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• Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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• Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options

  - by extended_events

  You can control different aspects of how an event session behaves by setting the event session options as part of the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL. The default settings for the event session options are designed to handle most of the common event collection situations so I generally recommend that you just use the defaults. Like everything in the real world though, there are going to be a handful of “special cases” that require something different. This post focuses on identifying the special cases and the correct use of the options to accommodate those cases. There is a reason it’s called Default The default session options specify a total event buffer size of 4 MB with a 30 second latency. Translating this into human terms; this means that our default behavior is that the system will start processing events from the event buffer when we reach about 1.3 MB of events or after 30 seconds, which ever comes first. Aside: What’s up with the 1.3 MB, I thought you said the buffer was 4 MB?The Extended Events engine takes the total buffer size specified by MAX_MEMORY (4MB by default) and divides it into 3 equally sized buffers. This is done so that a session can be publishing events to one buffer while other buffers are being processed. There are always at least three buffers; how to get more than three is covered later. Using this configuration, the Extended Events engine can “keep up” with most event sessions on standard workloads. Why is this? The fact is that most events are small, really small; on the order of a couple hundred bytes. Even when you start considering events that carry dynamically sized data (eg. binary, text, etc.) or adding actions that collect additional data, the total size of the event is still likely to be pretty small. This means that each buffer can likely hold thousands of events before it has to be processed. When the event buffers are finally processed there is an economy of scale achieved since most targets support bulk processing of the events so they are processed at the buffer level rather than the individual event level. When all this is working together it’s more likely that a full buffer will be processed and put back into the ready queue before the remaining buffers (remember, there are at least three) are full. I know what you’re going to say: “My server is exceptional! My workload is so massive it defies categorization!” OK, maybe you weren’t going to say that exactly, but you were probably thinking it. The point is that there are situations that won’t be covered by the Default, but that’s a good place to start and this post assumes you’ve started there so that you have something to look at in order to determine if you do have a special case that needs different settings. So let’s get to the special cases… What event just fired?! How about now?! Now?! If you believe the commercial adage from Heinz Ketchup (Heinz Slow Good Ketchup ad on You Tube), some things are worth the wait. This is not a belief held by most DBAs, particularly DBAs who are looking for an answer to a troubleshooting question fast. If you’re one of these anxious DBAs, or maybe just a Program Manager doing a demo, then 30 seconds might be longer than you’re comfortable waiting. If you find yourself in this situation then consider changing the MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY option for your event session. This option will force the event buffers to be processed based on your time schedule. This option only makes sense for the asynchronous targets since those are the ones where we allow events to build up in the event buffer – if you’re using one of the synchronous targets this option isn’t relevant. Avoid forgotten events by increasing your memory Have you ever had one of those days where you keep forgetting things? That can happen in Extended Events too; we call it dropped events. In order to optimizes for server performance and help ensure that the Extended Events doesn’t block the server if to drop events that can’t be published to a buffer because the buffer is full. You can determine if events are being dropped from a session by querying the dm_xe_sessions DMV and looking at the dropped_event_count field. Aside: Should you care if you’re dropping events?Maybe not – think about why you’re collecting data in the first place and whether you’re really going to miss a few dropped events. For example, if you’re collecting query duration stats over thousands of executions of a query it won’t make a huge difference to miss a couple executions. Use your best judgment. If you find that your session is dropping events it means that the event buffer is not large enough to handle the volume of events that are being published. There are two ways to address this problem. First, you could collect fewer events – examine you session to see if you are over collecting. Do you need all the actions you’ve specified? Could you apply a predicate to be more specific about when you fire the event? Assuming the session is defined correctly, the next option is to change the MAX_MEMORY option to a larger number. Picking the right event buffer size might take some trial and error, but a good place to start is with the number of dropped events compared to the number you’ve collected. Aside: There are three different behaviors for dropping events that you specify using the EVENT_RETENTION_MODE option. The default is to allow single event loss and you should stick with this setting since it is the best choice for keeping the impact on server performance low.You’ll be tempted to use the setting to not lose any events (NO_EVENT_LOSS) – resist this urge since it can result in blocking on the server. If you’re worried that you’re losing events you should be increasing your event buffer memory as described in this section. Some events are too big to fail A less common reason for dropping an event is when an event is so large that it can’t fit into the event buffer. Even though most events are going to be small, you might find a condition that occasionally generates a very large event. You can determine if your session is dropping large events by looking at the dm_xe_sessions DMV once again, this time check the largest_event_dropped_size. If this value is larger than the size of your event buffer [remember, the size of your event buffer, by default, is max_memory / 3] then you need a large event buffer. To specify a large event buffer you set the MAX_EVENT_SIZE option to a value large enough to fit the largest event dropped based on data from the DMV. When you set this option the Extended Events engine will create two buffers of this size to accommodate these large events. As an added bonus (no extra charge) the large event buffer will also be used to store normal events in the cases where the normal event buffers are all full and waiting to be processed. (Note: This is just a side-effect, not the intended use. If you’re dropping many normal events then you should increase your normal event buffer size.) Partitioning: moving your events to a sub-division Earlier I alluded to the fact that you can configure your event session to use more than the standard three event buffers – this is called partitioning and is controlled by the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE option. The result of setting this option is fairly easy to explain, but knowing when to use it is a bit more art than science. First the science… You can configure partitioning in three ways: None, Per NUMA Node & Per CPU. This specifies the location where sets of event buffers are created with fairly obvious implication. There are rules we follow for sub-dividing the total memory (specified by MAX_MEMORY) between all the event buffers that are specific to the mode used: None: 3 buffers (fixed)Node: 3 * number_of_nodesCPU: 2.5 * number_of_cpus Here are some examples of what this means for different Node/CPU counts: Configuration None Node CPU 2 CPUs, 1 Node 3 buffers 3 buffers 5 buffers 6 CPUs, 2 Node 3 buffers 6 buffers 15 buffers 40 CPUs, 5 Nodes 3 buffers 15 buffers 100 buffers   Aside: Buffer size on multi-processor computersAs the number of Nodes or CPUs increases, the size of the event buffer gets smaller because the total memory is sub-divided into more pieces. The defaults will hold up to this for a while since each buffer set is holding events only from the Node or CPU that it is associated with, but at some point the buffers will get too small and you’ll either see events being dropped or you’ll get an error when you create your session because you’re below the minimum buffer size. Increase the MAX_MEMORY setting to an appropriate number for the configuration. The most likely reason to start partitioning is going to be related to performance. If you notice that running an event session is impacting the performance of your server beyond a reasonably expected level [Yes, there is a reasonably expected level of work required to collect events.] then partitioning might be an answer. Before you partition you might want to check a few other things: Is your event retention set to NO_EVENT_LOSS and causing blocking? (I told you not to do this.) Consider changing your event loss mode or increasing memory. Are you over collecting and causing more work than necessary? Consider adding predicates to events or removing unnecessary events and actions from your session. Are you writing the file target to the same slow disk that you use for TempDB and your other high activity databases? <kidding> <not really> It’s always worth considering the end to end picture – if you’re writing events to a file you can be impacted by I/O, network; all the usual stuff. Assuming you’ve ruled out the obvious (and not so obvious) issues, there are performance conditions that will be addressed by partitioning. For example, it’s possible to have a successful event session (eg. no dropped events) but still see a performance impact because you have many CPUs all attempting to write to the same free buffer and having to wait in line to finish their work. This is a case where partitioning would relieve the contention between the different CPUs and likely reduce the performance impact cause by the event session. There is no DMV you can check to find these conditions – sorry – that’s where the art comes in. This is  largely a matter of experimentation. On the bright side you probably won’t need to to worry about this level of detail all that often. The performance impact of Extended Events is significantly lower than what you may be used to with SQL Trace. You will likely only care about the impact if you are trying to set up a long running event session that will be part of your everyday workload – sessions used for short term troubleshooting will likely fall into the “reasonably expected impact” category. Hey buddy – I think you forgot something OK, there are two options I didn’t cover: STARTUP_STATE & TRACK_CAUSALITY. If you want your event sessions to start automatically when the server starts, set the STARTUP_STATE option to ON. (Now there is only one option I didn’t cover.) I’m going to leave causality for another post since it’s not really related to session behavior, it’s more about event analysis. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Drawing a WPF UserControl with DataBinding to an Image

  - by LorenVS

  Hey Everyone, So I'm trying to use a WPF User Control to generate a ton of images from a dataset where each item in the dataset would produce an image... I'm hoping I can set it up in such a way that I can use WPF databinding, and for each item in the dataset, create an instance of my user control, set the dependency property that corresponds to my data item, and then draw the user control to an image, but I'm having problems getting it all working (not sure whether databinding or drawing to the image is my problem) Sorry for the massive code dump, but I've been trying to get this working for a couple of hours now, and WPF just doesn't like me (have to learn at some point though...) My User Control looks like this: <UserControl x:Class="Bleargh.ImageTemplate" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:c="clr-namespace:Bleargh" x:Name="ImageTemplateContainer" Height="300" Width="300"> <Canvas> <TextBlock Canvas.Left="50" Canvas.Top="50" Width="200" Height="25" FontSize="16" FontFamily="Calibri" Text="{Binding Path=Booking.Customer,ElementName=ImageTemplateContainer}" /> <TextBlock Canvas.Left="50" Canvas.Top="100" Width="200" Height="25" FontSize="16" FontFamily="Calibri" Text="{Binding Path=Booking.Location,ElementName=ImageTemplateContainer}" /> <TextBlock Canvas.Left="50" Canvas.Top="150" Width="200" Height="25" FontSize="16" FontFamily="Calibri" Text="{Binding Path=Booking.ItemNumber,ElementName=ImageTemplateContainer}" /> <TextBlock Canvas.Left="50" Canvas.Top="200" Width="200" Height="25" FontSize="16" FontFamily="Calibri" Text="{Binding Path=Booking.Description,ElementName=ImageTemplateContainer}" /> </Canvas> </UserControl> And I've added a dependency property of type "Booking" to my user control that I'm hoping will be the source for the databound values: public partial class ImageTemplate : UserControl { public static readonly DependencyProperty BookingProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Booking", typeof(Booking), typeof(ImageTemplate)); public Booking Booking { get { return (Booking)GetValue(BookingProperty); } set { SetValue(BookingProperty, value); } } public ImageTemplate() { InitializeComponent(); } } And I'm using the following code to render the control: List<Booking> bookings = Booking.GetSome(); for(int i = 0; i < bookings.Count; i++) { ImageTemplate template = new ImageTemplate(); template.Booking = bookings[i]; RenderTargetBitmap bitmap = new RenderTargetBitmap( (int)template.Width, (int)template.Height, 120.0, 120.0, PixelFormats.Pbgra32); bitmap.Render(template); BitmapEncoder encoder = new PngBitmapEncoder(); encoder.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(bitmap)); using (Stream s = File.OpenWrite(@"C:\Code\Bleargh\RawImages\" + i.ToString() + ".png")) { encoder.Save(s); } } EDIT: I should add that the process works without any errors whatsoever, but I end up with a directory full of plain-white images, not text or anything... And I have confirmed using the debugger that my Booking objects are being filled with the proper data... EDIT 2: Did something I should have done a long time ago, set a background on my canvas, but that didn't change the output image at all, so my problem is most definitely somehow to do with my drawing code (although there may be something wrong with my databinding too)

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• Problem releasing UIImageView after adding to UIScrollView

  - by Josiah Jordan

  I'm having a memory problem related to UIImageView. After adding this view to my UIScrollView, if I try to release the UIImageView the application crashes. According to the stack trace, something is calling [UIImageView stopAnimating] after [UIImageView dealloc] is called. However, if I don't release the view the memory is never freed up, and I've confirmed that there remains an extra retain call on the view after deallocating...which causes my total allocations to climb quickly and eventually crash the app after loading the view multiple times. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here though...I don't know what is trying to access the UIImageView after it has been released. I've included the relevant header and implementation code below (I'm using the Three20 framework, if that has anything to do with it...also, AppScrollView is just a UIScrollView that forwards the touchesEnded event to the next responder): Header: @interface PhotoHiResPreviewController : TTViewController <UIScrollViewDelegate> { NSString* imageURL; UIImage* hiResImage; UIImageView* imageView; UIView* mainView; AppScrollView* mainScrollView; } @property (nonatomic, retain) NSString* imageURL; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSString* imageShortURL; @property (nonatomic, retain) UIImage* hiResImage; @property (nonatomic, retain) UIImageView* imageView; - (id)initWithImageURL:(NSString*)imageTTURL; Implementation: @implementation PhotoHiResPreviewController @synthesize imageURL, hiResImage, imageView; - (id)initWithImageURL:(NSString*)imageTTURL { if (self = [super init]) { hiResImage = nil; NSString *documentsDirectory = [NSString stringWithString:[NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) lastObject]]; [self setImageURL:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/%@.jpg", documentsDirectory, imageTTURL]]; } return self; } - (void)loadView { [super loadView]; // Initialize the scroll view hiResImage = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:self.imageURL]; CGSize photoSize = [hiResImage size]; mainScrollView = [[AppScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:[UIScreen mainScreen].bounds]; mainScrollView.autoresizingMask = ( UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight); mainScrollView.backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor]; mainScrollView.contentSize = photoSize; mainScrollView.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit; mainScrollView.delegate = self; // Create the image view and add it to the scrollview. UIImageView *tempImageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, photoSize.width, photoSize.height)]; tempImageView.contentMode = UIViewContentModeCenter; [tempImageView setImage:hiResImage]; self.imageView = tempImageView; [tempImageView release]; [mainScrollView addSubview:imageView]; // Configure zooming. CGSize screenSize = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds].size; CGFloat widthRatio = screenSize.width / photoSize.width; CGFloat heightRatio = screenSize.height / photoSize.height; CGFloat initialZoom = (widthRatio > heightRatio) ? heightRatio : widthRatio; mainScrollView.maximumZoomScale = 3.0; mainScrollView.minimumZoomScale = initialZoom; mainScrollView.zoomScale = initialZoom; mainScrollView.bouncesZoom = YES; mainView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:[UIScreen mainScreen].bounds]; mainView.autoresizingMask = ( UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight); mainView.backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor]; mainView.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit; [mainView addSubview:mainScrollView]; // Add to view self.view = mainView; [imageView release]; [mainScrollView release]; [mainView release]; } - (UIView *)viewForZoomingInScrollView:(UIScrollView *)scrollView { return imageView; } - (void)dealloc { mainScrollView.delegate = nil; TT_RELEASE_SAFELY(imageURL); TT_RELEASE_SAFELY(hiResImage); [super dealloc]; } I'm not sure how to get around this. If I remove the call to [imageView release] at the end of the loadView method everything works fine...but I have massive allocations that quickly climb to a breaking point. If I DO release it, however, there's that [UIImageView stopAnimating] call that crashes the application after the view is deallocated. Thanks for any help! I've been banging my head against this one for days. :-P Cheers, Josiah

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• Pluralsight Meet the Author Podcast on HTML5 Canvas Programming

  - by dwahlin

    In the latest installment of Pluralsight’s Meet the Author podcast series, Fritz Onion and I talk about my new course, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals.  In the interview I describe different canvas technologies covered throughout the course and a sample application at the end of the course that covers how to build a custom business chart from start to finish. Meet the Author:  Dan Wahlin on HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals   Transcript [Fritz] Hi. This is Fritz Onion. I’m here today with Dan Wahlin to talk about his new course HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals. Dan founded the Wahlin Group, which you can find at thewahlingroup.com, which specializes in ASP.NET, jQuery, Silverlight, and SharePoint consulting. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director and has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP for ASP.NET, Connected Systems, and Silverlight. Dan is on the INETA Bureau’s — Speaker’s Bureau, speaks at conferences and user groups around the world, and has written several books on .NET. Thanks for talking to me today, Dan. [Dan] Always good to talk with you, Fritz. [Fritz] So this new course of yours, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals, I have to say that most of the really snazzy demos I’ve seen with HTML5 have involved Canvas, so I thought it would be a good starting point to chat with you about why we decided to create a course dedicated just to Canvas. If you want to kind of give us that perspective. [Dan] Sure. So, you know, there’s quite a bit of material out there on HTML5 in general, and as people that have done a lot with HTML5 are probably aware, a lot of HTML5 is actually JavaScript centric. You know, a lot of people when they first learn it, think it’s tags, but most of it’s actually JavaScript, and it just so happens that the HTML5 Canvas is one of those things. And so it’s not just, you know, a tag you add and it just magically draws all these things. You mentioned there’s a lot of cool things you can do from games to there’s some really cool multimedia applications out there where they integrate video and audio and all kinds of things into the Canvas, to more business scenarios such as charting and things along those lines. So the reason we made a course specifically on it is, a lot of the material out there touches on it but the Canvas is actually a pretty deep topic. You can do some pretty advanced stuff or easy stuff depending on what your application requirements are, and the API itself, you know, there’s over 30 functions just in the Canvas API and then a whole set of properties that actually go with that as well. So it’s a pretty big topic, and that’s why we created a course specifically tailored towards just the Canvas. [Fritz] Right. And let’s — let me just review the outline briefly here for everyone. So you start off with an introduction to getting started with Canvas, drawing with the HTML5 Canvas, then you talk about manipulating pixels, and you finish up with building a custom data chart. So I really like your example flow here. I think it will appeal to even business developers, right. Even if you’re not into HTML5 for the games or the media capabilities, there’s still something here for everyone I think working with the Canvas. Which leads me to another question, which is, where do you see the Canvas fitting in to kind of your day-to-day developer, people that are working business applications and maybe vanilla websites that aren’t doing kind of cutting edge stuff with interactivity with users? Is there a still a place for the Canvas in those scenarios? [Dan] Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of us — and I include myself here — over the last few years, the focus has generally been, especially if you’re, let’s say, a PHP or ASP.NET or Java type of developer, we’re kind of accustomed to working on the server side, and, you know, we kind of relied on Flash or Silverlight or these other plug-ins for the client side stuff when it was kind of fancy, like charts and graphs and things along those lines. With the what I call massive shift of applications, you know, mainly because of mobile, to more of client side, one of the big benefits I think from a maybe corporate standard way of thinking of things, since we do a lot of work with different corporations, is that, number one, rather than having to have the plug-in, which of course isn’t going to work on iPad and some of these other devices out there that are pretty popular, you can now use a built-in technology that all the modern browsers support, and that includes things like Safari on the iPad and iPhone and the Android tablets and things like that with their browsers, and actually render some really sophisticated charts. Whether you do it by scratch or from scratch or, you know, get a third party type of library involved, it’s just JavaScript. So it downloads fast so it’s good from a performance perspective; and when it comes to what you can render, it’s extremely robust. You can do everything from, you know, your basic circles to polygons or polylines to really advanced gradients as well and even provide some interactivity and animations, and that’s some of the stuff I touch upon in the class. In fact, you mentioned the last part of the outline there is building a custom data chart and that’s kind of gears towards more of the, what I’d call enterprise or corporate type developer. [Fritz] Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s, you know, a lot of the demos I’ve seen with HTML5 focus on more the interactivity and kind of game side of things, but the Canvas is such a diverse element within HTML5 that I can see it being applicable pretty much anywhere. So why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the specifics of what you cover? You talk about drawing and then manipulating pixels. You want to kind of give us the different ways of working with the Canvas and what some of those APIs provide for you? [Dan] Sure. So going all the way back to the start of the outline, we actually started off by showing different demonstrations of the Canvas in action, and we show some fun stuff — multimedia apps and games and things like that — and then also some more business scenarios; and then once you see that, hopefully it kinds of piques your interest and you go, oh, wow, this is actually pretty phenomenal what you can do. So then we start you off with, so how to you actually draw things. Now, there are some libraries out there that will draw things like graphs, but if you want to customize those or just build something you have from scratch, you need to know the basics, such as, you know, how do you draw circles and lines and arcs and Bezier curves and all those fancy types of shapes that a given chart may have on it or that a game may have in it for that matter. So we start off by covering what I call the core API functions; how do you, for instance, fill a rectangle or convert that to a square by setting the height and the width; how do you draw arcs or different types of curves and there’s different types supported such as I mentioned Bezier curves or quadratic curves; and then we also talk about how do you integrate text into it. You might have some images already that are just regular bitmap type images that you want to integrate, you can do that with a Canvas. And you can even sync video into the Canvas, which actually opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for both business and I think just general multimedia apps. Once you kind of get those core functions down for the basic shapes that you need to be able to draw on any type of Canvas, then we go a little deeper into what are the pixels that are there to manipulate. And that’s one of the important things to understand about the HTML5 Canvas, scalable vector graphics is another thing you can use now in the modern browsers; it’s vector based. Canvas is pixel based. And so we talk about how to do gradients, how can you do transforms, you know, how do you scale things or rotate things, which is extremely useful for charts ’cause you might have text that, you know, flips up on its side for a y-axis or something like that. And you can even do direct pixel manipulation. So it’s really, really powerful. If you want to get down to the RGBA level, you can do that, and I show how to do that in the course, and then kind of wrap that section up with some animation fundamentals. [Fritz] Great. Yeah, that’s really powerful stuff for programmatically rendering data to clients and responding to user inputs. Look forward to seeing what everyone’s going to come up with building this stuff. So great. That’s — that’s HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals with Dan Wahlin. Thanks very much, Dan. [Dan] Thanks again. I appreciate it.

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• Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options

  - by extended_events

  You can control different aspects of how an event session behaves by setting the event session options as part of the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL. The default settings for the event session options are designed to handle most of the common event collection situations so I generally recommend that you just use the defaults. Like everything in the real world though, there are going to be a handful of “special cases” that require something different. This post focuses on identifying the special cases and the correct use of the options to accommodate those cases. There is a reason it’s called Default The default session options specify a total event buffer size of 4 MB with a 30 second latency. Translating this into human terms; this means that our default behavior is that the system will start processing events from the event buffer when we reach about 1.3 MB of events or after 30 seconds, which ever comes first. Aside: What’s up with the 1.3 MB, I thought you said the buffer was 4 MB?The Extended Events engine takes the total buffer size specified by MAX_MEMORY (4MB by default) and divides it into 3 equally sized buffers. This is done so that a session can be publishing events to one buffer while other buffers are being processed. There are always at least three buffers; how to get more than three is covered later. Using this configuration, the Extended Events engine can “keep up” with most event sessions on standard workloads. Why is this? The fact is that most events are small, really small; on the order of a couple hundred bytes. Even when you start considering events that carry dynamically sized data (eg. binary, text, etc.) or adding actions that collect additional data, the total size of the event is still likely to be pretty small. This means that each buffer can likely hold thousands of events before it has to be processed. When the event buffers are finally processed there is an economy of scale achieved since most targets support bulk processing of the events so they are processed at the buffer level rather than the individual event level. When all this is working together it’s more likely that a full buffer will be processed and put back into the ready queue before the remaining buffers (remember, there are at least three) are full. I know what you’re going to say: “My server is exceptional! My workload is so massive it defies categorization!” OK, maybe you weren’t going to say that exactly, but you were probably thinking it. The point is that there are situations that won’t be covered by the Default, but that’s a good place to start and this post assumes you’ve started there so that you have something to look at in order to determine if you do have a special case that needs different settings. So let’s get to the special cases… What event just fired?! How about now?! Now?! If you believe the commercial adage from Heinz Ketchup (Heinz Slow Good Ketchup ad on You Tube), some things are worth the wait. This is not a belief held by most DBAs, particularly DBAs who are looking for an answer to a troubleshooting question fast. If you’re one of these anxious DBAs, or maybe just a Program Manager doing a demo, then 30 seconds might be longer than you’re comfortable waiting. If you find yourself in this situation then consider changing the MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY option for your event session. This option will force the event buffers to be processed based on your time schedule. This option only makes sense for the asynchronous targets since those are the ones where we allow events to build up in the event buffer – if you’re using one of the synchronous targets this option isn’t relevant. Avoid forgotten events by increasing your memory Have you ever had one of those days where you keep forgetting things? That can happen in Extended Events too; we call it dropped events. In order to optimizes for server performance and help ensure that the Extended Events doesn’t block the server if to drop events that can’t be published to a buffer because the buffer is full. You can determine if events are being dropped from a session by querying the dm_xe_sessions DMV and looking at the dropped_event_count field. Aside: Should you care if you’re dropping events?Maybe not – think about why you’re collecting data in the first place and whether you’re really going to miss a few dropped events. For example, if you’re collecting query duration stats over thousands of executions of a query it won’t make a huge difference to miss a couple executions. Use your best judgment. If you find that your session is dropping events it means that the event buffer is not large enough to handle the volume of events that are being published. There are two ways to address this problem. First, you could collect fewer events – examine you session to see if you are over collecting. Do you need all the actions you’ve specified? Could you apply a predicate to be more specific about when you fire the event? Assuming the session is defined correctly, the next option is to change the MAX_MEMORY option to a larger number. Picking the right event buffer size might take some trial and error, but a good place to start is with the number of dropped events compared to the number you’ve collected. Aside: There are three different behaviors for dropping events that you specify using the EVENT_RETENTION_MODE option. The default is to allow single event loss and you should stick with this setting since it is the best choice for keeping the impact on server performance low.You’ll be tempted to use the setting to not lose any events (NO_EVENT_LOSS) – resist this urge since it can result in blocking on the server. If you’re worried that you’re losing events you should be increasing your event buffer memory as described in this section. Some events are too big to fail A less common reason for dropping an event is when an event is so large that it can’t fit into the event buffer. Even though most events are going to be small, you might find a condition that occasionally generates a very large event. You can determine if your session is dropping large events by looking at the dm_xe_sessions DMV once again, this time check the largest_event_dropped_size. If this value is larger than the size of your event buffer [remember, the size of your event buffer, by default, is max_memory / 3] then you need a large event buffer. To specify a large event buffer you set the MAX_EVENT_SIZE option to a value large enough to fit the largest event dropped based on data from the DMV. When you set this option the Extended Events engine will create two buffers of this size to accommodate these large events. As an added bonus (no extra charge) the large event buffer will also be used to store normal events in the cases where the normal event buffers are all full and waiting to be processed. (Note: This is just a side-effect, not the intended use. If you’re dropping many normal events then you should increase your normal event buffer size.) Partitioning: moving your events to a sub-division Earlier I alluded to the fact that you can configure your event session to use more than the standard three event buffers – this is called partitioning and is controlled by the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE option. The result of setting this option is fairly easy to explain, but knowing when to use it is a bit more art than science. First the science… You can configure partitioning in three ways: None, Per NUMA Node & Per CPU. This specifies the location where sets of event buffers are created with fairly obvious implication. There are rules we follow for sub-dividing the total memory (specified by MAX_MEMORY) between all the event buffers that are specific to the mode used: None: 3 buffers (fixed)Node: 3 * number_of_nodesCPU: 2.5 * number_of_cpus Here are some examples of what this means for different Node/CPU counts: Configuration None Node CPU 2 CPUs, 1 Node 3 buffers 3 buffers 5 buffers 6 CPUs, 2 Node 3 buffers 6 buffers 15 buffers 40 CPUs, 5 Nodes 3 buffers 15 buffers 100 buffers   Aside: Buffer size on multi-processor computersAs the number of Nodes or CPUs increases, the size of the event buffer gets smaller because the total memory is sub-divided into more pieces. The defaults will hold up to this for a while since each buffer set is holding events only from the Node or CPU that it is associated with, but at some point the buffers will get too small and you’ll either see events being dropped or you’ll get an error when you create your session because you’re below the minimum buffer size. Increase the MAX_MEMORY setting to an appropriate number for the configuration. The most likely reason to start partitioning is going to be related to performance. If you notice that running an event session is impacting the performance of your server beyond a reasonably expected level [Yes, there is a reasonably expected level of work required to collect events.] then partitioning might be an answer. Before you partition you might want to check a few other things: Is your event retention set to NO_EVENT_LOSS and causing blocking? (I told you not to do this.) Consider changing your event loss mode or increasing memory. Are you over collecting and causing more work than necessary? Consider adding predicates to events or removing unnecessary events and actions from your session. Are you writing the file target to the same slow disk that you use for TempDB and your other high activity databases? <kidding> <not really> It’s always worth considering the end to end picture – if you’re writing events to a file you can be impacted by I/O, network; all the usual stuff. Assuming you’ve ruled out the obvious (and not so obvious) issues, there are performance conditions that will be addressed by partitioning. For example, it’s possible to have a successful event session (eg. no dropped events) but still see a performance impact because you have many CPUs all attempting to write to the same free buffer and having to wait in line to finish their work. This is a case where partitioning would relieve the contention between the different CPUs and likely reduce the performance impact cause by the event session. There is no DMV you can check to find these conditions – sorry – that’s where the art comes in. This is  largely a matter of experimentation. On the bright side you probably won’t need to to worry about this level of detail all that often. The performance impact of Extended Events is significantly lower than what you may be used to with SQL Trace. You will likely only care about the impact if you are trying to set up a long running event session that will be part of your everyday workload – sessions used for short term troubleshooting will likely fall into the “reasonably expected impact” category. Hey buddy – I think you forgot something OK, there are two options I didn’t cover: STARTUP_STATE & TRACK_CAUSALITY. If you want your event sessions to start automatically when the server starts, set the STARTUP_STATE option to ON. (Now there is only one option I didn’t cover.) I’m going to leave causality for another post since it’s not really related to session behavior, it’s more about event analysis. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Lightning talk: Coderetreat

  - by Michael Williamson

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

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• SQL Spatial: Getting “nearest” calculations working properly

  - by Rob Farley

  If you’ve ever done spatial work with SQL Server, I hope you’ve come across the ‘nearest’ problem. You have five thousand stores around the world, and you want to identify the one that’s closest to a particular place. Maybe you want the store closest to the LobsterPot office in Adelaide, at -34.925806, 138.605073. Or our new US office, at 42.524929, -87.858244. Or maybe both! You know how to do this. You don’t want to use an aggregate MIN or MAX, because you want the whole row, telling you which store it is. You want to use TOP, and if you want to find the closest store for multiple locations, you use APPLY. Let’s do this (but I’m going to use addresses in AdventureWorks2012, as I don’t have a list of stores). Oh, and before I do, let’s make sure we have a spatial index in place. I’m going to use the default options. CREATE SPATIAL INDEX spin_Address ON Person.Address(SpatialLocation); And my actual query: WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Great! This is definitely working. I know both those City locations, even if the AddressLine1s don’t quite ring a bell. I’m sure I’ll be able to find them next time I’m in the area. But of course what I’m concerned about from a querying perspective is what’s happened behind the scenes – the execution plan. This isn’t pretty. It’s not using my index. It’s sucking every row out of the Address table TWICE (which sucks), and then it’s sorting them by the distance to find the smallest one. It’s not pretty, and it takes a while. Mind you, I do like the fact that it saw an indexed view it could use for the State and Country details – that’s pretty neat. But yeah – users of my nifty website aren’t going to like how long that query takes. The frustrating thing is that I know that I can use the index to find locations that are within a particular distance of my locations quite easily, and Microsoft recommends this for solving the ‘nearest’ problem, as described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/ff929109.aspx. Now, in the first example on this page, it says that the query there will use the spatial index. But when I run it on my machine, it does nothing of the sort. I’m not particularly impressed. But what we see here is that parallelism has kicked in. In my scenario, it’s split the data up into 4 threads, but it’s still slow, and not using my index. It’s disappointing. But I can persuade it with hints! If I tell it to FORCESEEK, or use my index, or even turn off the parallelism with MAXDOP 1, then I get the index being used, and it’s a thing of beauty! Part of the plan is here: It’s massive, and it’s ugly, and it uses a TVF… but it’s quick. The way it works is to hook into the GeodeticTessellation function, which is essentially finds where the point is, and works out through the spatial index cells that surround it. This then provides a framework to be able to see into the spatial index for the items we want. You can read more about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895265.aspx#tessellation – including a bunch of pretty diagrams. One of those times when we have a much more complex-looking plan, but just because of the good that’s going on. This tessellation stuff was introduced in SQL Server 2012. But my query isn’t using it. When I try to use the FORCESEEK hint on the Person.Address table, I get the friendly error: Msg 8622, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Query processor could not produce a query plan because of the hints defined in this query. Resubmit the query without specifying any hints and without using SET FORCEPLAN. And I’m almost tempted to just give up and move back to the old method of checking increasingly large circles around my location. After all, I can even leverage multiple OUTER APPLY clauses just like I did in my recent Lookup post. WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT     l.Name,     COALESCE(a1.AddressLine1,a2.AddressLine1,a3.AddressLine1),     COALESCE(a1.City,a2.City,a3.City),     s.Name AS [State],     c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 1000     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a1 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 5000     AND a1.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a2 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 20000     AND a2.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a3 JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = COALESCE(a1.StateProvinceID,a2.StateProvinceID,a3.StateProvinceID) JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; But this isn’t friendly-looking at all, and I’d use the method recommended by Isaac Kunen, who uses a table of numbers for the expanding circles. It feels old-school though, when I’m dealing with SQL 2012 (and later) versions. So why isn’t my query doing what it’s supposed to? Remember the query... WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Well, I just wasn’t reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929109.aspx properly. The following requirements must be met for a Nearest Neighbor query to use a spatial index: A spatial index must be present on one of the spatial columns and the STDistance() method must use that column in the WHERE and ORDER BY clauses. The TOP clause cannot contain a PERCENT statement. The WHERE clause must contain a STDistance() method. If there are multiple predicates in the WHERE clause then the predicate containing STDistance() method must be connected by an AND conjunction to the other predicates. The STDistance() method cannot be in an optional part of the WHERE clause. The first expression in the ORDER BY clause must use the STDistance() method. Sort order for the first STDistance() expression in the ORDER BY clause must be ASC. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. Let’s start from the top. 1. Needs a spatial index on one of the columns that’s in the STDistance call. Yup, got the index. 2. No ‘PERCENT’. Yeah, I don’t have that. 3. The WHERE clause needs to use STDistance(). Ok, but I’m not filtering, so that should be fine. 4. Yeah, I don’t have multiple predicates. 5. The first expression in the ORDER BY is my distance, that’s fine. 6. Sort order is ASC, because otherwise we’d be starting with the ones that are furthest away, and that’s tricky. 7. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. But I don’t have any NULL values, so that shouldn’t affect me either. ...but something’s wrong. I do actually need to satisfy #3. And I do need to make sure #7 is being handled properly, because there are some situations (eg, differing SRIDs) where STDistance can return NULL. It says so at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933808.aspx – “STDistance() always returns null if the spatial reference IDs (SRIDs) of the geography instances do not match.” So if I simply make sure that I’m filtering out the rows that return NULL… …then it’s blindingly fast, I get the right results, and I’ve got the complex-but-brilliant plan that I wanted. It just wasn’t overly intuitive, despite being documented. @rob_farley

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• The Internet of Things & Commerce: Part 2 -- Interview with Brian Celenza, Commerce Innovation Strategist

  - by Katrina Gosek, Director | Commerce Product Strategy-Oracle

  Internet of Things & Commerce Series: Part 2 (of 3) Welcome back to the second installation of my three part series on the Internet of Things & Commerce. A few weeks ago, I wrote “The Next 7,000 Days” about how we’ve become embedded in a digital architecture in the last 7,000 days since the birth of the internet – an architecture that everyday ties the massive expanse of the internet evermore closely with our physical lives. This blog series explores how this new blend of virtual and material will change how we shop and how businesses sell. Now enjoy reading my interview with Brian Celenza, one of the chief strategists in our Oracle Commerce innovation group. He comments on the past, present, and future of the how the growing Internet of Things relates and will relate to the buying and selling of goods on and offline. -------------------------------------------- QUESTION: You probably have one of the coolest jobs on our team, Brian – and frankly, one of the coolest jobs in our industry. As part of the innovation team for Oracle Commerce, you’re regularly working on bold features and groundbreaking commerce-focused experiences for our vision demos. As you look back over the past couple of years, what is the biggest trend (or trends) you’ve seen in digital commerce that started to bring us closer to this idea of what people are calling an “Internet of Things”? Brian: Well as you look back over the last couple of years, the speed at which change in our industry has moved looks like one of those blurred movement photos – you know the ones where the landscape blurs because the observer is moving so quickly your eye focus can’t keep up. But one thing that is absolutely clear is that the biggest catalyst for that speed of change – especially over the last three years – has been mobile. Mobile technology changed everything. Over the last three years the entire thought process of how to sell on (and offline) has shifted because of mobile technology advances. Particularly for eCommerce professionals who have started to move past the notion of “channels” for selling goods to this notion of “Mobile First”… then the Web site. Or more accurately, that everything – smartphones, web, store, tablet – is just one channel or has to act like one singular access point to the same product catalog, information and content. The most innovative eCommerce professionals realized some time ago that it’s not ideal to build an eCommerce Web site and then build everything on top of or off of it. Rather, they want to build an eCommerce API and then integrate it will all other systems. To accomplish this, they are leveraging all the latest mobile technologies or possibilities mobile technology has opened up: 4G and LTE, GPS, bluetooth, touch screens, apps, html5… How has this all started to come together for shopping experiences on and offline? Well to give you a personal example, I remember visiting an Apple store a few years ago and being amazed that I didn’t have to wait in line because a store associate knew everything about me from my ID – right there on the sales floor – and could check me out anywhere. Then just a few months later (when like any good addict) I went back to get the latest and greatest new gadget, I felt like I was stealing it because I could check myself out with my smartphone. I didn’t even need to see a sales associate OR go to a cash register. Amazing. And since then, all sort sorts of companies across all different types of industries – from food service to apparel –  are starting to see mobile payments in the billions of dollars now thanks not only to the convenience factor but to smart loyalty rewards programs as well. These are just some really simple current examples that come to mind. So many different things have happened in the last couple of years, it’s hard to really absorb all of the quickly – because as soon as you do, everything changes again! Just like that blurry speed photo image. For eCommerce, however, this type of new environment underscores the importance of building an eCommerce API – a platform that has services you can tap in to and build on as the landscape changes at a fever pitch. It’s a mobile first perspective. A web service perspective – particularly if you are thinking of how to engage customers across digital and physical spaces. —— QUESTION: Thanks for bringing us into the present – some really great examples you gave there to put things into perspective. So what do you see as the biggest trend right now around the “Internet of Things” – and what’s coming next few years? Brian: Honestly, even sitting where I am in the innovation group – it’s hard to look out even 12 months because, well, I don’t even think we’ve fully caught up with what is possible now. But I can definitely say that in the last 12 months and in the coming 12 months, in the technology and eCommerce world it’s all about iBeacons. iBeacons are awesome tools we have right now to tie together physical and digital shopping experiences. They know exactly where you are as a shopper and can communicate that to businesses. Currently there seem to be two camps of thought around iBeacons. First, many people are thinking of them like an “indoor GPS”, which to be fair they literally are. The use case this first camp envisions for iBeacons is primarily for advertising and marketing. So they use iBeacons to push location-based promotions to customers if they are close to a store or in a store. You may have seen these types of mobile promotions start to pop up occasionally on your smart phone as you pass by a store you’ve bought from in the past. That’s the work of iBeacons. But in my humble opinion, these promotions probably come too early in the customer journey and although they may be well timed and work to “convert” in some cases, I imagine in most they are just eroding customer trust because they are kind of a “one-size-fits-all” solution rather than one that is taking into account what exactly the customer might be looking for in that particular moment. Maybe they just want more information and a promotion is way too soon for that type of customer. The second camp is more in line with where my thinking falls. In this case, businesses take a more sensitive approach with iBeacons to customers’ needs. Instead of throwing out a “one-size-fits-all” to any passer by with iBeacons, the use case is more around looking at the physical proximity of a customer as an opportunity to provide a service: show expert reviews on a product they may be looking at in a particular aisle of a store, offer the opportunity to compare prices (and then offer a promotion), signal an in-store associate if a customer has been in the store for more than 10 minutes in one place. These are all less intrusive more value-driven uses of iBeacons. And they are more about building customer trust through service. To take this example a bit further into the future realm of “Big Data” and “Internet of Things” businesses could actually use the Oracle Commerce Platform and iBeacons to “silently” track customer movement w/in the store to provide higher quality service. And this doesn’t have to be creepy or intrusive. Simply if a customer has been in a particular department or aisle for more than a 5 or 10 minutes, an in-store associate could come over an offer some assistance already knowing customer preferences from their online profile and maybe even seeing the items in a shopping cart they started at home. None of this has to be revealed to the customer, but it certainly could boost the level of service an in-store sales associate could provide. Or, in another futuristic example, stores could use the digital footprint of the physical store transmitted by iBeacons to generate heat maps of the store that could be tracked over time. Imagine how much you could find out about which parts of the store are more busy during certain parts of the day or seasons. This could completely revolutionize how physical merchandising is deployed or where certain high value / new items are placed. And / or this use of iBeacons could also help businesses figure out if customers are getting held up in certain parts of the store during busy days like Black Friday. If long lines are causing customers to bounce from a physical store and leave those holiday gifts behind, maybe having employees with mobile check as an option could remove the cash register bottleneck. But going to back to my original statement, it’s all still very early in the story for iBeacons. The hardware manufacturers are still very new and there is still not one clear standard.  Honestly, it all goes back to building and maintaining an extensible and flexible platform for anywhere engagement. What you’re building today should allow you to rapidly take advantage of whatever unimaginable use cases wait around the corner. ------------------------------------------------------ I hope you enjoyed the brief interview with Brian. It’s really awesome to have such smart and innovation-minded individuals on our Oracle Commerce innovation team. Please join me again in a few weeks for Part 3 of this series where I interview one of the product managers on our team about how the blending of digital and in-store selling in influencing our product development and vision.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 26, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 26, 2010Popular ReleasesNoSimplerAccounting: NoSimplerAccounting 6.0: -Fixed a bug in expense category report.Temporary Data Storage Folder: TDS Folder source code: This is latest version 0.2 Beta code. To know the password request at neutron.request@gmail.comNHibernate Mapping Generator: NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0: Added support for Postgres (Thanks to Angelo)NewLife XCode: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????（????v3.5??）: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????，??： NewLife.Core ??? NewLife.Net ??? XControl ??? XTemplate ????，??C#?????? XAgent ???? NewLife.CommonEnitty ??????（???，XCode??????） XCode?? ?????????，??????????????????，?????95% XCode v3.5.2009.0714 ??，?v3.5?v6.0???????????????，?????????。v3.5???????????，??????????????。 XCoder ??XTemplate?????????，????????XCode??? XCoder_Src ???????（????XTemplate????），??????????????????Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting 1.71: New in this release Episode as Tasks using the Task Parallel Library CHM Help file now included in release. StyleCop compliance is resulting in massive refatoring but should not cause breaking changes Breaking Change DefaultTimeout is now a TimeSpan Removed default parameters using int timeout = DefaultTimeout and added overloads insteadMiniTwitter: 1.64: MiniTwitter 1.64 ???? ?? 1.63 ??? URL ??????????????Ajax ASP.Net Forum: InSeCla Forum Software v0.1.9: *VERSION: 0.1.9* HAPPY CHRISTMAS FEATURES ADDED Added features customizabled per category level (Customize at ADMIN/Categories Tab) Allow Anonymous Threads, Allow Anonymous Post Virtual URLs (friendly urls) has finally added And you can have some forum (category) using virtual urls and other using normal urls. Check !, as this improve the SEO indexing results Moderation Instant On: Delete Thread, Move Thread Available to users being members of moderators or administrators InstantO...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.0: Please see changes: http://support.vivoware.com/project/ChangeLog.aspx?PROJID=48Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6 Beta - codename JUNO: The Umbraco 4.6 beta (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains more than 89 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Improved installer experience Updated Starter Kits (Simple, Blog, Personal, Business) Beautiful, free, customizable skins included Skinning engine and Skin customization (see Skinning Documentation Kit) Default dashboards on install with hide option Updated Login t...SSH.NET Library: 2010.12.23: This release includes some bug fixes and few new fetures. Fixes Allow to retrieve big directory structures ssh-dss algorithm is fixed Populate sftp file attributes New Features Support for passhrase when private key is used Support added for diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256 and diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1 key exchange algorithms Allow to provide multiple key files for authentication Add support for "keyboard-interactive" authentication method...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 2.3.0: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. Release notesThis will be the last release targeting ASP.NET MVC 2 and .NET 3.5. MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 will be targeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4 Web.config setting skipAssemblyScanOn has been deprecated in favor of excludeAssembliesForScan and includeAssembliesForScan ISiteMapNodeUrlResolver is now completely responsible for generating th...SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.3 beta 2: Compared with SuperSocket 1.3 beta 1, the changes listed below have been done in SuperSocket 1.3 beta 2: added supports for .NET 3.5 replaced Logging Application Block of EntLib with Log4Net improved the code about logging fixed a bug in QuickStart sample project added IPv6 supportTibiaPinger: TibiaPinger v1.0: TibiaPinger v1.0Media Companion: Media Companion 3.400: Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. A manual is included to get you startedMulticore Task Framework: MTF 1.0.1: Release 1.0.1 of Multicore Task Framework.SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 7: 1. added script save/load in user query window 2. fixed problem with connection dialog when choosing windows auth but still ask for user name 3. auto open user table when double click one table node 4. improved alert message, added log only methodEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.6 ALPHA: 2.2.6 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Fixing up some r...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4.3: Helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: Improvements for confirm, popup, popup form RenderView controller extension the user experience for crud in live demo has been substantially improved + added search all the features are shown in the live demoGanttPlanner: GanttPlanner V1.0: GanttPlanner V1.0 include GanttPlanner.dll and also a Demo application.N2 CMS: 2.1 release candidate 3: * Web platform installer support available N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) A bunch of bugs were fixed File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the templ...New ProjectsA.I. Semantic Net Tests: A test using "semantic net" artificial intelligence developed in C++.Awesome.ClientID: Awesome.ClientID is a HTTPModule which serializes the ClientID of server controls, and page/usercontrol properties to a Json to make working with JavaScript easier without the need for outputting ClientID's. It's a solution for clean ClientIDs for .NET 2.0/3.5BitTweet: BitTweet is a fast, simple and easy to use Twitter client with tweeting, reading and writing functions included. It is know for being the most secure and fast Twitter client out there! It is written in Visual Basic .NET 2008. ~Tweet in a bit!CarRental001: carCrudo: CRUDO - The MCG (Model-Controller-Generator) CGF (Code Generation Framework) Visit The Project HomePage: http://adityayadav.com/CRUDO_The_MCG_Model_Controller_Generator_CGF_Code_Generation_Framework.aspx Licenses: 1) GPL v2 2) Commercial (contact us for information)Effeks: FX trading sample application sing prismEnhanced WebPart: Enhanced Webpart is a webpart with enhanced properties editor. It allows you display properties of most common types, and provides easy way to add custom controls to display your own types in webpart properties editor. Enhanced Webpart fully supports localization.Esteffin's graphic: Esercitazioni grafica 2010farasun: Source code Repository for farasun.wordpress.comGCTF: Desafio .NET Realizado na FACISAImgshow Plugin for Windows Live Writer: By using Imgshow Query you are able to publish multimedia content such as Youtube, Facebook Video, PDF, and other Imgshow supported service.Instant Messenger Using WPF and WCF: instant messenger using wcf and wpfjMenu: Create a dotnetnuke module that cover all kind of jquery menu pluginsMcopy API: Copy all files and directores in windows shell. Support long path (less then 32000 chars) and network path (eg. \\server\share or \\127.0.0.1\share)MOSSWebServices: This project contains code for interacting with the 21 web services provided by MOSS. This is targeted towards WSS developers This currently contains code to interact with "UserGroups" web service. I will keep adding code to interact with other MOSS web services soon. Nest Hub - Twitter Client: Nest Hub is a free Twitter client for PC. It's developed in VB.NET.Neural Networks Library: Neural networks Library by SefnajParallelism: Parallelism- Unified Parallel & Concurrency Framework Visit the Project HomePage: http://adityayadav.com/Parallelism.aspx Licenses: 1) GPL v2 2) Commercial (contact us for information)PDF IRM Protector For SharePoint 2007 And 2010: The PDF IRM Protector controls the conversion of PDF documents to their encrypted, rights-managed format and the decryption of PDF documents from their rights-managed format back to their original format. The project targets both SharePoint 2007 and 2010. PHP Form Validator - Isis: Project Isis simplifies the process of form validation for PHP. Offering a robust flag and function system, allowing you to encode the forms with the correct validation data and be done.Recycle Me: Open Source Project is to help and educate people in regarding reuse and recycling of daily life items. This is a Social project so we need funds for research and surveys. Volunteers are most welcome to contribute and certifications for their participation are available. ThanksSencha ExtJS Import Library for Script#: Script# import library for Sencha Ext JS Javascript Framework Separating Vertices: Given a graph as a collection of edges and vertices, it identifies the separating vertices, biconnected components, and edges. SIG - SISTEMA DE GESTÃO INTERNA: Projeto feito para a empresa MODEMTELECOM, consultoria em telecomunicoções.Smart Card COM: Smart Card COM Library, useful to access smart cards from a Web page in Internet ExplorerSocial Hub: Social HubStock Research: Test project for stocke researchtaokeba: ????????????????????，???????????。Temporary Data Storage Folder: This software creates a folder that stores temporary data that you want to store for temporary tasks. Temporary tasks such as storing a file that is to be deleted after some time. It automatically deleted those files on exit. Learn more at www.neutronsoftwares.weebly.comTukUI Updater: A OpenSource Windows Updater tool for the World of Warcraft(R) addon TukUI Developed in .NET 3.5 Discusion thread are found at the official TukUI forums: http://www.tukui.org/v2/forums/topic.php?id=4982 WebUtil: This is a project for using all of features by the web.

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Problems with Android Fragment back stack

  - by DexterMoon

  I've got a massive problem with the way the android fragment backstack seems to work and would be most grateful for any help that is offered. Imagine you have 3 Fragments [1] [2] [3] I want the user to be able to navigate [1] > [2] > [3] but on the way back (pressing back button) [3] > [1]. As I would have imagined this would be accomplished by not calling addToBackStack(..) when creating the transaction that brings fragment [2] into the fragment holder defined in XML. The reality of this seems as though that if I dont want [2] to appear again when user presses back button on [3], I must not call addToBackStack in the transaction that shows fragment [3]. This seems completely counter-intuitive (perhaps coming from the iOS world). Anyway if i do it this way, when I go from [1] > [2] and press back I arrive back at [1] as expected. If I go [1] > [2] > [3] and then press back I jump back to [1] (as expected). Now the strange behavior happens when I try and jump to [2] again from [1]. First of all [3] is briefly displayed before [2] comes into view. If I press back at this point [3] is displayed, and if I press back once again the app exits. Can anyone help me to understand whats going on here? And here is the layout xml file for my main activity: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:orientation="vertical" > <fragment android:id="@+id/headerFragment" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" class="com.fragment_test.FragmentControls" > <!-- Preview: layout=@layout/details --> </fragment> <FrameLayout android:id="@+id/detailFragment" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" /> Update This is the code I'm using to build by nav heirarchy Fragment frag; FragmentTransaction transaction; //Create The first fragment [1], add it to the view, BUT Dont add the transaction to the backstack frag = new Fragment1(); transaction = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction(); transaction.replace(R.id.detailFragment, frag); transaction.commit(); //Create the second [2] fragment, add it to the view and add the transaction that replaces the first fragment to the backstack frag = new Fragment2(); transaction = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction(); transaction.replace(R.id.detailFragment, frag); transaction.addToBackStack(null); transaction.commit(); //Create third fragment frag = new Fragment3(); transaction = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction(); transaction.replace(R.id.detailFragment, frag); transaction.commit(); //END OF SETUP CODE------------------------- //NOW: //Press back once and then issue the following code: frag = new Fragment2(); transaction = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction(); transaction.replace(R.id.detailFragment, frag); transaction.addToBackStack(null); transaction.commit(); //Now press back again and you end up at fragment [3] not [1] Many thanks

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• How to overcome shortcomings in reporting from EAV database?

  - by David Archer

  The major shortcomings with Entity-Attribute-Value database designs in SQL all seem to be related to being able to query and report on the data efficiently and quickly. Most of the information I read on the subject warn against implementing EAV due to these problems and the commonality of querying/reporting for almost all applications. I am currently designing a system where almost all the fields necessary for data storage are not known at design/compile time and are defined by the end-user of the system. EAV seems like a good fit for this requirement but due to the problems I've read about, I am hesitant in implementing it as there are also some pretty heavy reporting requirements for this system as well. I think I've come up with a way around this but would like to pose the question to the SO community. Given that typical normalized database (OLTP) still isn't always the best option for running reports, a good practice seems to be having a "reporting" database (OLAP) where the data from the normalized database is copied to, indexed extensively, and possibly denormalized for easier querying. Could the same idea be used to work around the shortcomings of an EAV design? The main downside I see are the increased complexity of transferring the data from the EAV database to reporting as you may end up having to alter the tables in the reporting database as new fields are defined in the EAV database. But that is hardly impossible and seems to be an acceptable tradeoff for the increased flexibility given by the EAV design. This downside also exists if I use a non-SQL data store (i.e. CouchDB or similar) for the main data storage since all the standard reporting tools are expecting a SQL backend to query against. Do the issues with EAV systems mostly go away if you have a seperate reporting database for querying? EDIT: Thanks for the comments so far. One of the important things about the system I'm working on it that I'm really only talking about using EAV for one of the entities, not everything in the system. The whole gist of the system is to be able to pull data from multiple disparate sources that are not known ahead of time and crunch the data to come up with some "best known" data about a particular entity. So every "field" I'm dealing with is multi-valued and I'm also required to track history for each. The normalized design for this ends up being 1 table per field which makes querying it kind of painful anyway. Here are the table schemas and sample data I'm looking at (obviously changed from what I'm working on but I think it illustrates the point well): EAV Tables Person ------------------- - Id - Name - ------------------- - 123 - Joe Smith - ------------------- Person_Value ------------------------------------------------------------------- - PersonId - Source - Field - Value - EffectiveDate - ------------------------------------------------------------------- - 123 - CIA - HomeAddress - 123 Cherry Ln - 2010-03-26 - - 123 - DMV - HomeAddress - 561 Stoney Rd - 2010-02-15 - - 123 - FBI - HomeAddress - 676 Lancas Dr - 2010-03-01 - ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reporting Table Person_Denormalized ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Id - Name - HomeAddress - HomeAddress_Confidence - HomeAddress_EffectiveDate - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 123 - Joe Smith - 123 Cherry Ln - 0.713 - 2010-03-26 - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Normalized Design Person ------------------- - Id - Name - ------------------- - 123 - Joe Smith - ------------------- Person_HomeAddress ------------------------------------------------------ - PersonId - Source - Value - Effective Date - ------------------------------------------------------ - 123 - CIA - 123 Cherry Ln - 2010-03-26 - - 123 - DMV - 561 Stoney Rd - 2010-02-15 - - 123 - FBI - 676 Lancas Dr - 2010-03-01 - ------------------------------------------------------ The "Confidence" field here is generated using logic that cannot be expressed easily (if at all) using SQL so my most common operation besides inserting new values will be pulling ALL data about a person for all fields so I can generate the record for the reporting table. This is actually easier in the EAV model as I can do a single query. In the normalized design, I end up having to do 1 query per field to avoid a massive cartesian product from joining them all together.

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• Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

  - by Randy Walker

  I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

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• Solaris: What comes next?

  - by alanc

  As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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• Linq to SQL NullReferenceException's: A random needle in a haystack!

  - by Shane

  I'm getting NullReferenceExeceptions at seemly random times in my application and can't track down what could be causing the error. I'll do my best to describe the scenario and setup. Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated! C# .net 3.5 Forms Application, but I use the WebFormRouting library built by Phil Haack (http://haacked.com/archive/2008/03/11/using-routing-with-webforms.aspx) to leverage the Routing libraries of .net (usually used in conjunction with MVC) - intead of using url rewriting for my urls. My database has 60 tables. All Normalized. It's just a massive application. (SQL server 2008) All queries are built with Linq to SQL in code (no SP's). Each time a new instance of my data context is created. I use only one data context with all relationships defined in 4 relationship diagrams in SQL Server. the data context gets created a lot. I let the closing of the data context be handled automatically. I've heard arguments both sides about whether you should leave to be closed automatically or do it yourself. In this case I do it myself. It doesnt seem to matter if I'm creating a lot of instances of the data context or just one. For example, I've got a vote-up button. with the following code, and it errors probably 1 in 10-20 times. protected void VoteUpLinkButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { DatabaseDataContext db = new DatabaseDataContext(); StoryVote storyVote = new StoryVote(); storyVote.StoryId = storyId; storyVote.UserId = Utility.GetUserId(Context); storyVote.IPAddress = Utility.GetUserIPAddress(); storyVote.CreatedDate = DateTime.Now; storyVote.IsDeleted = false; db.StoryVotes.InsertOnSubmit(storyVote); db.SubmitChanges(); // If this story is not yet published, check to see if we should publish it. Make sure that // it is already approved. if (story.PublishedDate == null && story.ApprovedDate != null) { Utility.MakeUpcommingNewsPopular(storyId); } // Refresh our page. Response.Redirect("/news/" + category.UniqueName + "/" + RouteData.Values["year"].ToString() + "/" + RouteData.Values["month"].ToString() + "/" + RouteData.Values["day"].ToString() + "/" + RouteData.Values["uniquename"].ToString()); } The last thing I tried was the "Auto Close" flag setting on SQL Server. This was set to true and I changed to false. Doesnt seem to have done the trick although has had a good overall effect. Here's a detailed that wasnt caught. I also get slighly different errors when caught by my try/catch's. System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown. --- System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at System.Web.Util.StringUtil.GetStringHashCode(String s) at System.Web.UI.ClientScriptManager.EnsureEventValidationFieldLoaded() at System.Web.UI.ClientScriptManager.ValidateEvent(String uniqueId, String argument) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox.LoadPostData(String postDataKey, NameValueCollection postCollection) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessPostData(NameValueCollection postData, Boolean fBeforeLoad) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Web.UI.Page.HandleError(Exception e) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at ASP.forms_news_detail_aspx.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) HELP!!!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 27, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 27, 2011Popular ReleasesVidCoder: 0.8.2: Updated auto-naming to handle seconds and frames ranges as well. Deprecated the {chapters} token for auto-naming in favor of {range}. Allowing file drag to preview window and enabling main window shortcut keys to work no matter what window is focused. Added option in config to enable giving custom names to audio tracks. (Note that these names will only show up certain players like iTunes or on the iPod. Players that support custom track names normally may not show them.) Added tooltips ...DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 Beta 2: Beta 2 release to fix some early reported problems with the original 1.8.7 Beta.Chiave File Encryption: Chiave 0.9.2: Release Notes Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.1 to 0.9.2: ==================== Added: > Now it displays number of files added in the wizard to the Window Title bar. > Added support to Windows XP. > Minor UI tweaks. I...Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Drop 1 - Claims Identity Guide V2: Highlights of drop #1 This is the first drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All previous samples updated and enhanced. All code upgraded to .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Extensive cleanup. Refactored Simulated Issuers: each solution now gets its own issuers. This results in much cleaner and simpler to understand code. Added Single Sign Out support. Added first sample using ACS ("ACS as a Federation Provider"). This sample extends the ori...Simple Notify: Simple Notify Beta 2011-02-25: Feature: host the service with a single click in console Feature: host the service as a windows service Feature: notification cient application Feature: push client application Feature: push notifications from your powershell script Feature: C# wrapper libraries for your applicationsMono.Addins: Mono.Addins 0.6: The 0.6 release of Mono.Addins includes many improvements, bug fixes and new features: Add-in engine Add-in name and description can now be localized. There are new custom attributes for defining them, and can also be specified as xml elements in an add-in manifest instead of attributes. Support for custom add-in properties. It is now possible to specify arbitrary properties in add-ins, which can be queried at install time (using the Mono.Addins.Setup API) or at run-time. Custom extensio...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 3 - 25 Feb 2011: IntroductionWelcome to the third community drop of Project Silk. For this drop we are requesting feedback on overall application architecture, code review of the JavaScript Conductor and Widgets, and general direction of the application. Project Silk provides guidance and sample implementations that describe and illustrate recommended practices for building modern web applications using technologies such as HTML5, jQuery, CSS3 and Internet Explorer 9. This guidance is intended for experien...PhoneyTools: Initial Release (0.1): This is the 0.1 version for preview of the features.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.5: Now supports new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format, thanks to updated mcmap. Disabled biomes, until Minecraft Biome Extractor supports new format.Smartkernel: Smartkernel: ????，??????Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.2: New control, Toast Prompt! Removed progress bar since Silverlight Toolkit Feb 2010 has it.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.7: Service release fixing 31 issues. A full changelog will be available with the final stable release of 4.7 Important when upgradingUpgrade as if it was a patch release (update /bin, /umbraco and /umbraco_client). For general upgrade information follow the guide found at http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/upgrading-an-umbraco-installation 4.7 requires the .NET 4.0 framework Web.Config changes Update the web web.config to include the 4 changes found in (they're clearly marked in...HubbleDotNet - Open source full-text search engine: V1.1.0.0: Add Sqlite3 DBAdapter Add App Report when Query Cache is Collecting. Improve the performance of index through Synchronize. Add top 0 feature so that we can only get count of the result. Improve the score calculating algorithm of match. Let the score of the record that match all items large then others. Add MySql DBAdapter Improve performance for multi-fields sort . Using hash table to access the Payload data. The version before used bin search. Using heap sort instead of qui...DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta3: Grid jQuery Mvc extension is added,the Grid extension support data binding, server / client (ajax) mode, master/detail view, scrolling, paging, filtering, grouping and sorting. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.htmlSilverlight????[???]: silverlight????[???]2.0: ???????，?????，????????silverlight??????。DBSourceTools: DBSourceTools_1.3.0.0: Release 1.3.0.0 Changed editors from FireEdit to ICSharpCode.TextEditor. Complete re-vamp of Intellisense ( further testing needed). Hightlight Field and Table Names in sql scripts. Added field dropdown on all tables and views in DBExplorer. Added data option for viewing data in Tables. Fixed comment / uncomment bug as reported by tareq. Included Synonyms in scripting engine ( nickt_ch ).IronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 1: We are pleased to announce the first Release Candidate for IronPython 2.7. This release contains over two dozen bugs fixed in preparation for 2.7 Final. See the release notes for 60193 for details and what has already been fixed in the earlier 2.7 prereleases. - IronPython TeamCaliburn Micro: A Micro-Framework for WPF, Silverlight and WP7: Caliburn.Micro 1.0 RC: This is the official Release Candicate for Caliburn.Micro 1.0. The download contains the binaries, samples and VS templates. VS Templates The templates included are designed for situations where the Caliburn.Micro source needs to be embedded within a single project solution. This was targeted at government and other organizations that expressed specific requirements around using an open source project like this. NuGet This release does not have a corresponding NuGet package. The NuGet pack...Rawr: Rawr 4.0.20 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.3.2: New FeaturesPowerGUI Console Tool Window PowerShell Project Type PowerGUI 2.4 SupportNew ProjectsAppology SugarSync API: A SugarSync API for Windows Desktop, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7.CodeField - collection of sample code on algorithms: Collection of sample code on algorithms. It's contributed by myself. There's no plan to release them as a single product or part of it.Donsole: A live debugger console for windows client applications.F# AlgoLib: F# Algorithm Library - fully open source - under constructionFileShred: An easy-to-use secure File ShredderHyperlinked Validation System for WinForms: A very small system for validating complex forms in WinForms. It´s simple to use and takes a massive piece of work.KFtpClient - Ftp client (core et helper): <project name>kFtpClientmanagedCUDA: managedCUDA makes the CUDA Driver API available in .net. It also includes classes for an easy handling and interop with CUDA, i.e. build-in CUDA types like float3, but also classes for thread safe CUDA-context handling.Mini Dots: A simplified dots game with two remote playersMovieCollection: Programm to manage movie filesMSForge NextGen: MSForge NextGen je projekat izrade novog web sajta za MIcrosoft Community u Srbiji, što obuhvata izradu nekoliko wireframe-ova, dizajn Orchard CMS tema, alata za migraciu sadržaja sa starog sajta...OdeToFood: For people who love food ... and code. This is a sample application for ASP.NET MVC 3 using C# and Razor. PanzerTemplate: PanzerTemplate ????? http://zsharedcode.googlecode.com/ ???，??? zsharedcode ? panzer ?????????，??? DataWindowCore，IEBrowser ?，?? panzer ?????，??????????????。 ??????????????，???????????????。Sanal bildirimler: Sanal bildirisilverlight123_Shreous_Internal: This an project developed for internal purposeSkyper: TODOThai Airway & Nok Air WP7 App.: Flight Booking, Flight Info, Flight Check In.TicketValidator: A .net CF application to validate tickets with a barcode. A Denso BHT-420BW is used in my case.Toggl Time Traking for Windows Phone 7: Toggl is a web application that provides an easy way to track time spent on projects. It works well for both teams and freelancers. Unida Gestão Acadêmica: Sistema de Gestão Acadêmica

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 31, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 31, 2011Popular ReleasesMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 0.8: Fixed the following bugs: *Variable name error in the jvascript file that prevented the use of the deleted item template of the Datagrid *Now after the changes applied to an item of the DataGrid are cancelled all input fields are reset to the very initial value they had. *Other minor bugs. Added: *This version is available both for MVC2, and MVC 3. The MVC 3 version has a release number of 0.85. This way one can install both version. *Client Validation support has been added to all control...Office Web.UI: Beta preview (Source): This is the first Beta. it includes full source code and all available controls. Some designers are not ready, and some features are not finalized allready (missing properties, draft styles) ThanksASP.net Ribbon: Version 2.2: This release brings some new controls (part of Office Web.UI). A few bugs are fixed and it includes the "auto resize" feature as you resize the window. (It can cause an infinite loop when the window is too reduced, it's why this release is not marked as "stable"). I will release more versions 2.3, 2.4... until V3 which will be the official launch of Office Web.UI. Both products will evolve at the same speed. Thanks.Barcode Rendering Framework: 2.1.1.0: Final release for VS2008 Finally fixed bugs with code 128 symbology.HERB.IQ: HERB.IQ.UPGRADE.0.5.3.exe: HERB.IQ.UPGRADE.0.5.3.exexUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7: xUnit.net release 1.7Build #1540 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision) Ad...DoddleReport - Automatic HTML/Excel/PDF Reporting: DoddleReport 1.0: DoddleReport will add automatic tabular-based reporting (HTML/PDF/Excel/etc) for any LINQ Query, IEnumerable, DataTable or SharePoint List For SharePoint integration please click Here PDF Reporting has been placed into a separate assembly because it requies AbcPdf http://www.websupergoo.com/download.htmSpark View Engine: Spark v1.5: Release Notes There have been a lot of minor changes going on since version 1.1, but most important to note are the major changes which include: Support for HTML5 "section" tag. Spark has now renamed its own section tag to "segment" instead to avoid clashes. You can still use "section" in a Spark sense for legacy support by specifying ParseSectionAsSegment = true if needed while you transition Bindings - this is a massive feature that further simplifies your views by giving you a powerful ...Marr DataMapper: Marr DataMapper 1.0.0 beta: First release.WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.3: Version: 2.0.0.3 (Milestone 3): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...Rawr: Rawr 4.0.17 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 and on the Version Notes page: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you...Squiggle - A Free open source LAN Messenger: Squiggle 2.5 Beta: In this release following are the new features: Localization: Support for Arabic, French, German and Chinese (Simplified) Bridge: Connect two Squiggle nets across the WAN or different subnets Aliases: Special codes with special meaning can be embedded in message like (version),(datetime),(time),(date),(you),(me) Commands: cls, /exit, /offline, /online, /busy, /away, /main Sound notifications: Get audio alerts on contact online, message received, buzz Broadcast for group: You can ri...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.2: Version 7.4.2 of VivoSocial has been released. If you experienced any issues with the previous version, please update your modules to the 7.4.2 release and see if they persist. If you have any questions about this release, please post them in our Support forums. If you are experiencing a bug or would like to request a new feature, please submit it to our issue tracker. Web Controls * Updated Business Objects and added a new SQL Data Provider File. Groups * Fixed a security issue whe...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1.1 for IIS 7: This is a minor release of PHP Manager for IIS 7. It contains all the functionality available in 56962 plus several bug fixes (see change list for more details). Also, this release includes Russian language support. SHA1 codes for the downloads are: PHPManagerForIIS-1.1.0-x86.msi - 6570B4A8AC8B5B776171C2BA0572C190F0900DE2 PHPManagerForIIS-1.1.0-x64.msi - 12EDE004EFEE57282EF11A8BAD1DC1ADFD66A654mojoPortal: 2.3.6.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2361-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Parallel Programming with Microsoft Visual C++: Drop 6 - Chapters 4 and 5: This is Drop 6. It includes: Drafts of the Preface, Introduction, Chapters 2-7, Appendix B & C and the glossary Sample code for chapters 2-7 and Appendix A & B. The new material we'd like feedback on is: Chapter 4 - Parallel Aggregation Chapter 5 - Futures The source code requires Visual Studio 2010 in order to run. There is a known bug in the A-Dash sample when the user attempts to cancel a parallel calculation. We are working to fix this.NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.160: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release improves NodeXL's Twitter and Pajek features. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file in Windows Explorer and select "Extract All." Close Ex...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 CTP: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL, RavenDB and SQLCE. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder to enable...UOB & ME: UOB ME 2.6: UOB ME 2.6????: ???? V1.0: ???? V1.0 ??New ProjectsAuto Complete Control for ASP.NET: Autocomplete Control is a fully functional ASP.NET control for word suggestions and autocomplete. We had been using Ajax Control Toolkit AutoComplete Extender in our projects before, but we have needed some extra features and functionalities.Cours ESIEE: MAJ des cours ESIEE depuis la plateforme Icampus et autres documentsEngineering World Expenses: Demo expenses application for Engineering World 2011Entity Framework / Linq to Sql Poco Code Generator: Poco Orm data access layer (Dto) code generator for Entity Framework and Linq to Sql. Customizable code generation via simple templating system. Utilizes Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in order for application parts to dynamically composed and plug-able.linqish.py: Python module for manipulating iterables. An implementation of the .Net Framework's Linq to Objects for Python.Machinekey setter: This code sample is Windows Azure SDK 1.3 custom plugin. This sample do working at set custom key to machinekey of web.config file in your WebRole.MapReduce.NET: MapReduce.NET intends to implement the original paper proposed by Google on MapReduce.Marr DataMapper: Marr DataMapper provides a fast and easy to use wrapper around ADO.NET that enables you to focus more on your data access queries without having to write plumbing code. Load one-to-one, one-to-many, and hierarchical entity models with ease. No special base class required.Orchard Silverlight: Orchard module enabling embedding Silverlight applications and creating Silverlight-based content.RouteMagic: Library of useful routing helpers and classes.Smart Skelta Utilites: Smart Skelta Utilies will provide utilties like Visual Studio 2008 Skelta Starter Kit(Project Templates and Project Item Templates),Code Snippets for Skelta Components,Skleta Attachment Extracter Web based Logger,Skelta Server utility and others for skelta based development.Solfix: Solfix is a programming language tbat is work-in-progress, but it has a lot of functionality! You can make applications for console to windows applications. The main point of Solfix is to make coding easier and less time than before.SQLite Manager: A minimal manage for sqlite databases.State Search: StateSearch provides state search algoritms such as A*, IDA*, BestFirst, etc to solve problems such as puzzles and/or path searchingTable Check Custom Field Type: SharePoint Custom Field Type for displaying a list of values with checkboxes and people editors.testsgb: testWindows Phone 7 Extension Framework: An extension method framework for Windows Phone 7 to make your code more fluent and adding a lot of common functions you don't need to reproduce.

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• Fraud Detection with the SQL Server Suite Part 1

  - by Dejan Sarka

  While working on different fraud detection projects, I developed my own approach to the solution for this problem. In my PASS Summit 2013 session I am introducing this approach. I also wrote a whitepaper on the same topic, which was generously reviewed by my friend Matija Lah. In order to spread this knowledge faster, I am starting a series of blog posts which will at the end make the whole whitepaper. Abstract With the massive usage of credit cards and web applications for banking and payment processing, the number of fraudulent transactions is growing rapidly and on a global scale. Several fraud detection algorithms are available within a variety of different products. In this paper, we focus on using the Microsoft SQL Server suite for this purpose. In addition, we will explain our original approach to solving the problem by introducing a continuous learning procedure. Our preferred type of service is mentoring; it allows us to perform the work and consulting together with transferring the knowledge onto the customer, thus making it possible for a customer to continue to learn independently. This paper is based on practical experience with different projects covering online banking and credit card usage. Introduction A fraud is a criminal or deceptive activity with the intention of achieving financial or some other gain. Fraud can appear in multiple business areas. You can find a detailed overview of the business domains where fraud can take place in Sahin Y., & Duman E. (2011), Detecting Credit Card Fraud by Decision Trees and Support Vector Machines, Proceedings of the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists 2011 Vol 1. Hong Kong: IMECS. Dealing with frauds includes fraud prevention and fraud detection. Fraud prevention is a proactive mechanism, which tries to disable frauds by using previous knowledge. Fraud detection is a reactive mechanism with the goal of detecting suspicious behavior when a fraudster surpasses the fraud prevention mechanism. A fraud detection mechanism checks every transaction and assigns a weight in terms of probability between 0 and 1 that represents a score for evaluating whether a transaction is fraudulent or not. A fraud detection mechanism cannot detect frauds with a probability of 100%; therefore, manual transaction checking must also be available. With fraud detection, this manual part can focus on the most suspicious transactions. This way, an unchanged number of supervisors can detect significantly more frauds than could be achieved with traditional methods of selecting which transactions to check, for example with random sampling. There are two principal data mining techniques available both in general data mining as well as in specific fraud detection techniques: supervised or directed and unsupervised or undirected. Supervised techniques or data mining models use previous knowledge. Typically, existing transactions are marked with a flag denoting whether a particular transaction is fraudulent or not. Customers at some point in time do report frauds, and the transactional system should be capable of accepting such a flag. Supervised data mining algorithms try to explain the value of this flag by using different input variables. When the patterns and rules that lead to frauds are learned through the model training process, they can be used for prediction of the fraud flag on new incoming transactions. Unsupervised techniques analyze data without prior knowledge, without the fraud flag; they try to find transactions which do not resemble other transactions, i.e. outliers. In both cases, there should be more frauds in the data set selected for checking by using the data mining knowledge compared to selecting the data set with simpler methods; this is known as the lift of a model. Typically, we compare the lift with random sampling. The supervised methods typically give a much better lift than the unsupervised ones. However, we must use the unsupervised ones when we do not have any previous knowledge. Furthermore, unsupervised methods are useful for controlling whether the supervised models are still efficient. Accuracy of the predictions drops over time. Patterns of credit card usage, for example, change over time. In addition, fraudsters continuously learn as well. Therefore, it is important to check the efficiency of the predictive models with the undirected ones. When the difference between the lift of the supervised models and the lift of the unsupervised models drops, it is time to refine the supervised models. However, the unsupervised models can become obsolete as well. It is also important to measure the overall efficiency of both, supervised and unsupervised models, over time. We can compare the number of predicted frauds with the total number of frauds that include predicted and reported occurrences. For measuring behavior across time, specific analytical databases called data warehouses (DW) and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems can be employed. By controlling the supervised models with unsupervised ones and by using an OLAP system or DW reports to control both, a continuous learning infrastructure can be established. There are many difficulties in developing a fraud detection system. As has already been mentioned, fraudsters continuously learn, and the patterns change. The exchange of experiences and ideas can be very limited due to privacy concerns. In addition, both data sets and results might be censored, as the companies generally do not want to publically expose actual fraudulent behaviors. Therefore it can be quite difficult if not impossible to cross-evaluate the models using data from different companies and different business areas. This fact stresses the importance of continuous learning even more. Finally, the number of frauds in the total number of transactions is small, typically much less than 1% of transactions is fraudulent. Some predictive data mining algorithms do not give good results when the target state is represented with a very low frequency. Data preparation techniques like oversampling and undersampling can help overcome the shortcomings of many algorithms. SQL Server suite includes all of the software required to create, deploy any maintain a fraud detection infrastructure. The Database Engine is the relational database management system (RDBMS), which supports all activity needed for data preparation and for data warehouses. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) supports OLAP and data mining (in version 2012, you need to install SSAS in multidimensional and data mining mode; this was the only mode in previous versions of SSAS, while SSAS 2012 also supports the tabular mode, which does not include data mining). Additional products from the suite can be useful as well. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a tool for developing extract transform–load (ETL) applications. SSIS is typically used for loading a DW, and in addition, it can use SSAS data mining models for building intelligent data flows. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is useful for presenting the results in a variety of reports. Data Quality Services (DQS) mitigate the occasional data cleansing process by maintaining a knowledge base. Master Data Services is an application that helps companies maintaining a central, authoritative source of their master data, i.e. the most important data to any organization. For an overview of the SQL Server business intelligence (BI) part of the suite that includes Database Engine, SSAS and SSRS, please refer to Veerman E., Lachev T., & Sarka D. (2009). MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance. MS Press. For an overview of the enterprise information management (EIM) part that includes SSIS, DQS and MDS, please refer to Sarka D., Lah M., & Jerkic G. (2012). Training Kit (Exam 70-463): Implementing a Data Warehouse with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012. O'Reilly. For details about SSAS data mining, please refer to MacLennan J., Tang Z., & Crivat B. (2009). Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Wiley. SQL Server Data Mining Add-ins for Office, a free download for Office versions 2007, 2010 and 2013, bring the power of data mining to Excel, enabling advanced analytics in Excel. Together with PowerPivot for Excel, which is also freely downloadable and can be used in Excel 2010, is already included in Excel 2013. It brings OLAP functionalities directly into Excel, making it possible for an advanced analyst to build a complete learning infrastructure using a familiar tool. This way, many more people, including employees in subsidiaries, can contribute to the learning process by examining local transactions and quickly identifying new patterns.

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• Slow queries in Rails- not sure if my indexes are being used.

  - by Max Williams

  I'm doing a quite complicated find with lots of includes, which rails is splitting into a sequence of discrete queries rather than do a single big join. The queries are really slow - my dataset isn't massive, with none of the tables having more than a few thousand records. I have indexed all of the fields which are examined in the queries but i'm worried that the indexes aren't helping for some reason: i installed a plugin called "query_reviewer" which looks at the queries used to build a page, and lists problems with them. This states that indexes AREN'T being used, and it features the results of calling 'explain' on the query, which lists various problems. Here's an example find call: Question.paginate(:all, {:page=>1, :include=>[:answers, :quizzes, :subject, {:taggings=>:tag}, {:gradings=>[:age_group, :difficulty]}], :conditions=>["((questions.subject_id = ?) or (questions.subject_id = ? and tags.name = ?))", "1", 19, "English"], :order=>"subjects.name, (gradings.difficulty_id is null), gradings.age_group_id, gradings.difficulty_id", :per_page=>30}) And here are the generated sql queries: SELECT DISTINCT `questions`.id FROM `questions` LEFT OUTER JOIN `taggings` ON `taggings`.taggable_id = `questions`.id AND `taggings`.taggable_type = 'Question' LEFT OUTER JOIN `tags` ON `tags`.id = `taggings`.tag_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `subjects` ON `subjects`.id = `questions`.subject_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `gradings` ON gradings.question_id = questions.id WHERE (((questions.subject_id = '1') or (questions.subject_id = 19 and tags.name = 'English'))) ORDER BY subjects.name, (gradings.difficulty_id is null), gradings.age_group_id, gradings.difficulty_id LIMIT 0, 30 SELECT `questions`.`id` AS t0_r0 <..etc...> FROM `questions` LEFT OUTER JOIN `answers` ON answers.question_id = questions.id LEFT OUTER JOIN `quiz_questions` ON (`questions`.`id` = `quiz_questions`.`question_id`) LEFT OUTER JOIN `quizzes` ON (`quizzes`.`id` = `quiz_questions`.`quiz_id`) LEFT OUTER JOIN `subjects` ON `subjects`.id = `questions`.subject_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `taggings` ON `taggings`.taggable_id = `questions`.id AND `taggings`.taggable_type = 'Question' LEFT OUTER JOIN `tags` ON `tags`.id = `taggings`.tag_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `gradings` ON gradings.question_id = questions.id LEFT OUTER JOIN `age_groups` ON `age_groups`.id = `gradings`.age_group_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `difficulties` ON `difficulties`.id = `gradings`.difficulty_id WHERE (((questions.subject_id = '1') or (questions.subject_id = 19 and tags.name = 'English'))) AND `questions`.id IN (602, 634, 666, 698, 730, 762, 613, 645, 677, 709, 741, 592, 624, 656, 688, 720, 752, 603, 635, 667, 699, 731, 763, 614, 646, 678, 710, 742, 593, 625) ORDER BY subjects.name, (gradings.difficulty_id is null), gradings.age_group_id, gradings.difficulty_id SELECT count(DISTINCT `questions`.id) AS count_all FROM `questions` LEFT OUTER JOIN `answers` ON answers.question_id = questions.id LEFT OUTER JOIN `quiz_questions` ON (`questions`.`id` = `quiz_questions`.`question_id`) LEFT OUTER JOIN `quizzes` ON (`quizzes`.`id` = `quiz_questions`.`quiz_id`) LEFT OUTER JOIN `subjects` ON `subjects`.id = `questions`.subject_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `taggings` ON `taggings`.taggable_id = `questions`.id AND `taggings`.taggable_type = 'Question' LEFT OUTER JOIN `tags` ON `tags`.id = `taggings`.tag_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `gradings` ON gradings.question_id = questions.id LEFT OUTER JOIN `age_groups` ON `age_groups`.id = `gradings`.age_group_id LEFT OUTER JOIN `difficulties` ON `difficulties`.id = `gradings`.difficulty_id WHERE (((questions.subject_id = '1') or (questions.subject_id = 19 and tags.name = 'English'))) Actually, looking at these all nicely formatted here, there's a crazy amount of joining going on here. This can't be optimal surely. Anyway, it looks like i have two questions. 1) I have an index on each of the ids and foreign key fields referred to here. The second of the above queries is the slowest, and calling explain on it (doing it directly in mysql) gives me the following: +----+-------------+----------------+--------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+----------------+--------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | questions | range | PRIMARY,index_questions_on_subject_id | PRIMARY | 4 | NULL | 30 | Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort | | 1 | SIMPLE | answers | ref | index_answers_on_question_id | index_answers_on_question_id | 5 | millionaire_development.questions.id | 2 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | quiz_questions | ref | index_quiz_questions_on_question_id | index_quiz_questions_on_question_id | 5 | millionaire_development.questions.id | 1 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | quizzes | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | millionaire_development.quiz_questions.quiz_id | 1 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | subjects | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | millionaire_development.questions.subject_id | 1 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | taggings | ref | index_taggings_on_taggable_id_and_taggable_type,index_taggings_on_taggable_type | index_taggings_on_taggable_id_and_taggable_type | 263 | millionaire_development.questions.id,const | 1 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | tags | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | millionaire_development.taggings.tag_id | 1 | Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | gradings | ref | index_gradings_on_question_id | index_gradings_on_question_id | 5 | millionaire_development.questions.id | 2 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | age_groups | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | millionaire_development.gradings.age_group_id | 1 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | difficulties | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | millionaire_development.gradings.difficulty_id | 1 | | +----+-------------+----------------+--------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+ The query_reviewer plugin has this to say about it - it lists several problems: Table questions: Using temporary table, Long key length (263), Using filesort MySQL must do an extra pass to find out how to retrieve the rows in sorted order. To resolve the query, MySQL needs to create a temporary table to hold the result. The key used for the index was rather long, potentially affecting indices in memory 2) It looks like rails isn't splitting this find up in a very optimal way. Is it, do you think? Am i better off doing several find queries manually rather than one big combined one? Grateful for any advice, max

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012Popular ReleasesActipro WPF Controls Contrib: v2012.1: Updated to target WPF Studio 2012.1 Changes target framework to .NET 4.0, uses native WPF 4.0 DataGrid, and Prism 4.1.FileZilla Server Config File Editor: FileZillaConfig 1.0.0.1: Sorry for not including the config file with the previous release. It was a "lost in translation" when I was moving my local repository to CodePlex repository. Sorry for the rookie mistake.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.25: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Client Profile, and Windows 8. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet! Follow @JoeMayo.GAC Explorer: GACExplorer_x86_Setup: Version 1.0BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.6: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info BlogEngine.NET Hosting - 3 months free! Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.2: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.2 (1)　Web???????、????????·????????? (2)　Web???????、?????????? COMSPEC PATHEXT WINDIR SERVERADDR SERVERPORT DOCUMENTROOT SERVERADMIN REMOTE_PORT HTTPACCEPTCHRSET HTTPACCEPTLANGUAGE HTTPACCEPTEXCODINGGardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator version 1.5.0: ChangesVersion 1.5.0 contains a number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly. The default encoding of the *.y file is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The /report option has been improved, as has the automaton tracing facility. New facilities are included that allow multiple parsers to share a common token type. A complete change-log is available as a separate documentation file. The source project has been upgraded to Visual...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.0: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.0 contains a small number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly by default. The default encoding for lex input files is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The distribution also contains helper code for symbol pushback by GPPG parsers. A complete changelog is available as a separate documenta...Kinect Quiz Engine: update for sdk v1.0: updated to the new sdkMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected using the TV Show Selector for a single show. General Will no longer prompt for ...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.5.2012.0508、XCoder v4.7.2012.0320: X????： 1，????For .Net 4.0?? XCoder????： 1，???????，????X????，?????? XCode????： 1，Insert/Update/Delete???????????????，???SQL???? 2，IEntityOperate?????? 3，????????IEntityTree 4，????????????????? 5，?????????? 6，??????????????Google Book Downloader: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports Cpython, IronPython, Jython and Pypy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging...AD Gallery: AD Gallery 1.2.7: NewsFixed a bug which caused the current thumbnail not to be highlighted Added a hook to take complete control over how descriptions are handled, take a look under Documentation for more info Added removeAllImages()51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.8: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.81. The IsFirstTime method of the RedirectModule will now return the same value when called multiple times for the same request. This was prevent...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection ver 2.2 (WinRT supported): Added NamedParameterAttribute, OptionalParameterAttribute. Added behaviors ICycleDependencyBehavior, IResolveUnregisteredTypeBehavior. Added WinRT support. Added support for NET 4.5. Added support for MVC 4.NShape - .Net Diagramming Framework for Industrial Applications: NShape 2.0.1: Changes in 2.0.1:Bugfixes: IRepository.Insert(Shape shape) and IRepository.Insert(IEnumerable<Shape> shapes) no longer insert shape connections. Several context menu items did display although the required permission was not granted Display did not reset the visible and active layers when changing the diagram NullReferenceException when pressing Del key and no shape was selected Changed Behavior: LayerCollection.Find("") no longer throws an exception. Improvements: Display does not rese...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.11.6: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...sb0t: sb0t 4.64: New commands added: #scribble <url> #adminscribble on #adminscribble offJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5: New feature - Added ItemIsReference, ItemReferenceLoopHandling, ItemTypeNameHandling, ItemConverterType to JsonPropertyAttribute New feature - Added ItemRequired to JsonObjectAttribute New feature - Added Path to JsonWriterException Change - Improved deserializer call stack memory usage Change - Moved the PDB files out of the NuGet package into a symbols package Fix - Fixed infinite loop from an input error when reading an array and error handling is enabled Fix - Fixed base objec...New Projects[ACID]IMVU Cache Cleaner: A IMVU Cache cleaner simple as that just with some major tweaks to the code is all giving it more power then most[ACID]IMVU Modder: IMVU Software Modder for adding and removing features from IMVUs official ClientAmarok Framework Library: This framework library is an attempt to take advantage of the actor/agent programming model for standalone desktop applications. Most of the concepts are inspired by the actor model, Microsoft Robotics CCR and the TPL Dataflow library.amking: private...Bradaz Utilities: This is just a collection of some of my Utility classes i use within my Open Source ProjectsChris's Blog examples code: This project contains code examples from blog post I write. My blog can be found at http://chriscpetersonblog.blogspot.com/Culinary web site: Project for web site that will collect and display culinary receiptsdaboost: A Visual Studio add-in designed to auto-generate boilerplate data access code. Ever work with a lot of stored procedures? Ever work with displaying data returned by those stored procedures to a stock web forms pages. If so, please take a look at DaBoost. It will save you alot of typing and mis-spelled paramater names. FtLinq: The "Faster-than-Light integrated language query" library provides LINQ-to-enumerable queries that are pretty much as fast as regular 'foreach' statements.Jokeri: MVVM Silverlight Multiplayer Card Game hosted in Facebook. LSX?????: ????????，????Permutations with CUDA and OpenCL: Finding massive permutations on GPU with CUDA and OpenCLScon SDK: SDK for using the scon SB022S USB Servo Controller board available at http://sconcon.com/index.htmlscpEdit: scpEdit is a full feature text editor focused on data searching, extraction and transformation rather then focused on code editing. It makes extensive use of regular expressions, support VBscript macros and a lot more. For now, the interface is only available in french. Translators are welcome. scpEdit est un éditeur texte professionnel principalement caractérisé par des fonctionnalités avancées de recherche, d'extraction et de transformation de texte tirant pleinement profit de la puissan...Selection sort: HelloSkyline: The team is working hard to create a new way to made thingsSOAGame maker: This project is still undergoing extensive testing and tweaking as well as re-Edting as well. So changes may occur as this software is released to the public, however. This is designed to be a "Shell" project, meaning the UI is done. But the coding still remains to be seen.SokobanSolver: Simple Sokoban Editor+Solver+Game. Written in Java+Eclipse+SWT.SPListViewFilter: The SharePoint List search / filter WebPartStochasticSimulation: A stochastic simulator for chemical reactions with low copy numberString Extensions: The String Extensions project aims to provide a more complete String type experience by adding extension methods (including overloads of existing methods) providing commonly required functionality in a well-tested and well-documented fashion.Suucha Expression: Suucha Expression??????????(?????)??(????)??????，??????????：SuuchaMemberExpression（?????）、SuuchaConstantExpression（?????）、SuuchaBinaryExprssion（?????，?????????，????、??、In、Like?），??????IQueryable?Where??。VoxelEngine: Minecraft style terrain engine in SlimDX, C# XNA 4.0Web API For Swedish Soccer: A Web API For accessing information on the Swedish Soccer LeagueWhois Client .NET: This is .NET Class library of WHOIS client (with sample web site).xlcanvas: silverlight 5 xna canvas draw 2d or 3d obj use xna api in silverlight 5

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• Taming Hopping Windows

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  At first glance, hopping windows seem fairly innocuous and obvious. They organize events into windows with a simple periodic definition: the windows have some duration d (e.g. a window covers 5 second time intervals), an interval or period p (e.g. a new window starts every 2 seconds) and an alignment a (e.g. one of those windows starts at 12:00 PM on March 15, 2012 UTC). var wins = xs     .HoppingWindow(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5),                    TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2),                    new DateTime(2012, 3, 15, 12, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc)); Logically, there is a window with start time a + np and end time a + np + d for every integer n. That’s a lot of windows. So why doesn’t the following query (always) blow up? var query = wins.Select(win => win.Count()); A few users have asked why StreamInsight doesn’t produce output for empty windows. Primarily it’s because there is an infinite number of empty windows! (Actually, StreamInsight uses DateTimeOffset.MaxValue to approximate “the end of time” and DateTimeOffset.MinValue to approximate “the beginning of time”, so the number of windows is lower in practice.) That was the good news. Now the bad news. Events also have duration. Consider the following simple input: var xs = this.Application                 .DefineEnumerable(() => new[]                     { EdgeEvent.CreateStart(DateTimeOffset.UtcNow, 0) })                 .ToStreamable(AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime); Because the event has no explicit end edge, it lasts until the end of time. So there are lots of non-empty windows if we apply a hopping window to that single event! For this reason, we need to be careful with hopping window queries in StreamInsight. Or we can switch to a custom implementation of hopping windows that doesn’t suffer from this shortcoming. The alternate window implementation produces output only when the input changes. We start by breaking up the timeline into non-overlapping intervals assigned to each window. In figure 1, six hopping windows (“Windows”) are assigned to six intervals (“Assignments”) in the timeline. Next we take input events (“Events”) and alter their lifetimes (“Altered Events”) so that they cover the intervals of the windows they intersect. In figure 1, you can see that the first event e1 intersects windows w1 and w2 so it is adjusted to cover assignments a1 and a2. Finally, we can use snapshot windows (“Snapshots”) to produce output for the hopping windows. Notice however that instead of having six windows generating output, we have only four. The first and second snapshots correspond to the first and second hopping windows. The remaining snapshots however cover two hopping windows each! While in this example we saved only two events, the savings can be more significant when the ratio of event duration to window duration is higher. Figure 1: Timeline The implementation of this strategy is straightforward. We need to set the start times of events to the start time of the interval assigned to the earliest window including the start time. Similarly, we need to modify the end times of events to the end time of the interval assigned to the latest window including the end time. The following snap-to-boundary function that rounds a timestamp value t down to the nearest value t' <= t such that t' is a + np for some integer n will be useful. For convenience, we will represent both DateTime and TimeSpan values using long ticks: static long SnapToBoundary(long t, long a, long p) {     return t - ((t - a) % p) - (t > a ? 0L : p); } How do we find the earliest window including the start time for an event? It’s the window following the last window that does not include the start time assuming that there are no gaps in the windows (i.e. duration < interval), and limitation of this solution. To find the end time of that antecedent window, we need to know the alignment of window ends: long e = a + (d % p); Using the window end alignment, we are finally ready to describe the start time selector: static long AdjustStartTime(long t, long e, long p) {     return SnapToBoundary(t, e, p) + p; } To find the latest window including the end time for an event, we look for the last window start time (non-inclusive): public static long AdjustEndTime(long t, long a, long d, long p) {     return SnapToBoundary(t - 1, a, p) + p + d; } Bringing it together, we can define the translation from events to ‘altered events’ as in Figure 1: public static IQStreamable<T> SnapToWindowIntervals<T>(IQStreamable<T> source, TimeSpan duration, TimeSpan interval, DateTime alignment) {     if (source == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("source");     // reason about DateTime and TimeSpan in ticks     long d = Math.Min(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, duration.Ticks);     long p = Math.Min(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, Math.Abs(interval.Ticks));     // set alignment to earliest possible window     var a = alignment.ToUniversalTime().Ticks % p;     // verify constraints of this solution     if (d <= 0L) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("duration"); }     if (p == 0L || p > d) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("interval"); }     // find the alignment of window ends     long e = a + (d % p);     return source.AlterEventLifetime(         evt => ToDateTime(AdjustStartTime(evt.StartTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, e, p)),         evt => ToDateTime(AdjustEndTime(evt.EndTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, a, d, p)) -             ToDateTime(AdjustStartTime(evt.StartTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, e, p))); } public static DateTime ToDateTime(long ticks) {     // just snap to min or max value rather than under/overflowing     return ticks < DateTime.MinValue.Ticks         ? new DateTime(DateTime.MinValue.Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc)         : ticks > DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks         ? new DateTime(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc)         : new DateTime(ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc); } Finally, we can describe our custom hopping window operator: public static IQWindowedStreamable<T> HoppingWindow2<T>(     IQStreamable<T> source,     TimeSpan duration,     TimeSpan interval,     DateTime alignment) {     if (source == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("source"); }     return SnapToWindowIntervals(source, duration, interval, alignment).SnapshotWindow(); } By switching from HoppingWindow to HoppingWindow2 in the following example, the query returns quickly rather than gobbling resources and ultimately failing! public void Main() {     var start = new DateTimeOffset(new DateTime(2012, 6, 28), TimeSpan.Zero);     var duration = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5);     var interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2);     var alignment = new DateTime(2012, 3, 15, 12, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc);     var events = this.Application.DefineEnumerable(() => new[]     {         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(0), "e0"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(1), "e1"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(1), start.AddSeconds(2), "e1"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(3), "e2"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(9), "e3"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(3), start.AddSeconds(10), "e2"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(9), start.AddSeconds(10), "e3"),     }).ToStreamable(AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime);     var adjustedEvents = SnapToWindowIntervals(events, duration, interval, alignment);     var query = from win in HoppingWindow2(events, duration, interval, alignment)                 select win.Count();     DisplayResults(adjustedEvents, "Adjusted Events");     DisplayResults(query, "Query"); } As you can see, instead of producing a massive number of windows for the open start edge e0, a single window is emitted from 12:00:15 AM until the end of time: Adjusted Events StartTime EndTime Payload 6/28/2012 12:00:01 AM 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM e0 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM e1 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM e2 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM e3 Query StartTime EndTime Payload 6/28/2012 12:00:01 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 1 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 2 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM 3 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 2 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM 3 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM 1 Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• How do you stop scripters from slamming your website hundreds of times a second?

  - by davebug

  [update] I've accepted an answer, as lc deserves the bounty due to the well thought-out answer, but sadly, I believe we're stuck with our original worst case scenario: CAPTCHA everyone on purchase attempts of the crap. Short explanation: caching / web farms make it impossible for us to actually track hits, and any workaround (sending a non-cached web-beacon, writing to a unified table, etc.) slows the site down worse than the bots would. There is likely some pricey bit of hardware from Cisco or the like that can help at a high level, but it's hard to justify the cost if CAPTCHAing everyone is an alternative. I'll attempt to do a more full explanation in here later, as well as cleaning this up for future searchers (though others are welcome to try, as it's community wiki). I've added bounty to this question and attempted to explain why the current answers don't fit our needs. First, though, thanks to all of you who have thought about this, it's amazing to have this collective intelligence to help work through seemingly impossible problems. I'll be a little more clear than I was before: This is about the bag o' crap sales on woot.com. I'm the president of Woot Workshop, the subsidiary of Woot that does the design, writes the product descriptions, podcasts, blog posts, and moderates the forums. I work in the css/html world and am only barely familiar with the rest of the developer world. I work closely with the developers and have talked through all of the answers here (and many other ideas we've had). Usability of the site is a massive part of my job, and making the site exciting and fun is most of the rest of it. That's where the three goals below derive. CAPTCHA harms usability, and bots steal the fun and excitement out of our crap sales. To set up the scenario a little more, bots are slamming our front page tens of times a second screenscraping (and/or scanning our rss) for the Random Crap sale. The moment they see that, it triggers a second stage of the program that logs in, clicks I want One, fills out the form, and buys the crap. In current (2/6/2009) order of votes: lc: On stackoverflow and other sites that use this method, they're almost always dealing with authenticated (logged in) users, because the task being attempted requires that. On Woot, anonymous (non-logged) users can view our home page. In other words, the slamming bots can be non-authenticated (and essentially non-trackable except by IP address). So we're back to scanning for IPs, which a) is fairly useless in this age of cloud networking and spambot zombies and b) catches too many innocents given the number of businesses that come from one IP address (not to mention the issues with non-static IP ISPs and potential performance hits to trying to track this). Oh, and having people call us would be the worst possible scenario. Can we have them call you? BradC Ned Batchelder's methods look pretty cool, but they're pretty firmly designed to defeat bots built for a network of sites. Our problem is bots are built specifically to defeat our site. Some of these methods could likely work for a short time until the scripters evolved their bots to ignore the honeypot, screenscrape for nearby label names instead of form ids, and use a javascript-capable browser control. lc again "Unless, of course, the hype is part of you

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• Python: Memory usage and optimization when modifying lists

  - by xApple

  The problem My concern is the following: I am storing a relativity large dataset in a classical python list and in order to process the data I must iterate over the list several times, perform some operations on the elements, and often pop an item out of the list. It seems that deleting one item out of a Python list costs O(N) since Python has to copy all the items above the element at hand down one place. Furthermore, since the number of items to delete is approximately proportional to the number of elements in the list this results in an O(N^2) algorithm. I am hoping to find a solution that is cost effective (time and memory-wise). I have studied what I could find on the internet and have summarized my different options below. Which one is the best candidate ? Keeping a local index: while processingdata: index = 0 while index < len(somelist): item = somelist[index] dosomestuff(item) if somecondition(item): del somelist[index] else: index += 1 This is the original solution I came up with. Not only is this not very elegant, but I am hoping there is better way to do it that remains time and memory efficient. Walking the list backwards: while processingdata: for i in xrange(len(somelist) - 1, -1, -1): dosomestuff(item) if somecondition(somelist, i): somelist.pop(i) This avoids incrementing an index variable but ultimately has the same cost as the original version. It also breaks the logic of dosomestuff(item) that wishes to process them in the same order as they appear in the original list. Making a new list: while processingdata: for i, item in enumerate(somelist): dosomestuff(item) newlist = [] for item in somelist: if somecondition(item): newlist.append(item) somelist = newlist gc.collect() This is a very naive strategy for eliminating elements from a list and requires lots of memory since an almost full copy of the list must be made. Using list comprehensions: while processingdata: for i, item in enumerate(somelist): dosomestuff(item) somelist[:] = [x for x in somelist if somecondition(x)] This is very elegant but under-the-cover it walks the whole list one more time and must copy most of the elements in it. My intuition is that this operation probably costs more than the original del statement at least memory wise. Keep in mind that somelist can be huge and that any solution that will iterate through it only once per run will probably always win. Using the filter function: while processingdata: for i, item in enumerate(somelist): dosomestuff(item) somelist = filter(lambda x: not subtle_condition(x), somelist) This also creates a new list occupying lots of RAM. Using the itertools' filter function: from itertools import ifilterfalse while processingdata: for item in itertools.ifilterfalse(somecondtion, somelist): dosomestuff(item) This version of the filter call does not create a new list but will not call dosomestuff on every item breaking the logic of the algorithm. I am including this example only for the purpose of creating an exhaustive list. Moving items up the list while walking while processingdata: index = 0 for item in somelist: dosomestuff(item) if not somecondition(item): somelist[index] = item index += 1 del somelist[index:] This is a subtle method that seems cost effective. I think it will move each item (or the pointer to each item ?) exactly once resulting in an O(N) algorithm. Finally, I hope Python will be intelligent enough to resize the list at the end without allocating memory for a new copy of the list. Not sure though. Abandoning Python lists: class Doubly_Linked_List: def __init__(self): self.first = None self.last = None self.n = 0 def __len__(self): return self.n def __iter__(self): return DLLIter(self) def iterator(self): return self.__iter__() def append(self, x): x = DLLElement(x) x.next = None if self.last is None: x.prev = None self.last = x self.first = x self.n = 1 else: x.prev = self.last x.prev.next = x self.last = x self.n += 1 class DLLElement: def __init__(self, x): self.next = None self.data = x self.prev = None class DLLIter: etc... This type of object resembles a python list in a limited way. However, deletion of an element is guaranteed O(1). I would not like to go here since this would require massive amounts of code refactoring almost everywhere.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 19, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 19, 2012Popular ReleasesOrchard Project: Orchard 1.6 RC: RELEASE NOTES This is the Release Candidate version of Orchard 1.6. You should use this version to prepare your current developments to the upcoming final release, and report problems. Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.6 RC: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-6-Release-Notes Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you wil...Rawr: Rawr 5.0.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...TFS 2012 Server/service Setup for Demo: TfsDemo_1.0.0.2: Release 1.0.0.2 New Stuff Feature 1 - Now add team favorite queries using the Tfs demo setup application. Simply specify the name of the work item query in the demoConfig.xml file and let the application work its magic. Feature 2 - Exclude the sections you do not want to be run as part of the demo. Mark the sections you don't want to run during the demo with the attribute Run="false" in the demoConfig.xml. Bug Fix 1 - If the DemoConfig.xml contains users or email addresses in work item a...XamlImageConverter: Xaml Image Converter 3.2: VisualStudio Integration Installer is now a VSIX Extension.Yahoo! 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Windows, Linux, Android and Windows 8. If you need to build for iOS or Mac you will need to get the source code at this time as the installers for those platforms are not available yet. The installer will also install a bunch of Project templates for Visual Studio 2010 , 2012 and MonoDevleop. For those of you wish...WPUtils: WPUtils 1.3: Blend SDK for Silverlight provides a HyperlinkAction which is missing in Blend SDK for Windows Phone. This release adds such an action which makes use of WebBrowserTask to show web page. You can also bind the hyperlink to your view model. NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.Windawesome: Windawesome v1.4.1 x64: Fixed switching of applications across monitors Changed window flashing API (fix your config files) Added NetworkMonitorWidget (thanks to weiwen) Any issues/recommendations/requests for future versions? This is the 64-bit version of the release. Be sure to use that if you are on a 64-bit Windows. Works with "Required DLLs v3".CODE Framework: 4.0.21017.0: See change log in the Documentation section for details.Global Stock Exchange (Hobby Project): Global Stock Exchange - Invst Banking (Hobby Proj): Initial VersionMagelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.1: Add support for .net 4.0 to Magelia.Webstore.Client and StarterSite version 2.1.254.3 Scheduler Import & Export feature (for Professional and Entreprise Editions) UTC datetime and timezone support .net 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 migration client magelia global refactoring release of a nugget package to help developers speed up development http://nuget.org/packages/Magelia.Webstore.Client optimization of the data update mechanism (a.k.a. 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Revitalized IndexedDB providerNow you c...VFPX: FoxcodePlus: FoxcodePlus - Visual Studio like extensions to Visual FoxPro IntelliSense.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.8 Beta: fixed the icon for packages on the desktop fixed the install dialog closing right when it starts removed the link to "set up the sdk for me" as this is no longer supported. fixed bug where the device selection dialog would show, even if there was only one device connected. fixed toolbar from having "gap" between other toolbar removed main menu items that do not have any menus Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.0: Prva verzija ovog projekta, još je uvijek oznacena kao BETA - ovo znaci da su naša testiranja prošla uspješno :) No, kako mi ne proizvodimo neki software za blagajne, tako sve ovo nije niti isprobano u "realnim" uvjetima - svaka je sugestija, primjedba ili prijava bug-a je dobrodošla. Za sve ovo koristite, molimo, Discussions ili Issue Tracker. 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Sitecore Image Placeholder: Sitecore Image Placeholder module helps Content Editors by displaying placeholders with correct image size when field of type Image is empty.SlidePuzzle: A slide puzzle.StackAttack: StackAttack is a .NET client for use with the Stack Exchange API v2.1.testASPsite: Nothing of interesttestdd18102012git01: dtestdd18102012tfs02: stestddgit10182012git03: tTransform Manager Task for creating assets in Windows Azure Media Services: Task for Transform Manager that creates assets in Windows Azure Media Services and requests a stream locator. Used to push assets into the cloud for streaming.Trie for C#: Implementing the Trie structer in C#/.Netwsccm11aah: My Project for Web Scripting and Content Creation module submitted to Steve Bennet and Mariana Lilleywuggi: Wuggi is a simple website that focuses on its users input to enrich its content. Discussions and feedback are always welcomed on Wuggi.YahtzeePC: A Yahtzee emulator for the PC.

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