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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

  - by Dave Campbell

  Today's Review (alphabetic order): GooNews, Grocery Shopping List, Need for Speed, SurfCube, and United Nations News. I'm a day late if these are going to be 'Monday' posts, but there are lots of apps, lots of goodness, and lots of email, so I might try to do 2 a week, we'll see. So once again I've got a small review of 5 apps that are either on my phone or have been. Disclaimers at the end. In this Issue:   GooNews is a very cool app from Shawn Wildermuth (AgiliTrain). I don't know if he uses this as a demo during his instruction, but it definitely serves a purpose... wanna pick up the top news items from Google on a never-ending basis? ... this is it. You can add your own keyword searches, and send stories to InstaPaper or share via email. I like this because it brings me the news quickly and updated, and works great. GooNews is by AgiliTrain and is Free This was a request by the author, and actually surprised me. I'm a big one for lists, but I would have just done a OneNote list to SkyDrive and to my phone. This app is a lot more than that, but will take you some setup to make it be 'yours'. For obvious reasons, there are no unit prices on things, so you have to set that up to get some idea of the cost of what you're shopping for. But if you do that, you'll get a nice total. Lots of thought went into the various categories and you can add your own. There's a bit of animation on the category selection that's nice. He seems to have covered all the bases necessary to use this, even shopping 'plans' that can be saved, and emailing of lists. As I said, I'm more of a raw list person, but if you take the time to set this up, it should work very nicely for you. Grocery Shopping List is by Grocery Shopper and is $0.99 ($1.99 after Feb 1) with a free trial. This was my 2nd commercial game I bought, and the one I've played the most. I ran the trial, thought it worked great, and bought it. I've had a lot of fun with this... there's no gas pedal.. your foot is in the carbeurator from the GO!, and unless you wanna tap the screen and brake like a little girl, just hang onto the steering wheel (the phone), and guide your way through. Hours of fun and challenges here. I like this because it's got some challenge to it, and the cars seem to be very realistic in their reactions. Need for Speed Undercover is by Electronic Arts is $4.99 and has a free trial. SurfCube Browser is another app by the folks that did the GuitarTuner I reviewed on Monday. You have to see SurfCube to believe it. You've probably seen the YouTube video, if not check SilverlightCream number 1017. The app works very solid, and just as the video demonstrates. I downloaded and tried this, and it immediately did 2 things: bought it, and pinned it to my start page. I like this because it's fun to work with, and it works great as a browser. I'm about *this* close to replacing the IE tile on my front page with SurfCube. SurfCube Browser is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $1.99 and has a free trial. Coming in with another News app is United Nations News by Justin Angel. This is definitely a news aggregator for 'grown ups'... news, photos, videos, and radio broadcsts from the international community all in one very slick app. This is an amazingly well thought-out and complete app. Even better yet, Justin has the code on CodePlex. A very well-done International news aggregator. United Nations News is by Justin Angel and is Free. A few disclaimers: Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week (twice if I find time), and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. I'm still playing with the format, comments are welcome. I decided I should alphabetize the list today... so there's no order implied Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Why is NDA so hard to understand?

  - by Dave Campbell

  Maybe this concept is simpler for me because of all the jobs I've been on over the years requiring security clearances. I've signed quite a few NDA forms. Some for big companies, some for small, but the meaning of "NDA" remains constant: Non-Disclosure Agreement. To me, that takes no further explanation, but apparently it's confusing to some people, and I don't understand how you can be confused. The papers I signed with the U.S. Army in 1970 read "10 years and $10,000" for a violation... can't imagine what it's up to now, but THAT is a strict NDA :) So those things I've been told, I cannot talk about, period. Even if the entire world knows about them, I cannot speak about them until the information goes off NDA. An example was a Silverlight release a while back. It might have been Silverlight 3, I don't remember. Everyone was anxiously awaiting the release so they could post their material. Of course the entire world knew it was coming out and imminently so. Some enterprising folks had even found the bits on a server before the official announcement. So then the situation became: everyone knew about it, some were even coding with it and blogging about it and yet we couldn't talk about it. Scott Guthrie's posting about it opened the flood gates and then it went off NDA, but up until that moment, we were locked. Sitting out on the edge you're uninstalling and re-installing all the time and you get frustrated when things that used to work don't, but hey... those bits were still warm when you got 'em, and that's the fun. But that fun comes at a price, and the price is the NDA. Awkward yes, confusing no... See you at MIX10, and Stay in the 'Light! MIX10

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• GameplayScreen does not contain a definition for GraphicsDevice

  - by Dave Voyles

  Long story short: I'm trying to intergrate my game with Microsoft's Game State Management. In doing so I've run into some errors, and the latest one is in the title. I'm not able to display my HUD for the reasons listed above. Previously, I had much of my code in my Game.cs class, but the GSM has a bit of it in Game1, and most of what you have drawn for the main screen in your GameplayScreen class, and that is what is causing confusion on my part. I've created an instance of the GameplayScreen class to be used in the HUD class (as you can see below). Before integrating with the GSM however, I created an instance of my Game class, and all worked fine. It seems that I need to define my graphics device somewhere, but I am not sure of where exactly. I've left some code below to help you understand. public class GameStateManagementGame : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { #region Fields GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; ScreenManager screenManager; // Creates a new intance, which is used in the HUD class public static Game Instance; // By preloading any assets used by UI rendering, we avoid framerate glitches // when they suddenly need to be loaded in the middle of a menu transition. static readonly string[] preloadAssets = { "gradient", }; #endregion #region Initialization /// <summary> /// The main game constructor. /// </summary> public GameStateManagementGame() { Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 1280; graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 720; graphics.IsFullScreen = false; graphics.ApplyChanges(); // Create the screen manager component. screenManager = new ScreenManager(this); Components.Add(screenManager); // Activate the first screens. screenManager.AddScreen(new BackgroundScreen(), null); //screenManager.AddScreen(new MainMenuScreen(), null); screenManager.AddScreen(new PressStartScreen(), null); } namespace Pong { public class HUD { public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Used in the Draw method titleSafeRectangle = new Rectangle (GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.X, GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.Y, GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.Width, GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.Height); } } } class GameplayScreen : GameScreen { #region Fields ContentManager content; public static GameStates gamestate; private GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; public int screenWidth; public int screenHeight; private Texture2D backgroundTexture; private SpriteBatch spriteBatch; private Menu menu; private SpriteFont arial; private HUD hud; Animation player; // Creates a new intance, which is used in the HUD class public static GameplayScreen Instance; public GameplayScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } protected void Initialize() { lastScored = false; menu = new Menu(); resetTimer = 0; resetTimerInUse = true; ball = new Ball(content, new Vector2(screenWidth, screenHeight)); SetUpMulti(); input = new Input(); hud = new HUD(); // Places the powerup animation inside of the surrounding box // Needs to be cleaned up, instead of using hard pixel values player = new Animation(content.Load<Texture2D>(@"gfx/powerupSpriteSheet"), new Vector2(103, 44), 64, 64, 4, 5); // Used by for the Powerups random = new Random(); vec = new Vector2(100, 50); vec2 = new Vector2(100, 100); promptVec = new Vector2(50, 25); timer = 10000.0f; // Starting value for the cooldown for the powerup timer timerVector = new Vector2(10, 10); //JEP - one time creation of powerup objects playerOnePowerup = new Powerup(); playerOnePowerup.Activated += PowerupActivated; playerOnePowerup.Deactivated += PowerupDeactivated; playerTwoPowerup = new Powerup(); playerTwoPowerup.Activated += PowerupActivated; playerTwoPowerup.Deactivated += PowerupDeactivated; //JEP - moved from events since these only need set once activatedVec = new Vector2(100, 125); deactivatedVec = new Vector2(100, 150); powerupReady = false; }

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• Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors August, 2010 to January, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  It's *way* past the first of February, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for August 1, 2010 through January 31, 2011: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is March 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7304 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 265 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 783 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 155 posts over last month, or over half of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

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• My computer will no longer suspend or shut off when I close the lid

  - by dave

  This is somewhat annoying. I have an old laptop and the screen on it is shot, so now I have an old monitor hooked up and it works fine. Before the upgrade I had it set so that when i closed the lid on the laptop everything would shutdown or suspend, when I lift the lid, everything would come back. Now, however, when i close the lid nothing happens, when i open the lid the screen flashes black and comes back. I have it set so that it should suspend when i close the lid. It's confusing...

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• PeopleSoft 8.52 iPad Certification

  - by Dave Bain

  One of the real gems in the PeopleTools 8.52 release is the certification of PeopleSoft applications running in the Safari Browser on an iPad.  It is nice that PeopleSoft is not constrained by technology like Adobe Flex/Flash, so announcements like this "Adobe drops plans for mobile Flash support" do not limit our mobile solution to custom mobile development. There are parts of PeopleSoft applications that operate better on iPads than others.  One of the best is Workcenters.  Workcenters were new to PeopleTools 8.51 and we are starting to see more and more adoption of them.  Workcenters are roll based landing pages that eliminate difficult navigation by providing access to most links, pages, and reports a user in a role needs.  One of the nicest I’ve seen is the Supply Manager Workspace.  Here are some links to screenshots of what a WorkCenter looks like on an iPad: Here's the standard PeopleSoft Login Page The Supply Manager Workspace looks great full screen on an iPad iPad has a great user interface to zoom, here's a screenshot of an upclose view of an analytic. Touch one of the analytics and it drills into the details. Go ahead and give it a try.  WorkCenters and Dashboards are starting to show up across applications.  For a quick one to try, navigate to the PeopleTools->Integration Broker->Integration Network WorkCenter.  It’s new in PeopleTools 8.52.

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• Configuring WS-Security with PeopleSoft Web Services

  - by Dave Bain

  I was speaking with a customer a few days ago about PeopleSoft Web Services.  The customer created a web service but when they went to deploy it, they had so many problems configuring ws-security, they pulled the service.  They spent several days trying to get it working but never got it working so they've put it on hold until they have time to work through the issues. Having gone through the process of configuring ws-security myself, I understand the complexity.  There is no magic 'easy' button to push.  If you are not familiar with all the moving parts like policies, certificates, public and private keys, credential stores, and so on, it can be a daunting task.  PeopleBooks documentation is good but does not offer a step-by-step example to follow.  Fear not, for those that want more help, there is a place to go. PeopleSoft released a Mobile Inventory Management application over a year ago.  It is a mobile app built with Oracle Fusion Application Development Framework (ADF) that accesses PeopleSoft content through standard web services.  Part of the installation of this app is configuring ws-security for the web services used in the application.  Appendix A of the PeopleSoft FSCM91 Mobile Inventory Management Installation Guide is called Configuring WS-Security for Mobile Inventory Management.  It is a step-by-step guide to configure ws-security between a server running Oracle Web Server Management (OWSM) and PeopleSoft Integration Broker.  Your environment might be different, but the steps will be similar, and on the PeopleSoft side, Integration Broker will remain a constant. You can find the installation guide on Oracle Suport.  Sign in to https://support.us.oracle.com and search for document 1290972.1.  Read through Appendix A for more details about how to set up ws-security with PeopleSoft web services.

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• How do I create my own programming language and a compiler for it

  - by Dave

  I am thorough with programming and have come across languages including BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, LOGO, Java, C++, C, MATLAB, Mathematica, Python, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, Assembly and so on. I can't understand how people create programming languages and devise compilers for it. I also couldn't understand how people create OS like Windows, Mac, UNIX, DOS and so on. The other thing that is mysterious to me is how people create libraries like OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenCV, Cocoa, MFC and so on. The last thing I am unable to figure out is how scientists devise an assembly language and an assembler for a microprocessor. I would really like to learn all of these stuff and I am 15 years old. I always wanted to be a computer scientist someone like Babbage, Turing, Shannon, or Dennis Ritchie. I have already read Aho's Compiler Design and Tanenbaum's OS concepts book and they all only discuss concepts and code in a high level. They don't go into the details and nuances and how to devise a compiler or operating system. I want a concrete understanding so that I can create one myself and not just an understanding of what a thread, semaphore, process, or parsing is. I asked my brother about all this. He is a SB student in EECS at MIT and hasn't got a clue of how to actually create all these stuff in the real world. All he knows is just an understanding of Compiler Design and OS concepts like the ones that you guys have mentioned (i.e. like Thread, Synchronization, Concurrency, memory management, Lexical Analysis, Intermediate code generation and so on)

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• Loading levels from .txt or .XML for XNA

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm attemptin to add multiple levels to my pong game. I'd like to simply exchange a few elements with each level, nothing crazy. Just the background texture, the color of the AI paddle (the one on the right side), and the music. It seems that the best way to go about this is by utilizing the StreamReader to read and write the files from XML. If there is a better, or more efficient alternative way then I'm all for it. In looking over the XNA Starter Platformer Kit provided by MS it seems that they've done it in this manner as well. I'm perplexed by a few things, however, namely parts within the Level class which aren't commented. /// <summary> /// Iterates over every tile in the structure file and loads its /// appearance and behavior. This method also validates that the /// file is well-formed with a player start point, exit, etc. /// </summary> /// <param name="fileStream"> /// A stream containing the tile data. /// </param> private void LoadTiles(Stream fileStream) { // Load the level and ensure all of the lines are the same length. int width; List<string> lines = new List<string>(); using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileStream)) { string line = reader.ReadLine(); width = line.Length; while (line != null) { lines.Add(line); if (line.Length != width) throw new Exception(String.Format("The length of line {0} is different from all preceeding lines.", lines.Count)); line = reader.ReadLine(); } } What does width = line.Length mean exactly? I mean I know how it reads the line, but what difference does it make if one line is longer than any of the others? Finally, their levels are simply text files that look like this: .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .........GGG........ .........###........ .................... ....GGG.......GGG... ....###.......###... .................... .1................X. #################### It can't be that easy..... Can it?

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• How can I play AMR files in Firefox on Ubuntu?

  - by Dave M G

  I use Evernote to keep voice and text notes. Unfortunately, I've just discovered that I can't take full advantage of the cloud storage capabilities of Evernote, because support for Android's native sound file format, AMR, is deficient in Ubuntu. When I view my voice notes in Firefox in Ubuntu, I get a "missing plugin" error. The problem is discussed on the Evernote forums, but the solutions offered there are really lacking. They all involve saving and converting files, which seems like an unreasonable amount of fiddling. Surely an AMR file is just a sound file, and surely Ubuntu could (and should) have a way of playing it? There is some suggestion that Media Player can play AMR format, and I thought there was a Media Player plugin for Firefox. But I can not find any specifics. How can I get Ubuntu to play AMR file directly in Firefox in Ubuntu?

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• What are the preferred documentation tools for the major programming languages?

  - by Dave Peck

  I'm interested in compiling a list of major programming languages and their preferred documentation toolsets. To scope this a bit: The exact structure of the answer may vary from language to language, but there appear to be two aspects common to all languages: (1) in-code syntax for documentation, and (2) documentation generators that make use of said syntax. There are also cases where generators are used independent of code. For example, tutorial-style documentation is common in the Python world and is often disconnected from underlying code. Many languages have multiple commonly-used documentation strategies and tool chains, and I'd love to capture this. Finally, there are cross-language tools like Doxygen that also have some traction and would be worth noting here. Here are some obvious target languages to start with: Python, Ruby, Java, C#, PHP, Objective-C, C/C++, Haskell, Erlang, Scala, Clojure If this question catches on, I'll try and keep this section updated with the most recent list. Thanks!

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• SilverlightShow for November 14 - 20, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for SilverlightShow Top 5 News for November 14 - 20, 2011. Here are the top 5 news on SilverlightShow for last week: Why Adobe had to Kill Flash Player for Mobile; and Silverlight, Flex, HTML5 parallels PhoneGap on Windows Phone Tips 10 tips about porting Silverlight apps to WinRT/Metro style apps (Part 1) Microsoft reportedly rolling out 7740 OS update for Windows Phone The WinRT Genome Project Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light 

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• US Government moving to the cloud and saving $

  - by Dave Noderer

  Good to see that government is getting more responsive to current technology. This is a good article by Vivek Kundra, US Chief Information Officer and some examples of how the government is using cloud services. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/13/moving-cloud

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• Microsoft gives you your cache back

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  The system works and its called Microsoft Connect , who would of thought it :) Following on from my previous blog post MicroSoft – Follow best practices, on the connect item , the followup stated that changes had been made in 2008.  I genuinely thought that a change would take an age to trickle through to the customer. But after firing up 2008R2 RTM and examining the SqlAgent traffic with profiler , where before i would see non-parameterized sql, I now see RPC calls.    Excellent , i get my cache back.

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• Do I have to completely reinstall Ubuntu now that it won't boot?

  - by Dave M G

  I just tried installing software called Teamviewer. It said there was some kind of error with unresolved dependancies. Then I realized I was trying to install the 32 bit version, but I needed to install the 64 bit version. So I tried that, and I got an error saying that Ubuntu needed to do a partial upgrade. I thought that was weird, so I just wanted to abandon installing anything and get out of this. I exited all programs and rebooted, and now I can't get back into Ubuntu. After the GRUB screen I get a black screen and no login options. If I boot into recovery, I get the following screen: I booted up a live CD of 12.04 to see if that could help, but it seems the only option is to completely reinstall Ubuntu. Can I repair this in any way, or is my only option to make a fresh install?

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• Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors September, 2010 to February, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  It's a bit past the first of March, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for September 1, 2010 through February 28, 2011: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is March 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7672 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 368 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 984 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 201 posts over last month, or 54% of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

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• Building an OpenStack Cloud for Solaris Engineering, Part 1

  - by Dave Miner

  One of the signature features of the recently-released Solaris 11.2 is the OpenStack cloud computing platform.  Over on the Solaris OpenStack blog the development team is publishing lots of details about our version of OpenStack Havana as well as some tips on specific features, and I highly recommend reading those to get a feel for how we've leveraged Solaris's features to build a top-notch cloud platform.  In this and some subsequent posts I'm going to look at it from a different perspective, which is that of the enterprise administrator deploying an OpenStack cloud.  But this won't be just a theoretical perspective: I've spent the past several months putting together a deployment of OpenStack for use by the Solaris engineering organization, and now that it's in production we'll share how we built it and what we've learned so far.In the Solaris engineering organization we've long had dedicated lab systems dispersed among our various sites and a home-grown reservation tool for developers to reserve those systems; various teams also have private systems for specific testing purposes.  But as a developer, it can still be difficult to find systems you need, especially since most Solaris changes require testing on both SPARC and x86 systems before they can be integrated.  We've added virtual resources over the years as well in the form of LDOMs and zones (both traditional non-global zones and the new kernel zones).  Fundamentally, though, these were all still deployed in the same model: our overworked lab administrators set up pre-configured resources and we then reserve them.  Sounds like pretty much every traditional IT shop, right?  Which means that there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies from greater use of virtualization and the self-service style of cloud computing.  As we were well into development of OpenStack on Solaris, I was recruited to figure out how we could deploy it to both provide more (and more efficient) development and test resources for the organization as well as a test environment for Solaris OpenStack.At this point, let's acknowledge one fact: deploying OpenStack is hard.  It's a very complex piece of software that makes use of sophisticated networking features and runs as a ton of service daemons with myriad configuration files.  The web UI, Horizon, doesn't often do a good job of providing detailed errors.  Even the command-line clients are not as transparent as you'd like, though at least you can turn on verbose and debug messaging and often get some clues as to what to look for, though it helps if you're good at reading JSON structure dumps.  I'd already learned all of this in doing a single-system Grizzly-on-Linux deployment for the development team to reference when they were getting started so I at least came to this job with some appreciation for what I was taking on.  The good news is that both we and the community have done a lot to make deployment much easier in the last year; probably the easiest approach is to download the OpenStack Unified Archive from OTN to get your hands on a single-system demonstration environment.  I highly recommend getting started with something like it to get some understanding of OpenStack before you embark on a more complex deployment.  For some situations, it may in fact be all you ever need.  If so, you don't need to read the rest of this series of posts!In the Solaris engineering case, we need a lot more horsepower than a single-system cloud can provide.  We need to support both SPARC and x86 VM's, and we have hundreds of developers so we want to be able to scale to support thousands of VM's, though we're going to build to that scale over time, not immediately.  We also want to be able to test both Solaris 11 updates and a release such as Solaris 12 that's under development so that we can work out any upgrade issues before release.  One thing we don't have is a requirement for extremely high availability, at least at this point.  We surely don't want a lot of down time, but we can tolerate scheduled outages and brief (as in an hour or so) unscheduled ones.  Thus I didn't need to spend effort on trying to get high availability everywhere.The diagram below shows our initial deployment design.  We're using six systems, most of which are x86 because we had more of those immediately available.  All of those systems reside on a management VLAN and are connected with a two-way link aggregation of 1 Gb links (we don't yet have 10 Gb switching infrastructure in place, but we'll get there).  A separate VLAN provides "public" (as in connected to the rest of Oracle's internal network) addresses, while we use VxLANs for the tenant networks. One system is more or less the control node, providing the MySQL database, RabbitMQ, Keystone, and the Nova API and scheduler as well as the Horizon console.  We're curious how this will perform and I anticipate eventually splitting at least the database off to another node to help simplify upgrades, but at our present scale this works.I had a couple of systems with lots of disk space, one of which was already configured as the Automated Installation server for the lab, so it's just providing the Glance image repository for OpenStack.  The other node with lots of disks provides Cinder block storage service; we also have a ZFS Storage Appliance that will help back-end Cinder in the near future, I just haven't had time to get it configured in yet.There's a separate system for Neutron, which is our Elastic Virtual Switch controller and handles the routing and NAT for the guests.  We don't have any need for firewalling in this deployment so we're not doing so.  We presently have only two tenants defined, one for the Solaris organization that's funding this cloud, and a separate tenant for other Oracle organizations that would like to try out OpenStack on Solaris.  Each tenant has one VxLAN defined initially, but we can of course add more.  Right now we have just a single /24 network for the floating IP's, once we get demand up to where we need more then we'll add them.Finally, we have started with just two compute nodes; one is an x86 system, the other is an LDOM on a SPARC T5-2.  We'll be adding more when demand reaches the level where we need them, but as we're still ramping up the user base it's less work to manage fewer nodes until then.My next post will delve into the details of building this OpenStack cloud's infrastructure, including how we're using various Solaris features such as Automated Installation, IPS packaging, SMF, and Puppet to deploy and manage the nodes.  After that we'll get into the specifics of configuring and running OpenStack itself.

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• Execution plan warnings–The final chapter

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  In my previous posts (here and here), I showed examples of some of the execution plan warnings that have been added to SQL Server 2012.  There is one other warning that is of interest to me : “Unmatched Indexes”. Firstly, how do I know this is the final one ?  The plan is an XML document, right ? So that means that it can have an accompanying XSD.  As an XSD is a schema definition, we can poke around inside it to find interesting things that *could* be in the final XML file. The showplan schema is stored in the folder Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\schemas\sqlserver\2004\07\showplan and by comparing schemas over releases you can get a really good idea of any new functionality that has been added. Here is the section of the Sql Server 2012 showplan schema that has been interesting me so far : <xsd:complexType name="AffectingConvertWarningType"> <xsd:annotation> <xsd:documentation>Warning information for plan-affecting type conversion</xsd:documentation> </xsd:annotation> <xsd:sequence> <!-- Additional information may go here when available --> </xsd:sequence> <xsd:attribute name="ConvertIssue" use="required"> <xsd:simpleType> <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string"> <xsd:enumeration value="Cardinality Estimate" /> <xsd:enumeration value="Seek Plan" /> <!-- to be extended here --> </xsd:restriction> </xsd:simpleType> </xsd:attribute> <xsd:attribute name="Expression" type ="xsd:string" use="required" /></xsd:complexType><xsd:complexType name="WarningsType"> <xsd:annotation> <xsd:documentation>List of all possible iterator or query specific warnings (e.g. hash spilling, no join predicate)</xsd:documentation> </xsd:annotation> <xsd:choice minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="unbounded"> <xsd:element name="ColumnsWithNoStatistics" type="shp:ColumnReferenceListType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" /> <xsd:element name="SpillToTempDb" type="shp:SpillToTempDbType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> <xsd:element name="Wait" type="shp:WaitWarningType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> <xsd:element name="PlanAffectingConvert" type="shp:AffectingConvertWarningType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> </xsd:choice> <xsd:attribute name="NoJoinPredicate" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="SpatialGuess" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="UnmatchedIndexes" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="FullUpdateForOnlineIndexBuild" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /></xsd:complexType> I especially like the “to be extended here” comment,  high hopes that we will see more of these in the future.   So “Unmatched Indexes” was a warning that I couldn’t get and many thanks must go to Fabiano Amorim (b|t) for showing me the way.   Filtered indexes were introduced in Sql Server 2008 and are really useful if you only need to index only a portion of the data within a table.  However,  if your SQL code uses a variable as a predicate on the filtered data that matches the filtered condition, then the filtered index cannot be used as, naturally,  the value in the variable may ( and probably will ) change and therefore will need to read data outside the index.  As an aside,  you could use option(recompile) here , in which case the optimizer will build a plan specific to the variable values and use the filtered index,  but that can bring about other problems.   To demonstrate this warning, we need to generate some test data :   DROP TABLE #TestTab1GOCREATE TABLE #TestTab1 (Col1 Int not null, Col2 Char(7500) not null, Quantity Int not null)GOINSERT INTO #TestTab1 VALUES (1,1,1),(1,2,5),(1,2,10),(1,3,20), (2,1,101),(2,2,105),(2,2,110),(2,3,120)GO and then add a filtered index CREATE INDEX ixFilter ON #TestTab1 (Col1)WHERE Quantity = 122 Now if we execute SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #TestTab1 WHERE Quantity = 122 We will see the filtered index being scanned But if we parameterize the query DECLARE @i INT = 122SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #TestTab1 WHERE Quantity = @i The plan is very different a table scan, as the value of the variable used in the predicate can change at run time, and also we see the familiar warning triangle. If we now look at the properties pane, we will see two pieces of information “Warnings” and “UnmatchedIndexes”. So, handily, we are being told which filtered index is not being used due to parameterization.

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• Simple collision detection for pong

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm making a simple pong game, and things are great so far, but I have an odd bug which causes my ball (well, it's a box really) to get stuck on occasion when detecting collision against the ceiling or floor. It looks as though it is trying to update too frequently to get out of the collision check. Basically the box slides against the top or bottom of the screen from one paddle to the other, and quickly bounces on and off the wall while doing so, but only bounces a few pixels from the wall. What can I do to avoid this problem? It seems to occur at random. Below is my collision detection for the wall, as well as my update method for the ball. public void UpdatePosition() { size.X = (int)position.X; size.Y = (int)position.Y; position.X += speed * (float)Math.Cos(direction); position.Y += speed * (float)Math.Sin(direction); CheckWallHit(); } // Checks for collision with the ceiling or floor. // 2*Math.pi = 360 degrees // TODO: Change collision so that ball bounces from wall after getting caught private void CheckWallHit() { while (direction > 2 * Math.PI) { direction -= 2 * Math.PI; } while (direction < 0) { direction += 2 * Math.PI; } if (position.Y <= 0 || (position.Y > resetPos.Y * 2 - size.Height)) { direction = 2 * Math.PI - direction; } }

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• SilverlightShow for March 7-13, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for March 7-13, 2011. Here are the top 5 news on SilverlightShow for last week: SilverlightShow EcoContest Grand Prize Winner and First Runner-up Selected WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 enhancements Upcoming Silverlight Show Webinar: Switching on the Cloud for Silverlight 30+ Projects Will be at Open Source Fest at MIX11 Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light

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• Strategies for managUse of types in Python

  - by dave

  I'm a long time programmer in C# but have been coding in Python for the past year. One of the big hurdles for me was the lack of type definitions for variables and parameters. Whereas I totally get the idea of duck typing, I do find it frustrating that I can't tell the type of a variable just by looking at it. This is an issue when you look at someone else's code where they've used ambiguous names for method parameters (see edit below). In a few cases, I've added asserts to ensure parameters comply with an expected type but this goes against the whole duck typing thing. On some methods, I'll document the expected type of parameters (eg: list of user objects), but even this seems to go against the idea of just using an object and let the runtime deal with exceptions. What strategies do you use to avoid typing problems in Python? Edit: Example of the parameter naming issues: If our code base we have a task object (ORM object) and a task_obj object (higher level object that embeds a task). Needless to say, many methods accept a parameter named 'task'. The method might expect a task or a task_obj or some other construct such as a dictionary of task properties - it is not clear. It is them up to be to look at how that parameter is used in order to work out what the method expects.

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• SilverlightShow for Jan 7-13, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for Feb 7-13, 2011. Here's SilverlightShow top 5 news for last week: Data Binding in Silverlight with RIA and EntityFramework - Part 1 (Displaying Data) Simple Silverlight MVVM Base Class This Thursday: Free Windows Phone 7 Webinar by Telerik A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel Using SilverLight 4 Line Of Business Application Development Template (LOB) Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light

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• Creating a blog for software changes

  - by Dave

  I work for a small company where I maintain a number of project all at once. I would like to create a blog and note software changes/update so that I can keep track of things. Plus it will also serve as help tool for other if they need help. I would like to install something locally on my machine or network, either ASP or PHP is fine. Which software would you recommend? Is it good idea, bad idea? Has anyone done it? I have worked with wordpress and I like it but I am afraid it is not best for code snippets. Any thoughts I do use source control. I am not an expert on it though. I use three different development environment. 1. Visual Studio 2. Eclipse 3. SQL Server Management Studio

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• How to edit Synaptics Touchpad values in Ubuntu 12.04? No xorg.conf file!

  - by Dave

  After I installed Ubuntu 12.04 got some issues with my touchpad. I reported the problem and finally today a guy replied here - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/992330 It seems that the solution was good because I edited HorizHysteresis and VertHysteresis using synclient: synclient VertHysteresis=48 and synclient HorizHysteresis=48 To see if they were really edited I run into terminal synclient and just seen there the values I added. Everything is running perfectly till now. But after I restarted Ubuntu the values are gone and rolled back to default. A guy told me to edit the xorg.conf file but there is no xorg.conf file in etc/X11. Thanks and hope someone can give me a good solution.

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• What are the disadvantages of self-encapsulation?

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Background Tony Hoare's billion dollar mistake was the invention of null. Subsequently, a lot of code has become riddled with null pointer exceptions (segfaults) when software developers try to use (dereference) uninitialized variables. In 1989, Wirfs-Brock and Wikerson wrote: Direct references to variables severely limit the ability of programmers to re?ne existing classes. The programming conventions described here structure the use of variables to promote reusable designs. We encourage users of all object-oriented languages to follow these conventions. Additionally, we strongly urge designers of object-oriented languages to consider the effects of unrestricted variable references on reusability. Problem A lot of software, especially in Java, but likely in C# and C++, often uses the following pattern: public class SomeClass { private String someAttribute; public SomeClass() { this.someAttribute = "Some Value"; } public void someMethod() { if( this.someAttribute.equals( "Some Value" ) ) { // do something... } } public void setAttribute( String s ) { this.someAttribute = s; } public String getAttribute() { return this.someAttribute; } } Sometimes a band-aid solution is used by checking for null throughout the code base: public void someMethod() { assert this.someAttribute != null; if( this.someAttribute.equals( "Some Value" ) ) { // do something... } } public void anotherMethod() { assert this.someAttribute != null; if( this.someAttribute.equals( "Some Default Value" ) ) { // do something... } } The band-aid does not always avoid the null pointer problem: a race condition exists. The race condition is mitigated using: public void anotherMethod() { String someAttribute = this.someAttribute; assert someAttribute != null; if( someAttribute.equals( "Some Default Value" ) ) { // do something... } } Yet that requires two statements (assignment to local copy and check for null) every time a class-scoped variable is used to ensure it is valid. Self-Encapsulation Ken Auer's Reusability Through Self-Encapsulation (Pattern Languages of Program Design, Addison Wesley, New York, pp. 505-516, 1994) advocated self-encapsulation combined with lazy initialization. The result, in Java, would resemble: public class SomeClass { private String someAttribute; public SomeClass() { setAttribute( "Some Value" ); } public void someMethod() { if( getAttribute().equals( "Some Value" ) ) { // do something... } } public void setAttribute( String s ) { this.someAttribute = s; } public String getAttribute() { String someAttribute = this.someAttribute; if( someAttribute == null ) { setAttribute( createDefaultValue() ); } return someAttribute; } protected String createDefaultValue() { return "Some Default Value"; } } All duplicate checks for null are superfluous: getAttribute() ensures the value is never null at a single location within the containing class. Efficiency arguments should be fairly moot -- modern compilers and virtual machines can inline the code when possible. As long as variables are never referenced directly, this also allows for proper application of the Open-Closed Principle. Question What are the disadvantages of self-encapsulation, if any? (Ideally, I would like to see references to studies that contrast the robustness of similarly complex systems that use and don't use self-encapsulation, as this strikes me as a fairly straightforward testable hypothesis.)

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