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• A good php framework in 2012

  - by Jormundir

  I've done a lot of googling around this, and practically all of the answers I find are pre 2011, and are answered in the usual, here are the 5 most popular frameworks... So I'd like to update this topic for 2012, I'm going to build a web application with a pretty complex back-end system driving it, and I'd like to use a framework so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. My application will be hugely user based, so I would appreciate a built in authentication/validation system. (When this is missing it takes me a good 2 weeks of intense and frivolous research to try to pick the "best" one (I don't want to roll my own, I don't think I'd do a better job than what's out there). I've looked into a tried a few, so I'll give you what I like and don't like, but I don't want to bias answers too much. I don't like: Frameworks that auto-generate bloated code. If they have the feature, fine, but if I have to use it, I get frustrated. Backwards compatibility with php4, eww. I don't need backwards compatibility at all. I like: Getting up and running quickly (but without all the auto-generation bogus), what I mean by this is that all the essentials are there, so I don't have to come to a grinding halt to research what the best 3rd party plugin is to get the feature I need. Thorough documentation, good tutorials. Good presentation of these materials. Please explain why your framework suggestion is good, don't just give the name of a framework without any justification. Thanks!

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• [c++/STL] Selective iterator

  - by rubenvb

  FYI: no boost, yes it has this, I want to reinvent the wheel ;) Is there some form of a selective iterator (possible) in C++? What I want is to seperate strings like this: some:word{or other to a form like this: some : word { or other I can do that with two loops and find_first_of(":") and ("{") but this seems (very) inefficient to me. I thought that maybe there would be a way to create/define/write an iterator that would iterate over all these values with for_each. I fear this will have me writing a full-fledged custom way-too-complex iterator class for a std::string. So I thought maybe this would do: std::vector<size_t> list; size_t index = mystring.find(":"); while( index != std::string::npos ) { list.push_back(index); index = mystring.find(":", list.back()); } std::for_each(list.begin(), list.end(), addSpaces(mystring)); This looks messy to me, and I'm quite sure a more elegant way of doing this exists. But I can't think of it. Anyone have a bright idea? Thanks PS: I did not test the code posted, just a quick write-up of what I would try

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• Ubuntu 10.04 not detecting multiple monitors

  - by user28837

  I have 2 graphics cards, the output from the lspci: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] I have one monitor connected to the 4850 and 2 connected to the 4350. However when I go into System Preferences Monitors the only monitor shown is the one connected to the 4850. Is there something I need to enable for it to be able to use the other card? How do I get this to work. Thanks. As per request: X.Org X Server 1.7.6 Release Date: 2010-03-17 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-25-server i686 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux jeff-desktop 2.6.32-22-generic-pae #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 14:57:29 UTC 2010 i686 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-22-generic-pae root=UUID=852e1013-4ed6-40fd-a462-c29087888383 ro quiet splash Build Date: 23 April 2010 05:11:50PM xorg-server 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7 (Bryce Harrington <[email protected]>) Current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Tue May 11 08:24:52 2010 (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" (==) Using config directory: "/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d" (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section. (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen" (0) (**) | |-->Monitor "<default monitor>" (==) No device specified for screen "Default Screen". Using the first device section listed. (**) | |-->Device "Default Device" (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen". Using a default monitor configuration. (==) Automatically adding devices (==) Automatically enabling devices (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. Entry deleted from font path. (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi, /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType, built-ins (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. (II) Loader magic: 0x81f0e80 (II) Module ABI versions: X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 X.Org Video Driver: 6.0 X.Org XInput driver : 7.0 X.Org Server Extension : 2.0 (++) using VT number 7 (--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 1002:9442:174b:e104 ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] rev 0, Mem @ 0xc0000000/268435456, 0xfe7e0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000a000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072 (--) PCI: (0:2:0:0) 1002:954f:1462:1618 ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] rev 0, Mem @ 0xd0000000/268435456, 0xfe8e0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000b000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072 (WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory) (II) "extmod" will be loaded by default. (II) "dbe" will be loaded by default. (II) "glx" will be loaded. This was enabled by default and also specified in the config file. (II) "record" will be loaded by default. (II) "dri" will be loaded by default. (II) "dri2" will be loaded by default. (II) LoadModule: "glx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/extensions/libglx.so (II) Module glx: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 7.5.0, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension GLX (II) LoadModule: "extmod" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libextmod.so (II) Module extmod: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER (II) Loading extension XFree86-VidModeExtension (II) Loading extension XFree86-DGA (II) Loading extension DPMS (II) Loading extension XVideo (II) Loading extension XVideo-MotionCompensation (II) Loading extension X-Resource (II) LoadModule: "dbe" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdbe.so (II) Module dbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension DOUBLE-BUFFER (II) LoadModule: "record" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/librecord.so (II) Module record: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.13.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension RECORD (II) LoadModule: "dri" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri.so (II) Module dri: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI (II) LoadModule: "dri2" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri2.so (II) Module dri2: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension DRI2 (II) LoadModule: "fglrx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so (II) Module fglrx: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 8.72.11 Module class: X.Org Video Driver (II) Loading sub module "fglrxdrm" (II) LoadModule: "fglrxdrm" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/linux/libfglrxdrm.so (II) Module fglrxdrm: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 8.72.11 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version Identifier:8.72.11 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Release Identifier: 8.723.1 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Build Date: Apr 8 2010 21:40:29 (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0 (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fglrx (II) Loading PCS database from /etc/ati/amdpcsdb (--) Assigning device section with no busID to primary device (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@2:0:0) found (--) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x9442) found (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@2:0:1) found (**) ChipID override: 0x954F (**) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x954F) found (II) AMD Video driver is running on a device belonging to a group targeted for this release (II) AMD Video driver is signed (II) fglrx(0): pEnt->device->identifier=0x9428aa0 (II) pEnt->device->identifier=(nil) (II) fglrx(0): === [atiddxPreInit] === begin (II) Loading sub module "vgahw" (II) LoadModule: "vgahw" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvgahw.so (II) Module vgahw: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 0.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section "Default Screen" for depth/fbbpp 24/32 (**) fglrx(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 (II) fglrx(0): Pixel depth = 24 bits stored in 4 bytes (32 bpp pixmaps) (==) fglrx(0): Default visual is TrueColor (==) fglrx(0): RGB weight 888 (II) fglrx(0): Using 8 bits per RGB (==) fglrx(0): Buffer Tiling is ON (II) Loading sub module "fglrxdrm" (II) LoadModule: "fglrxdrm" (II) Reloading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/linux/libfglrxdrm.so ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 10, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 10 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 10, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 10 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 11, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 11 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series" (Chipset = 0x9442) (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x174b, PciSubDevice = 0xe104) (==) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party graphics adapter - NOT original ATI (--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xc0000000 (--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xfe7e0000 (--) fglrx(0): I/O port at 0x0000a000 (==) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0x000c0000 (II) fglrx(0): AC Adapter is used (II) fglrx(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000 (II) Loading sub module "vbe" (II) LoadModule: "vbe" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvbe.so (II) Module vbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): VESA BIOS detected (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Version 3.0 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Total Mem: 16384 kB (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM: ATI ATOMBIOS (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Software Rev: 11.13 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Vendor: (C) 1988-2005, ATI Technologies Inc. (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Product: RV770 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Product Rev: 01.00 (II) fglrx(0): ATI Video BIOS revision 9 or later detected (--) fglrx(0): Video RAM: 524288 kByte, Type: GDDR3 (II) fglrx(0): PCIE card detected (--) fglrx(0): Using per-process page tables (PPPT) as GART. (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series" (Chipset = 0x954f) (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x1462, PciSubDevice = 0x1618) (==) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party graphics adapter - NOT original ATI (--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd0000000 (--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xfe8e0000 (--) fglrx(0): I/O port at 0x0000b000 (==) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0x000c0000 (II) fglrx(0): AC Adapter is used (II) fglrx(0): Invalid ATI BIOS from int10, the adapter is not VGA-enabled (II) fglrx(0): ATI Video BIOS revision 9 or later detected (--) fglrx(0): Video RAM: 524288 kByte, Type: DDR2 (II) fglrx(0): PCIE card detected (--) fglrx(0): Using per-process page tables (PPPT) as GART. (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported (II) fglrx(0): Using adapter: 1:0.0. (II) fglrx(0): [FB] MC range(MCFBBase = 0xf00000000, MCFBSize = 0x20000000) (II) fglrx(0): Interrupt handler installed at IRQ 31. (II) fglrx(0): Using adapter: 2:0.0. (II) fglrx(0): [FB] MC range(MCFBBase = 0xf00000000, MCFBSize = 0x20000000) (II) fglrx(0): RandR 1.2 support is enabled! (II) fglrx(0): RandR 1.2 rotation support is enabled! (==) fglrx(0): Center Mode is disabled (II) Loading sub module "fb" (II) LoadModule: "fb" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libfb.so (II) Module fb: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 (II) Loading sub module "ddc" (II) LoadModule: "ddc" (II) Module "ddc" already built-in (II) fglrx(0): Finished Initialize PPLIB! (II) Loading sub module "ddc" (II) LoadModule: "ddc" (II) Module "ddc" already built-in (II) fglrx(0): Connected Display0: DFP on external TMDS [tmds2] (II) fglrx(0): Display0 EDID data --------------------------- (II) fglrx(0): Manufacturer: DEL Model: a038 Serial#: 810829397 (II) fglrx(0): Year: 2008 Week: 51 (II) fglrx(0): EDID Version: 1.3 (II) fglrx(0): Digital Display Input (II) fglrx(0): Max Image Size [cm]: horiz.: 53 vert.: 30 (II) fglrx(0): Gamma: 2.20 (II) fglrx(0): DPMS capabilities: StandBy Suspend Off (II) fglrx(0): Supported color encodings: RGB 4:4:4 YCrCb 4:4:4 (II) fglrx(0): Default color space is primary color space (II) fglrx(0): First detailed timing is preferred mode (II) fglrx(0): redX: 0.640 redY: 0.330 greenX: 0.300 greenY: 0.600 (II) fglrx(0): blueX: 0.150 blueY: 0.060 whiteX: 0.312 whiteY: 0.329 (II) fglrx(0): Supported established timings: (II) fglrx(0): 720x400@70Hz (II) fglrx(0): 640x480@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 640x480@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 800x600@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 800x600@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1024x768@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1024x768@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1280x1024@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): Manufacturer's mask: 0 (II) fglrx(0): Supported standard timings: (II) fglrx(0): #0: hsize: 1152 vsize 864 refresh: 75 vid: 20337 (II) fglrx(0): #1: hsize: 1280 vsize 1024 refresh: 60 vid: 32897 (II) fglrx(0): #2: hsize: 1920 vsize 1080 refresh: 60 vid: 49361 (II) fglrx(0): Supported detailed timing: (II) fglrx(0): clock: 148.5 MHz Image Size: 531 x 298 mm (II) fglrx(0): h_active: 1920 h_sync: 2008 h_sync_end 2052 h_blank_end 2200 h_border: 0 (II) fglrx(0): v_active: 1080 v_sync: 1084 v_sync_end 1089 v_blanking: 1125 v_border: 0 (II) fglrx(0): Serial No: Y183D8CF0TFU (II) fglrx(0): Monitor name: DELL S2409W (II) fglrx(0): Ranges: V min: 50 V max: 76 Hz, H min: 30 H max: 83 kHz, PixClock max 170 MHz (II) fglrx(0): EDID (in hex): (II) fglrx(0): 00ffffffffffff0010ac38a055465430 (II) fglrx(0): 3312010380351e78eeee91a3544c9926 (II) fglrx(0): 0f5054a54b00714f8180d1c001010101 (II) fglrx(0): 010101010101023a801871382d40582c (II) fglrx(0): 4500132a2100001e000000ff00593138 (II) fglrx(0): 3344384346305446550a000000fc0044 (II) fglrx(0): 454c4c205332343039570a20000000fd (II) fglrx(0): 00324c1e5311000a2020202020200059 (II) fglrx(0): End of Display0 EDID data -------------------- (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP2 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT1 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT2 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP2 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS connected (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT1 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT2 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Using exact sizes for initial modes (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS using initial mode 1920x1080 (II) fglrx(0): DPI set to (96, 96) (II) fglrx(0): Adapter ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series has 2 configurable heads and 1 displays connected. (==) fglrx(0): QBS disabled (==) fglrx(0): PseudoColor visuals disabled (II) Loading sub module "ramdac" (II) LoadModule: "ramdac" (II) Module "ramdac" already built-in (==) fglrx(0): NoAccel = NO (==) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO (==) fglrx(0): Capabilities: 0x00000000 (==) fglrx(0): CapabilitiesEx: 0x00000000 (==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "fglrx_dri.so" (==) fglrx(0): UseFastTLS=0 (==) fglrx(0): BlockSignalsOnLock=1 (--) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp (II) Loading extension ATIFGLRXDRI (II) fglrx(0): doing swlDriScreenInit (II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit for fglrx driver ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 17, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 17 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 17, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 17 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] DRM interface version 1.0 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] created "fglrx" driver at busid "PCI:1:0:0" (II) fglrx(0): [uki] added 8192 byte SAREA at 0x2000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] mapped SAREA 0x2000 to 0xb6996000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] framebuffer handle = 0x3000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] added 1 reserved context for kernel (II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit done (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Version Information: (II) fglrx(0): Name: fglrx (II) fglrx(0): Version: 8.72.11 (II) fglrx(0): Date: Apr 8 2010 (II) fglrx(0): Desc: ATI FireGL DRM kernel module (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver. (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Build Time Information: (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel UTS_RELEASE: 2.6.32-22-generic-pae (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel MODVERSIONS: yes (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel __SMP__: yes (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel PAGE_SIZE: 0x1000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] register handle = 0x00004000 (II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull! (II) fglrx(0): FBADPhys: 0xf00000000 FBMappedSize: 0x01068000 (II) fglrx(0): FBMM initialized for area (0,0)-(1920,2240) (II) fglrx(0): FBMM auto alloc for area (0,0)-(1920,1920) (front color buffer - assumption) (II) fglrx(0): Largest offscreen area available: 1920 x 320 (==) fglrx(0): Backing store disabled (II) Loading extension FGLRXEXTENSION (==) fglrx(0): DPMS enabled (II) fglrx(0): Initialized in-driver Xinerama extension (**) fglrx(0): Textured Video is enabled. (II) LoadModule: "glesx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/glesx.so (II) Module glesx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension GLESX (II) Loading sub module "xaa" (II) LoadModule: "xaa" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libxaa.so (II) Module xaa: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.2.1 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): GLESX enableFlags = 94 (II) fglrx(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) Screen to screen bit blits Solid filled rectangles Solid Horizontal and Vertical Lines Driver provided ScreenToScreenBitBlt replacement Driver provided FillSolidRects replacement (II) fglrx(0): GLESX is enabled (II) LoadModule: "amdxmm" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/amdxmm.so (II) Module amdxmm: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension AMDXVOPL (II) fglrx(0): UVD2 feature is available (II) fglrx(0): Enable composite support successfully (II) fglrx(0): X context handle = 0x1 (II) fglrx(0): [DRI] installation complete (==) fglrx(0): Silken mouse enabled (==) fglrx(0): Using HW cursor of display infrastructure! (II) fglrx(0): Disabling in-server RandR and enabling in-driver RandR 1.2. (--) RandR disabled (II) Found 2 VGA devices: arbiter wrapping enabled (II) Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension (II) Initializing built-in extension SHAPE (II) Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM (II) Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension (II) Initializing built-in extension XTEST (II) Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS (II) Initializing built-in extension SYNC (II) Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD (II) Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC (II) Initializing built-in extension SECURITY (II) Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA (II) Initializing built-in extension XFIXES (II) Initializing built-in extension RENDER (II) Initializing built-in extension RANDR (II) Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE (II) Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 18, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 18 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 18, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 18 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so (II) GLX: Initialized DRI GL provider for screen 0 (II) fglrx(0): Enable the clock gating! (II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 507 x 285 (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-B20D7FC79C7F597315E3E501AEF10E0D866E8E92.xkm (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event1) (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (II) LoadModule: "evdev" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so (II) Module evdev: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.3.2 Module class: X.Org XInput Driver ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 7.0 (**) Power Button: always reports core events (**) Power Button: Device: "/dev/input/event1" (II) Power Button: Found keys (II) Power Button: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event0) (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Power Button: always reports core events (**) Power Button: Device: "/dev/input/event0" (II) Power Button: Found keys (II) Power Button: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (/dev/input/event3) (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Device: "/dev/input/event3" (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found 12 mouse buttons (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found scroll wheel(s) (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found relative axes (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found x and y relative axes (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Configuring as mouse (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" (type: MOUSE) (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: initialized for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (/dev/input/mouse1) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard (/dev/input/event4) (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Device: "/dev/input/event4" (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Found keys (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard (/dev/input/event5) (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Device: "/dev/input/event5" (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Found keys (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/event6) (**) KEYBOARD: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) KEYBOARD: always reports core events (**) KEYBOARD: Device: "/dev/input/event6" (II) KEYBOARD: Found keys (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "KEYBOARD" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/event7) (**) KEYBOARD: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) KEYBOARD: always reports core events (**) KEYBOARD: Device: "/dev/input/event7" (II) KEYBOARD: Found 14 mouse buttons (II) KEYBOARD: Found scroll wheel(s) (II) KEYBOARD: Found relative axes (II) KEYBOARD: Found keys (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as mouse (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as keyboard (**) KEYBOARD: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) KEYBOARD: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "KEYBOARD" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (EE) KEYBOARD: failed to initialize for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/mouse2) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) config/udev: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation (/dev/input/event2) (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: always reports core events (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Device: "/dev/input/event2" (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found 3 mouse buttons (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found relative axes (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found x and y relative axes (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Configuring as mouse (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Macintosh mouse button emulation" (type: MOUSE) (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: initialized for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation (/dev/input/mouse0) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) fglrx(0): Restoring Recent Mode via PCS is not supported in RANDR 1.2 capable environments

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• Automating silent software deployments on Solaris 10

  - by datSilencer

  Hello everyone. Essentially, the question I'd like to ask is related to the automation of software package deployments on Solaris 10. Specifically, I have a set of software components in tar files that run as daemon processes after being extracted and configured in the host environment. Pretty much like any server side software package out there, I need to ensure that a list of prerequisites are met before extracting and running the software. For example: Checking that certain users exists, and they are associated with one or many user groups. If not, then create them and their group associations. Checking that target application folders exist and if not, then create them with preconfigured path values defined when the package was assembled. Checking that such folders have the appropriate access control level and ownership for a certain user. If not, then set them. Checking that a set of environment variables are defined in /etc/profile, pointed to predefined path locations, added to the general $PATH environment variable, and finally exported into the user's environment. Other files include /etc/services and /etc/system. Obviously, doing this for many boxes (the goal in question) by hand can be slow and error prone. I believe a better alternative is to somehow automate this process. So far I have thought about the following options, and discarded them for one reason or another. 1) Traditional shell scripts. I've only troubleshooted these before, and I don't really have much experience with them. These would be my last resort. 2) Python scripts using the pexpect library for analyzing system command output. This was my initial choice since the target Solaris environments have it installed. However, I want to make sure that I'm not reinveting the wheel again :P. 3) Ant or Gradle scripts. They may be an option since the boxes also have java 1.5 enabled, and the fileset abstractions can be very useful. However, they may fall short when dealing with user and folder permissions checking/setting. It seems obvious to me that I'm not the first person in this situation, but I don't seem to find a utility framework geared towards this purpose. Please let me know if there's a better way to accomplish this. I thank you for your time and help.

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• Puppet and launchd services?

  - by Joel Westberg

  We have a production environment configured with Puppet, and want to be able to set up a similar environment on our development machines: a mix of Red Hats, Ubuntus and OSX. As might be expected, OSX is the odd man out here, and sadly, I'm having a lot of trouble with getting this to work. My first attempt was using macports, using the following declaration: package { 'rabbitmq-server': ensure => installed, provider => macports, } but this, sadly, generates the following error: Error: /Stage[main]/Rabbitmq/Package[rabbitmq-server]: Could not evaluate: Execution of '/opt/local/bin/port -q installed rabbitmq-server' returned 1: usage: cut -b list [-n] [file ...] cut -c list [file ...] cut -f list [-s] [-d delim] [file ...] while executing "exec dscl -q . -read /Users/$env(SUDO_USER) NFSHomeDirectory | cut -d ' ' -f 2" (procedure "mportinit" line 95) invoked from within "mportinit ui_options global_options global_variations" Next up, I figured I'd give homebrew a try. There is no package provider available by default, but puppet-homebrew seemed promising. Here, I got much farther, and actually managed to get the install to work. package { 'rabbitmq': ensure => installed, provider => brew, } file { "plist": path => "/Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.rabbitmq.plist", source => "/usr/local/opt/rabbitmq/homebrew.mxcl.rabbitmq.plist", ensure => present, owner => root, group => wheel, mode => 0644, } service { "homebrew.mxcl.rabbitmq": enable => true, ensure => running, provider => "launchd", require => [ File["/Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.rabbitmq.plist"] ], } Here, I don't get any error. But RabbitMQ doesn't start either (as it does if I do a manual load with launchctl) [... snip ...] Debug: Executing '/bin/launchctl list' Debug: Executing '/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 -o /dev/stdout /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.rabbitmq.plist' Debug: Executing '/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 -o /dev/stdout /var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist' Debug: /Schedule[weekly]: Skipping device resources because running on a host Debug: /Schedule[puppet]: Skipping device resources because running on a host Debug: Finishing transaction 2248294820 Debug: Storing state Debug: Stored state in 0.01 seconds Finished catalog run in 25.90 seconds What am I doing wrong?

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• Low FPS in some games, but hardware not fully used

  - by Mario De Schaepmeester

  I just did a little funny experiment in the game/sim "Train Simulator 2013". I normally have good FPS in it (around 30) at full settings. What I did was make a really, really long train so that the calculations the sim needed to make were enormous (the sim is quite realistic, it takes all things into account like speed/acceleration, G-forces, comfort levels, possible wheel slip and many more, and most of those things on each carriage seperately). This resulted in only 14FPS as reported by the game, but it felt more like 8FPS or so. I have a Logitech G15 keyboard which has an LCD, and it allows me to monitor CPU/RAM and video card load on it. The strange thing is, all CPU cores were busy, but the total load was only about 60% maximum at all times. The video card was only on 30% load (possibly an important note, the memory was full, which is however not unusual for the game in question). The RAM had plenty of room and there weren't many operations as it didn't grow or shrink much. I just have the feeling that the game would run smoother if it used more of my hardware power. Why is it not doing so? I had the same in another game, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind when using more than 100 mods (that all use scripting) and a few high res texture mods, + a full-on graphics improvement program. The engine is very old (2003), and so I thought this might be the cause (not being optimised for multithreading). I had thought of possible causes, like: The operating system doesn't let the games use all the resources. It doesn't make use of multi-threading appropriately. To eliminate the former, I tried a CPU stress tool and that got 100% CPU juice as I let it run, so the OS is not the problem. I gave its thread the "higher" priority though. My actual question In both games, I did things the engine was not really built to do or support. Can those games' framerate be limited cause of their own engine not being able to cope? What is the real reason and more importantly, can I help it? And in any case, could something actually be wrong with my hardware? It's all reasonably new, a couple of months, and I (almost) never experience any other trouble. Modern and much more demanding games work absolutely fine. Specs CPU: AMD Phenom II 965 X4 @ 3.4gHz RAM: 8GB of DDR3 RAM Video: MSI GTX560 (nVidia chip) with 1GB of GDDR5 memory OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Nothing overclocked.

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• This is the End of Business as Usual...

  - by Michael Snow

  This week, we'll be hosting our last Social Business Thought Leader Series Webcast for 2012. Our featured guest this week will be Brian Solis of Altimeter Group. As we've been going through the preparations for Brian's webcast, it became very clear that an hour's time is barely scraping the surface of the depth of Brian's insights and analysis. Accordingly, in the spirit of sharing Brian's perspective for all of our readers, we'll be featuring guest posts all this week pulled from Brian's larger collection of blog postings on his own website. If you like what you've read here this week, we highly recommend digging deeper into his tome of wisdom. Guest Post by Brian Solis, Analyst, Altimeter Group as originally featured on his site with the minor change of the video addition at the beginning of the post. This is the End of Business as Usual and the Beginning of a New Era of Relevance - Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group The Times They Are A-Changin’ Come gather ’round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you Is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’. - Bob Dylan I’m sure you are wondering why I chose lyrics to open this article. If you skimmed through them, stop here for a moment. Go back through the Dylan’s words and take your time. Carefully read, and feel, what it is he’s saying and savor the moment to connect the meaning of his words to the challenges you face today. His message is as important and true today as it was when they were first written in 1964. The tide is indeed once again turning. And even though the 60s now live in the history books, right here, right now, Dylan is telling us once again that this is our time to not only sink or swim, but to do something amazing. This is your time. This is our time. But, these times are different and what comes next is difficult to grasp. How people communicate. How people learn and share. How people make decisions. Everything is different now. Think about this…you’re reading this article because it was sent to you via email. Yet more people spend their online time in social networks than they do in email. Duh. According to Nielsen, of the total time spent online 22.5% are connecting and communicating in social networks. To put that in perspective, the time spent in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube is greater than online gaming at 9.8%, email at 7.6% and search at 4%. Imagine for a moment if you and I were connected to one another in Facebook, which just so happens to be the largest social network in the world. How big? Well, Facebook is the size today of the entire Internet in 2004. There are over 1 billion people friending, Liking, commenting, sharing, and engaging in Facebook…that’s roughly 12% of the world’s population. Twitter has over 200 million users. Ever hear of tumblr? More time is spent on this popular microblogging community than Twitter. The point is that the landscape for communication and all that’s affected by human interaction is profoundly different than how you and I learned, shared or talked to one another yesterday. This transformation is only becoming more pervasive and, it’s not going back. Survival of the Fitting But social media is just one of the channels we can use to reach people. I must be honest. I’m as much a part of tomorrow as I am of yesteryear. It’s why I spend all of my time researching the evolution of media and its impact on business and culture. Because of you, I share everything I learn in newsletters, emails, blogs, Youtube videos, and also traditional books. I’m dedicated to helping everyone not only understand, but grasp the change that’s before you. Technologies such as social, mobile, virtual, augmented, et al compel us adapt our story and value proposition and extend our reach to be part of communities we don’t realize exist. The people who will keep you in business or running tomorrow are the very people you’re not reaching today. Before you continue to read on, allow me to clarify my point of view. My inspiration for writing this is to help you augment, not necessarily replace, the programs you’re running today. We must still reach those whom matter to us in the ways they prefer to be engaged. To reach what I call the connected consumer of Geneeration-C we must too reach them in the ways they wish to be engaged. And in all of my work, how they connect, talk to one another, influence others, and make decisions are not at all like the traditional consumers of the past. Nor are they merely the kids…the Millennial. Connected consumers are representative across every age group and demographic. As you can see, use of social networks, media sharing sites, microblogs, blogs, etc. equally span across Gen Y, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. The DNA of connected customers is indiscriminant of age or any other demographic for that matter. This is more about psychographics, the linkage of people through common interests (than it is their age, gender, education, nationality or level of income. Once someone is introduced to the marvels of connectedness, the sensation becomes a contagion. It touches and affects everyone. And, that’s why this isn’t going anywhere but normalcy. Social networking isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing. Nor is it just about generic, meaningless conversation. Today’s connected consumer is incredibly influential. They’re connected to hundreds and even thousands of other like-minded people. What they experiences, what they support, it’s shared throughout these networks and as information travels, it shapes and steers impressions, decisions, and experiences of others. For example, if we revisit the Nielsen research, we get an idea of just how big this is becoming. 75% spend heavily on music. How does that translate to the arts? I’d imagine the number is equally impressive. If 53% follow their favorite brand or organization, imagine what’s possible. Just like this email list that connects us, connections in social networks are powerful. The difference is however, that people spend more time in social networks than they do in email. Everything begins with an understanding of the “5 W’s and H.E.” – Who, What, When, Where, How, and to What Extent? The data that comes back tells you which networks are important to the people you’re trying to reach, how they connect, what they share, what they value, and how to connect with them. From there, your next steps are to create a community strategy that extends your mission, vision, and value and it align it with the interests, behavior, and values of those you wish to reach and galvanize. To help, I’ve prepared an action list for you, otherwise known as the 10 Steps Toward New Relevance: 1. Answer why you should engage in social networks and why anyone would want to engage with you 2. Observe what brings them together and define how you can add value to the conversation 3. Identify the influential voices that matter to your world, recognize what’s important to them, and find a way to start a dialogue that can foster a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship 4. Study the best practices of not just organizations like yours, but also those who are successfully reaching the type of people you’re trying to reach – it’s benching marking against competitors and benchmarking against undefined opportunities 5. Translate all you’ve learned into a convincing presentation written to demonstrate tangible opportunity to your executive board, make the case through numbers, trends, data, insights – understanding they have no idea what’s going on out there and you are both the scout and the navigator (start with a recommended pilot so everyone can learn together) 6. Listen to what they’re saying and develop a process to learn from activity and adapt to interests and steer engagement based on insights 7. Recognize how they use social media and innovate based on what you observe to captivate their attention 8. Align your objectives with their objectives. If you’re unsure of what they’re looking for…ask 9. Invest in the development of content, engagement 10. Build a community, invest in values, spark meaningful dialogue, and offer tangible value…the kind of value they can’t get anywhere else. Take advantage of the medium and the opportunity! The reality is that we live and compete in a perpetual era of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than our ability to adapt. This is why it’s our time to alter our course. We must connect with those who are defining the future of engagement, commerce, business, and how the arts are appreciated and supported. Even though it is the end of business as usual, it is the beginning of a new age of opportunity. The consumer revolution is already underway, and the question is: How do you better understand the role you play in this production as a connected or social consumer as well as business professional? Again, this is your time to define a new era of engagement and relevance. Originally written for The National Arts Marketing Project Connect with Brian via: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ --- Note from Michael: If you really like this post above - check out Brian's TEDTalk and his thought process for preparing it in this post: 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} http://www.briansolis.com/2012/10/tedtalk-reinventing-consumer-capitalism-screw-business-as-usual/

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 2 – Learn through disagreement

  - by Chris George

  I think I was in the right place! During Day 1 I kept on reading tweets about Lean Coffee that has happened earlier that morning. It intrigued me and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, and set my alarm for 6:45am. Following the award night the night before, it was _really_ hard getting up when it went off, but I did and after a very early breakfast, set off for the 10 min walk to the Dorint. With Lean Coffee due to start at 07:30, I arrived at the hotel and made my way to one of the hotel bars. I soon realised I was in the right place as although the bar was empty, there was a table with post-it’s and pens! This MUST be the place! The premise of Lean Coffee is to have several small timeboxed discussions. Everyone writes down what they would like to discuss on post-its that are then briefly explained and submitted to the pile. Once everyone is done, the group dot-votes on the topics. The topics are then sorted by the dot vote counts and the discussions begin. Each discussion had 8 mins to start with, which meant it prevented the discussions getting off topic too much. After the time elapsed, the group had a vote whether to extend the discussion by a further 4 mins or move on. Several discussion were had around training, soft skills etc. The conversations were really interesting and there were quite a few good ideas. Overall it was a very enjoyable experience, certainly worth the early start! Make Melly Happy Following Lean Coffee was real coffee, and much needed that was! The first keynote of the day was “Let’s help Melly (Changing Work into Life)”by Jurgen Appelo. Draw lines to track happiness This was a very interesting presentation, and set the day nicely. The theme to the keynote was projects are about the people, more-so than the actual tasks. So he started by showing a photo of an employee ‘Melly’ who looked happy enough. He then stated that she looked happy but actually hated her job. In fact 50% of Americans hate their jobs. He went on to say that the world over 50% of people hate Americans their jobs. Jurgen talked about many ways to reduce the feedback cycle, not only of the project, but of the people management. Ideas such as Happiness doors, happiness tracking (drawing lines on a wall indicating your happiness for that day), kudo boxes (to compliment a colleague for good work). All of these (and more) ideas stimulate conversation amongst the team, lead to early detection of issues and investigation of solutions. I’ve massively simplified Jurgen’s keynote and have certainly not done it justice, so I will post a link to the video once it’s available. Following more coffee, the next talk was “How releasing faster changes testing” by Alexander Schwartz. This is a topic very close to our hearts at the moment, so I was eager to find out any juicy morsels that could help us achieve more frequent releases, and Alex did not disappoint. He started off by confirming something that I have been a firm believer in for a number of years now; adding more people can do more harm than good when trying to release. This is for a number of reasons, but just adding new people to a team at such a critical time can be more of a drain on resources than they add. The alternative is to have the whole team have shared responsibility for faster delivery. So the whole team is responsible for quality and testing. Obviously you will have the test engineers on the project who have the specialist skills, but there is no reason that the entire team cannot do exploratory testing on the product. This links nicely with the Developer Exploratory testing presented by Sigge on Day 1, and certainly something that my team are really striving towards. Focus on cycle time, so what can be done to reduce the time between dev cycles, release cycles. What’s stops a release, what delays a release? all good solid questions that can be answered. Alex suggested that perhaps the product doesn’t need to be fully tested. Doing less testing will reduce the cycle time therefore get the release out faster. He suggested a risk-based approach to planning what testing needs to happen. Reducing testing could have an impact on revenue if it causes harm to customers, so test the ‘right stuff’! Determine a set of tests that are ‘face saving’ or ‘smoke’ tests. These tests cover the core functionality of the product and aim to prevent major embarrassment if these areas were to fail! Amongst many other very good points, Alex suggested that a good approach would be to release after every new feature is added. So do a bit of work -> release, do some more work -> release. By releasing small increments of work, the impact on the customer of bugs being introduced is reduced. Red Pill, Blue Pill The second keynote of the day was “Adaptation and improvisation – but your weakness is not your technique” by Markus Gartner and proved to be another very good presentation. It started off quoting lines from the Matrix which relate to adapting, improvising, realisation and mastery. It has alot of nerds in the room smiling! Markus went on to explain how through deliberate practice ( and a lot of it!) you can achieve mastery, but then you never stop learning. Through methods such as code retreats, testing dojos, workshops you can continually improve and learn. The code retreat idea was one that interested me. It involved pairing to write an automated test for, say, 45 mins, they deleting all the code, finding a different partner and writing the same test again! This is another keynote where the video will speak louder than anything I can write here! Markus did elaborate on something that Lisa and Janet had touched on yesterday whilst busting the myth that “Testers Must Code”. Whilst it is true that to be a tester, you don’t need to code, it is becoming more common that there is this crossover happening where more testers are coding and more programmers are testing. Markus made a special distinction between programmers and developers as testers develop tests code so this helped to make that clear. “Extending Continuous Integration and TDD with Continuous Testing” by Jason Ayers was my next talk after lunch. We already do CI and a bit of TDD on my project team so I was interested to see what this continuous testing thing was all about and whether it would actually work for us. At the start of the presentation I was of the opinion that it just would not work for us because our tests are too slow, and that would be the case for many people. Jason started off by setting the scene and saying that those doing TDD spend between 10-15% of their time waiting for tests to run. This can be reduced by testing less often, reducing the test time but this then increases the risk of introduced bugs not being spotted quickly. Therefore, in comes Continuous Testing (CT). CT systems run your unit tests whenever you save some code and runs them in the background so you can continue working. This is a really nice idea, but to do this, your tests must be fast, independent and reliable. The latter two should be the case anyway, and the first is ideal, but hard! Jason makes several suggestions to make tests fast. Firstly keep the scope of the test small, secondly spin off any expensive tests into a suite which is run, perhaps, overnight or outside of the CT system at any rate. So this started to change my mind, perhaps we could re-engineer our tests, and continuously run the quick ones to give an element of coverage. This talk was very interesting and I’ve already tried a couple of the tools mentioned on our product (Mighty Moose and NCrunch). Sadly due to the way our solution is built, it currently doesn’t work, but we will look at whether we can make this work because this has the potential to be a mini-game-changer for us. Using the wrong data Gojko’s Hierarchy of Quality The final keynote of the day was “Reinventing software quality” by Gojko Adzic. He opened the talk with the statement “We’ve got quality wrong because we are using the wrong data”! Gojko then went on to explain that we should judge a bug by whether the customer cares about it, not by whether we think it’s important. Why spend time fixing issues that the customer just wouldn’t care about and releasing months later because of this? Surely it’s better to release now and get customer feedback? This was another reference to the idea of how it’s better to build the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Get feedback early to make sure you’re making the right thing. Gojko then showed something which was very analogous to Maslow’s heirachy of needs. Successful – does it contribute to the business? Useful – does it do what the user wants Usable – does it do what it’s supposed to without breaking Performant/Secure – is it secure/is the performance acceptable Deployable Functionally ok – can it be deployed without breaking? He then explained that User Stories should focus on change. In other words they should focus on the users needs, not the users process. Describe what the change will be, how that change will happen then measure it! Networking and Beer Following the day’s closing keynote, there were drinks and nibble for the ‘Networking’ evening. This was a great opportunity to talk to people. I find approaching strangers very uncomfortable but once again, when in Rome! Pete Walen and I had a long conversation about only fixing issues that the customer cares about versus fixing issues that make you proud of your software! Without saying much, and asking the right questions, Pete made me re-evaluate my thoughts on the matter. Clever, very clever!  Oh and he ‘bought’ me a beer! My Takeaway Triple from Day 2: release small and release often to minimize issues creeping in and get faster feedback from ‘the real world’ Focus on issues that the customers care about, not what we think is important It’s okay to disagree with someone, even if they are well respected agile testing gurus, that’s how discussion and learning happens!  

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• Rx IObservable buffering to smooth out bursts of events

  - by Dan

  I have an Observable sequence that produces events in rapid bursts (ie: five events one right after another, then a long delay, then another quick burst of events, etc.). I want to smooth out these bursts by inserting a short delay between events. Imagine the following diagram as an example: Raw: --oooo--------------ooooo-----oo----------------ooo| Buffered: --o--o--o--o--------o--o--o--o--o--o--o---------o--o--o| My current approach is to generate a metronome-like timer via Observable.Interval() that signals when it's ok to pull another event from the raw stream. The problem is that I can't figure out how to then combine that timer with my raw unbuffered observable sequence. IObservable.Zip() is close to doing what I want, but it only works so long as the raw stream is producing events faster than the timer. As soon as there is a significant lull in the raw stream, the timer builds up a series of unwanted events that then immediately pair up with the next burst of events from the raw stream. Ideally, I want an IObservable extension method with the following function signature that produces the bevaior I've outlined above. Now, come to my rescue StackOverflow :) public static IObservable<T> Buffered(this IObservable<T> src, TimeSpan minDelay) PS. I'm brand new to Rx, so my apologies if this is a trivially simple question... 1. Simple yet flawed approach Here's my initial naive and simplistic solution that has quite a few problems: public static IObservable<T> Buffered<T>(this IObservable<T> source, TimeSpan minDelay) { Queue<T> q = new Queue<T>(); source.Subscribe(x => q.Enqueue(x)); return Observable.Interval(minDelay).Where(_ => q.Count > 0).Select(_ => q.Dequeue()); } The first obvious problem with this is that the IDisposable returned by the inner subscription to the raw source is lost and therefore the subscription can't be terminated. Calling Dispose on the IDisposable returned by this method kills the timer, but not the underlying raw event feed that is now needlessly filling the queue with nobody left to pull events from the queue. The second problem is that there's no way for exceptions or end-of-stream notifications to be propogated through from the raw event stream to the buffered stream - they are simply ignored when subscribing to the raw source. And last but not least, now I've got code that wakes up periodically regardless of whether there is actually any work to do, which I'd prefer to avoid in this wonderful new reactive world. 2. Way overly complex appoach To solve the problems encountered in my initial simplistic approach, I wrote a much more complicated function that behaves much like IObservable.Delay() (I used .NET Reflector to read that code and used it as the basis of my function). Unfortunately, a lot of the boilerplate logic such as AnonymousObservable is not publicly accessible outside the system.reactive code, so I had to copy and paste a lot of code. This solution appears to work, but given its complexity, I'm less confident that its bug free. I just can't believe that there isn't a way to accomplish this using some combination of the standard Reactive extensions. I hate feeling like I'm needlessly reinventing the wheel, and the pattern I'm trying to build seems like a fairly standard one.

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• Looking for a function that will split profits/loss equally between 2 business partners.

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  This is not homework, for I am not a student. This is for my general curiosity. I apologize if I am reinventing the wheel here.The function I seek can be defined as follows (language agnostic): int getPercentageOfA(double moneyA, double workA, double moneyB, double workB) { // Perhaps you may assume that workA == 0 // Compute result return result; } Suppose Alice and Bob want to do business together ... such as ... selling used books. Alice is only interested in investing money in it and nothing else. Bob might invest some money, but he might have no $ available to invest. He will, however, put in the effort in finding a seller, a buyer, and doing maintenance. There are no tools, education, health insurance costs, or other expenses to consider. Both Alice and Bob wish to split the profits "equally" (A different weight like 40/60 for advanced users). Both are entrepreneurs, so they deal with low ROI/wage, and high income alike. There is no fixed wage, minimum wage, fixed ROI, or minimum ROI. They try to find the best deal possible, assume risks and go for it. Now, let's stick with the 50/50 model. If Alice invests $100, Bob invests work, and they will end up with a profit (or loss) of $60, they will split it equally - either both get $30 for their efforts/investments, or Bob ends up owing $30 to Alice. A second possibility: Both Alice and Bob invest 100, then Bob does all the work, and they end up splitting $60 profit. It looks like Alice should get only $15, because $30 of that profit came from Bob's investment and Bob's effort, so Alice shall have none of it, and the other $30 is to be split 50/50. Both of the examples above are trivial even when A and B want to split it 35/65 or what have you. Now it gets more complicated: What if Alice invests $70, and Bob invests $30 + does all of the work. It appears simple: (70,30) = (30,30) + (40,0) ... but, if only we knew how to weigh the two parts relative to each other. Another complicated (I think) example: what if Alice and Bob invest $70 and $30 respectively, and also put in an equal amount of work? I have a few data points: When A and B put in the same amount of work and the same $ - 50/50. When A puts in 100% of the money, and B does 100% of the work - 50/50. When A does all of the work and puts in all of the money - 100 for A / 0 for B (and vice-versa). When A puts in 50% of the money, and B puts in 50% of the money as well as does all of the work - 25 for A, and 75 for B (and vice-versa). If I fix things such that always workA = 0%, workB = 100% of the total work, then getPercentageOfA becomes a function: height z given x and y. The question is - how do you extrapolate this function between these several points? What is this function? If you can cover the cases when workA does not have to be 0% of the total work, and when investment vs work is split as 85/15 or using some other model, then what would the new function be?

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• What does a WinForm application need to be designed for usability, and be robust, clean, and profess

  - by msorens

  One of the principal problems impeding productivity in software implementation is the classic conundrum of “reinventing the wheel”. Of late I am a .NET developer and even the wonderful wizardry of .NET and Visual Studio covers only a portion of this challenging issue. Below I present my initial thoughts both on what is available and what should be available from .NET on a WinForm, focusing on good usability. That is, aspects of an application exposed to the user and making the user experience easier and/or better. (I do include a couple items not visible to the user because I feel strongly about them, such as diagnostics.) I invite you to contribute to these lists. LIST A: Components provided by .NET These are substantially complete components provided by .NET, i.e. those requiring at most trivial coding to use. “About” dialog -- add it with a couple clicks then customize. Persist settings across invocations -- .NET has the support; just use a few lines of code to glue them together. Migrate settings with a new version -- a powerful one, available with one line of code. Tooltips (and infotips) -- .NET includes just plain text tooltips; third-party libraries provide richer ones. Diagnostic support -- TraceSources, TraceListeners, and more are built-in. Internationalization -- support for tailoring your app to languages other than your own. LIST B: Components not provided by .NET These are not supplied at all by .NET or supplied only as rudimentary elements requiring substantial work to be realized. Splash screen -- a small window present during program startup with your logo, loading messages, etc. Tip of the day -- a mini-tutorial presented one bit at a time each time the user starts your app. Check for available updates -- facility to query a server to see if the user is running the latest version of your app, then provide a simple way to upgrade if a new version is found. Maximize to multiple monitors -- the canonical window allows you to maximize to a single monitor only; in my apps I allow maximizing across multiple monitors with a click. Taskbar notifier -- flash the taskbar when your backgrounded app has new info for the user. Options dialogs -- multi-page dialogs letting the user customize the app settings to his/her own preferences. Progress indicator -- for long running operations give the user feedback on how far there is left to go. Memory gauge -- an indicator (either absolute or percentage) of how much memory is used by your app. LIST C: Stylistic and/or tiny bits of functionality This list includes bits of functionality that are too tiny to merit being called a component, along with stylistic concerns (that admittedly do overlap with the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines). Design a form for resizing -- unless you are restricting your form to be a fixed size, use anchors and docking so that it does what is reasonable when enlarged or shrunk by the user. Set tab order on a form -- repeated tab presses by the user should advance from field to field in a logical order rather than the default order in which you added fields. Adjust controls to be aware of operating modes -- When starting a background operation with, for example, a “Go” button, disable that “Go” button until the operation completes. Provide access keys for all menu items (per UXGuide). Provide shortcut keys for commonly used menu items (per UXGuide). Set up some (global or important or common) shortcut keys without associating to menu items. Allow some menu items to be invoked with or without modifier keys (shift, control, alt) where the modifier key is useful to vary the operation slightly. Hook up Escape and Enter on child forms to do what is reasonable. Decorate any library classes with documentation-comments and attributes -- this allows Visual Studio to leverage them for Intellisense and property descriptions. Spell check your code! What else would you include?

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Design Patterns: Feeling the Love after Launch

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceIn the first video by the Oracle Applications User Experience team on the Oracle Partner Network, Vice President Jeremy Ashley said that Oracle is looking to expand the ecosystem of support for Oracle’s applications customers as they begin to assess their investment and adoption of Oracle Fusion Applications. Oracle has made a massive investment to maintain the benefits of the Fusion Applications User Experience. This summer, the Applications User Experience team released the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns.Design patterns help create consistent experiences across devices.The launch has been very well received:Angelo Santagata, Senior Principal Technologist and Fusion Middleware evangelist for Oracle,  wrote this to the system integrator community: “The web site is the result of many years of Oracle R&D into user interface design for Fusion Applications and features a really cool web app which allows you to visualise the UI components in action.”  Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, Application Development Framework (ADF) said: “It’s a science I don't understand, but now I don't have to ... Now you can learn from the UX experience of Fusion Applications.”Frank Nimphius, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle (ADF) wrote about the launch of the design patterns for the ADF Code Corner, and Jürgen Kress, Senior Manager EMEA Alliances & Channels for Fusion MiddleWare and Service Oriented Architecture, (SOA), shared the news with his Partner Community. Oracle Twitter followers also helped spread the message about the design patterns launch: ?@bex – Brian Huff, founder and Chief Software Architect for Bezzotech, and Oracle ACE Director:“Nifty! The Oracle Fusion UX team just released new ADF design patterns.”@maiko_rocha, Maiko Rocha, Oracle Consulting Solutions Architect and Oracle FMW engineer: “Haven't seen any other vendor offer such comprehensive UX Design Patterns catalog for free!”@zirous_chad, Chad Thompson, Senior Solutions Architect for Zirous, Inc. and ADF Developer:Wow - @ultan and company did a great job with the Fusion UX PatternsWhat is a user experience design pattern?A user experience design pattern is a re-usable, usability tested functional blueprint for a particular user experience.  Some examples are guided processes, shopping carts, and search and search results.  Ultan O’Broin discusses the top design patterns every developer should know.The patterns that were just released are based on thousands of hours of end-user field studies, state-of-the-art user interface assessments, and usability testing.  To be clear, these are functional design patterns, not technical design patterns that developers may be used to working with.  Because we know there is a gap, we are putting together some training that will help close that gap.Who should care?This is an offering targeted primarily at Application Development Framework (ADF) developers. If you are faced with the following questions regarding Fusion Applications, you will want to know and learn more:•    How do I build something that looks like Fusion Applications?•    How do I build a next-generation application?•    How do I extend a Fusion Application and maintain the user experience?•    I don’t want to re-invent the wheel on the user interface, so where do I start?•    I need to build something that will eventually co-exist with Fusion Applications. How do I do that?These questions are relevant to partners with an ADF competency, individual practitioners, or small consultancies with an ADF specialization, and customers who are trying to shift their IT staff over to supporting Fusion Applications.Where you can find out more?OnlineOur Fusion User Experience design patterns maven is Ultan O’Broin. The Oracle Partner Network is helping our team bring this first e-seminar to you in order to go into a more detail on what this means and how to take advantage of it:? Webinar: Build a Better User Experience with Oracle: Oracle Fusion Applications Functional Design PatternsSept 20, 2012 , 10:30am-11:30am PacificDial-In:  1. 877-664-9137 / Passcode 102546?International:  706-634-9619  http://www.intercall.com/national/oracleuniversity/gdnam.htmlAccess the Live Event Or Via Webconference Access http://ouweb.webex.com  ?and enter this session number: 598036234At a Usergroup eventThe Fusion User Experience Advocates (FXA) are also going to be getting some deep-dive training on this content and can share it with local user groups.At OpenWorld Ultan O’Broin               Chris MuirIf you will be at OpenWorld this year, our own Ultan O’Broin will be visiting the ADF demopod to say hello, thanks to Shay Shmeltzer, Senior Group Manager for ADF outbound communication and at the OTN lounge: Monday 10-10:45, Tuesday 2:15-2:45, Wednesday 2:15-3:30 ?  Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF,  Moscone South, Right - S-207? “ADF Meet and Greett”, OTN Lounge, Wednesday 4:30 And I cannot talk about OpenWorld and ADF without mentioning Chris Muir’s ADF EMG event: the Year After the Year Of the ADF Developer – Sunday, Sept 30 of OpenWorld. Chris has played host to Ultan and the Applications user experience message for his online community and is now a seasoned UX expert.Expect to see additional announcements about expanded and training on similar topics in the future.

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• Mouse takes a while to start working after boot

  - by warkior

  I just recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit) and a number of my USB devices have stopped working. At least, they don't work for the first 3-5 minutes. I have two mice (one wireless, one wired) and a camera, which seem to take Ubuntu 3-5 minutes to recognize after booting up. Eventually, they do start to work, but it takes ages! lsusb results: (when the mice are working...) $ lsusb Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:c512 Logitech, Inc. LX-700 Cordless Desktop Receiver Bus 003 Device 003: ID 03f0:3f11 Hewlett-Packard PSC-1315/PSC-1317 Bus 006 Device 002: ID 046d:c00c Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse Bus 006 Device 003: ID 046d:c52b Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver syslog entries for what seems (to my very untrained eye) to be the problem: Oct 12 20:12:51 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 17.420117] usb 2-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:12:57 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H goa[1879]: goa-daemon version 3.4.0 starting [main.c:112, main()] Oct 12 20:13:06 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 32.636107] usb 2-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:13:06 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 32.852122] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd Oct 12 20:13:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 47.964131] usb 2-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:13:37 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 63.180115] usb 2-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:13:37 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 63.396126] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd Oct 12 20:13:47 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 73.804158] usb 2-3: device not accepting address 4, error -110 Oct 12 20:13:47 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 73.916190] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 84.324160] usb 2-3: device not accepting address 5, error -110 Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 84.324197] hub 2-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 3 Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H udev-configure-printer: failed to claim interface Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H udev-configure-printer: Failed to get parent Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H udev-configure-printer: device devpath is /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb3/3-3 Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H udev-configure-printer: MFG:hp MDL:psc 1310 series SERN:CN47CB60BJO2 serial:CN47CB60BJO2 Oct 12 20:13:58 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 84.768132] usb 5-3: new full-speed USB device number 2 using ohci_hcd Oct 12 20:14:01 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H udev-configure-printer: no corresponding CUPS device found Oct 12 20:14:13 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 99.904185] usb 5-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:14:29 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 115.144188] usb 5-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:14:29 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 115.384178] usb 5-3: new full-speed USB device number 3 using ohci_hcd Oct 12 20:14:44 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 130.520196] usb 5-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:14:59 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 145.760179] usb 5-3: device descriptor read/64, error -110 Oct 12 20:14:59 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 146.000173] usb 5-3: new full-speed USB device number 4 using ohci_hcd Oct 12 20:15:10 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 156.408168] usb 5-3: device not accepting address 4, error -110 Oct 12 20:15:10 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 156.544188] usb 5-3: new full-speed USB device number 5 using ohci_hcd Oct 12 20:15:20 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 166.952181] usb 5-3: device not accepting address 5, error -110 Oct 12 20:15:20 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 166.952215] hub 5-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 3 Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.216164] usb 6-2: new low-speed USB device number 2 using ohci_hcd Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H mtp-probe: checking bus 6, device 2: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.1/usb6/6-2" Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H mtp-probe: bus: 6, device: 2 was not an MTP device Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.396138] input: Logitech USB Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.1/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.0/input/input16 Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.396442] generic-usb 0003:046D:C00C.0003: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB Mouse] on usb-0000:00:13.1-2/input0 Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.660187] usb 6-3: new full-speed USB device number 3 using ohci_hcd Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H mtp-probe: checking bus 6, device 3: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.1/usb6/6-3" Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H mtp-probe: bus: 6, device: 3 was not an MTP device Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.859045] logitech-djreceiver 0003:046D:C52B.0006: hiddev0,hidraw3: USB HID v1.11 Device [Logitech USB Receiver] on usb-0000:00:13.1-3/input2 Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.865086] input: Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:400a as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.1/usb6/6-3/6-3:1.2/0003:046D:C52B.0006/input/input17 Oct 12 20:15:21 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H kernel: [ 167.865291] logitech-djdevice 0003:046D:C52B.0007: input,hidraw4: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:400a] on usb-0000:00:13.1-3:1 Oct 12 20:15:24 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H colord: io/hpmud/musb.c 139: unable get_string_descriptor -1: Operation not permitted Oct 12 20:15:24 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H colord: io/hpmud/musb.c 2040: invalid product id string ret=-1 Oct 12 20:15:24 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H colord: io/hpmud/musb.c 139: unable get_string_descriptor -1: Operation not permitted Oct 12 20:15:24 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H colord: io/hpmud/musb.c 2045: invalid serial id string ret=-1 Oct 12 20:15:24 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H colord: io/hpmud/musb.c 139: unable get_string_descriptor -1: Operation not permitted Oct 12 20:15:24 REMOVED-GA-MA785GM-US2H colord: io/hpmud/musb.c 2050: invalid manufacturer string ret=-1

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

  - by Dave Campbell

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

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• Windows for IoT, continued

  - by Valter Minute

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products.   *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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• Yes, I did it - Skydiving in Mauritius

  Finally, I did it or better said we did it. Already back in November last year I saw the big billboard advertisement of Skydive Austral Mauritius near Caudan Waterfront in Port Louis and decided for myself that this is going to be the perfect birthday gift for my wife. Simply out of curiosity I would join her tandem jump with a second instructor. Due to her pregnancy of our son I had to be patient... But then finally, her birthday had arrived and on our midnight celebration session I showed her her netbook with the website preloaded. Actually, it was the "perfect" timing... Recovery from her cesarean is fine, local weather conditions are gorgious and the children were under surveillance of my mum - spending her annual holidays on the island. So, after late wake-up in the morning, we packed our stuff and off we went. According to Google Maps direction indication we had to drive for roughly 50km (only) but traffic here in Mauritius is always challenging. The dropzone is at the Zone Industrielle Mon Loisir Sugar Estate near Riviere du Rempart at the northern east coast. Anyways, we were not in a hurry and arrived there shortly after noon. The access road to the airfield are just small down-driven paths through sugar cane fields and according to our daughter "it's bumpy!". True true true... The facilities at Skydive Austral Mauritius are complete except for food. Enough space for parking, easy handling at the reception and a lot to see for the kids. There's even a big terrace with several sets of tables and chairs, small bar for soft drinks, strictly non-alcoholic. The team over there is all welcoming and warm-hearthy! Having the kids with us was no issue at all. Quite the opposite, our daugther was allowed to discover a lot of things than we adults did. Even visiting the small air plane was on the menu for her. Really great stuff! While waiting for our turn we enjoyed watching other people getting ready in the jump gear, taking off with the Cessna, and finally coming back down on the tandem parachute. Actually, the different expressions on their faces was one of the best parts while waiting. Great mental preparation as my wife was getting more anxious about her first jump... {loadposition content_adsense} First, we got some information about the procedures on the plane about how to get seated, tight up with our instructors and how to get ready for the jump off the plane as soon as we arrive the height of 10.000 ft. All well explained and easy to understand after all.Next, we met with our jumpers Chris and Lee aka "Rasta" to get dressed and ready for take-off. Those guys are really cool and relaxed for their job. From that point on, the DVD session / recording for my wife's birthday started and we really had a lot of fun... The difference between that small Cessna and a commercial flight with an Airbus or a Boeing is astronomic! The climb up to 10.000 ft took us roughly 25 minutes and we enjoyed the magnificent view over the turquoise lagunes near Poste de Flacq, Lafayette and Isle d'Ambre on the north-east coast. After flying through the clouds we sun-bathed and looked over "iced-sugar covered" Mauritius. You might have a look at the picture gallery of Skydive Mauritius for better imagination. The moment of truth, or better said, point of no return came after approximately 25 minutes. The door opens, moving into position on the side on top of the wheel and... out! Back flip and free fall! Slight turns and Wooooohooooo! through the clouds... It so amazing and breath-taking! So undescribable! You have to experience this yourself! Some seconds later the parachute opened and we glided smoothly with some turns and spins back down to the dropzone. The rest of the family could hear and see us soon and the landing was easy going. We never had any doubts or fear about our instructors. They did a great job and we are looking forward to book our next job. I might even consider to follow educational classes on skydiving and earn a license. By the way, feel free to get in touch with Skydive Austral Mauritius. Either via contact details on their website or tweeting a little bit with them. Follow the tweets of Chris and fellows on SkydiveAustral.

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• How do I cleanly design a central render/animation loop?

  - by mtoast

  I'm learning some graphics programming, and am in the midst of my first such project of any substance. But, I am really struggling at the moment with how to architect it cleanly. Let me explain. To display complicated graphics in my current language of choice (JavaScript -- have you heard of it?), you have to draw graphical content onto a <canvas> element. And to do animation, you must clear the <canvas> after every frame (unless you want previous graphics to remain). Thus, most canvas-related JavaScript demos I've seen have a function like this: function render() { clearCanvas(); // draw stuff here requestAnimationFrame(render); } render, as you may surmise, encapsulates the drawing of a single frame. What a single frame contains at a specific point in time, well... that is determined by the program state. So, in order for my program to do its thing, I just need to look at the state, and decide what to render. Right? Right. But that is more complicated than it seems. My program is called "Critter Clicker". In my program, you see several cute critters bouncing around the screen. Clicking on one of them agitates it, making it bounce around even more. There is also a start screen, which says "Click to start!" prior to the critters being displayed. Here are a few of the objects I'm working with in my program: StartScreenView // represents the start screen CritterTubView // represents the area in which the critters live CritterList // a collection of all the critters Critter // a single critter model CritterView // view of a single critter Nothing too egregious with this, I think. Yet, when I set out to flesh out my render function, I get stuck, because everything I write seems utterly ugly and reminiscent of a certain popular Italian dish. Here are a couple of approaches I've attempted, with my internal thought process included, and unrelated bits excluded for clarity. Approach 1: "It's conditions all the way down" // "I'll just write the program as I think it, one frame at a time." if (assetsLoaded) { if (userClickedToStart) { if (critterTubDisplayed) { if (crittersDisplayed) { forEach(crittersList, function(c) { if (c.wasClickedRecently) { c.getAgitated(); } }); } else { displayCritters(); } } else { displayCritterTub(); } } else { displayStartScreen(); } } That's a very much simplified example. Yet even with only a fraction of all the rendering conditions visible, render is already starting to get out of hand. So, I dispense with that and try another idea: Approach 2: Under the Rug // "Each view object shall be responsible for its own rendering. // "I'll pass each object the program state, and each can render itself." startScreen.render(state); critterTub.render(state); critterList.render(state); In this setup, I've essentially just pushed those crazy nested conditions to a deeper level in the code, hiding them from view. In other words, startScreen.render would check state to see if it needed actually to be drawn or not, and take the correct action. But this seems more like it only solves a code-aesthetic problem. The third and final approach I'm considering that I'll share is the idea that I could invent my own "wheel" to take care of this. I'm envisioning a function that takes a data structure that defines what should happen at any given point in the render call -- revealing the conditions and dependencies as a kind of tree. Approach 3: Mad Scientist renderTree({ phases: ['startScreen', 'critterTub', 'endCredits'], dependencies: { startScreen: ['assetsLoaded'], critterTub: ['startScreenClicked'], critterList ['critterTubDisplayed'] // etc. }, exclusions: { startScreen: ['startScreenClicked'], // etc. } }); That seems kind of cool. I'm not exactly sure how it would actually work, but I can see it being a rather nifty way to express things, especially if I flex some of JavaScript's events. In any case, I'm a little bit stumped because I don't see an obvious way to do this. If you couldn't tell, I'm coming to this from the web development world, and finding that doing animation is a bit more exotic than arranging an MVC application for handling simple requests - responses. What is the clean, established solution to this common-I-would-think problem?

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Getting Caller Information

  - by James Michael Hare

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2013/07/25/c.net-little-wonders-getting-caller-information.aspx Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. There are times when it is desirable to know who called the method or property you are currently executing.  Some applications of this could include logging libraries, or possibly even something more advanced that may server up different objects depending on who called the method. In the past, we mostly relied on the System.Diagnostics namespace and its classes such as StackTrace and StackFrame to see who our caller was, but now in C# 5, we can also get much of this data at compile-time. Determining the caller using the stack One of the ways of doing this is to examine the call stack.  The classes that allow you to examine the call stack have been around for a long time and can give you a very deep view of the calling chain all the way back to the beginning for the thread that has called you. You can get caller information by either instantiating the StackTrace class (which will give you the complete stack trace, much like you see when an exception is generated), or by using StackFrame which gets a single frame of the stack trace.  Both involve examining the call stack, which is a non-trivial task, so care should be done not to do this in a performance-intensive situation. For our simple example let's say we are going to recreate the wheel and construct our own logging framework.  Perhaps we wish to create a simple method Log which will log the string-ified form of an object and some information about the caller.  We could easily do this as follows: 1: static void Log(object message) 2: { 3: // frame 1, true for source info 4: StackFrame frame = new StackFrame(1, true); 5: var method = frame.GetMethod(); 6: var fileName = frame.GetFileName(); 7: var lineNumber = frame.GetFileLineNumber(); 8: 9: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 10: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 11: fileName, lineNumber, method.Name, message); 12: } So, what we are doing here is grabbing the 2nd stack frame (the 1st is our current method) using a 2nd argument of true to specify we want source information (if available) and then taking the information from the frame.  This works fine, and if we tested it out by calling from a file such as this: 1: // File c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs 2:  3: public class CallerInfo 4: { 5: Log("Hello Logger!"); 6: } We'd see this: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! This works well, and in fact CallStack and StackFrame are still the best ways to examine deeper into the call stack.  But if you only want to get information on the caller of your method, there is another option… Determining the caller at compile-time In C# 5 (.NET 4.5) they added some attributes that can be supplied to optional parameters on a method to receive caller information.  These attributes can only be applied to methods with optional parameters with explicit defaults.  Then, as the compiler determines who is calling your method with these attributes, it will fill in the values at compile-time. These are the currently supported attributes available in the  System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespace": CallerFilePathAttribute – The path and name of the file that is calling your method. CallerLineNumberAttribute – The line number in the file where your method is being called. CallerMemberName – The member that is calling your method. So let’s take a look at how our Log method would look using these attributes instead: 1: static int Log(object message, 2: [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", 3: [CallerFilePath] string fileName = "", 4: [CallerLineNumber] int lineNumber = 0) 5: { 6: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 7: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 8: fileName, lineNumber, memberName, message); 9: } Again, calling this from our sample Main would give us the same result: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! However, though this seems the same, there are a few key differences. First of all, there are only 3 supported attributes (at this time) that give you the file path, line number, and calling member.  Thus, it does not give you as rich of detail as a StackFrame (which can give you the calling type as well and deeper frames, for example).  Also, these are supported through optional parameters, which means we could call our new Log method like this: 1: // They're defaults, why not fill 'em in 2: Log("My message.", "Some member", "Some file", -13); In addition, since these attributes require optional parameters, they cannot be used in properties, only in methods. These caveats aside, they do let you get similar information inside of methods at a much greater speed!  How much greater?  Well lets crank through 1,000,000 iterations of each.  instead of logging to console, I’ll return the formatted string length of each.  Doing this, we get: 1: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with StackTrace: 5096 ms 2: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with Attributes: 196 ms So you see, using the attributes is much, much faster!  Nearly 25x faster in fact.  Summary There are a few ways to get caller information for a method.  The StackFrame allows you to get a comprehensive set of information spanning the whole call stack, but at a heavier cost.  On the other hand, the attributes allow you to quickly get at caller information baked in at compile-time, but to do so you need to create optional parameters in your methods to support it. Technorati Tags: Little Wonders,CSharp,C#,.NET,StackFrame,CallStack,CallerFilePathAttribute,CallerLineNumberAttribute,CallerMemberName

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• PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

  - by Duncan Mills

  With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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• Increasing efficiency of N-Body gravity simulation

  - by Postman

  I'm making a space exploration type game, it will have many planets and other objects that will all have realistic gravity. I currently have a system in place that works, but if the number of planets goes above 70, the FPS decreases an practically exponential rates. I'm making it in C# and XNA. My guess is that I should be able to do gravity calculations between 100 objects without this kind of strain, so clearly my method is not as efficient as it should be. I have two files, Gravity.cs and EntityEngine.cs. Gravity manages JUST the gravity calculations, EntityEngine creates an instance of Gravity and runs it, along with other entity related methods. EntityEngine.cs public void Update() { foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e in Entities) { e.Value.Update(); } gravity.Update(); } (Only relevant piece of code from EntityEngine, self explanatory. When an instance of Gravity is made in entityEngine, it passes itself (this) into it, so that gravity can have access to entityEngine.Entities (a dictionary of all planet objects)) Gravity.cs namespace ExplorationEngine { public class Gravity { private EntityEngine entityEngine; private Vector2 Force; private Vector2 VecForce; private float distance; private float mult; public Gravity(EntityEngine e) { entityEngine = e; } public void Update() { //First loop foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e in entityEngine.Entities) { //Reset the force vector Force = new Vector2(); //Second loop foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e2 in entityEngine.Entities) { //Make sure the second value is not the current value from the first loop if (e2.Value != e.Value ) { //Find the distance between the two objects. Because Fg = G * ((M1 * M2) / r^2), using Vector2.Distance() and then squaring it //is pointless and inefficient because distance uses a sqrt, squaring the result simple cancels that sqrt. distance = Vector2.DistanceSquared(e2.Value.Position, e.Value.Position); //This makes sure that two planets do not attract eachother if they are touching, completely unnecessary when I add collision, //For now it just makes it so that the planets are not glitchy, performance is not significantly improved by removing this IF if (Math.Sqrt(distance) > (e.Value.Texture.Width / 2 + e2.Value.Texture.Width / 2)) { //Calculate the magnitude of Fg (I'm using my own gravitational constant (G) for the sake of time (I know it's 1 at the moment, but I've been changing it) mult = 1.0f * ((e.Value.Mass * e2.Value.Mass) / distance); //Calculate the direction of the force, simply subtracting the positions and normalizing works, this fixes diagonal vectors //from having a larger value, and basically makes VecForce a direction. VecForce = e2.Value.Position - e.Value.Position; VecForce.Normalize(); //Add the vector for each planet in the second loop to a force var. Force = Vector2.Add(Force, VecForce * mult); //I have tried Force += VecForce * mult, and have not noticed much of an increase in speed. } } } //Add that force to the first loop's planet's position (later on I'll instead add to acceleration, to account for inertia) e.Value.Position += Force; } } } } I have used various tips (about gravity optimizing, not threading) from THIS question (that I made yesterday). I've made this gravity method (Gravity.Update) as efficient as I know how to make it. This O(N^2) algorithm still seems to be eating up all of my CPU power though. Here is a LINK (google drive, go to File download, keep .Exe with the content folder, you will need XNA Framework 4.0 Redist. if you don't already have it) to the current version of my game. Left click makes a planet, right click removes the last planet. Mouse moves the camera, scroll wheel zooms in and out. Watch the FPS and Planet Count to see what I mean about performance issues past 70 planets. (ALL 70 planets must be moving, I've had 100 stationary planets and only 5 or so moving ones while still having 300 fps, the issue arises when 70+ are moving around) After 70 planets are made, performance tanks exponentially. With < 70 planets, I get 330 fps (I have it capped at 300). At 90 planets, the FPS is about 2, more than that and it sticks around at 0 FPS. Strangely enough, when all planets are stationary, the FPS climbs back up to around 300, but as soon as something moves, it goes right back down to what it was, I have no systems in place to make this happen, it just does. I considered multithreading, but that previous question I asked taught me a thing or two, and I see now that that's not a viable option. I've also thought maybe I could do the calculations on my GPU instead, though I don't think it should be necessary. I also do not know how to do this, it is not a simple concept and I want to avoid it unless someone knows a really noob friendly simple way to do it that will work for an n-body gravity calculation. (I have an NVidia gtx 660) Lastly I've considered using a quadtree type system. (Barnes Hut simulation) I've been told (in the previous question) that this is a good method that is commonly used, and it seems logical and straightforward, however the implementation is way over my head and I haven't found a good tutorial for C# yet that explains it in a way I can understand, or uses code I can eventually figure out. So my question is this: How can I make my gravity method more efficient, allowing me to use more than 100 objects (I can render 1000 planets with constant 300+ FPS without gravity calculations), and if I can't do much to improve performance (including some kind of quadtree system), could I use my GPU to do the calculations?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 22, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 22, 2012Popular ReleasesXDA ROM HUB: XDA ROM HUB v0.7: Added custom ROM list. Xperia Active and Arc/s will be added on 0.7.1BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.5: 2012.06.22 Ver5.6.5 　(1) FTP??????? EPSV ??　EPRT　???????PrepareQuery for MVC: PrepareQuery Demo with assemplies: ??????????????? ?????? ?????????? ? ???????? ??????. ????? ?? ?????? ??? ?????? ????????? ????? nuget-??????. Dynamic Linq Query Builder for ASP.NET MVC ??????? ?? Dynamic Linq Query Builder, ? ?????? ??????????? ?????????????. ?????? ???? ??????? ????? ???????????? ? ?????? ?? ????????? ?????????????.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.01: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.01 Changes in 06.00.01 Icons are shown in module action buttons (workaraound to core issue with IconAPI) Fix to Token2XSL Editor, changing List type raised exception MakeTumbnail and ShowXml handlers had been missing in install package Updated help texts for better understanding of filter statement, token support in email subject and css style Major changes for fnL 6.0: DNN 6 Form Patterns including modal PopUps and Tabs http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Po...MVVM Light Toolkit: V4RTM (binaries only) including Windows 8 RP: This package contains all the latest DLLs for MVVM Light V4 RTM. It includes the DLLs for Windows 8 Release Preview. An updated Nuget package is also available at http://nuget.org/packages/MvvmLightLibs An installer with binaries, snippets and templates will follow ASAP.Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0: - Some changes to Layout and CSS - Changed version number to 1.0.0.0 - Solved Cache and Session items handler error in IIS 7 - Created the Modules, Plugins and Widgets Areas - Replaced CKEditor with TinyMCE - Created the System Info page - Minor changesTabular AMO 2012: Tabular AMO 2012 V2 - release 1.0: This is the first stable release of Tabular AMO 2012 V2. In this download you will find the AMO2Tabular V2 library and the AdventureWorks Tabular AMO 2012 sample project to build a tabular model using the library.AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v3.11.7: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????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)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ...NShader - HLSL - GLSL - CG - Shader Syntax Highlighter AddIn for Visual Studio: NShader 1.3 - VS2010 + VS2012: This is a small maintenance release to support new VS2012 as well as VS2010. This release is also fixing the issue The "Comment Selection" include the first line after the selection If the new NShader version doesn't highlight your shader, you can try to: Remove the registry entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\FontAndColors\Cache Remove all lines using "fx" or "hlsl" in file C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Micr...asp.net membership: v1.0 Membership Management: Abmemunit is a Membership Management Project where developer can use their learning purposes of various issues related to ASP.NET, MVC, ASP.NET membership, Entity Framework, Code First, Ajax, Unit Test, IOC Container, Repository, and Service etc. Though it is a very simple project and all of these topics are used in an easy manner gathering from various big projects, it can easily understand. User End Functional Specification The functionalities of this project are very simple and straight...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.0: Up to 2.5x performance improvement in stringify operations Up to 1.7x performance improvement in parse operations Improved error messages when parsing invalid JSON strings Extended support to .Net 2.0, .Net 3.5, .Net 4.0, Silverlight 4, Windows Phone, Windows 8 metro apps and Xbox JSON namespace changed to ComputerBeacon.Json namespaceXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0: System Requirements OS Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Server Internet Information Service 7.0 or above .NET Framework .NET Framework 4.0 WCF Activation feature HTTP Activation Non-HTTP Activation for net.pipe/net.tcp WCF bindings ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC 3.0 Database Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Additional Deployment Configuration Started Windows Process Activation service Start...CrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.1: Added screenshot support that takes screenshot of user's desktop on application crash and provides option to include screenshot with crash report. Added Windows version in crash reports. Added email field and exception type field in crash report dialog. Added exception type in crash reports. Added screenshot tab that shows crash screenshot.MFCMAPI: June 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1034 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5.1: Release Notes The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5.1 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes and minor updates. Recent additions include project templates for iOS and MacOS. The MonoDevelop.MonoGame AddIn also works on Linux. We have removed the dependency on the thirdparty GamePad library to allow MonoGame to be included in the debian/ubuntu repositories. There have been a major bug fix to ensure textures are disposed of correctly as well as some ...????: ????2.0.2: 1、???????????。 2、DJ???????10?，?????????10?。 3、??.NET 4.5(Windows 8)????????????。 4、???????????。 5、??????????????。 6、???Windows 8????。 7、?????2.0.1???????????????。 8、??DJ?????????。Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 5 Preview 1 (6.17.2012): Azure Storage Explorer verison 5 is in development, and Preview 1 provides an early look at the new user interface and some of the new features. Here's what's new in v5 Preview 1: New UI, similar to the new Windows Azure HTML5 portal Support for configuring and viewing storage account logging Support for configuring and viewing storage account monitoring Uses the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK libraries Bug fixes????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 2: 6?20????? ?? - FrindesInActive???????json?????????，???????????。??。 6?19????? ?? - ???????????????，???????0?????????。 ?? - ???Entity?????Suggestion??????????????JSON????????。 ?? - ???OAuth?Request??????AccessToken???SourceKey????QueryString?????????。 6?17????? ??? - .net 4.0 SDK??Dynamic??????????????????API?? ??? - ?Utility?????????API??????DateTime???ParseUTCDate ?? - ?????????????Json.net???，???SDK????Json.net?????。 ?? - ???Client??????API???GetCommand?PostCommand，??????????????...KangaModeling: Kanga Modeling 1.0: This is the public release 1.0 of Kanga Modeling. -Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): Release 92560: Prerequisites Visual Studio 2010 - Any version including Express. Express users must also install Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell runtime VMWare - Cosmos can run on real hardware as well as other virtualization environments but our default debug setup is configured for VMWare. VMWare Player (Free). or Workstation VMWare VIX API 1.11New ProjectsBilling and Collection .NET (BACS.Net): BACS.NET is a project to create a billing and collections system for financial users in a small, parochial school environment.Bing Wallpaper: Gets current picture from Bing and sets it as wallpaper, with optional correction of aspect ratioBlogForFree: This is a simple blog for free users.Break Time: Break-Time reminds you to take a mental and physical break from sitting in front of your computer for too long. Yes, a glorified timer but better, I promise!BTasks: Sistema para controle de tarefas.Calculate Library: Calculate Library is a library capable of parsing math expressions from strings and evaluating the value at run time. ControleMatricula: Este projeto tem por objetivo realizar o gerenciamento de matriculas de cursos escolares.EagleTrack2012: Application for tracking achievements for scout type programsFury OS: FuryOS isn't reinventing the wheel. Fury is a new simple COSMOS OS written to run on real hardware with a GUI and Dynamite#/D# programming language. Take a lookGeneric Compact Input Language: Generic Compact Input Language (GCIL) is a library supporting interpretation of a customizable input language. hgdd06212012: fdghgdd062120123: asdhgdd062120125: weJava to CSharp: This is a tiny project with an intention to make it large. Currently it can be used to convert very tiny and simple Java programs to C# .ModelStore: This project aims to create a generic engine and persistence store for modeling operations.MsSqlMetaDataProvider: Simple wrapper around system views using entity framework model. Intended to be used for auto code generation and template consumption.Multiple Select Refinement Panel Web Part: Multiple Select Refinement Panel web part is developed by extending the out of the box Refinement Panel. It is built over a TreeView control with all the nodes Note+: Coming SoonPrairieAsunder: PrairieAsunder is an HTML5 + MVC3 application that streams local music from Central Illinois. The code is a fork of the Chavah Messianic Radio codebaseRemoteCommand Add-On Module for Mayhem: RemoteCommand is and add-on module for the CodePlex project Mayhem. RemoteCommand allows remote systems, such as IVR's, to trigger events .Results Per Page Search Core Results Web Part: Results Per Page Search Core Results web part is developed by extending the out of the box Search Core Results web part.Secure Socket Protocol: Create a secured Server/Client the easy way with SSPSkype Screen Saver: A handy addition for those who use Skype and like to use headphones. And for those who are mute speakers - too..Tabular AMO 2012: Tabular AMO 2012 is about creating and managing tabular models using the AMO api. It is a developer’s sample, for those interested in managing Analysis Servicestestdd062120126: sdtesttom06212012git01: gfdgfdgfdXDesigner.Development: .Tools for developer , Support VS.NET , VB6.0 or others, Future: 1.Source code line count . 2.Add or remove comment batch. 3.Copy source file clearly. ......

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• Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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• Does .NET have a built in IEnumerable for multiple collections?

  - by Bryce Wagner

  I need an easy way to iterate over multiple collections without actually merging them, and I couldn't find anything built into .NET that looks like it does that. It feels like this should be a somewhat common situation. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Is there anything built in that does something like this: public class MultiCollectionEnumerable<T> : IEnumerable<T> { private MultiCollectionEnumerator<T> enumerator; public MultiCollectionEnumerable(params IEnumerable<T>[] collections) { enumerator = new MultiCollectionEnumerator<T>(collections); } public IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator() { enumerator.Reset(); return enumerator; } IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() { enumerator.Reset(); return enumerator; } private class MultiCollectionEnumerator<T> : IEnumerator<T> { private IEnumerable<T>[] collections; private int currentIndex; private IEnumerator<T> currentEnumerator; public MultiCollectionEnumerator(IEnumerable<T>[] collections) { this.collections = collections; this.currentIndex = -1; } public T Current { get { if (currentEnumerator != null) return currentEnumerator.Current; else return default(T); } } public void Dispose() { if (currentEnumerator != null) currentEnumerator.Dispose(); } object IEnumerator.Current { get { return Current; } } public bool MoveNext() { if (currentIndex >= collections.Length) return false; if (currentIndex < 0) { currentIndex = 0; if (collections.Length > 0) currentEnumerator = collections[0].GetEnumerator(); else return false; } while (!currentEnumerator.MoveNext()) { currentEnumerator.Dispose(); currentEnumerator = null; currentIndex++; if (currentIndex >= collections.Length) return false; currentEnumerator = collections[currentIndex].GetEnumerator(); } return true; } public void Reset() { if (currentEnumerator != null) { currentEnumerator.Dispose(); currentEnumerator = null; } this.currentIndex = -1; } } }

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• Does my fat-client application belong in the MVC pattern?

  - by boatingcow

  The web-based application I’m currently working on is growing arms and legs! It’s basically an administration system which helps users to keep track of bookings, user accounts, invoicing etc. It can also be accessed via a couple of different websites using a fairly crude API. The fat-client design loosely follows the MVC pattern (or perhaps MVP) with a php/MySQL backend, Front Controller, several dissimilar Page Controllers, a liberal smattering of object-oriented and procedural Models, a confusing bunch of Views and templates, some JavaScripts, CSS files and Flash objects. The programmer in me is a big fan of the principle of “Separation of Concerns” and on that note, I’m currently trying to figure out the best way to separate and combine the various concerns as the project grows and more people contribute to it. The problem we’re facing is that although JavaScript (or Flash with ActionScript) is normally written with the template, hence part of the View and decoupled from the Controller and Model, we find that it actually encompasses the entire MVC pattern... Swap an image with an onmouseover event - that’s Behaviour. Render a datagrid - we’re manipulating the View. Send the result of reordering a list via AJAX - now we’re in Control. Check a form field to see if an email address is in a valid format - we’re consulting the Model. Is it wise to let the database people write up the validation Model with jQuery? Can the php programmers write the necessary Control structures in JavaScript? Can the web designers really write a functional AJAX form for their View? Should there be a JavaScript overlord for every project? If the MVC pattern could be applied to the people instead of the code, we would end up with this: Model - the database boffins - “SELECT * FROM mind WHERE interested IS NULL” Control - pesky programmers - “class Something extends NothingAbstractClass{…}” View - traditionally the domain of the graphic/web designer - “” …and a new layer: Behaviour - interaction and feedback designer - “CSS3 is the new black…” So, we’re refactoring and I’d like to stick to best practice design, but I’m not sure how to proceed. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so would anyone have any hints or tips as to what pattern I should be looking at or any code samples from someone who’s already done the dirty work? As the programmer guy, how can I rewrite the app for backend and front end whilst keeping the two separate? And before you ask, yes I’ve looked at Zend, CodeIgnitor, Symfony, etc., and no, they don’t seem to cross the boundary between server logic and client logic!

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