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• Five Reasons to Attend PLM Summit 2013: The Conference Formerly Known as AGILITY

  - by Terri Hiskey

  As we approach the end of 2012, we are also closing in on the last couple of weeks that Agile customers and prospects can register for the upcoming PLM Summit 2013 for the bargain early bird rate of $195. Register now to secure your spot! The Conference Formerly Known as AGILITY... Long-time Agile customers may remember AGILITY, which was Agile's PLM customer conference that was held on an annual basis prior to Oracle's acquisiton of Agile in 2007. In February 2012, due to feedback we received from our Agile PLM community, we successfully resurrected the AGILITY conference and renamed it the PLM Summit. The PLM Summit was so well received and well-attended, that we are doing it again in 2013. This upcoming PLM Summit is being co-located in San Francisco under the overarching banner of the Oracle Value Chain Summit, and will be held alongside several other Oracle customer conferences that cover a range of value chain solutions, including Value Chain Planning, Value Chain Execution, Procurement, Maintenance and Manufacturing. This setup offers PLM attendees the best of all worlds--the opportunity to participate and learn about PLM in smaller, focused sessions by product and by industry, while also giving attendees the chance to see how PLM works together with other critical enterprise applications that address other important aspects of the value chain. Top Five Reasons to Attend the PLM Summit 2013 In the spirit of all of the end-of-the-year lists that are currently popping up, here is a list of the top five reasons to attend the PLM Summit for anyone out there needs a little extra encouragement to register: 1. The Best Opportunities for Customer Networking   The PLM Summit offers attendees numerous opportunities to learn and network with fellow Agile users. Customer stories are featured in keynote and breakout presentations and the schedule allows for plenty of networking time during breakfasts, lunches, breaks and dinners. Customer networking is the number one reason that Agile users attend the PLM Summit. Read what attendees thought of the most recent PLM Summit: "Hearing about the implementation of Agile products from a customers’ perspective is invaluable." - Director of Quality Assurance & Regulatory Affairs, leading medical device manufacturer "Understanding the scope of other companies’ projects and the lessons learned made attending this event well worth my time." - Director of Test Engineering, global industrial manufacturer "The most beneficial thing about attending this event is the opportunity to network with other customers with similar experiences." - Director of Business Process Improvement, leading high technology company Come to the PLM Summit and play an active role within the PLM community: swap war stories and business cards, connect on LinkedIn and Facebook, share your stories and discuss the sessions from each day. Register now! 2. It's Educational! The PLM Summit is the premier educational event for anyone in the Agile PLM community. There are nearly 40 PLM-focused in-depth educational sessions led by Agile PLM experts, customers and partners that will cover a range of specific product and industry-focused topics. Keynotes will give attendees a broad overview of the entire Agile PLM footprint, while sessions will delve deeply into specific product functionality and customer case studies. There is truly something for everyone. Check out the latest agenda for view of all the sessions. 3. Visit with the PLM Partner Community Our partners play a significant and important role within the Agile PLM community. At the PLM Summit, attendees will be able to meet and mingle with several of the top Oracle Agile PLM partners including: Deloitte, Domain, GoEngineer, Hitachi Consulting, IBM, Kalypso, KPIT Cummins (CPG Solutions), Perception Software, Verdant, Xavor and ZeroWaitState. Go here for a complete list of all the Value Chain Summit sponsors. 4. See Agile PLM in Action at our Dedicated PLM Demo Pods At the PLM Summit, attendees will have the chance to see Agile PLM in action at dedicated PLM demo pods, manned by expert members of our Agile PLM team. If you would like to see up close specific Agile PLM functionality, or if you have a question on how to extend the scope of your current implemention or if you want a better understanding of how to leverage Agile PLM to address specific use-cases, stop by one of the Agile PLM demo pods and engage the Agile PLM experts on hand at the PLM Summit. 5. Spend Some Time in Lovely San Francisco Still on the fence about the upcoming PLM Summit? Remember that it is being held in San Francisco, which is a fantastic city for a getaway. After spending time learning and networking about PLM, take an extra day or two to escape the dreary winter and enjoy the beautiful scenery and the unique actitivies offered only by the City by the Bay. You will walk away from the conference not only with renewed excitement about Agile PLM, but feeling rejuvenated in general.

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• Welcome to Jackstown

  - by fatherjack

  I live in a small town, the population count isn't that great but let me introduce you to some of the population. We'll start with Martin the Doc, he fixes up anything that gets poorly, so much so that he could be classed as the doctor, the vet and even the garage mechanic. He's got a reputation that he can fix anything and that hasn't been proved wrong yet. He's great friends with Brian (who gets called "Brains") the teacher who seems to have a sound understanding of any topic you care to pass his way. If he isn't sure he tells you and then goes to find out and comes back with a full answer real quick. Its good to have that sort of research capability close at hand. Brains is also great at encouraging anyone who needs a bit of support to get them up to speed and working on their jobs. Steve sees Brains regularly, that's because he is the librarian, he keeps all sorts of reading material and nowadays there's even video to watch about any topic you like. Steve keeps scouring all sorts of places to get the content that's needed and he keeps it in good order so that what ever is needed can be found quickly. He also has to make sure that old stuff gets marked as probably out of date so that anyone reading it wont get mislead. Over the road from him is Greg, he's the town crier. We don't have a newspaper here so Greg keeps us all informed of what's going on "out of town" - what new stuff we might make use of and what wont work in a small place like this. If we are interested he goes ahead and gets people in to demonstrate their products  and tell us about the details. Greg is pretty good at getting us discounts too. Now Greg's brother Ian works for the mayors office in the "waste management department" nowadays its all about the recycling but he still has to make sure that the stuff that cant be used any more gets disposed of properly. It depends on the type of waste he's dealing with that decides how it need to be treated and he has to know a lot about the different methods and when to use which ones. There are two people that keep the peace in town, Brent is the detective, investigating wrong doings and applying justice where necessary and Bart is the diplomat who smooths things over when any people have a dispute or disagreement. Brent is meticulous in his investigations and fair in the way he handles any situation he finds. Discretion is his byword. There's a rumour that Bart used to work for the United Nations but what ever his history there is no denying his ability to get apparently irreconcilable parties working together to their combined benefit. Someone who works closely with Bart is Brad, he is the translator in town. He has several languages that he can converse in but he can also explain things from someone's point of view or  and make it understandable to someone else. To keep things on the straight and narrow from a legal perspective is Ben the solicitor, making sure we all abide by the rules.Two people who make for an interesting evening's conversation if you get them together are Aaron and Grant, Aaron is the local planning inspector and Grant is an inventor of some reputation. Anything being constructed around here needs Aarons agreement. He's quite flexible in his rules though; if you can justify what you want to do with solid logic but he wont stand for any development going on without his inclusion. That gets a demolition notice and there's no argument. Grant as I mentioned is the inventor in town, if something can be improved or created then Grant is your man. He mainly works on his own but isnt averse to getting specific advice and assistance from specialist from out of town if they can help him finish his creations.There aren't too many people left for you to meet in the town, there's Rob, he's an ex professional sportsman. He played Hockey, Football, Cricket, you name it. He was in his element as goal keeper / wicket keeper and that shows in his personal life. He just goes about his business and people often don't even know that he's helped them. Really low profile, doesn't get any glory but saves people from lots of problems, even disasters on occasion. There goes Neil, he's a bit of an odd person, some people say he's gifted with special clairvoyant powers, personally I think he's got his ear to the ground and knows where to find out the important news as soon as its made public. Anyone getting a visit from Neil is best off to follow his advice though, he's usually spot on and you wont be caught by surprise if you follow his recommendations – wherever it comes from.Poor old Andrew is the last person to introduce you to. Andrew doesn't show himself too often but when he does it seems that people find a reason to blame him for their problems, whether he had anything to do with their predicament or not. In all honesty, without fail, and to his great credit, he takes it in good grace and never retaliates or gets annoyed when he's out and about.  It pays off too as its very often the case that those who were blaming him recently suddenly find they need his help and they readily forget the issues pretty rapidly.And then there's me, what do I do in town? Well, I'm just a DBA with a lot of hats. (Jackstown Pop. 1)

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Whoosh: PASS Board Year 1, Q4

  - by Denise McInerney

  "Whoosh". That's the sound the last quarter of 2012 made as it rushed by. My first year on the PASS Board is complete, and the last three months of it were probably the busiest. PASS Summit 2012 Much of October was devoted to preparing for Summit. Every Board  member, HQ staffer and dozens of volunteers were busy in the run-up to our flagship event. It takes a lot of work to put on the Summit. The community meetings,  first-timers program, keynotes, sessions and that fabulous Community Appreciation party are the result of many hours of preparation. Virtual Chapters at the Summit With a lot of help from Karla Landrum, Michelle Nalliah, Lana Montgomery and others at HQ the VCs had a good presence at Summit. We started the week with a VC leaders meeting. I shared some information about the activities and growth during the first part of the year.   From January - September 2012: The number of VCs increased from 14 to 20 VC membership  grew from 55,200 to 80,100 Total attendance at VC meetings increased from 1,480 to 2,198 Been part of PASS Global Growth with language-based VC- including Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. We also heard from some VC leaders and volunteers. Ryan Adams (Performance VC) shared his tips for successful marketing of VC events. Amy Lewis (Business Intelligence VC) described how the BI chapter has expanded to support PASS' global growth by finding volunteers to organize events at times that are convenient for people in Europe and Australia. Felipe Ferreira (Portuguese language VC) described the experience of building a user group first in Brazil, then expanding to work with Portuguese-speaking data professionals around the world. Virtual Chapter leaders and volunteers were in evidence throughout Summit, beginning with the Welcome Reception. For the past several years VCs have had an organized presence at this event, signing up new members and advertising their meetings. Many VC leaders also spent time at the Community Zone. This new addition to the Summit proved to be a vibrant spot were new members and volunteers could network with others and find out how to start a chapter or host a SQL Saturday. Women In Technology 2012 was the 10th WIT Luncheon to be held at Summit. I was honored to be asked to be on the panel to discuss the topic "Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?" The PASS community has come a long way in our understanding of issues facing women in tech and our support of women in the organization. It was great to hear from panelists Stefanie Higgins and Kevin Kline who were there at the beginning as well as Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup who are part of the progress being made by women in our community today. Bylaw Changes The Board spent a good deal of time in 2012 discussing how to move our global growth initiatives forward. An important component of this is a proposed change to how the Board is elected with some seats representing geographic regions. At the end of December we voted on these proposed bylaw changes which have been published for review. The member review and feedback is open until February 8. I encourage all members to review these changes and send any feedback to [email protected]  In addition to reading the bylaws, I recommend reading Bill Graziano's blog post on the subject. Business Analytics Conference At Summit we announced a new event: the PASS Business Analytics Conference. The inaugural event will be April 10-12, 2013 in Chicago. The world of data is changing rapidly. More and more businesses want to extract value and insight from their data. Data professionals who provide these insights or enable others to do so are in demand. The BA Conference offers expert content on predictive analytics, data exploration and visualization, content delivery strategies and more. By holding this new event PASS is participating in important discussions happening in our industry, offering our members more educational value and reaching out to data professionals who are not currently part of our organization. New Year, New Portfolio In addition to my work with the Virtual Chapters I am also now responsible for the 24 Hours of PASS portfolio. Since the first 24HOP of 2013 is scheduled for January 30 we started the transition of the portfolio work from Rob Farley to me right after Summit. Work immediately started to secure speakers for the January event. We have also been evaluating webinar platforms that can be used for 24HOP as well as the Virtual Chapters. Next Up 24 Hours of PASS: Business Analytics Edition will be held on January 30. I'll be there and will moderate one or two sessions. The 24HOP topics are a sneak peek into the type of content that will be offered at the Business Analytics Conference. I hope to see some of you there. The Virtual Chapters have hit the ground running in 2013; many of them have events scheduled. The Application Development VC is getting restarted  and a new Business Analytics VC will be starting soon. Check out the lineup and join the VCs that interest you. And watch the Events page and Connector for announcements of upcoming meetings. At the end of January I will be attending a Board meeting in Seattle, and February 23 I will be at SQL Saturday #177 in Silicon Valley.

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• What Counts For A DBA: Foresight

  - by drsql

  Of all the valuable attributes of a DBA covered so far in this series, ranging from passion to humility to practicality, perhaps one of the most important attributes may turn out to be the most seemingly-nebulous: foresight. According to Free Dictionary foresight is the "perception of the significance and nature of events before they have occurred". Foresight does not come naturally to most people, as the parent of any teenager will attest. No matter how clearly you see their problems coming they won't listen, and have to fail before eventually (hopefully) learning for themselves. Having graduated from the school of hard knocks, the DBA, the naive teenager no longer, acquires the ability to foretell how events will unfold in response to certain actions or attitudes with the unerring accuracy of a doom-laden prophet. Like Simba in the Lion King, after a few blows to the head, we foretell that a sore head that will be the inevitable consequence of a swing of Rafiki's stick, and we take evasive action. However, foresight is about more than simply learning when to duck. It's about taking the time to understand and prevent the habits that caused the stick to swing in the first place. And based on this definition, I often think there is a lot less foresight on display in my industry than there ought to be. Most DBAs reading this blog will spot a line such as the following in a piece of "working" code, understand immediately why it is less than optimimum, and take evasive action. …WHERE CAST (columnName as int) = 1 However, the programmers who regularly write this sort of code clearly lack that foresight, and this and numerous other examples of similarly-malodorous code prevail throughout our industry (and provide premium-grade fertilizer for the healthy growth of many a consultant's bank account). Sometimes, perhaps harried by impatient managers and painfully tight deadlines, everyone makes mistakes. Yes, I too occasionally write code that "works", but basically stinks. When the problems manifest, it is sometimes accompanied by a sense of grim recognition that somewhere in me existed the foresight to know that that approach would lead to this problem. However, in the headlong rush, warning signs got overlooked, lessons learned previously, which could supply the foresight to the current project, were lost and not applied.   Of course, the problem often is a simple lack of skills, training and knowledge in the relevant technology and/or business space; programmers and DBAs forced to do their best in the face of inadequate training, or to apply their skills in areas where they lack experience. However, often the problem goes deeper than this; I detect in some DBAs and programmers a certain laziness of attitude.   They veer from one project to the next, going with "whatever works", unwilling or unable to take the time to understand where their actions are leading them. Of course, the whole "Agile" mindset is often interpreted to favor flexibility and rapid production over aiming to get things right the first time. The faster you try to travel in the dark, frequently changing direction, the more important it is to have someone who has the foresight to know at least roughly where you are heading. This is doubly true for the data tier which, no matter how you try to deny it, simply cannot be "redone" every month as you learn aspects of the world you are trying to model that, with a little bit of foresight, you would have seen coming.   Sometimes, when as a DBA you can glance briefly at 200 lines of working SQL code and know instinctively why it will cause problems, foresight can feel like magic, but it isn't; it's more like muscle memory. It is acquired as the consequence of good experience, useful communication with those around you, and a willingness to learn continually, through continued education as well as from failure. Foresight can be deployed only by finding time to understand how the lessons learned from other DBAs, and other projects, can help steer the current project in the right direction.   C.S. Lewis once said "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." It cannot be avoided; the quality of what you build now is going to affect you, and others, at some point in the future. Take the time to acquire foresight; it is a love letter to your future self, to say you cared.

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• The first day of JavaOne is already over!

  - by delabassee

  In the past Sunday used to be a more relaxing day with ‘just’ some JavaOne activities going on. Sunday used to be a soft day to prepare yourself for an exhausting week. This is now over as JavaOne is expanding; Sunday is now an integral part of the conference. One of the side effect of this extra day is that some activities related to JavaOne and OpenWorld such as MySQL Connect are being push to start a day earlier on Saturday (can you spot the pattern here?). On the GlassFish front, Sunday was a very busy day! It started at the Moscone Center with the annual GlassFish Community Event where the Java EE 7 and GF 4 roadmaps were presented and discussed. During the event, different GlassFish users such as ZeroTurnaround (the JRebel guys), Grupo RBS and IDR Solutions shared their views on GF, why they like GF but also what could be improved. The event was also a forum for the GF community to exchange with some of the key Java EE / GlassFish Oracle Executives and the different GF team members. The Strategy keynote and the Technical keynote were held in the Masonic Auditorium later in the after-noon. Oracle executives have presented the plans for Java SE, Java FX and Java EE. As on-demand replays will be available soon, I will not summarize several hours of content but here are some personal takeaways from those keynotes. Modularity Modularity is a big deal. We know by now that Project Jigsaw will not be ready for Java SE 8 but in any case, it is already possible (and encouraged) to test Jigsaw today. In the future, Java EE plan to rely on the modularity features provided by Java SE, so Project Jigsaw is also relevant for Java EE developers. Shorter term, to cover some of the modular requirements, Java SE will adopt the approach that was used for Java EE 6 and the notion of Profiles. This approach does not define a module system per say; Profiles is a way to clearly define different subsets of Java SE to fulfill different needs (e.g. the full JRE is not required for a headless application). The introduction of different Profiles, from the Base profile (10mb) to the Full Profile (+50mb), has been proposed for Java SE 8. Embedded Embedded is a strong theme going forward for the Java Plaform. There is now a dedicated program : Java Embedded @ JavaOne Java by nature (e.g. platform independence, built-in security, ability easily talks to any back-end systems, large set of skills available on the market, etc.) is probably the most suited platform for the Internet of Things. You can quickly be up-to-speed and develop services and applications for that space just by using your current Java skills. All you need to start developing on ARM is a 35$ Raspberry Pi ARM board (25$ if you are cheap and can live without an ethernet connection) and the recently released JDK for Linux/ARM. Obviously, GlassFish runs on Raspberry Pi. If you wan to go further in the embedded space, you should take a look Java SE Embedded, an optimized, low footprint, Java environment that support the major embedded architectures (ARM, PPC and x86). Finally, Oracle has recently introduced Java Embedded Suite, a new solution that brings modern middleware capabilities to the embedded space. Java Embedded Suite is an optimized solution that leverage Java SE Embedded but also GlassFish, Jersey and JavaDB to deploy advanced value added capabilities (eg. sensor data filtering and) deeper in the network, closer to the devices. JavaFX JavaFX is going strong! Starting from Java SE 7u6, JavaFX is bundled with the JDK. JavaFX is now available for all the major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). JavaFX is now also available, in developer preview, for low end device running Linux/ARM. During the keynote, JavaFX was shown running on a Raspberry Pi! And as announced during the keynote, JavaFX should be fully open-sourced by the end of the year; contributions are welcome!. There is a strong momentum around JavaFX, it’s the ideal client solution for the Java platform. A client layer that works perfectly with GlassFish on the back-end. If you were not convince by JavaFX, it’s time to reconsider it! As an old Chinese proverb say “One tweet is worth a thousand words!” HTML5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 HTML5 got a lot of airtime too, it was covered during the Java EE 7 section of the keynote. Some details about Project Avatar, Oracle’s incubator project for a TSA (Thin Server Architecture) solution, were diluted and shown during the keynote. On the tooling side, Project Easel running on NetBeans 7.3 beta was demo’ed, including a cool NetBeans debugging session running in Chrome! HTML 5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 deserve separate posts... Feedback We need your feedback! There are many projects, JSRs and products cooking : GlassFish 4, Project Jigsaw, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236), OpenJFX, OpenJDK to name just a few. Those projects, those specifications will have a profound impact on the Java platform for the years to come! So if you have the opportunity, download, install, learn, tests them and give feedback! Remember, you can "Make the Future Java!" Finally, the traditional GlassFish Party at the Thirsty Bear concluded the first JavaOne day. This party is another place where the community can freely exchange with the GlassFish team in a more relaxed, more friendly (but sometime more noisy) atmosphere. Arun has posted a set of pictures to reflect the atmosphere of the keynotes and the GlassFish party. You can find more details on the others Java EE and GlassFish activities here.

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• Planning an Event&ndash;SPS NYC

  - by MOSSLover

  I bet some of you were wondering why I am not going to any events for the most part in June and July (aside from volunteering at SPS Chicago).  Well I basically have no life for the next 2 months.  We are approaching the 11th hour of SharePoint Saturday New York City.  The event is slated to have 350 to 400 attendees.  This is second year in a row I’ve helped run it with Jason Gallicchio.  It’s amazingly crazy how much effort this event requires versus Kansas City.  It’s literally 2x the volume of attendees, speakers, and sponsors plus don’t even get me started about volunteers.  So here is a bit of the break down… We have 30 volunteers+ that Tasha Scott from the Hampton Roads Area will be managing the day of the event to do things like timing the speakers, handing out food, making sure people don’t walk into the event that did not sign up until we get a count for fire code, registering people, watching the sharpees, watching the prizes, making sure attendees get to the right place,  opening and closing the partition in the big room, moving chairs, moving furniture, etc…Then there is Jason, Greg, and I who will be making sure that the speakers, sponsors, and everything is going smoothly in the background.  We need to make sure that everything is setup properly and in the right spot.  We also need to make sure signs are printed, schedules are created, bags are stuffed with sponsor material.  Plus we need to send out emails to sponsors reminding them to send us the right information to post on the site for charity sessions, send us boxes with material to stuff bags, and we need to make sure that Michael Lotter gets there information for invoicing.  We also need to check that Michael has invoiced everyone and who has paid, because we can’t order anything for the event without money.  Once people have paid we need to setup food orders, speaker and volunteer dinners, buy prizes, buy bags, buy speakers/volunteer/organizer shirts, etc…During this process we need all the abstracts from speakers, all the bios, pictures, shirt sizes, and other items so we can create schedules and order items.  We also need to keep track of who is attending the dinner the night before for volunteers and speakers and make sure we don’t hit capacity.  Then there is attendee tracking and making sure that we don’t hit too many attendees.  We need to make sure that attendees know where to go and what to do.  We have to make all kinds of random supply lists during this process and keep on track with a variety of lists and emails plus conference calls.  All in all it’s a lot of work and I am trying to keep track of it all the top so that we don’t duplicate anything or miss anything.  So basically all in all if you don’t see me around for another month don’t worry I do exist. Right now if you look at what I’m doing I am traveling every Monday morning and Thursday night back and forth to Washington DC from New Jersey.  Every night I am working on organizational stuff for SharePoint Saturday New York City.  Every Tuesday night we are running an event conference call.  Every weekend I am either with family or my boyfriend and cat trying hard not to touch the event.  So all my time is pretty much work, event, and family/boyfriend.  I have 0 bandwidth for anything in the community.  If you compound that with my severe allergy problems in DC and a doctor’s appointment every month plus a new med once a week I’m lucky I am still standing and walking.  So basically once July 30th hits hopefully Jason Gallicchio, Greg Hurlman, and myself will be able to breathe a little easier.  If I forget to do this thank you Greg and Jason.  Thank you Tom Daly.  Thank you Michael Lotter.  Thank you Tasha Scott.  Thank you Kevin Griffin.  Thank you all the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees who will and have made this event a success.  Hopefully, we have enough time until next year to regroup, recharge, and make the event grow bigger in a different venue.  Awesome job everyone we sole out within 3 days of registration and we still have several weeks to go.  Right now the waitlist is at 49 people with room to grow.  If you attend the event thank all these guys I mentioned above for making it possible.  It’s going to be awesome I know it but I probably won’t remember half of it due to the blur of things that we will all be taking care of the day of the event.  Catch you all in the end of July/Early August where I will attempt to post something useful and clever and possibly while wearing a fez. Technorati Tags: SPS NYC,SharePoint Saturday,SharePoint Saturday New York City

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  Another SharePoint Server 2010 feature which cannot go unnoticed is the Access Services. Access Services is a service in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows administrators to view, edit, and configure a Microsoft access application within a Web Browser. Access Services settings support backup and recovery, regardless of whether there is a UI setting in Central Administration. However, backup and recovery only apply to service-level and administrative-level settings; end-user content from the Access application is not backed up as part of this process. Access Services has Windows PowerShell functionality that can be used to provide the service that uses settings from a previous backup; configure and manage macro and query setting; manage and configure session management; and configure all the global settings of the service. Key Benefits of SharePoint Server Access Services Easier Access to right tools: The enhanced, customizable Ribbon in Access 2010 makes it easy to uncover more commands so you can focus on the end product. The new Microsoft Office BackstageTM view is yet another feature that can help you easily analyze and document your database, share, publish, and customize your Access 2010 experience, all from one convenient location. Helps build database effortlessly and quickly: Out-of-the box templates and reusable components make Access Services the fastest, simplest database solution available. It helps find new pre-built templates which you can start using without customization or select templates created by your peers in the Access online community and customize them to meet your needs. It builds your databases with new modular components. New Application Parts enable you to add a set of common Access components, such as a table and form for task management, to your database in a few simple clicks. Database navigation is now simplified. It creates Navigation Forms and makes your frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. Create Impactful forms and reports: Whether it's an inventory of your assets or customer sales database, Access 2010 brings the innovative tools you'd expect from Microsoft Office. Access Services easily spot trends and add emphasis to your data. It quickly create coordinating database forms and reports and bring the Web into your database. Obtain a centralized landing pad for your data: Access 2010 offers easy ways to bring your data together and help increase work quality. New technologies help break down barriers so you can share and work together on your databases, making you or your team more efficient and productive. Add automation and complex expressions: If you need a more robust database design, such as preventing record deletion if a specific condition is met or if you need to create calculations to forecast your budget, Access 2010 empowers you to be your own developer. The enhanced Expression Builder greatly simplifies your expression building experience with IntelliSense®. With the revamped Macro Designer, it's now even easier for you to add basic logic to your database. New Data Macros allow you to attach logic to your data, centralizing the logic on the table, not the objects that update your data. Key features of Access Services 2010 - Access database content through a Web browser: Newly added Access Services on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to make your databases available on the Web with new Web databases. Users without an Access client can open Web forms and reports via a browser and changes are automatically synchronized. - Simplify how you access the features you need: The Ribbon, improved in Access 2010, helps you access commands even more quickly by enabling you to customize or create your own tabs. The new Microsoft Office Backstage view replaces the traditional File menu to provide one central, organized location for all of your document management tasks. - Codeless navigation: Use professional looking web-like navigation forms to make frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. - Easily reuse Access items in other databases: Use Application Parts to add pre-built Access components for common tasks to your database in a few simple clicks. You can also package common database components, such as data entry forms and reports for task management, and reuse them across your organization or other databases. - Simplified formatting: By using Office themes you can create coordinating professional forms and reports across your database. Simply select a familiar and great looking Office theme, or design your own, and apply it to your database. Newly created Access objects will automatically match your chosen theme.

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• Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

  - by tom

  Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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• How is the gimbal locked problem solved using accumulative matrix transformations

  - by Luke San Antonio

  I am reading the online "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming" book by Jason L. McKesson As of now, I am up to the gimbal lock problem and how to solve it using quaternions. However right here, at the Quaternions page. Part of the problem is that we are trying to store an orientation as a series of 3 accumulated axial rotations. Orientations are orientations, not rotations. And orientations are certainly not a series of rotations. So we need to treat the orientation of the ship as an orientation, as a specific quantity. I guess this is the first spot I start to get confused, the reason is because I don't see the dramatic difference between orientations and rotations. I also don't understand why an orientation cannot be represented by a series of rotations... Also: The first thought towards this end would be to keep the orientation as a matrix. When the time comes to modify the orientation, we simply apply a transformation to this matrix, storing the result as the new current orientation. This means that every yaw, pitch, and roll applied to the current orientation will be relative to that current orientation. Which is precisely what we need. If the user applies a positive yaw, you want that yaw to rotate them relative to where they are current pointing, not relative to some fixed coordinate system. The concept, I understand, however I don't understand how if accumulating matrix transformations is a solution to this problem, how the code given in the previous page isn't just that. Here's the code: void display() { glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glClearDepth(1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glutil::MatrixStack currMatrix; currMatrix.Translate(glm::vec3(0.0f, 0.0f, -200.0f)); currMatrix.RotateX(g_angles.fAngleX); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_X_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.4f, 0.4f, 1.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateY(g_angles.fAngleY); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Y_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateZ(g_angles.fAngleZ); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Z_AXIS, glm::vec4(1.0f, 0.3f, 0.3f, 1.0f)); glUseProgram(theProgram); currMatrix.Scale(3.0, 3.0, 3.0); currMatrix.RotateX(-90); //Set the base color for this object. glUniform4f(baseColorUnif, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0); glUniformMatrix4fv(modelToCameraMatrixUnif, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(currMatrix.Top())); g_pObject->Render("tint"); glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); } To my understanding, isn't what he is doing (modifying a matrix on a stack) considered accumulating matrices, since the author combined all the individual rotation transformations into one matrix which is being stored on the top of the stack. My understanding of a matrix is that they are used to take a point which is relative to an origin (let's say... the model), and make it relative to another origin (the camera). I'm pretty sure this is a safe definition, however I feel like there is something missing which is blocking me from understanding this gimbal lock problem. One thing that doesn't make sense to me is: If a matrix determines the difference relative between two "spaces," how come a rotation around the Y axis for, let's say, roll, doesn't put the point in "roll space" which can then be transformed once again in relation to this roll... In other words shouldn't any further transformations to this point be in relation to this new "roll space" and therefore not have the rotation be relative to the previous "model space" which is causing the gimbal lock. That's why gimbal lock occurs right? It's because we are rotating the object around set X, Y, and Z axes rather than rotating the object around it's own, relative axes. Or am I wrong? Since apparently this code I linked in isn't an accumulation of matrix transformations can you please give an example of a solution using this method. So in summary: What is the difference between a rotation and an orientation? Why is the code linked in not an example of accumulation of matrix transformations? What is the real, specific purpose of a matrix, if I had it wrong? How could a solution to the gimbal lock problem be implemented using accumulation of matrix transformations? Also, as a bonus: Why are the transformations after the rotation still relative to "model space?" Another bonus: Am I wrong in the assumption that after a transformation, further transformations will occur relative to the current? Also, if it wasn't implied, I am using OpenGL, GLSL, C++, and GLM, so examples and explanations in terms of these are greatly appreciated, if not necessary. The more the detail the better! Thanks in advance...

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• Provocative Tweets From the Dachis Social Business Summit

  - by Mike Stiles

  On June 20, all who follow social business and how social is changing how we do business and internal business structures, gathered in London for the Dachis Social Business Summit. In addition to Oracle SVP Product Development, Reggie Bradford, brands and thought leaders posed some thought-provoking ideas and figures. Here are some of the most oft-tweeted points, and our thoughts that they provoked. Tweet: The winners will be those who use data to improve performance.Thought: Everyone is dwelling on ROI. Why isn’t everyone dwelling on the opportunity to make their product or service better (as if that doesn’t have an effect on ROI)? Big data can improve you…let it. Tweet: High performance hinges on integrated teams that interact with each other.Thought: Team members may work well with each other, but does the team as a whole “get” what other teams are doing? That’s the key to an integrated, companywide workforce. (Internal social platforms can facilitate that by the way). Tweet: Performance improvements come from making the invisible visible.Thought: Many of the factors that drive customer behavior and decisions are invisible. Through social, customers are now showing us what we couldn’t see before…if we’re paying attention. Tweet: Games have continuous feedback, which is why they’re so engaging.  Apply that to business operations.Thought: You think your employees have an obligation to be 100% passionate and engaged at all times about making you richer. Think again. Like customers, they must be motivated. Visible insight that they’re advancing on their goals helps. Tweet: Who can add value to the data?  Data will tend to migrate to where it will be most effective.Thought: Not everybody needs all the data. One team will be able to make sense of, use, and add value to data that may be irrelevant to another team. Like a strategized football play, the data has to get sent to the spot on the field where it’s needed most. Tweet: The sale isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the start of a new marketing cycle.Thought: Another reason the ROI question is fundamentally flawed. The sale is not the end of the potential return on investment. After-the-sale service and nurturing begins where the sales “victory” ends. Tweet: A dead sale is one that’s not shared.  People must be incentivized to share.Thought: Guess what, customers now know their value to you as marketers on your behalf. They’ll tell people about your product, but you’ve got to answer, “Why should I?” And you’ve got to answer it with something substantial, not lame trinkets. Tweet: Social user motivations are competition, affection, excellence and curiosity.Thought: Your followers will engage IF; they can get something for doing it, love your culture so much they want you to win, are consistently stunned at the perfection and coolness of your products, or have been stimulated enough to want to know more. Tweet: In Europe, 92% surveyed said they couldn’t care less about brands.Thought: Oh well, so much for loving you or being impressed enough with your products & service that they want you to win. We’ve got a long way to go. Tweet: A complaint is a gift.Thought: Our instinct where complaints are concerned is to a) not listen, b) dismiss the one who complains as a kook, c) make excuses, and d) reassure ourselves with internal group-think that they’re wrong and we’re right. It’s the perfect recipe for how to never, ever grow or get better. In a way, this customer cares more than you do. Tweet: 78% of consumers think peer recommendation is the best form of advertising.  Eventually, engagement is going to eat advertising.Thought: Why is peer recommendation best? Trust. If a friend tells me how great a movie was, I believe him. He has credibility with me. He’s seen it, and he could care less if I buy a ticket. He’s telling me it was awesome because he sincerely believes that it was.  That’s gold. Tweet: 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Thought: This “how mad can we make our customers without losing them” strategy has to end. The customer experience has actual monetary value, money you’re probably leaving on the table. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• What Counts for a DBA: Humility

  - by drsql

  In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• 2D isometric picking

  - by Bikonja

  I'm trying to implement picking in my isometric 2D game, however, I am failing. First of all, I've searched for a solution and came to several, different equations and even a solution using matrices. I tried implementing every single one, but none of them seem to work for me. The idea is that I have an array of tiles, with each tile having it's x and y coordinates specified (in this simplified example it's by it's position in the array). I'm thinking that the tile (0, 0) should be on the left, (max, 0) on top, (0, max) on the bottom and (max, max) on the right. I came up with this loop for drawing, which googling seems to have verified as the correct solution, as has the rendered scene (ofcourse, it could still be wrong, also, forgive the messy names and stuff, it's just a WIP proof of concept code) // Draw code int col = 0; int row = 0; for (int i = 0; i < nrOfTiles; ++i) { // XOffset and YOffset are currently hardcoded values, but will represent camera offset combined with HUD offset Point tile = IsoToScreen(col, row, TileWidth / 2, TileHeight / 2, XOffset, YOffset); int x = tile.X; int y = tile.Y; spriteBatch.Draw(_tiles[i], new Rectangle(tile.X, tile.Y, TileWidth, TileHeight), Color.White); col++; if (col >= Columns) // Columns is the number of tiles in a single row { col = 0; row++; } } // Get selection overlay location (removed check if selection exists for simplicity sake) Point tile = IsoToScreen(_selectedTile.X, _selectedTile.Y, TileWidth / 2, TileHeight / 2, XOffset, YOffset); spriteBatch.Draw(_selectionTexture, new Rectangle(tile.X, tile.Y, TileWidth, TileHeight), Color.White); // End of draw code public Point IsoToScreen(int isoX, int isoY, int widthHalf, int heightHalf, int xOffset, int yOffset) { Point newPoint = new Point(); newPoint.X = widthHalf * (isoX + isoY) + xOffset; newPoint.Y = heightHalf * (-isoX + isoY) + yOffset; return newPoint; } This code draws the tiles correctly. Now I wanted to do picking to select the tiles. For this, I tried coming up with equations of my own (including reversing the drawing equation) and I tried multiple solutions I found on the internet and none of these solutions worked. Trying out lots of solutions, I came upon one that didn't work, but it seemed like an axis was just inverted. I fiddled around with the equations and somehow managed to get it to actually work (but have no idea why it works), but while it's close, it still doesn't work. I'm not really sure how to describe the behaviour, but it changes the selection at wrong places, while being fairly close (sometimes spot on, sometimes a tile off, I believe never more off than the adjacent tile). This is the code I have for getting which tile coordinates are selected: public Point? ScreenToIso(int screenX, int screenY, int tileHeight, int offsetX, int offsetY) { Point? newPoint = null; int nX = -1; int nY = -1; int tX = screenX - offsetX; int tY = screenY - offsetY; nX = -(tY - tX / 2) / tileHeight; nY = (tY + tX / 2) / tileHeight; newPoint = new Point(nX, nY); return newPoint; } I have no idea why this code is so close, especially considering it doesn't even use the tile width and all my attempts to write an equation myself or use a solution I googled failed. Also, I don't think this code accounts for the area outside the "tile" (the transparent part of the tile image), for which I intend to add a color map, but even if that's true, it's not the problem as the selection sometimes switches on approx 25% or 75% of width or height. I'm thinking I've stumbled upon a wrong path and need to backtrack, but at this point, I'm not sure what to do so I hope someone can shed some light on my error or point me to the right path. It may be worth mentioning that my goal is to not only pick the tile. Each main tile will be divided into 5x5 smaller tiles which won't be drawn seperately from the whole main tile, but they will need to be picked out. I think a color map of a main tile with different colors for different coordinates within the main tile should take care of that though, which would fall within using a color map for the main tile (for the transparent parts of the tile, meaning parts that possibly belong to other tiles).

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• Content in Context: The right medicine for your business applications

  - by Lance Shaw

  For many of you, your companies have already invested in a number of applications that are critical to the way your business is run. HR, Payroll, Legal, Accounts Payable, and while they might need an upgrade in some cases, they are all there and handling the lifeblood of your business. But are they really running as efficiently as they could be? For many companies, the answer is no. The problem has to do with the important information caught up within documents and paper. It’s everywhere except where it truly needs to be – readily available right within the context of the application itself. When the right information cannot be easily found, business processes suffer significantly. The importance of this recently struck me when I recently went to meet my new doctor and get a routine physical. Walking into the office lobby, I couldn't help but notice rows and rows of manila folders in racks from floor to ceiling, filled with documents and sensitive, personal information about various patients like myself.  As I looked at all that paper and all that history, two things immediately popped into my head.  “How do they find anything?” and then the even more alarming, “So much for information security!” It sure looked to me like all those documents could be accessed by anyone with a key to the building. Now the truth is that the offices of many general practitioners look like this all over the United States and the world.  But it had me thinking, is the same thing going on in just about any company around the world, involving a wide variety of important business processes? Probably so. Think about all the various processes going on in your company right now. Invoice payments are being processed through Accounts Payable, contracts are being reviewed by Procurement, and Human Resources is reviewing job candidate submissions and doing background checks. All of these processes and many more like them rely on access to forms and documents, whether they are paper or digital. Now consider that it is estimated that employee’s spend nearly 9 hours a week searching for information and not finding it. That is a lot of very well paid employees, spending more than one day per week not doing their regular job while they search for or re-create what already exists. Back in the doctor’s office, I saw this trend exemplified as well. First, I had to fill out a new patient form, even though my previous doctor had transferred my records over months previously. After filling out the form, I was later introduced to my new doctor who then interviewed me and asked me the exact same questions that I had answered on the form. I understand that there is value in the interview process and it was great to meet my new doctor, but this simple process could have been so much more efficient if the information already on file could have been brought directly together with the new patient information I had provided. Instead of having a highly paid medical professional re-enter the same information into the records database, the form I filled out could have been immediately scanned into the system, associated with my previous information, discrepancies identified, and the entire process streamlined significantly. We won’t solve the health records management issues that exist in the United States in this blog post, but this example illustrates how the automation of information capture and classification can eliminate a lot of repetitive and costly human entry and re-creation, even in a simple process like new patient on-boarding. In a similar fashion, by taking a fresh look at the various processes in place today in your organization, you can likely spot points along the way where automating the capture and access to the right information could be significantly improved. As you evaluate how content-process flows through your organization, take a look at how departments and regions share information between the applications they are using. Business applications are often implemented on an individual department basis to solve specific problems but a holistic approach to overall information management is not taken at the same time. The end result over the years is disparate applications with separate information repositories and in many cases these contain duplicate information, or worse, slightly different versions of the same information. This is where Oracle WebCenter Content comes into the story. More and more companies are realizing that they can significantly improve their existing application processes by automating the capture of paper, forms and other content. This makes the right information immediately accessible in the context of the business process and making the same information accessible across departmental systems which has helped many organizations realize significant cost savings. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, one of our primary goals is to help customers find new ways to be more effective, more cost-efficient and manage information as effectively as possible. We have a series of three webcasts occurring over the next few weeks that are focused on the integration of enterprise content management within the context of business applications. We hope you will join us for one or all three and that you will find them informative. Click here to learn more about these sessions and to register for them. There are many aspects of information management to consider as you look at integrating content management within your business applications. We've barely scratched the surface here but look for upcoming blog posts where we will discuss more specifics on the value of delivering documents, forms and images directly within applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards Enterprise One, Siebel CRM and many others. What do you think?  Are your important business processes as healthy as they can be?  Do you have any insights to share on the value of delivering content directly within critical business processes? Please post a comment and let us know the value you have realized, the lessons learned and what specific areas you are interested in.

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• rotate player based off of joystick

  - by pengume

  Hey everyone I have this game that i am making in android and I have a touch screen joystick that moves the player around based on the joysticks position. I cant figure out how to also get the player to rotate at the same angle of the joystick. so when the joystick is to the left the players bitmap is rotated to the left as well. Maybe someone here has some sample code I could look at here is the joysticks class that I am using. `public class GameControls implements OnTouchListener { public float initx = DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 45; //255; // 320 og 425 public float inity = DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 45;//425; // 480 og 267 public Point _touchingPoint = new Point( DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 45, DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 45); public Point _pointerPosition = new Point(DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 100, DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 100); // ogx 220 ogy 150 private Boolean _dragging = false; private boolean attackMode = false; @Override public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) { update(event); return true; } private MotionEvent lastEvent; public boolean ControlDragged; private static double angle; public void update(MotionEvent event) { if (event == null && lastEvent == null) { return; } else if (event == null && lastEvent != null) { event = lastEvent; } else { lastEvent = event; } // drag drop if (event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) { if ((int) event.getX() > 0 && (int) event.getX() < 50 && (int) event.getY() > DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 160 && (int) event.getY() < DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 0) { setAttackMode(true); } else { _dragging = true; } } else if (event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP) { if(isAttackMode()){ setAttackMode(false); } _dragging = false; } if (_dragging) { ControlDragged = true; // get the pos _touchingPoint.x = (int) event.getX(); _touchingPoint.y = (int) event.getY(); // Log.d("GameControls", "x = " + _touchingPoint.x + " y = " //+ _touchingPoint.y); // bound to a box if (_touchingPoint.x < DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 75) { // og 400 _touchingPoint.x = DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 75; } if (_touchingPoint.x > DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 15) {// og 450 _touchingPoint.x = DroidzActivity.screenWidth - 15; } if (_touchingPoint.y < DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 75) {// og 240 _touchingPoint.y = DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 75; } if (_touchingPoint.y > DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 15) {// og 290 _touchingPoint.y = DroidzActivity.screenHeight - 15; } // get the angle setAngle(Math.atan2(_touchingPoint.y - inity, _touchingPoint.x - initx) / (Math.PI / 180)); // Move the ninja in proportion to how far // the joystick is dragged from its center _pointerPosition.y += Math.sin(getAngle() * (Math.PI / 180)) * (_touchingPoint.x / 70); // og 180 70 _pointerPosition.x += Math.cos(getAngle() * (Math.PI / 180)) * (_touchingPoint.x / 70); // make the pointer go thru if (_pointerPosition.x > DroidzActivity.screenWidth) { _pointerPosition.x = 0; } if (_pointerPosition.x < 0) { _pointerPosition.x = DroidzActivity.screenWidth; } if (_pointerPosition.y > DroidzActivity.screenHeight) { _pointerPosition.y = 0; } if (_pointerPosition.y < 0) { _pointerPosition.y = DroidzActivity.screenHeight; } } else if (!_dragging) { ControlDragged = false; // Snap back to center when the joystick is released _touchingPoint.x = (int) initx; _touchingPoint.y = (int) inity; // shaft.alpha = 0; } } public void setAttackMode(boolean attackMode) { this.attackMode = attackMode; } public boolean isAttackMode() { return attackMode; } public void setAngle(double angle) { this.angle = angle; } public static double getAngle() { return angle; } }` I should also note that the player has animations based on when he is moving or attacking. EDIT: I got the angle and am rotating the sprite around in the correct angle however it rotates on the wrong spot. My sprite is one giant bitmap that gets cut into four pieces and only one shown at a time to animate walking. here is the code I am using to rotate him right now. ` public void draw(Canvas canvas,int pointerX, int pointerY) { Matrix m; if (setRotation){ // canvas.save(); m = new Matrix(); m.reset(); // spriteWidth and spriteHeight are for just the current frame showed //m.setTranslate(spriteWidth / 2, spriteHeight / 2); //get and set rotation for ninja based off of joystick m.preRotate((float) GameControls.getRotation()); //create the rotated bitmap flipedSprite = Bitmap.createBitmap(bitmap , 0, 0,bitmap.getWidth(),bitmap.getHeight() , m, true); //set new bitmap to rotated ninja setBitmap(flipedSprite); setRotation = false; // canvas.restore(); Log.d("Ninja View", "angle of rotation= " +(float) GameControls.getRotation()); } ` And then the draw method // create the destination rectangle for the ninjas current animation frame // pointerX and pointerY are from the joystick moving the ninja around destRect = new Rect(pointerX, pointerY, pointerX + spriteWidth, pointerY + spriteHeight); canvas.drawBitmap(bitmap, getSourceRect(), destRect, null);

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• IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

  - by andrewbrust

  Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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• In 3D camera math, calculate what Z depth is pixel unity for a given FOV

  - by badweasel

  I am working in iOS and OpenGL ES 2.0. Through trial and error I've figured out a frustum to where at a specific z depth pixels drawn are 1 to 1 with my source textures. So 1 pixel in my texture is 1 pixel on the screen. For 2d games this is good. Of course it means that I also factor in things like the size of the quad and the size of the texture. For example if my sprite is a quad 32x32 pixels. The quad size is 3.2 units wide and tall. And the texcoords are 32 / the size of the texture wide and tall. Then the frustum is: matrixFrustum(-(float)backingWidth/frustumScale,(float)backingWidth/frustumScale, -(float)backingHeight/frustumScale, (float)backingHeight/frustumScale, 40, 1000, mProjection); Where frustumScale is 800 for a retina screen. Then at a distance of 800 from camera the sprite is pixel for pixel the same as photoshop. For 3d games sometimes I still want to be able to do this. But depending on the scene I sometimes need the FOV to be different things. I'm looking for a way to figure out what Z depth will achieve this same pixel unity for a given FOV. For this my mProjection is set using: matrixPerspective(cameraFOV, near, far, (float)backingWidth / (float)backingHeight, mProjection); With testing I found that at an FOV of 45.0 a Z of 38.5 is very close to pixel unity. And at an FOV of 30.0 a Z of 59.5 is about right. But how can I calculate a value that is spot on? Here's my matrixPerspecitve code: void matrixPerspective(float angle, float near, float far, float aspect, mat4 m) { //float size = near * tanf(angle / 360.0 * M_PI); float size = near * tanf(degreesToRadians(angle) / 2.0); float left = -size, right = size, bottom = -size / aspect, top = size / aspect; // Unused values in perspective formula. m[1] = m[2] = m[3] = m[4] = 0; m[6] = m[7] = m[12] = m[13] = m[15] = 0; // Perspective formula. m[0] = 2 * near / (right - left); m[5] = 2 * near / (top - bottom); m[8] = (right + left) / (right - left); m[9] = (top + bottom) / (top - bottom); m[10] = -(far + near) / (far - near); m[11] = -1; m[14] = -(2 * far * near) / (far - near); } And my mView is set using: lookAtMatrix(cameraPos, camLookAt, camUpVector, mView); * UPDATE * I'm going to leave this here in case anyone has a different solution, can explain how they do it, or why this works. This is what I figured out. In my system I use a 10th scale unit to pixels on non-retina displays and a 20th scale on retina displays. The iPhone is 640 pixels wide on retina and 320 pixels wide on non-retina (obsolete). So if I want something to be the full screen width I divide by 20 to get the OpenGL unit width. Then divide that by 2 to get the left and right unit position. Something 32 units wide centered on the screen goes from -16 to +16. Believe it or not I have an excel spreadsheet do all this math for me and output all the vertex data for my sprite sheet. It's an arbitrary thing I made up to do .1 units = 1 non-retina pixel or 2 retina pixels. I could have made it .01 units = 2 pixels and someday I might switch to that. But for now it's the other. So the width of the screen in units is 32.0, and that means the left most pixel is at -16.0 and the right most is at 16.0. After messing a bit I figured out that if I take the [0] value of an identity modelViewProjection matrix and multiply it by 16 I get the depth required to get 1:1 pixels. I don't know why. I don't know if the 16 is related to the screen size or just a lucky guess. But I did a test where I placed a sprite at that calculated depth and varied the FOV through all the valid values and the object stays steady on screen with 1:1 pixels. So now I'm just calculating the unityDepth that way. If someone gives me a better answer I'll checkmark it.

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• Plagued by multithreaded bugs

  - by koncurrency

  On my new team that I manage, the majority of our code is platform, TCP socket, and http networking code. All C++. Most of it originated from other developers that have left the team. The current developers on the team are very smart, but mostly junior in terms of experience. Our biggest problem: multi-threaded concurrency bugs. Most of our class libraries are written to be asynchronous by use of some thread pool classes. Methods on the class libraries often enqueue long running taks onto the thread pool from one thread and then the callback methods of that class get invoked on a different thread. As a result, we have a lot of edge case bugs involving incorrect threading assumptions. This results in subtle bugs that go beyond just having critical sections and locks to guard against concurrency issues. What makes these problems even harder is that the attempts to fix are often incorrect. Some mistakes I've observed the team attempting (or within the legacy code itself) includes something like the following: Common mistake #1 - Fixing concurrency issue by just put a lock around the shared data, but forgetting about what happens when methods don't get called in an expected order. Here's a very simple example: void Foo::OnHttpRequestComplete(statuscode status) { m_pBar->DoSomethingImportant(status); } void Foo::Shutdown() { m_pBar->Cleanup(); delete m_pBar; m_pBar=nullptr; } So now we have a bug in which Shutdown could get called while OnHttpNetworkRequestComplete is occuring on. A tester finds the bug, captures the crash dump, and assigns the bug to a developer. He in turn fixes the bug like this. void Foo::OnHttpRequestComplete(statuscode status) { AutoLock lock(m_cs); m_pBar->DoSomethingImportant(status); } void Foo::Shutdown() { AutoLock lock(m_cs); m_pBar->Cleanup(); delete m_pBar; m_pBar=nullptr; } The above fix looks good until you realize there's an even more subtle edge case. What happens if Shutdown gets called before OnHttpRequestComplete gets called back? The real world examples my team has are even more complex, and the edge cases are even harder to spot during the code review process. Common Mistake #2 - fixing deadlock issues by blindly exiting the lock, wait for the other thread to finish, then re-enter the lock - but without handling the case that the object just got updated by the other thread! Common Mistake #3 - Even though the objects are reference counted, the shutdown sequence "releases" it's pointer. But forgets to wait for the thread that is still running to release it's instance. As such, components are shutdown cleanly, then spurious or late callbacks are invoked on an object in an state not expecting any more calls. There are other edge cases, but the bottom line is this: Multithreaded programming is just plain hard, even for smart people. As I catch these mistakes, I spend time discussing the errors with each developer on developing a more appropriate fix. But I suspect they are often confused on how to solve each issue because of the enormous amount of legacy code that the "right" fix will involve touching. We're going to be shipping soon, and I'm sure the patches we're applying will hold for the upcoming release. Afterwards, we're going to have some time to improve the code base and refactor where needed. We won't have time to just re-write everything. And the majority of the code isn't all that bad. But I'm looking to refactor code such that threading issues can be avoided altogether. One approach I am considering is this. For each significant platform feature, have a dedicated single thread where all events and network callbacks get marshalled onto. Similar to COM apartment threading in Windows with use of a message loop. Long blocking operations could still get dispatched to a work pool thread, but the completion callback is invoked on on the component's thread. Components could possibly even share the same thread. Then all the class libraries running inside the thread can be written under the assumption of a single threaded world. Before I go down that path, I am also very interested if there are other standard techniques or design patterns for dealing with multithreaded issues. And I have to emphasize - something beyond a book that describes the basics of mutexes and semaphores. What do you think? I am also interested in any other approaches to take towards a refactoring process. Including any of the following: Literature or papers on design patterns around threads. Something beyond an introduction to mutexes and semaphores. We don't need massive parallelism either, just ways to design an object model so as to handle asynchronous events from other threads correctly. Ways to diagram the threading of various components, so that it will be easy to study and evolve solutions for. (That is, a UML equivalent for discussing threads across objects and classes) Educating your development team on the issues with multithreaded code. What would you do?

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• ASP.NET 3.5 GridView - row editing - dynamic binding to a DropDownList

  - by marc_s

  This is driving me crazy :-) I'm trying to get a ASP.NET 3.5 GridView to show a selected value as string when being displayed, and to show a DropDownList to allow me to pick a value from a given list of options when being edited. Seems simple enough? My gridview looks like this (simplified): <asp:GridView ID="grvSecondaryLocations" runat="server" DataKeyNames="ID" OnInit="grvSecondaryLocations_Init" OnRowCommand="grvSecondaryLocations_RowCommand" OnRowCancelingEdit="grvSecondaryLocations_RowCancelingEdit" OnRowDeleting="grvSecondaryLocations_RowDeleting" OnRowEditing="grvSecondaryLocations_RowEditing" OnRowUpdating="grvSecondaryLocations_RowUpdating" > <Columns> <asp:TemplateField> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label ID="lblPbxTypeCaption" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("PBXTypeCaptionValue") %>' /> </ItemTemplate> <EditItemTemplate> <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlPBXTypeNS" runat="server" Width="200px" DataTextField="CaptionValue" DataValueField="OID" /> </EditItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </asp:GridView> The grid gets displayed OK when not in editing mode - the selected PBX type shows its value in the asp:Label control. No surprise there. I load the list of values for the DropDownList into a local member called _pbxTypes in the OnLoad event of the form. I verified this - it works, the values are there. Now my challenge is: when the grid goes into editing mode for a particular row, I need to bind the list of PBX's stored in _pbxTypes. Simple enough, I thought - just grab the drop down list object in the RowEditing event and attach the list: protected void grvSecondaryLocations_RowEditing(object sender, GridViewEditEventArgs e) { grvSecondaryLocations.EditIndex = e.NewEditIndex; GridViewRow editingRow = grvSecondaryLocations.Rows[e.NewEditIndex]; DropDownList ddlPbx = (editingRow.FindControl("ddlPBXTypeNS") as DropDownList); if (ddlPbx != null) { ddlPbx.DataSource = _pbxTypes; ddlPbx.DataBind(); } .... (more stuff) } Trouble is - I never get anything back from the FindControl call - seems like the ddlPBXTypeNS doesn't exist (or can't be found). What am I missing?? Must be something really stupid.... but so far, all my Googling, reading up on GridView controls, and asking buddies hasn't helped. Who can spot the missing link? ;-) Marc

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• How to assess a job offer with stock options? [closed]

  - by seas

  Cannot help expressing my curiosity about this issue. First of all, Russia, a country, I live in, as far as I understand, is a virgin land on this matter. Motivation is purely developed here and options are not existed at all. So, I am absolutely not aware about this. I roughly understand the mechanism of options. And, as far as I understand, the major white spot in the whole that story, how much will a singe share cost. How much will I get from all those N x 1000 options? I see two ways one can get money from the business: 1. Business goes IPO !!! 2. Business is sold as a whole to another owner. Next way is rather questionable about getting money: 3. Business goes without IPO "forever" (a generation would rather die before it IPO). I am also interested some explanations about situation ?3. Situation ?1 is clear - market decides everything, you either wait for stock price you satisfied or sell everything now. But topic is rather about ?2 - business is sold to another business. I am considering the following model: I am well payed specialist with company X. Somebody, with a company Y makes me an offer. Y is a startup. They cannot offer me much money and cannot overbid my salary, but they grow fast and hope to be bought soon. Instead of money, they offer me N x 1000 options. My problem is "how to assess this offer against my current, stable and well-payed job"? Are there any average cost of virtual share during selling one company to another? Are there any average stock price companies prefer to go to IPO? Are there any barriers against spreading the value of sock before selling the company or IPO (hiring too much people with options package too fast will decrease each package value, I mean)? Are there any good articles with explanations? Is all that somehow written in the law?

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• Managing database connections in an Android Activity

  - by Daniel Lew

  I have an application with a ListActivity that uses a CursorAdapter as its adapter. The ListActivity opens the database and does the querying for the CursorAdapter, which is all well and good, but I am having issues with figuring out when to close both the Cursor and the SQLiteDatabase. The way things are handled right now, if the user finishes the activity, I close the database and the cursor. However, this still ends up with the DalvikVM warning me that I've left a database open - for example, if the user hits the "home" button (leaving the activity in the task's stack), rather than the "back" button. If I close them during pause and then re-query during resume, then I don't get any errors, but then a user cannot return to the list without it requerying (and thus losing the user's place in the list). By this I mean, the user can click on any item in the list and open a new activity based on it, but will often want to hit "back" afterwards and return to the same place on the list. If I requery, then I cannot return the user back to the correct spot. What is the proper way to handle this issue? I want the list to remain scrolled properly, but I don't want the VM to keep complaining about unclosed databases. Edit: Here's a general outline of how I handle the code at the moment: public class MyListActivity extends ListActivity { private Cursor mCursor; private CursorAdapter mAdapter; protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); mAdapter = new MyCursorAdapter(this); setListAdapter(mAdapter); } protected void onPause() { super.onPause(); if (isFinishing()) { mCursor.close(); } } protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); mCursor.close(); } private void updateQuery() { // If we had a cursor open before, close it. if (mCursor != null) { mCursor.close(); } MyDbHelper dbHelper = new MyDbHelper(this); SQLiteDatabase db = dbHelper.getReadableDatabase(); mCursor = db.query(...); mAdapter.changeCursor(mCursor); db.close(); } } updateQuery() can be called multiple times because the user can filter the results via menu items (I left this part out of the code, as the problem still occurs even if the user does no filtering). Again, the issue is that when I hit home I get leak errors. Yet, after going home, I can go back to the app and find my list again - cursor fully intact.

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• WCF method not receiving the parameters

  - by Thiago Sayão

  I have a WCF method that is not receiving the request parameters. But if I use the WCFTest client (the one that comes with visual studio) the method receives the parameters. If I capture the requests, they look very similar: If the request is this, it works: <s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <s:Body xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <consultaValeCompra xmlns="http://tempuri.org/"> <dataMovto>1</dataMovto> <numSeqOperacao>2</numSeqOperacao> <numDocumento>3</numDocumento> <valorDocumento>4</valorDocumento> <tipo>5</tipo> <codPreVenda>6</codPreVenda> </consultaValeCompra> </s:Body> </s:Envelope> If the request is this, I do not get the parameters: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <soapenv:Body> <consultaValeCompra xmlns="http://valeCompra/jaws"> <dataMovto>121212</dataMovto> <numSeqOperacao>003719</numSeqOperacao> <numDocumento>000000000000005555466465454546</numDocumento> <valorDocumento>000046400</valorDocumento> <tipo>0</tipo> <codPreVenda>0000000000</codPreVenda> </consultaValeCompra> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> The method signature is: public Retorno consultaValeCompra(string dataMovto, string numSeqOperacao, string numDocumento, string valorDocumento, string tipo, string codPreVenda) I can spot the differences, but I cannot understand why the first works and the second does not. What can I do to make it work? Thanks.

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• AutoIt scripts runs without error but I can't see archive?

  - by Scott

  #include <File.au3> #include <Zip.au3> ; bad file extensions Local $extData="ade|adp|app|asa|ashx|asp|bas|bat|cdx|cer|chm|class|cmd|com|cpl|crt|csh|der|exe|fxp|gadget|hlp|hta|htr|htw|ida|idc|idq|ins|isp|its|jse|ksh|lnk|mad|maf|mag|mam|maq|mar|mas|mat|mau|mav|maw|mda|mdb|mde|mdt|mdw|mdz|msc|msh|msh1|msh1xml|msh2|msh2xml|mshxml|msi|msp|mst|ops|pcd|pif|prf|prg|printer|pst|reg|rem|scf|scr|sct|shb|shs|shtm|shtml|soap|stm|url|vb|vbe|vbs|ws|wsc|wsf|wsh" Local $extensions = StringSplit($extData, "|") ; What is the root directory? $rootDirectory = InputBox("Root Directory", "Please enter the root directory...") archiveDir($rootDirectory) Func archiveDir($dir) $goDirs = True $goFiles = True ; Get all the files under the current dir $allOfDir = _FileListToArray($dir) Local $countDirs = 0 Local $countFiles = 0 $imax = UBound($allOfDir) For $i = 0 to $imax - 1 If StringInStr(FileGetAttrib($dir & "\" & $allOfDir[$i]),"D") Then $countDirs = $countDirs + 1 ElseIf StringInStr(($allOfDir[$i]),".") Then $countFiles = $countFiles + 1 EndIf Next MsgBox(0, "Value of $countDirs in " & $dir, $countDirs) MsgBox(0, "Value of $countFiles in " & $dir, $countFiles) If ($countDirs > 0) Then Local $allDirs[$countDirs] $goDirs = True Else $goDirs = False EndIf If ($countFiles > 0) Then Local $allFiles[$countFiles] $goFiles = True Else $goFiles = False EndIf $dirCount = 0 $fileCount = 0 For $i = 0 to $imax - 1 If (StringInStr(FileGetAttrib($dir & "\" & $allOfDir[$i]),"D")) And ($goDirs == True) Then $allDirs[$dirCount] = $allOfDir[$i] $dirCount = $dirCount + 1 ElseIf (StringInStr(($allOfDir[$i]),".")) And ($goFiles == True) Then $allFiles[$fileCount] = $allOfDir[$i] $fileCount = $fileCount + 1 EndIf Next ; Zip them if need be in current spot using 'ext_zip.zip' as file name, loop through each file ext. If ($goFiles == True) Then $emax = UBound($extensions) $fmax = UBound($allFiles) For $e = 0 to $emax - 1 For $f = 0 to $fmax - 1 $currentExt = getExt($allFiles[$f]) If ($currentExt == $extensions[$e]) Then $zip = _Zip_Create($dir & "\" & $currentExt & "_zip.zip") _Zip_AddFile($zip, $allFiles[$f]) EndIf Next Next EndIf ; Get all dirs under current DirCopy ; For each dir, recursive call from step 2 If ($goDirs == True) Then $dmax = UBound($allDirs) $rootDirectory = $rootDirectory & "\" For $d = 0 to $dmax - 1 archiveDir($rootDirectory & $allDirs[$d]) Next EndIf EndFunc Func getExt($filename) $pos = StringInStr($filename, ".") $retval = StringTrimLeft($filename, $pos + 1) Return $retval EndFunc This should output the .zip archives in the directories it finds the files that it needs to zip but it doesn't. Is there something I have to do after I create and add files to the archive within the code to put this created archive in the directory?

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