) might be new to you, but some quick Googling will fill in everything you need to know. The first part of the file builds a simple (but attractive) list with some links in it: The second part of the file is where things get interesting and it taps into the PhoneGap library. For instance, it gets the geolocation position by calling position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude: ...and then displays it in a simple span: Building is pretty simple, at least for Android (I'm not an iOS developer so I didn't look at that feature) - just configure the display name, version number, and package ID. There's no need to specify Android version; Nomad supports 2.2 and later. Enter these bits of information, click the new "Build for Android" button (not the regular Visual Studio Build link...) and you get a dialog box saying that your code is being built by their cloud build service (so no building while away from a WiFi signal apparently). After a couple minutes you wind up with a .apk file that can be copied over to your device. Applications built with Nomad for Android currently use a temporary certificate, so you can test the app on your devices but you cannot publish them in the Google Play Store (yet). And I love the "success" dialog box: Since Nomad is still in Beta, no pricing plans have been announced yet, so I'll be curious to see if this becomes a cost-effective solution to mobile app development. If it is, I may even be tempted to spring for the $99 iOS membership fee! In the meantime, I plan to work on porting some of my apps over to it and seeing how they work. My only quibble at this time is the lack of a centralized documentation location - I'd like to at least see which (if any) features of JQuery and PhoneGap are limited or not supported. Also, some notes on targeting different Android screen sizes would be nice, but it's relatively easy to find jQuery examples out on the InterWebs. Oh well, trial and error! You can download the Nomad extension for Visual Studio by going to their web site: www.vsnomad.com. Technorati Tags: Android, Nomad

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.?

  - by Asian Angel

  When it comes to computers, Windows definitely rules the desktop in comparison to other operating systems. What we would like to know this week is if you would actually be willing to give up using Windows altogether and move to a different operating system on your computers. Note: This week’s Ask the Readers post is posing a hypothetical situation, so please refrain from starting arguments or a flame war in the comments. Good reasoned discussion is always welcome. There is no doubt that Windows is the dominant operating system in use today. Everywhere you go or look it is easy to find computers with Windows installed such as at work, home, the library, government offices, and more. For many people it is the operating system that they know and are comfortable with, which makes changing to a different operating system less appealing. Adding to the preference for Windows (or dependency based on your view) is the custom software that many businesses use on a daily basis. Throw in the high volume of people who depend on and use Microsoft Office as a standard for their business documents and it is little wonder that Windows is so dominant. So what would you use if you did decide to take a break from or permanently move away from Windows? If your choice is Linux then you have a large and wonderful variety of distributions to choose from based on what you want out of your system. Want a distribution that is easy to work with? You could choose Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or others that are engineered to be ready to go “out of the box”. Like a challenge? Perhaps Arch Linux is more your style. One of the most attractive features of all about Linux is the price…it is very hard to beat free! Maybe Mac OS X sounds like the perfect choice. It has a certain mystique and elegance associated with it and many OS X fans refuse to use anything else if given a choice. Then there is the soon to be released Chrome OS with its’ emphasis on cloud computing. This is a system that is definitely focused on being as low-maintenance and hassle-free as possible. Quick on, quick off, minimalist, and made to be portable. All of the system’s updates will occur automatically leaving you free to work and play in the cloud. But it does have its’ limitations…no installing all of those custom apps that you love using on Windows or other systems…it is literally all about the browsing window and web apps. So there you have it. If the opportunity presented itself would you, could you give Windows up and use a different operating system? Would it be easy or hard for you to do? Perhaps it would not really matter so long as you could do what you needed or wanted to do on a computer. And maybe this is the perfect time to try something new and find out…that new favorite operating system could be just an install disc away. Let us know your thoughts in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The Brothers Mario – Epic Gangland Style Mario Brothers Movie Trailer [Video] Score Awesome Games on the Cheap with the Humble Indie Bundle Add a Colorful Christmas Theme to Your Windows 7 Desktop This Windows Hack Changes the Blue Screen of Death to Red Edit Images Quickly in Firefox with Pixlr Grabber Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show Now Available in Chrome Web Store

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• questions about dual-boot install Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 on same hard drive

  - by Tim

  I'd like to dual-boot install Ubuntu 10.04 on the same hard drive as Windows 7 which has already been installed. As to sources on the internet: I found a website iinet about dual-boot installation of Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 on the same hard drive, which I think more specific than the one on Ubuntu Community without specific version of the OSes. Since I am installing Ubuntu 10.04 instead of 10.10, my question is whether their installers are same or almost same and if I can follow iinet for my dual-boot installation? Or are there better websites for information about dual-boot installtion of Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7? As to shrinking Windows partitions to make free space for Ubuntu partitions: iinet uses the partition software in Ubuntu's installer to shrink the Windows partition. But I saw in many website that the partition software in Ubuntu's installer cannot guarantee shrinking Windows 7 partitions successfully, so they recommended in general to shrink Windows partitions under Windows itself using its softwares. For example, in Ubuntu Community, it says: Some people think that the Windows partition must be resized only from within Windows Vista and Windows 7 using the shrink/resize option. ... If you use GParted Partition Editor in the Ubuntu Live CD be careful. So I was wondering which way to go in my situation? As to partition for bootloader files: In iinet, I don't see there is a partition created and dedicated to boot files (i.e. Grub files). However, I saw in many websites strongly suggesting using a boot partition for Grub files, especially for the purpose of separation and protection from installed OS files. I was wondering which way I should choose and why? As to installing bootloader Grub, in iinet, I see that to install Grub it only needs to specify the hard drive device for bootloader installation. However, in ubuntuguide(for more than 2 OSes and Ubuntu 9.04), some commands are needed to run in order to put Grub configuration files in MBR, and OS partition, for the chain-load process (where to find the files for the next stage). In Ubuntu Community, there are some related sentences which I don't quite understand how to do in practice: the only thing in your computer outside of Ubuntu that needs to be changed is a small code in the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the first hard disk. The MBR code is changed to point to the boot loader in Ubuntu. If you have a problem with changing the MBR code, you might prefer to just install the code for pointing to GRUB to the first sector of your Ubuntu partition instead. If you do that during the Ubuntu installation process, then Ubuntu won't boot until you configure some other boot manager to point to Ubuntu's boot sector. Windows Vista no longer utilizes boot.ini, ntdetect.com, and ntldr when booting. Instead, Vista stores all data for its new boot manager in a boot folder. Windows Vista ships with an command line utility called bcdedit.exe, which requires administrator credentials to use. You may want to read http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=112156 about it. Using a command line utility always has its learning curve, so a more productive and better job can be done with a free utility called EasyBCD, developed and mastered in during the times of Vista Beta already. EasyBCD is user friendly and many Vista users highly recommend EasyBCD. In what is quoted above, I was wondering how exactly I should change the MBR code to point to the bootloader in Ubuntu? if I fail to change MBR code, are the other suggested boot managers being bcdedit.exe and EasyBCD in Windows? With the three sources above, which one shall I follow? Thanks and regards

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• Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing. The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. So what does this mean for you? Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them.  What does this mean for IT? Use software and technology as an enabler, not as a roadblock. Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options.  We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth. Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network. And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world. The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below. 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail. By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today. Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized. If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!) The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices. By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.  86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities. Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?

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• Big Data – Interacting with Hadoop – What is Sqoop? – What is Zookeeper? – Day 17 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Pig and Pig Latin in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand what is Sqoop and Zookeeper in Big Data Story. There are two most important components one should learn when learning about interacting with Hadoop – Sqoop and Zookper. What is Sqoop? Most of the business stores their data in RDBMS as well as other data warehouse solutions. They need a way to move data to the Hadoop system to do various processing and return it back to RDBMS from Hadoop system. The data movement can happen in real time or at various intervals in bulk. We need a tool which can help us move this data from SQL to Hadoop and from Hadoop to SQL. Sqoop (SQL to Hadoop) is such a tool which extract data from non-Hadoop data sources and transform them into the format which Hadoop can use it and later it loads them into HDFS. Essentially it is ETL tool where it Extracts, Transform and Load from SQL to Hadoop. The best part is that it also does extract data from Hadoop and loads them to Non-SQL (or RDBMS) data stores. Essentially, Sqoop is a command line tool which does SQL to Hadoop and Hadoop to SQL. It is a command line interpreter. It creates MapReduce job behinds the scene to import data from an external database to HDFS. It is very effective and easy to learn tool for nonprogrammers. What is Zookeeper? ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. In other words Zookeeper is a replicated synchronization service with eventual consistency. In simpler words – in Hadoop cluster there are many different nodes and one node is master. Let us assume that master node fails due to any reason. In this case, the role of the master node has to be transferred to a different node. The main role of the master node is managing the writers as that task requires persistence in order of writing. In this kind of scenario Zookeeper will assign new master node and make sure that Hadoop cluster performs without any glitch. Zookeeper is the Hadoop’s method of coordinating all the elements of these distributed systems. Here are few of the tasks which Zookeepr is responsible for. Zookeeper manages the entire workflow of starting and stopping various nodes in the Hadoop’s cluster. In Hadoop cluster when any processes need certain configuration to complete the task. Zookeeper makes sure that certain node gets necessary configuration consistently. In case of the master node fails, Zookeepr can assign new master node and make sure cluster works as expected. There many other tasks Zookeeper performance when it is about Hadoop cluster and communication. Basically without the help of Zookeeper it is not possible to design any new fault tolerant distributed application. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Big Data Analytics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Disneyland Inside Out on iPhone and Android

  - by Ryan Cain

  It's hard to believe October was the last time I was over here on my blog.  Ironically after getter the developer phone from Microsoft I have been knee deep in iPhone programming and for the past few weeks Android programming again.  This time I've spent all my non-working hours programming a fun project for my "other" website, Disneyland Inside Out.  Disneyland Inside Out, a vacation planning site for Disneyland in California, has been around in various forms since June 1996.  It has always been a place for me to explore new technologies and learn about some of the new trends on the web.  I recently migrated the site over to DotNetNuke and have been building out custom modules for DNN.  I've also been hacking things together w/ the URLRewrite module in IIS 7.5 to provide strong SEO optimized URLs.  I can't say all that has really stuck within the DNN model of doing things, but it has worked pretty well. As part of my learning process, I spent most of the Fall bringing Disneyland Inside Out to the iPhone.  I will post more details on my development experiences later.  But this project gave me a really great opportunity to get a good feel for Objective-C development.  After 3 months I actually feel somewhat competent in the language and iPhone SDK, instead of just floundering around getting things to work.  The project also gave me a chance to play with some new frameworks on the iPhone and really dig into the Facebook SDK.  I also dug into some of the Gowalla REST api's as well.  We've been live with the app in iTunes for just about 10 days now, and have been sitting in the top 200 of free travel apps for the past few days.  You can get more info and the direct iTunes download link on our site: Disneyland Inside Out for iPhone Since launching the iPhone version I have gotten back into Android development, porting the Disneyland Inside Out app over to Android.  As I said in my first review of iPhone vs. Android, coming from a managed code background, Android is much easier to get going with.  I just about 3 weeks total I will have about 85 - 90% of the functionality up and running in the Android app, that took probably 1.5 - 2x's that time for iPhone.  That isn't a totally fair comparison as I am much more comfortable w/ Xcode and Objective-C today and can get some of the basic stuff done much faster than I could in the fall.  Though I'd say some of the hardest code to debug is still the null pointer issues on objects that were dealloc'd too early in Objective-C.  This isn't too bad with the NSZoombies enabled for synchronous code, but when you have a lot of async, which my app does, it can be hairy at times to track exactly what was causing the issue.   I will post more details later, as I am trying to wrap up a beta of the Android app today.  But in the meantime, if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad head on over to the site and take a look at my app.

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• More Free Apps Bound for the Marketplace

  - by Scott Kuhl

  Microsoft has announced they are raising the limit of free applications a developer can submit from 5 to 100.  But what does that really mean? First, lets look at the reason for the limitation.  The iTunes Store and the Android Market both have a lot more applications available than the Windows Phone Marketplace.  But that says nothing about the quality of those applications.  I attended a couple of pre-launch events and Microsoft representatives were clearly told to send a message. We don’t want a bunch of junky applications that do nothing but spam the marketplace.  That was the reason for the 5 free application limit. Okay, so now what has the result been?  Well, there are still fart apps, but there is no sign of a developer flooding the marking with 1500 wallpaper applications or 1000 of the same application all pointed at different RSS feeds.   On the other hand there are developers who want to release real free apps but are constrained by the 5 app limit. So why did Microsoft change it’s mind?  Is it to get the count of applications up, or is to make developers happy?  Windows Phone Marketplace is growing fast but it’s a long way behind the other guys.   I don’t think Microsoft wants to have 100,000 apps show up in the next 3 months if they are loaded with copy cat apps.  Those numbers will get picked apart quickly and the press will start complaining about  the same problems the Android Market has.  I do think the bump was at developer request.  Microsoft is usually good about listening to developer feedback, but has been pretty slow about it at times.  And from a financial perspective, there will me more apps that Microsoft has to review that they will see no profit on.  At least not until they bake in a advertising model connected to Bing. Ultimately, what does this mean for the future? Well, there are developers out there looking to release more than 5 simple free apps, so I think we will see more hobby apps.  And there are developers out there trying to make money from advertising instead of sales, so I think we will see more of those also.  But the category that I think will grow the fastest is free versions of paid applications that are the same as the trial version of the application.  While technically that makes no sense, its purely a marketing move.  Free apps get downloaded a lot more than paid apps, even with a trial mode.  It always surprises me how little consumers are willing to spend on mobile apps.  How many reviews of applications have you seen that says something like “a bit pricey at $1.99”.  Really?  Have you looked at how much you spend on your phone and plan?  I always thought the trial mode baked into Windows Marketplace was a good idea.  So I’m not sure how the more open free market will play out. In the long run though, I won’t be surprised to see a Bing ad mobile ad model show up so Microsoft can capitalize on the more open and free Windows Marketplace. Bonus: The Oatmeal on How I Feel About Buying Apps

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• SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration.  For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Handling "related" work within a single agile work item

  - by Tesserex

  I'm on a project team of 4 devs, myself included. We've been having a long discussion on how to handle extra work that comes up in the course of a single work item. This extra work is usually things that are slightly related to the task, but not always necessary to accomplish the goal of the item (that may be an opinion). Examples include but are not limited to: refactoring of the code changed by the work item refactoring code neighboring the code changed by the item re-architecting the larger code area around the ticket. For example if an item has you changing a single function, you realize the entire class now could be redone to better accommodate this change. improving the UI on a form you just modified When this extra work is small we don't mind. The problem is when this extra work causes a substantial extension of the item beyond the original feature point estimation. Sometimes a 5 point item will actually take 13 points of time. In one case we had a 13 point item that in retrospect could have been 80 points or more. There are two options going around in our discussion for how to handle this. We can accept the extra work in the same work item, and write it off as a mis-estimation. Arguments for this have included: We plan for "padding" at the end of the sprint to account for this sort of thing. Always leave the code in better shape than you found it. Don't check in half-assed work. If we leave refactoring for later, it's hard to schedule and may never get done. You are in the best mental "context" to handle this work now, since you're waist deep in the code already. Better to get it out of the way now and be more efficient than to lose that context when you come back later. We draw a line for the current work item, and say that the extra work goes into a separate ticket. Arguments include: Having a separate ticket allows for a new estimation, so we aren't lying to ourselves about how many points things really are, or having to admit that all of our estimations are terrible. The sprint "padding" is meant for unexpected technical challenges that are direct barriers to completing the ticket requirements. It is not intended for side items that are just "nice-to-haves". If you want to schedule refactoring, just put it at the top of the backlog. There is no way for us to properly account for this stuff in an estimation, since it seems somewhat arbitrary when it comes up. A code reviewer might say "those UI controls (which you actually didn't modify in this work item) are a bit confusing, can you fix that too?" which is like an hour, but they might say "Well if this control now inherits from the same base class as the others, why don't you move all of this (hundreds of lines of) code into the base and rewire all this stuff, the cascading changes, etc.?" And that takes a week. It "contaminates the crime scene" by adding unrelated work into the ticket, making our original feature point estimates meaningless. In some cases, the extra work postpones a check-in, causing blocking between devs. Some of us are now saying that we should decide some cut off, like if the additional stuff is less than 2 FP, it goes in the same ticket, if it's more, make it a new ticket. Since we're only a few months into using Agile, what's the opinion of all the more seasoned Agile veterans around here on how to handle this?

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• Selecting the correct installer to install Oracle Weblogic Server

  - by PratikS -- Oracle

  When ever we start learning about a software product, the first step is to get the software installer and install it.Before we start with "How to install Oracle Weblogic Server?", lets understand the different kinds of installers available for Oracle Weblogic Server and select the correct installer.There are three different kinds of Weblogic server Installers: Package Installer Development-only and supplemental installers Upgrade Installer 1) Package Installer: If you have never installed Oracle Weblogic Server and this is the first time you are installing it, then what you need is a Oracle Weblogic Server's Package Installer.Again there are two different kinds of Package Installers:    a) Generic Package installer:         It does not include JAVA runtime. (When using "Generic Package installer" it is a prerequisite that a supported JDK should be installed)         If you want to install weblogic server with 64bit JVM, you have to use "Generic Package installer".         "Generic Package installer" is platform independent and can be used to install weblogic server on any supported 32bit or 64bit platform.     b) OS-specific Package installer         As the name suggests the installer is platform specific.         It is meant for installation with a 32bit JVM only.         Both SUN and JROCKIT 32 bit JDKs come bundled with "OS-specific Package installer", so no need to install the JDK in advance. 2) Development-only and supplemental installers:         If you have no plans to use the Oracle Weblogic Server in Production and need a simple installer for testing purpose only, then use this installer.         Download the zip distribution, unzip it and its ready to use. 3) Upgrade Installer:         Upgrade installer is used to upgrade a Oracle Weblogic Server installation from one minor version to a higher minor version.         There are no installers available to upgrade Oracle Weblogic Server Installation from one major version to another, though Domain Upgrade is always available. Note:Following are the different versions of Oracle Weblogic Server in ascending order(excluding versions before WLS 9.2): WLS 9.2.x WLS 10.0.x WLS 10.3.x WLS 12.1.x Where "x" denotes the minor version, 9.2, 10.0,10.3 and 12.1 are the major versions.So you may use the upgrade installer to upgrade from WLS 10.3.1 to 10.3.6, or 10.0.1 to 10.0.2 etc.  ------------------------------------- Important links to refer: Oracle Weblogic Server Documentation Supported Configuration Installation Guide for Oracle WebLogic Server

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• Ti Launchpad

  - by raysmithequip

  Just thought I would get a couple of notes up here for reference to anyone that is interested...it is now Feb 2011 and I have not been posting here enough to remember this blog. Back in Nov 2010 I ordered the Ti launchpad msp430, it is a little target board kit replete with a mini USB cable, two very inexpensive programmable mcu's and a couple of pin headers with a couple of led's on board, a spi connector some on board jumpers and two programmable micro switches....all for less than $5.00...INCLUDING SHIPPING!!....not bad when the ardruino's are running around 20.00 for the target board, atmega328 and cable off of eBay...I wont even mention the microchip pic right now.  Naw, for $5.00 the Ti launchpad kit is about the cheapest fun around...if-uns your a geek that is... Well, the launchpad was backordered for almost two months, came like Xmas eve in fact...I had almost forgotten it!! And really, it was way late and not my idea of an Xmas present for myself.  That would of been the web expressions 4 I bought a few weeks back.  With all the holidays, I did not even look at it till last week, in fact I passed the wrapped board around at my local ham club meeting during points of personal privilege....some oh's and ahhs but mostly duhs...I actually ordered it to avoid downloading the huge code compressor studio 4 (CCS) that was supposed to be included on the cd.  No cd.  I had already downloaded IAR  another programming IDE for these little micro bugs. In my spare time I toyed with IAR and the launchpad board but after about two days of playing delete the driver with windows I decided to just download CCS 4, the code limited version, and give that a shot......CCS 4, is a good rewrite from the earlier versions, it is based on Eclipse as an IDE and includes the drivers for the msp430 target board I received in the kit.  Once installed I quickly configured the debugger for the target chip which was already plugged into the dip socket at the factory, msp430G2131 from he drop down list and clicked ok...I was in!! The CCS4 is full of bells and whistles compared to the IAR, which I would of preferred for the simplicity.  But the code compressor studio really does have it all!!..the code limited version is free, and of all things will give you java script editor box.  The whole layout in debugger mode reminds me of any modern programmer IDE...I mean sure give me Tex anytime but you simply must admire all the boxes and options included in the GUI.  It was a simple matter to check the assembly code in the flash and ram memory that came preloaded for the launchpad kit.  Assembly.  I am right now looking for my old assembly textbooks...sure I remember how to use mov and add etc but a couple of the commands are a little more than vague anymore.  Still, these little mcu's are about 50 cents each and might just work in a couple of projects I have lined up for the near future.  I may document the code here.  Luckily, I plan to write the code in c++ for the main project but if it has to be assembly, no prob.  For reference, the program that came already on the 2131 in the kit was a temperature indicator that alternately flashed red and green leds and changed the intensity of either depending on whether the temp was rising or falling...neat.  Neat enough that it might be worthwhile banging out a little GUI in windows 7 to test the new user device system calls, maybe put a temp gauge widget up on the desktop...just to keep from getting bored.  If you see some assembly code on this blog, you know I was doing something with one of the many mcu's out there.....thats all for now, more to follow...a bit later, of course.

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• How to use DI and DI containers

  - by Pinetree

  I am building a small PHP mvc framework (yes, yet another one), mostly for learning purposes, and I am trying to do it the right way, so I'd like to use a DI container, but I am not asking which one to use but rather how to use one. Without going into too much detail, the mvc is divided into modules which have controllers which render views for actions. This is how a request is processed: a Main object instantiates a Request object, and a Router, and injects the Request into the Router to figure out which module was called. then it instantiates the Module object and sends the Request to that the Module creates a ModuleRouter and sends the Request to figure out the controller and action it then creates the Controller and the ViewRenderer, and injects the ViewRenderer into the Controller (so that the controller can send data to the view) the ViewRenderer needs to know which module, controller and action were called to figure out the path to the view scripts, so the Module has to figure out this and inject it to the ViewRenderer the Module then calls the action method on the controller and calls the render method on the ViewRenderer For now, I do not have any DI container set up, but what I do have are a bunch of initX() methods that create the required component if it is not already there. For instance, the Module has the initViewRenderer() method. These init methods get called right before that component is needed, not before, and if the component was already set it will not initialize it. This allows for the components to be switched, but it does not require manually setting them if they are not there. Now, I'd like to do this by implementing a DI container, but still keep the manual configuration to a bare minimum, so if the directory structure and naming convention is followed, everything should work, without even touching the config. If I use the DI container, do I then inject it into everything (the container would inject itself when creating a component), so that other components can use it? When do I register components with the DI? Can a component register other components with the DI during run-time? Do I create a 'common' config and use that? How do I then figure out on the fly which components I need and how they need to be set up? If Main uses Router which uses Request, Main then needs to use the container to get Module (or does the module need to be found and set beforehand? How?) Module uses Router but needs to figure out the settings for the ViewRenderer and the Controller on the fly, not in advance, so my DI container can't be setting those on the Module before the module figures out the controller and action... What if the controller needs some other service? Do I inject the container into every controller? If I start doing that, I might just inject it into everything... Basically I am looking for the best practices when dealing with stuff like this. I know what DI is and what DI containers do, but I am looking for guidance to using them in real life, and not some isolated examples on the net. Sorry for the lengthy post and many thanks in advance.

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• what differs a computer scientist/software engineer to regular people who learn programming language and APIs?

  - by Amumu

  In University, we learn and reinvent the wheel a lot to truly learn the programming concepts. For example, we may learn assembly language to understand, what happens inside the box, and how the system operates, when we execute our code. This helps understanding higher level concepts deeper. For example, memory management like in C is just an abstraction of manually managed memory contents and addresses. The problem is, when we're going to work, usually productivity is required more. I could program my own containers, or string class, or date/time (using POSIX with C system call) to do the job, but then, it would take much longer time to use existing STL or Boost library, which abstract all of those thing and very easy to use. This leads to an issue, that a regular person doesn't need to get through all the low level/under the hood stuffs, who learns only one programming language and using language-related APIs. These people may eventually compete with the mainstream graduates from computer science or software engineer and call themselves programmers. At first, I don't think it's valid to call them programmers. I used to think, a real programmer needs to understand the computer deeply (but not at the electronic level). But then I changed my mind. After all, they get the job done and satisfy all the test criteria (logic, performance, security...), and in business environment, who cares if you're an expert and understand how computer works or not. You may get behind the "amateurs" if you spend to much time learning about how things work inside. It is totally valid for those people to call themselves programmers. This makes me confuse. So, after all, programming should be considered an universal skill? Does programming language and concepts matter or the problems we solve matter? For example, many C/C++ vs Java and other high level language, one of the main reason is because C/C++ features performance, as well as accessing low level facility. One of the main reason (in my opinion), is coding in C/C++ seems complex, so people feel good about it (not trolling anyone, just my observation, and my experience as well. Try to google "C hacker syndrome"). While Java on the other hand, made for simplifying programming tasks to help developers concentrate on solving their problems. Based on Java rationale, if the programing language keeps evolve, one day everyone can map their logic directly with natural language. Everyone can program. On that day, maybe real programmers are mathematicians, who could perform most complex logic (including business logic and academic logic) without worrying about installing/configuring compiler, IDEs? What's our job as a computer scientist/software engineer? To solve computer specific problems or to solve problems in general? For example, take a look at this exame: http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/attach/Problem%20Resources/2010WorldFinalProblemSet.pdf . The example requires only basic knowledge about the programming language, but focus more on problem solving with the language. In sum, what differs a computer scientist/software engineer to regular people who learn programming language and APIs? A mathematician can be considered a programmer, if he is good enough to use programming language to implement his formula. Can we programmer do this? Probably not for most of us, since we specialize about computer, not math. An electronic engineer, who learns how to use C to program for his devices, can be considered a programmer. If the programming languages keep being simplified, may one day the software engineers, who implements business logic and create softwares, be obsolete? (Not for computer scientist though, since many of the CS topics are scientific, and science won't change, but technology will).

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 6

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Discuss the physical characteristics of magnetic disks Describe how data is organized and accessed on a magnetic disk Discuss the parameters that play a role in the performance of magnetic disks Describe different optical memory devices Magnetic Disk The way data is stored on and retried from magnetic disks Data is recorded on and later retrieved form the disk via a conducting coil named the head (in many systems there are two heads) The writ mechanism exploits the fact that electricity flowing through a coil produces a magnetic field. Electric pulses are sent to the write head, and the resulting magnetic patterns are recorded on the surface below with different patterns for positive and negative currents The physical characteristics of a magnetic disk   Summarize from book   The factors that play a role in the performance of a disk Seek time – the time it takes to position the head at the track Rotational delay / latency – the time it takes for the beginning of the sector to reach the head Access time – the sum of the seek time and rotational delay Transfer time – the time it takes to transfer data RAID The rate of improvement in secondary storage performance has been considerably less than the rate for processors and main memory. Thus secondary storage has become a bit of a bottleneck. RAID works on the concept that if one disk can be pushed so far, additional gains in performance are to be had by using multiple parallel components. Points to note about RAID… RAID is a set of physical disk drives viewed by the operating system as a single logical drive Data is distributed across the physical drives of an array in a scheme known as striping Redundant disk capacity is used to store parity information, which guarantees data recoverability in case of a disk failure (not supported by RAID 0 or RAID 1) Interesting to note that the increase in the number of drives, increases the probability of failure. To compensate for this decreased reliability RAID makes use of stored parity information that enables the recovery of data lost due to a disk failure.   The RAID scheme consists of 7 levels…   Category Level Description Disks Required Data Availability Large I/O Data Transfer Capacity Small I/O Request Rate Striping 0 Non Redundant N Lower than single disk Very high Very high for both read and write Mirroring 1 Mirrored 2N Higher than RAID 2 – 5 but lower than RAID 6 Higher than single disk Up to twice that of a signle disk for read Parallel Access 2 Redundant via Hamming Code N + m Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Parallel Access 3 Bit interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Independent Access 4 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Independent Access 5 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, generally  lower than single disk for write Independent Access 6 Block interleaved parity N + 2 Highest of all listed alternatives Similar to RAID 0 for read; lower than RAID 5 for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than RAID 5  for write   Read page 215 – 221 for detailed explanation on RAID levels Optical Memory There are a variety of optical-disk systems available. Read through the table on page 222 – 223 Some of the devices include… CD CD-ROM CD-R CD-RW DVD DVD-R DVD-RW Blue-Ray DVD Magnetic Tape Most modern systems use serial recording – data is lade out as a sequence of bits along each track. The typical recording used in serial is referred to as serpentine recording. In this technique when data is being recorded, the first set of bits is recorded along the whole length of the tape. When the end of the tape is reached the heads are repostioned to record a new track, and the tape is again recorded on its whole length, this time in the opposite direction. That process continued back and forth until the tape is full. To increase speed, the read-write head is capable of reading and writing a number of adjacent tracks simultaneously. Data is still recorded serially along individual tracks, but blocks in sequence are stored on adjacent tracks as suggested. A tape drive is a sequential access device. Magnetic tape was the first kind of secondary memory. It is still widely used as the lowest-cost, slowest speed member of the memory hierarchy.

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• Moving from Silverlight 4 Beta to RC - Part 1

  The other day I had finished up my Task-It Webinar, written a few blog posts, and knew the time had come to move from my Silverlight 4 Beta environment up to the latest RC (release candidate) bits that were released last Monday. What disappointed me when I went to the Silverlight 4 Information Page is that it told me what to install, but not what to uninstall first. Uninstalling I'm not entirely sure if I had to uninstall anything, or if installing the new stuff would just work, but in poking around the web I found posts stating that you must uninstall the following items first. Unfortunately I'm going by memory here and have not been able to find my way back to the magic page I found in the myriad of posts that I went through: Microsoft VisualStudio Beta 2 Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended (apparently this must be done *before* the next one) Microsoft .NET Framework Client Profile Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010 While I was at it, I removed a bunch of other stuff, like Blend 3, Blend 4, the SDK's associated with them, and a bunch other stuff that was old. Of course, I didn't really want/need to keep any Silverlight 3 stuff around as I am developing Task-It in Silverlight 4. If I need a Silverlight 3 environment at some point I'll set it up in a virtual environment. NOTE: One thing that I did not uninstall is the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Toolkit November 2009. The reason is that they have not released the March version yet, so if you uninstall this, youll end up having to reinstall it. Installing OK, now that I had all of that old stuff off my machine, now it was time to get the new stuff. For this part I liked Tim Heuer's post, A Guide to What has Changed in Silverlight 4 RC better than the Silverlight 4 Information Page. VisualStudio 2010 RC - I installed Ultimate, but you may not need that version. No harm, it's free for now anyway. I downloaded the .exe and the 3 .rar files, then ran the .exe. I then extracted the contents of the ISO (using WinZip) to a new directory, and now had Setup.exe, a bunch of .cab files and some other assorted stuff. I simply ran Setup.exe and chose custom install (only because I wanted to uncheck Visual C++...I don't really have a need for that) Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 - As mentioned in Tim's blog post, this installs this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and WCF RIA Services. WCF RIA Services Toolkit March 2010 - I'm not sure if/when I'll need any of this stuff, but no harm in installing it anyway. Expression Blend 4 beta - Only if you plan to use Blend, which I do. Windows Phone Developer Tools - Only if you are interested in playing with Windows Phone 7 development. Wrap Up Hopefully I got those steps right. If anyone finds anything I've missed, please just add a comment to this post and I'll update it accordingly.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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• How to translate along Z axis in OpenTK

  - by JeremyJAlpha

  I am playing around with an OpenGL sample application I downloaded for Xamarin-Android. The sample application produces a rotating colored cube I would simply like to edit it so that the rotating cube is translated along the Z axis and disappears into the distance. I modified the code by: adding an cumulative variable to store my Z distance, adding GL.Enable(All.DepthBufferBit) - unsure if I put it in the right place, adding GL.Translate(0.0f, 0.0f, Depth) - before the rotate functions, Result: cube rotates a couple of times then disappears, it seems to be getting clipped out of the frustum. So my question is what is the correct way to use and initialize the Z buffer and get the cube to travel along the Z axis? I am sure I am missing some function calls but am unsure of what they are and where to put them. I apologise in advance as this is very basic stuff but am still learning :P, I would appreciate it if anyone could show me the best way to get the cube to still rotate but to also move along the Z axis. I have commented all my modifications in the code: // This gets called when the drawing surface is ready protected override void OnLoad (EventArgs e) { // this call is optional, and meant to raise delegates // in case any are registered base.OnLoad (e); // UpdateFrame and RenderFrame are called // by the render loop. This is takes effect // when we use 'Run ()', like below UpdateFrame += delegate (object sender, FrameEventArgs args) { // Rotate at a constant speed for (int i = 0; i < 3; i ++) rot [i] += (float) (rateOfRotationPS [i] * args.Time); }; RenderFrame += delegate { RenderCube (); }; GL.Enable(All.DepthBufferBit); //Added by Noob GL.Enable(All.CullFace); GL.ShadeModel(All.Smooth); GL.Hint(All.PerspectiveCorrectionHint, All.Nicest); // Run the render loop Run (30); } void RenderCube () { GL.Viewport(0, 0, viewportWidth, viewportHeight); GL.MatrixMode (All.Projection); GL.LoadIdentity (); if ( viewportWidth > viewportHeight ) { GL.Ortho(-1.5f, 1.5f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); } else { GL.Ortho(-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.5f, 1.5f, -1.0f, 1.0f); } GL.MatrixMode (All.Modelview); GL.LoadIdentity (); Depth -= 0.02f; //Added by Noob GL.Translate(0.0f,0.0f,Depth); //Added by Noob GL.Rotate (rot[0], 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); GL.Rotate (rot[1], 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); GL.Rotate (rot[2], 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); GL.ClearColor (0, 0, 0, 1.0f); GL.Clear (ClearBufferMask.ColorBufferBit); GL.VertexPointer(3, All.Float, 0, cube); GL.EnableClientState (All.VertexArray); GL.ColorPointer (4, All.Float, 0, cubeColors); GL.EnableClientState (All.ColorArray); GL.DrawElements(All.Triangles, 36, All.UnsignedByte, triangles); SwapBuffers (); }

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• Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the sayings (attributed to Thomas Paine) that totally resonated with me from the first time I heard it, which was only 3 years ago during some training course at work: "Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way" You'll find many books with this title and you'll find it quoted by politicians and other leaders in various countries at various times... the quote is open to interpretation and works on many levels. To set the tone of what this means to me, I'll use a simple micro example: In any given conversation, you are either leading it or following it, at different times/snapshots of the conversation. If you are not willing or able to lead it, and you are not willing or able to follow it, then you should depart. The bad alternative which this guidance encourages you NOT to do is to stick around and obstruct progress by not following, not leading, and simply complaining or trying to derail the discussion in no particular direction. The same pattern applies at your position/role at work. Either follow your management/leadership team, or try to lead them to what you think is a better place, or change jobs. Don't stick around complaining about the direction things are going, while not actively trying to either change things or make peace with it. In the previous paragraph you can replace the word "your management" with "the people reporting to you" and the guidance still holds. Either lead your direct reports to where you think they should go, or follow their lead, or change jobs. Complaining about folks not taking direction while doing nothing is not a maintainable state. To me this quote is not about a permanent state, it is not about some people always leading and some always following: It is about a role/hat that anybody can play/wear at any given moment. One minute I am leading you, the next I am following you, and the next we are both following someone else and so on... When there is disagreement, debate the different directions for as long as it takes for you to be comfortable that you can either follow or lead. If you don't become comfortable with either of those, get out of the way. Something to remember is that it is impossible to learn how to lead well, without learning how to follow well (probably deserves its own blog entry)... Things go wrong when someone thinks that they must always be leading, or when everybody wants to follow and nobody steps up to lead... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and they don't try to reach agreement on a shared direction, stubbornly sticking to their guns pulling the rest of the team in multiple directions... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and after numerous and lengthy discussions, none of them decides to follow or get out of the way... Things go wrong when people don't want to lead, don't want to follow, and insist on sticking around... While there are a few ways things that can go wrong as enumerated in the previous paragraph, the most common one in my experience is the last one I mentioned. You'll recognize these folks as the ones that always complain about everything that is wrong with their company/product but do nothing about it. Every time you hear someone giving feedback on how something is wrong or suboptimal, ask them "So now that you identified the problem, what do you think the solution is and what are you doing to drive us to that solution?" The next time things start going wrong, step up and remind everyone: Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way. For more perspectives, and for input to help you form your own interpretation, search the web for this phrase to see in what contexts it is being used (bing, google). Finally, regardless of your political views, I hope you can appreciate if only as an example this perspective of someone leading by actually getting out of the way. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Cloud hosted CI for .NET projects

  - by Scott Dorman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2014/06/02/cloud-hosted-ci-for-.net-projects.aspxContinuous integration (CI) is important. If you don’t have it set up…you should. There are a lot of different options available for hosting your own CI server, but they all require you to maintain your own infrastructure. If you’re a business, that generally isn’t a problem. However, if you have some open source projects hosted, for example on GitHub, there haven’t really been any options. That has changed with the latest release of AppVeyor, which bills itself as “Continuous integration for busy developers.” What’s different about AppVeyor is that it’s a hosted solution. Why is that important? By being a hosted solution, it means that I don’t have to maintain my own infrastructure for a build server. How does that help if you’re hosting an open source project? AppVeyor has a really competitive pricing plan. For an unlimited amount of public repositories, it’s free. That gives you a cloud hosted CI system for all of your GitHub projects for the cost of some time to set them up, which actually isn’t hard to do at all. I have several open source projects (hosted at https://github.com/scottdorman), so I signed up using my GitHub credentials. AppVeyor fully supported my two-factor authentication with GitHub, so I never once had to enter my password for GitHub into AppVeyor. Once it was done, I authorized GitHub and it instantly found all of the repositories I have (both the ones I created and the ones I cloned from elsewhere). You can even add “build badges” to your markdown files in GitHub, so anyone who visits your project can see the status of the lasted build. Out of the box, you can simply select a repository, add the build project, click New Build and wait for the build to complete. You now have a complete CI server running for your project. The best part of this, besides the fact that it “just worked” with almost zero configuration is that you can configure it through a web-based interface which is very streamlined, clean and easy to use or you can use a appveyor.yml file. This means that you can define your CI build process (including any scripts that might need to be run, etc.) in a standard file format (the YAML format) and store it in your repository. The benefits to that are huge. The file becomes a versioned artifact in your source control system, so it can be branched, merged, and is completely transparent to anyone working on the project. By the way, AppVeyor isn’t limited to just GitHub. It currently supports GitHub, BitBucket, Visual Studio Online, and Kiln. I did have a few issues getting one of my projects to build, but the same day I posted the problem to the support forum a fix was deployed, and I had a functioning CI build about 5 minutes after that. Since then, I’ve provided some additional feature requests and had a few other questions, all of which have seen responses within a 24-hour period. I have to say that it’s easily been one of the best customer support experiences I’ve seen in a long time. AppVeyor is still young, so it doesn’t yet have full feature parity with some of the older (more established) CI systems available,  but it’s getting better all the time and I have no doubt that it will quickly catch up to those other CI systems and then pass them. The bottom line, if you’re looking for a good cloud-hosted CI system for your .NET-based projects, look at AppVeyor.

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• Business School graduate joins Oracle

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  My name is Mathias, I work as an Applications Inside Sales Rep for the French market, and I’d like to give you a brief snapshot of my experience at Oracle. First things first, how did you hear about Oracle? Where have you seen the sharp and recognizable red logo? Was it in Charles de Gaulle Airport when your eyes crossed the 20-metre banner with a picture of a strange big machine in the middle? Was it through reading the Forbes 10 top IT companies worldwide ranking? Or is it because IT is your thing and you cannot but know one of the “big four”? Meeting with a Grenoble Alumnus My story is a little different. My plan was to work in sales, in the IT industry. I had heard about Oracle, but my opinion at the time was that this kind of multinational company was way out of reach for a young graduate, even with high enthusiasm and great excitement to be (finally) on the job market. So, I was really surprised when I had an interesting conversation with a top alumnus of my business school. We were at the Grenoble Ecole de Management graduation ceremony (our graduation!), and before the party got really started, I got to chat with her. She told me of the great experience she was getting by living and working in Dublin. She had already figured it all out: “you work with another 100 young people from 10 different nationalities across Europe, you can be based in Dublin, but then once you work really hard you can move to Malaga Spain or other BUs around the world, you can work with different lines of business and learn about new “techy” and business oriented products, move to the field in your home country or elsewhere, etc.” What, what, what? Moving around Europe, trained by the best sales coaches in the world, acquiring strong IT knowledge and getting on board with one of fastest-growing and most watched companies in the world? Well, I was in. The next day (OK, 3 days after, the time to recover), I sent her my CV, and 3 months later I started as a Business Development Consultant at Oracle in Dublin, representing the latest cloud based CRM across the French market. That was 15 months ago. Since then, I moved line of business twice, I’m always learning new things and working with different and senior stakeholders; I have attended hundreds of hours of sales and product training (priceless when you come from a business background); I passed the Dublin Institute of Technology Sales Certification through different trainings given onsite within Oracle; I’ve led projects based around social media and I’ve gotten involved within various sales deals going on my market. Despite all of these great things, two will remain in my spirit: the multiculturalism that I experience every day in the office, and the American style of management - more direct and open than what you can find in “regular French companies”. Sales Progression Board In May 2012, I passed what we call a ‘Sales Progression Board’ to be promoted to an Inside Sales position. I am now in charge of generating revenue through the sale of Oracle applications on my specific territory. Always keeping in my mind my personal ambition: going to the field one day. Interested to join Oracle in the same role as Mathias? Visit http://campus.oracle.com.

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• UPOS RFIDScanner data format

  - by Robert Snyder

  A lot of work that I do currently is based in the OPOS/UPOS world. My company has a device that can read 13.56Mhz tags (RFID), Smart Cards, and Mag Stripe cards. Up until somewhat recently I have only been working with RFID for a very specific scenario. That was to read UltraLight C and Desfire cards. These cards were all setup very specifically so that I could take the data read from those cards and force it into a MSR track2 format. The past couple of weeks, however, I have been working on reading RFID credit cards (since I have a Visa card I've been using mine), and Smart Card credit cards. (The visa card I have has both) In learning how to communicate with SmartCard and reading ISO7816 and EMVCO documents I became a little more familiar with how info is stored. But now I have a question regarding UPOS. The RFID data on my Visa is stored (and read) very similar to how the data is stored and read from the Smart Card on my Visa. Cool. Well in the UPOS spec for SmartCardRW the ReadData method returns a byte array. That's cool, I can just return all that data and then parse it as my heart desires. The RFID though has a LinkedList of Tags. Well this makes sense in terms of my Visa card (reminds me of a question I have in regards to SmartCard, but that is for another question) but what about ULC and Desfire, or for that matter any Mifare card. Pages, Files, Purses don't exactly fit the Tag profile. For instance lets just say I read pages 4-12 on my ULC card. Each page I read is 4 bytes long. Does this mean I have 9 tags in my LinkedList? Is my Tag id the page number? Or then how does that translate to Desfire? I open application 123456 and read file 1 and file 2, Do I have 2 tags? and if so what is my tag id? At least with my Visa I think that I have to use the Tag id (ex 5F24 for my expiration date) and value of {0x15, 0x10, 0x31} Part of me says yes..that makes sense. Another part of me says, "well if that is the case then why doesn't SmartCardRW have Tags?" So that is my question. How do I format my data from those different types of media? or is that the job of my Control Object (the application)? Is so how does it know? The only protocols I have are: // Summary: // Enumerates the available predefined RFID tag protocols the device supports. [Flags] public enum RFIDProtocols { EpcClass0 = 1, RFIDSdt0Plus = 2, EpcClass1 = 4, EpcClass1Gen2 = 8, EpcClass2 = 16, Iso14443A = 4096, Iso14443B = 8192, Iso15693 = 12288, Iso180006B = 16384, Other = 16777216, All = 1073741824, } If I use that well all of my cards that I have are all Iso14443A. I use the ATQA and the SAK to know what type of card I really have. There is no RFID property that lets me specify that. So I'm lost.

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• Oracle GoldenGate Active-Active Part 1

  - by Nick_W

  My name is Nick Wagner, and I'm a recent addition to the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) product management team.  I've spent the last 15+ years working on database replication products, and I've spent the last 10 years working on the Oracle GoldenGate product.  So most of my posting will probably be focused on OGG.  One question that comes up all the time is around active-active replication with Oracle GoldenGate.  How do I know if my application is a good fit for active-active replication with GoldenGate?   To answer that, it really comes down to how you plan on handling conflict resolution.  I will delve into topology and deployment in a later blog, but here is a simple architecture: The two most common resolution routines are host based resolution and timestamp based resolution. Host based resolution is used less often, but works with the fewest application changes.  Think of it like this: any transactions from SystemA always take precedence over any transactions from SystemB.  If there is a conflict on SystemB, then the record from SystemA will overwrite it.  If there is a conflict on SystemA, then it will be ignored.  It is quite a bit less restrictive, and in most cases, as long as all the tables have primary keys, host based resolution will work just fine.  Timestamp based resolution, on the other hand, is a little trickier. In this case, you can decide which record is overwritten based on timestamps. For example, does the older record get overwritten with the newer record?  Or vice-versa?  This method not only requires primary keys on every table, but it also requires every table to have a timestamp/date column that is updated each time a record is inserted or updated on the table.  Most homegrown applications can always be customized to include these requirements, but it's a little more difficult with 3rd party applications, and might even be impossible for large ERP type applications.  If your database has these features - whether it’s primary keys for host based resolution, or primary keys and timestamp columns for timestamp based resolution - then your application could be a great candidate for active-active replication.  But table structure is not the only requirement.  The other consideration applies when there is a conflict; i.e., do I need to perform any notification or track down the user that had their data overwritten?  In most cases, I don't think it's necessary, but if it is required, OGG can always create an exceptions table that contains all of the overwritten transactions so that people can be notified. It's a bit of extra work to implement this type of option, but if the business requires it, then it can be done. Unless someone is constantly monitoring this exception table or has an automated process in dealing with exceptions, there will be a delay in getting a response back to the end user. Ideally, when setting up active-active resolution we can include some simple procedural steps or configuration options that can reduce, or in some cases eliminate the potential for conflicts.  This makes the whole implementation that much easier and foolproof.  And I'll cover these in my next blog. 

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• Why do I need two Instances in Windows Azure?

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) means that there are various components you can use in it to solve a problem: Compute “Roles” - Computers running an OS and optionally IIS - you can have more than one "Instance" of a given Role Storage - Blobs, Tables and Queues for Storage Other Services - Things like the Service Bus, Azure Connection Services, SQL Azure and Caching It’s important to understand that some of these services are Stateless and others maintain State. Stateless means (at least in this case) that a system might disappear from one physical location and appear elsewhere. You can think of this as a cashier at the front of a store. If you’re in line, a cashier might take his break, and another person might replace him. As long as the order proceeds, you as the customer aren’t really affected except for the few seconds it takes to change them out. The cashier function in this example is stateless. The Compute Role Instances in Windows Azure are Stateless. To upgrade hardware, because of a fault or many other reasons, a Compute Role's Instance might stop on one physical server, and another will pick it up. This is done through the controlling fabric that Windows Azure uses to manage the systems. It’s important to note that storage in Azure does maintain State. Your data will not simply disappear - it is maintained - in fact, it’s maintained three times in a single datacenter and all those copies are replicated to another for safety. Going back to our example, storage is similar to the cash register itself. Even though a cashier leaves, the record of your payment is maintained. So if a Compute Role Instance can disappear and re-appear, the things running on that first Instance would stop working. If you wrote your code in a Stateless way, then another Role Instance simply re-starts that transaction and keeps working, just like the other cashier in the example. But if you only have one Instance of a Role, then when the Role Instance is re-started, or when you need to upgrade your own code, you can face downtime, since there’s only one. That means you should deploy at least two of each Role Instance not only for scale to handle load, but so that the first “cashier” has someone to replace them when they disappear. It’s not just a good idea - to gain the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our uptime in Azure it’s a requirement. We point this out right in the Management Portal when you deploy the application: (Click to enlarge) When you deploy a Role Instance you can also set the “Upgrade Domain”. Placing Roles on separate Upgrade Domains means that you have a continuous service whenever you upgrade (more on upgrades in another post) - the process looks like this for two Roles. This example covers the scenario for upgrade, so you have four roles total - One Web and one Worker running the "older" code, and one of each running the new code. In all those Roles you want at least two instances, and this example shows that you're covered for High Availability and upgrade paths: The take-away is this - always plan for forward-facing Roles to have at least two copies. For Worker Roles that do background processing, there are ways to architect around this number, but it does affect the SLA if you have only one.

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• Feynman's inbox

  - by user12607414

  Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

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• Personal Financial Management – The need for resuscitation

  - by Salil Ravindran

  Until a year or so ago, PFM (Personal Financial Management) was the blue eyed boy of every channel banking head. In an age when bank account portability is still fiction, PFM was expected to incentivise customers to switch banks. It still is, in some emerging economies, but if the state of PFM in matured markets is anything to go by, it is in a state of coma and badly requires resuscitation. Studies conducted around the year show an alarming decline and stagnation in PFM usage in mature markets. A Sept 2012 report by Aite Group – Strategies for PFM Success shows that 72% of users hadn’t used PFM and worse, 58% of them were not kicked about using it. Of the rest who had used it, only half did on a bank site. While there are multiple reasons for this lack of adoption, some are glaringly obvious. While pretty graphs and pie charts are important to provide a visual representation of my income and expense, it is simply not enough to encourage me to return. Static representation of data without any insightful analysis does not help me. Budgeting and Cash Flow is important but when I have an operative account, a couple of savings accounts, a mortgage loan and a couple of credit cards help me with what my affordability is in specific contexts rather than telling me I just busted my budget. Help me with relative importance of each budget category so that I know it is fine to go over budget on books for my daughter as against going over budget on eating out. Budget over runs and spend analysis are post facto and I am informed of my sins only when I return to online banking. That too, only if I decide to come to the PFM area. Fundamentally, PFM should be a part of my banking engagement rather than an analysis tool. It should be contextual so that I can make insight based decisions. So what can be done to resuscitate PFM? Amalgamation with banking activities – In most cases, PFM tools are integrated into online banking pages and they are like chapter 37 of a long story. PFM needs to be a way of banking rather than a tool. Available balances should shift to Spendable Balances. Budget and goal related insights should be integrated with transaction sessions to drive pre-event financial decisions. Personal Financial Guidance - Banks need to think ground level and see if their PFM offering is really helping customers achieve self actualisation. Banks need to recognise that most customers out there are non-proficient about making the best value of their money. Customers return when they know that they are being guided rather than being just informed on their finance. Integrating contextual financial offers and financial planning into PFM is one way ahead. Yet another way is to help customers tag unwanted spending thereby encouraging sound savings habits. Mobile PFM – Most banks have left all those numbers on online banking. With access mostly having moved to devices and the success of apps, moving PFM on to devices will give it a much needed shot in the arm. This is not only about presenting the same wine in a new bottle but also about leveraging the power of the device in pushing real time notifications to make pre-purchase decisions. The pursuit should be to analyse spend, budgets and financial goals real time and push them pre-event on to the device. So next time, I should know that I have over run my eating out budget before walking into that burger joint and not after. Increase participation and collaboration – Peer group experiences and comments are valued above those offered by the bank. Integrating social media into PFM engagement will let customers share and solicit their financial management experiences with their peer group. Peer comparisons help benchmark one’s savings and spending habits with those of the peer group and increases stickiness. While mature markets have gone through this learning in some way over the last one year, banks in maturing digital banking economies increasingly seem to be falling into this trap. Best practices lie in profiling and segmenting customers, being where they are and contextually guiding them to identify and achieve their financial goals. Banks could look at the likes of Simple and Movenbank to draw inpiration from.

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