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• PCI Encryption Key Management

  - by Unicorn Bob

  (Full disclosure: I'm already an active participant here and at StackOverflow, but for reasons that should hopefully be obvious, I'm choosing to ask this particular question anonymously). I currently work for a small software shop that produces software that's sold commercially to manage small- to mid-size business in a couple of fairly specialized industries. Because these industries are customer-facing, a large portion of the software is related to storing and managing customer information. In particular, the storage (and securing) of customer credit card information. With that, of course, comes PCI compliance. To make a long story short, I'm left with a couple of questions about why certain things were done the way they were, and I'm unfortunately without much of a resource at the moment. This is a very small shop (I report directly to the owner, as does the only other full-time employee), and the owner doesn't have an answer to these questions, and the previous developer is...err...unavailable. Issue 1: Periodic Re-encryption As of now, the software prompts the user to do a wholesale re-encryption of all of the sensitive information in the database (basically credit card numbers and user passwords) if either of these conditions is true: There are any NON-encrypted pieces of sensitive information in the database (added through a manual database statement instead of through the business object, for example). This should not happen during the ordinary use of the software. The current key has been in use for more than a particular period of time. I believe it's 12 months, but I'm not certain of that. The point here is that the key "expires". This is my first foray into commercial solution development that deals with PCI, so I am unfortunately uneducated on the practices involved. Is there some aspect of PCI compliance that mandates (or even just strongly recommends) periodic key updating? This isn't a huge issue for me other than I don't currently have a good explanation to give to end users if they ask why they are being prompted to run it. Question 1: Is the concept of key expiration standard, and, if so, is that simply industry-standard or an element of PCI? Issue 2: Key Storage Here's my real issue...the encryption key is stored in the database, just obfuscated. The key is padded on the left and right with a few garbage bytes and some bits are twiddled, but fundamentally there's nothing stopping an enterprising person from examining our (dotfuscated) code, determining the pattern used to turn the stored key into the real key, then using that key to run amok. This seems like a horrible practice to me, but I want to make sure that this isn't just one of those "grin and bear it" practices that people in this industry have taken to. I have developed an alternative approach that would prevent such an attack, but I'm just looking for a sanity check here. Question 2: Is this method of key storage--namely storing the key in the database using an obfuscation method that exists in client code--normal or crazy? Believe me, I know that free advice is worth every penny that I've paid for it, nobody here is an attorney (or at least isn't offering legal advice), caveat emptor, etc. etc., but I'm looking for any input that you all can provide. Thank you in advance!

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• Data breakpoints to find points where data gets broken

  - by raccoon_tim

  When working with a large code base, finding reasons for bizarre bugs can often be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Finding out why an object gets corrupted without no apparent reason can be quite daunting, especially when it seems to happen randomly and totally out of context. Scenario Take the following scenario as an example. You have defined the a class that contains an array of characters that is 256 characters long. You now implement a method for filling this buffer with a string passed as an argument. At this point you mistakenly expect the buffer to be 256 characters long. At some point you notice that you require another character buffer and you add that after the previous one in the class definition. You now figure that you don’t need the 256 characters that the first member can hold and you shorten that to 128 to conserve space. At this point you should start thinking that you also have to modify the method defined above to safeguard against buffer overflow. It so happens, however, that in this not so perfect world this does not cross your mind. Buffer overflow is one of the most frequent sources for errors in a piece of software and often one of the most difficult ones to detect, especially when data is read from an outside source. Many mass copy functions provided by the C run-time provide versions that have boundary checking (defined with the _s suffix) but they can not guard against hard coded buffer lengths that at some point get changed. Finding the bug Getting back to the scenario, you’re now wondering why does the second string get modified with data that makes no sense at all. Luckily, Visual Studio provides you with a tool to help you with finding just these kinds of errors. It’s called data breakpoints. To add a data breakpoint, you first run your application in debug mode or attach to it in the usual way, and then go to Debug, select New Breakpoint and New Data Breakpoint. In the popup that opens, you can type in the memory address and the amount of bytes you wish to monitor. You can also use an expression here, but it’s often difficult to come up with an expression for data in an object allocated on the heap when not in the context of a certain stack frame. There are a couple of things to note about data breakpoints, however. First of all, Visual Studio supports a maximum of four data breakpoints at any given time. Another important thing to notice is that some C run-time functions modify memory in kernel space which does not trigger the data breakpoint. For instance, calling ReadFile on a buffer that is monitored by a data breakpoint will not trigger the breakpoint. The application will now break at the address you specified it to. Often you might immediately spot the issue but the very least this feature can do is point you in the right direction in search for the real reason why the memory gets inadvertently modified. Conclusions Data breakpoints are a great feature, especially when doing a lot of low level operations where multiple locations modify the same data. With the exception of some special cases, like kernel memory modification, you can use it whenever you need to check when memory at a certain location gets changed on purpose or inadvertently.

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• Cloud – the forecast is improving

  - by Rob Farley

  There is a lot of discussion about “the cloud”, and how that affects people’s data stories. Today the discussion enters the realm of T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jorge Segarra. Over the years, companies have invested a lot in making sure that their data is good, and I mean every aspect of it – the quality of it, the security of it, the performance of it, and more. Experts such as those of us at LobsterPot Solutions have helped these companies with this, and continue to work with clients to make sure that data is a strong part of their business, not an oversight. Whether business intelligence systems are being utilised or not, every business needs to be able to rely on its data, and have the confidence in it. Data should be a foundation upon which a business is built. In the past, data had been stored in paper-based systems. Filing cabinets stored vital information. Today, people have server rooms with storage of various kinds, recognising that filing cabinets don’t necessarily scale particularly well. It’s easy to ‘lose’ data in a filing cabinet, when you have people who need to make sure that the sheets of paper are in the right spot, and that you know how things are stored. Databases help solve that problem, but still the idea of a large filing cabinet continues, it just doesn’t involve paper. If something happens to the physical ‘filing cabinet’, then the problems are larger still. Then the data itself is under threat. Many clients have generators in case the power goes out, redundant cables in case the connectivity dies, and spare servers in other buildings just in case they’re required. But still they’re maintaining filing cabinets. You see, people like filing cabinets. There’s something to be said for having your data ‘close’. Even if the data is not in readable form, living as bits on a disk somewhere, the idea that its home is ‘in the building’ is comforting to many people. They simply don’t want to move their data anywhere else. The cloud offers an alternative to this, and the human element is an obstacle. By leveraging the cloud, companies can have someone else look after their filing cabinet. A lot of people really don’t like the idea of this, partly because the administrators of the data, those people who could potentially log in with escalated rights and see more than they should be allowed to, who need to be trusted to respond if there’s a problem, are now a faceless entity in the cloud. But this doesn’t mean that the cloud is bad – this is simply a concern that some people may have. In new functionality that’s on its way, we see other hybrid mechanisms that mean that people can leverage parts of the cloud with less fear. Companies can use cloud storage to hold their backup data, for example, backups that have been encrypted and are therefore not able to be read by anyone (including administrators) who don’t have the right password. Companies can have a database instance that runs locally, but which has its data files in the cloud, complete with Transparent Data Encryption if needed. There can be a higher level of control, making the change easier to accept. Hybrid options allow people who have had fears (potentially very justifiable) to take a new look at the cloud, and to start embracing some of the benefits of the cloud (such as letting someone else take care of storage, high availability, and more) without losing the feeling of the data being close. @rob_farley

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• Is Visual Source Safe (The latest Version) really that bad? Why? What's the Best Alternative? Why? [closed]

  - by hanzolo

  Over the years I've constantly heard horror stories, had people say "Real Programmers Dont Use VSS", and so on. BUT, then in the workplace I've worked at two companies, one, a very well known public facing high traffic website, and another high end Financial Services "Web-Based" hosted solution catering to some very large, very well known companies, which is where I currently Reside and everything's working just fine (KNOCK KNOCK!!). I'm constantly interfacing with EXTREMELY Old technology with some of these financial institutions.. OLD LIKE YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE.. which leads me to the conclusion that if it works "LEAVE IT", and that maybe there's some value in old technology? at least enough value to overrule a rewrite!? right?? Is there something fundamentally flawed with the underlying technology that VSS uses? I have a feeling that if i said "someone said VSS Sucks" they would beg to differ, most likely give me this look like i dont know -ish, and I'd never gain back their respect and my credibility (well, that'll be hard to blow.. lol), BUT, give me an argument that I can take to someone whose been coding for 30 years, that builds Platforms that leverage current technology (.NET 3.5 / SQL 2008 R2 ), write's their own ORM with scaffolding and is able to provide a quality platform that supports thousands of concurrent users on a multi-tenant hosted solution, and does not agree with any benefits from having Source Control Integrated, and yet uses the Infamous Visual Source Safe. I have extensive experience with TFS up to 2010, and honestly I think it's great when a team (beyond developers) can embrace it. I've worked side by side with someone whose a die hard SVN'r and from a purist standpoint, I see the beauty in it (I need a bit more, out of my SS, but it surely suffices). So, why are such smarties not running away from Visual Source Safe? surely if it was so bad, it would've have been realized by now, and I would not be sitting here with this simple old, Check In, Check Out, Version Resistant, Label Intensive system. But here I am... I would love to drop an argument that would be the end all argument, but if it's a matter of opinion and personal experience, there seems to be too much leeway for keeping VSS. UPDATE: I guess the best case is to have the VSS supporters check other people's experiences and draw from that until we (please no) experience the breaking factor ourselves. Until then, i wont be engaging in a discussion to migrate off of VSS.. UPDATE 11-2012: So i was able to convince everyone at my work place that since MS is sun downing Visual Source Safe it might be time to migrate over to TFS. I was able to convince them and have recently upgraded our team to Visual Studio 2012 and TFS 2012. The migration was fairly painless, had to run analyze.exe which found a bunch of errors (not sure they'll ever affect the project) and then manually run the VSSConverter.exe. Again, painless, except it took 16 hours to migrate 5 years worth of everything.. and now we're on TFS.. much more integrated.. much more cooler.. so all in all, VSS served it's purpose for years without hick-up. There were no horror stories and Visual Source Save as source control worked just fine. so to all the nay sayers (me included). there's nothing wrong with using VSS. i wouldnt start a new project with it, and i would definitely consider migrating to TFS. (it's really not super difficult and a new "wizard" type converter is due out any day now so migrating should be painless). But from my experience, it worked just fine and got the job done.

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• College Ratings via the Federal Government

  - by user9147039

  A few weeks back you might remember news about a higher education rating system proposal from the Obama administration. As I've discussed previously, political and stakeholder pressures to improve outcomes and increase transparency are stronger than ever before. The executive branch proposal is intended to make progress in this area. Quoting from the proposal itself, "The ratings will be based upon such measures as: Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and Outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates.” This is going to be quite complex, to say the least. Most notably, higher ed is not monolithic. From community and other 2-year colleges, to small private 4-year, to professional schools, to large public research institutions…the many walks of higher ed life are, well, many. Designing a ratings system that doesn't wind up with lots of unintended consequences and collateral damage will be difficult. At best you would end up potentially tarnishing the reputation of certain institutions that were actually performing well against the metrics and outcome measures that make sense in their "context" of education. At worst you could spend a lot of time and resources designing a system that would lose credibility with its "customers". A lot of institutions I work with already have in place systems like the one described above. They are tracking completion rates, completion timeframes, transfers to other institutions, job placement, and salary information. As I talk to these institutions there are several constants worth noting: • Deciding on which metrics to measure is complicated. While employment and salary data are relatively easy to track, qualitative measures are more difficult. How do you quantify the benefit to someone who studies in one field that may not compensate him or her as well as another field but that provides huge personal fulfillment and reward is a difficult measure to quantify? • The data is available but the systems to transform the data into actual information that can be used in meaningful ways are not. Too often in higher ed information is siloed. As such, much of the data that need to be a part of a comprehensive system sit in multiple organizations, oftentimes outside the reach of core IT. • Politics and culture are big barriers. One of the areas that my team and I spend a lot of time talking about with higher ed institutions all over the world is the imperative to optimize for student success. This, like the tracking of the students’ achievement after graduation, requires a level or organizational capacity that does not currently exist. The primary barrier is the culture of "data islands" in higher ed, and the need for leadership to drive out the divisions between departments, schools, colleges, etc. and institute academy-wide analytics and data stewardship initiatives that will enable student success. • Data quality is a very big issue. So many disparate systems exist (some on premise, some "in the cloud") that keep data about "persons" using different means to identify them. Establishing a single source of truth about an individual and his or her data is difficult without some type of data quality policy and tools. Good tools actually exist but are seldom leveraged. Don't misunderstand - I think it's a great idea to drive additional transparency and accountability into the system of higher education. And not just at home, but globally. Students and parents need access to key data to make informed, responsible choices. The tools exist to not only enable this kind of information to be shared but to capture the very metrics stakeholders care most about and in a way that makes sense in the context of a given institution's "place" in the overall higher ed panoply.

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• Optimal Data Structure for our own API

  - by vermiculus

  I'm in the early stages of writing an Emacs major mode for the Stack Exchange network; if you use Emacs regularly, this will benefit you in the end. In order to minimize the number of calls made to Stack Exchange's API (capped at 10000 per IP per day) and to just be a generally responsible citizen, I want to cache the information I receive from the network and store it in memory, waiting to be accessed again. I'm really stuck as to what data structure to store this information in. Obviously, it is going to be a list. However, as with any data structure, the choice must be determined by what data is being stored and what how it will be accessed. What, I would like to be able to store all of this information in a single symbol such as stack-api/cache. So, without further ado, stack-api/cache is a list of conses keyed by last update: `(<csite> <csite> <csite>) where <csite> would be (1362501715 . <site>) At this point, all we've done is define a simple association list. Of course, we must go deeper. Each <site> is a list of the API parameter (unique) followed by a list questions: `("codereview" <cquestion> <cquestion> <cquestion>) Each <cquestion> is, you guessed it, a cons of questions with their last update time: `(1362501715 <question>) (1362501720 . <question>) <question> is a cons of a question structure and a list of answers (again, consed with their last update time): `(<question-structure> <canswer> <canswer> <canswer> and ` `(1362501715 . <answer-structure>) This data structure is likely most accurately described as a tree, but I don't know if there's a better way to do this considering the language, Emacs Lisp (which isn't all that different from the Lisp you know and love at all). The explicit conses are likely unnecessary, but it helps my brain wrap around it better. I'm pretty sure a <csite>, for example, would just turn into (<epoch-time> <api-param> <cquestion> <cquestion> ...) Concerns: Does storing data in a potentially huge structure like this have any performance trade-offs for the system? I would like to avoid storing extraneous data, but I've done what I could and I don't think the dataset is that large in the first place (for normal use) since it's all just human-readable text in reasonable proportion. (I'm planning on culling old data using the times at the head of the list; each inherits its last-update time from its children and so-on down the tree. To what extent this cull should take place: I'm not sure.) Does storing data like this have any performance trade-offs for that which must use it? That is, will set and retrieve operations suffer from the size of the list? Do you have any other suggestions as to what a better structure might look like?

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• Where are my date ranges in Analytics coming from?

  - by Jeffrey McDaniel

  In the P6 Reporting Database there are two main tables to consider when viewing time - W_DAY_D and W_Calendar_FS.  W_DAY_D is populated internally during the ETL process and will provide a row for every day in the given time range. Each row will contain aspects of that day such as calendar year, month, week, quarter, etc. to allow it to be used in the time element when creating requests in Analytics to group data into these time granularities. W_Calendar_FS is used for calculations such as spreads, but is also based on the same set date range. The min and max day_dt (W_DAY_D) and daydate (W_Calendar_FS) will be related to the date range defined, which is a start date and a rolling interval plus a certain range. Generally start date plus 3 years.  In P6 Reporting Database 2.0 this date range was defined in the Configuration utility.  As of P6 Reporting Database 3.0, with the introduction of the Extended Schema this date range is set in the P6 web application. The Extended Schema uses this date range to calculate the data for near real time reporting in P6.  This same date range is validated and used for the P6 Reporting Database.  The rolling date range means if today is April 1, 2010 and the rolling interval is set to three years, the min date will be 1/1/2010 and the max date will be 4/1/2013.  1/1/2010 will be the min date because we always back fill to the beginning of the year. On April 2nd, the Extended schema services are run and the date range is adjusted there to move the max date forward to 4/2/2013.  When the ETL process is run the Reporting Database will pick up this change and also adjust the max date on the W_DAY_D and W_Calendar_FS. There are scenarios where date ranges affecting areas like resource limit may not be adjusted until a change occurs to cause a recalculation, but based on general system usage these dates in these tables will progress forward with the rolling intervals. Choosing a large date range can have an effect on the ETL process for the P6 Reporting Database. The extract portion of the process will pull spread data over into the STAR. The date range defines how long activity and resource assignment spread data is spread out in these tables. If an activity lasts 5 days it will have 5 days of spread data. If a project lasts 5 years, and the date range is 3 years the spread data after that 3 year date range will be bucketed into the last day in the date range. For the overall project and even the activity level you will still see the correct total values.  You just would not be able to see the daily spread 5 years from now. This is an important question when choosing your date range, do you really need to see spread data down to the day 5 years in the future?  Generally this amount of granularity years in the future is not needed. Remember all those values 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future are still available to report on they would be in more of a summary format on the activity or project.  The data is always there, the level of granularity is the decision.

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• Broken Views

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  “SELECT *” isn’t just hazardous to performance, it can actually return blatantly wrong information. There are a number of blog posts and articles out there that actively discourage the use of the SELECT * FROM …syntax.  The two most common explanations that I have seen are: Performance:  The SELECT * syntax will return every column in the table, but frequently you really only need a few of the columns, and so by using SELECT * your are retrieving large volumes of data that you don’t need, but the system has to process, marshal across tiers, and so on.  It would be much more efficient to only select the specific columns that you need. Future-proof:  If you are taking other shortcuts in your code, along with using SELECT *, you are setting yourself up for trouble down the road when enhancements are made to the system.  For example, if you use SELECT * to return results from a table into a DataTable in .NET, and then reference columns positionally (e.g. myDataRow[5]) you could end up with bad data if someone happens to add a column into position 3 and skewing all the remaining columns’ ordinal position.  Or if you use INSERT…SELECT * then you will likely run into errors when a new column is added to the source table in any position. And if you use SELECT * in the definition of a view, you will run into a variation of the future-proof problem mentioned above.  One of the guys on my team, Mike Byther, ran across this in a project we were doing, but fortunately he caught it while we were still in development.  I asked him to put together a test to prove that this was related to the use of SELECT * and not some other anomaly.  I’ll walk you through the test script so you can see for yourself what happens. We are going to create a table and two views that are based on that table, one of them uses SELECT * and the other explicitly lists the column names.  The script to create these objects is listed below. IF OBJECT_ID('testtab') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE testtabgoIF OBJECT_ID('testtab_vw') IS NOT NULL DROP VIEW testtab_vwgo IF OBJECT_ID('testtab_vw_named') IS NOT NULL DROP VIEW testtab_vw_namedgo CREATE TABLE testtab (col1 NVARCHAR(5) null, col2 NVARCHAR(5) null)INSERT INTO testtab(col1, col2)VALUES ('A','B'), ('A','B')GOCREATE VIEW testtab_vw AS SELECT * FROM testtabGOCREATE VIEW testtab_vw_named AS SELECT col1, col2 FROM testtabgo Now, to prove that the two views currently return equivalent results, select from them. SELECT 'star', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vwSELECT 'named', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vw_named OK, so far, so good.  Now, what happens if someone makes a change to the definition of the underlying table, and that change results in a new column being inserted between the two existing columns?  (Side note, I normally prefer to append new columns to the end of the table definition, but some people like to keep their columns alphabetized, and for clarity for later people reviewing the schema, it may make sense to group certain columns together.  Whatever the reason, it sometimes happens, and you need to protect yourself and your code from the repercussions.) DROP TABLE testtabgoCREATE TABLE testtab (col1 NVARCHAR(5) null, col3 NVARCHAR(5) NULL, col2 NVARCHAR(5) null)INSERT INTO testtab(col1, col3, col2)VALUES ('A','C','B'), ('A','C','B')goSELECT 'star', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vwSELECT 'named', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vw_named I would have expected that the view using SELECT * in its definition would essentially pass-through the column name and still retrieve the correct data, but that is not what happens.  When you run our two select statements again, you see that the View that is based on SELECT * actually retrieves the data based on the ordinal position of the columns at the time that the view was created.  Sure, one work-around is to recreate the View, but you can’t really count on other developers to know the dependencies you have built-in, and they won’t necessarily recreate the view when they refactor the table. I am sure that there are reasons and justifications for why Views behave this way, but I find it particularly disturbing that you can have code asking for col2, but actually be receiving data from col3.  By the way, for the record, this entire scenario and accompanying test script apply to SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1. So, let the developer beware…know what assumptions are in effect around your code, and keep on discouraging people from using SELECT * syntax in anything but the simplest of ad-hoc queries. And of course, let’s clean up after ourselves.  To eliminate the database objects created during this test, run the following commands. DROP TABLE testtabDROP VIEW testtab_vwDROP VIEW testtab_vw_named

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• Introducing the Metro User Interface on Windows 2012

  - by andywe

  Although I am a big fan of using PowerShell to do many of my server operations, that aspect is well covered by those far more knowledgeable than I, and there is vast information around the web already on that. The new Metro interface, and getting around both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 though is relatively new, even for those whop ran the previews. What is this? A blank Desktop!   Where did the start button go? Well, it is still there...sort of. It is hidden, and acts like an auto hidden component that appear only when the mouse is hovered over the lower left corner of the screen. Those familiar with Gnome or OSX can relate this to the "Hot Corners" functions. To get to the start button, hover your mouse in the very left corner of the task bar. Let it sit there a moment, and a small blue square with colored tiles in it called start will appear. Click it. I clicked it and now I have all the tiles..What is this?   Welcome to the Metro interface. This is a much more modern look, and although at first seems weird and cumbersome, I have actually found that it is a bit more extensible, allowing greater organization and customization than the older explorer desktop. If you look closely, you'll see each box represents either a program, or program group. First, a few basics about using the start view. First and foremost, a right mouse click will bring up a bar on the bottom, with an icon towards the right. Notice it is titled “All Apps”. An even easier way in many places is to hover your mouse in the exact opposite corner, in the upper right. A sidebar will open and expose what used to be a widget bar (remember Vista?), and there are options for Search, Start, and Settings.   Ok Great, but where is everything? It’s all there…Click the All Apps icon.   Look better? Notice the scroll bar at the bottom. Move it right..your desktop is sized to your content..so you can have a smaller, or larger amount of programs exposed. Each icon can be secondary clicked (right mouse click for most of us, and an options bar at the bottom, rather than the old small context menu, is opened with some very familiar options.   Notice the top of the Windows Explorer window has some new features. You still have your right mouse click functions, but since the shortcuts for these items already exist..just copy them. There are many ways, but here is a long way to show you more of the interface. 1. Right mouse click a program icon, and select the Open File Location option. 2. Trusty file manager opens…but if you look closely up at top edge of the window, you’ll see a nifty enhancement. An orange colored box that is titled Shortcut Tools and another lavender box Title Application tools. Each of these adds options at the top of the file manager window to make selection easy. Of course, you can still secondary click an item in the listing window too. 3. Click shortcut tools, right click your app shortcut and copy it. Then simply paste it into the desktop outside the File Explorer window Also note some of the newer features. The large icons up top below the menu that has many common operations. The options change as you select each menu item. Well, that’s it for this installment. I hope this helps you out.

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• Integrating Amazon S3 in Java via NetBeans IDE

  - by Geertjan

  To continue from yesterday, let's set up a scenario that enables us to make use of this drag/drop service in NetBeans IDE: The above service is applicable to Amazon S3, an Amazon storage provider that is typically used to store large binary files. In Amazon S3, every object stored is contained in a bucket. Buckets partition the namespace of objects stored in Amazon S3. More on buckets here. Let's use the tools in NetBeans IDE to create a Java application that accesses our Amazon S3 buckets. Create a Java application named "AmazonBuckets" with a main class named "AmazonBuckets". Open the main class and then drag the above service into the main method of the class. Now, NetBeans IDE will create all the other classes and the properties file that you see in the screenshot below. The first thing to do is to open the properties file above and enter the access key and secret: access_key=SOMETHINGsecret=SOMETHINGELSE Now you're all set up. Make sure to, of course, actually have some buckets available: Then rewrite the Java class to parse the XML that is returned via the generated code: package amazonbuckets;import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;import java.io.IOException;import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;import org.netbeans.saas.amazon.AmazonS3Service;import org.netbeans.saas.RestResponse;import org.w3c.dom.DOMException;import org.w3c.dom.Document;import org.w3c.dom.Node;import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;import org.xml.sax.InputSource;import org.xml.sax.SAXException;public class AmazonBuckets {    public static void main(String[] args) {        try {            RestResponse result = AmazonS3Service.getBuckets();            String dataAsString = result.getDataAsString();            DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();            DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();            Document doc = dBuilder.parse(                    new InputSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(dataAsString.getBytes("utf-8"))));            NodeList bucketList = doc.getElementsByTagName("Bucket");            for (int i = 0; i < bucketList.getLength(); i++) {                Node node = bucketList.item(i);                System.out.println("Bucket Name: " + node.getFirstChild().getTextContent());            }        } catch (IOException | ParserConfigurationException | SAXException | DOMException ex) {        }    }}That's all. This is simpler to setup than the scenario described yesterday. Also notice that there are other Amazon S3 services you can interact with from your Java code, again after generating a heap of code after drag/drop into a Java source file: I tried the above, e.g., I created a new Amazon S3 bucket after dragging "createBucket", adding my credentials in the properties file, and then running the code that had been created. I.e., without adding a single line of code I was able to programmatically create new buckets. The above outlines a handy set of tools and techniques to use if you want to let your users store and access data in Amazon S3 buckets directly from the application you've created for them.

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• Can someone explain the true landscape of Rails vs PHP deployment, particularly within the context of Reseller-based web hosting (e.g., Hostgator)?

  - by rcd

  Currently, I have a reseller account with the company HostGator. I design websites, which up until now have occasionally been wrapped in Wordpress CMSs and the like (PHP applications). I then sell hosting (of the site I've designed) to the client, which is pretty simple, in that I can simply click a button and add a new shared hosting account/site with whatever settings I want. Furthermore, I then utilize WHMCS to automate billing and account management. It's a nice package and pretty simple. I pay something like $25 a month, and can sell a hundred accounts under this (because my clients bandwidth requirements are low). Now I am finding the need to develop more customized applications, including a minimalist CMS and several proprietary things. I soon anticipate developing these apps for clients as well. Thus, I've spent the past few months learning Rails, and it's coming along well now. The thing that has nagged at me all along, though, is the deployment issue. I can't wrap my brain around it. It seems like all of the popular options (Heroku, etc) have nice automation with git and are set up in the "Rails Way". I get that (sort of). But it's terribly expensive... a single dyno, a helper, and the cheapest database (which they say is mainly suitable for testing) that isn't limited to 5MB runs $51. This is for ONE app!!! Throw in a "production" DB and you're over $200. This is like... the same prices as getting a server somewhere, right? Meanwhile, going back to what I guess is a "traditional" hosting environment with Hostgator, their server only has Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.5... No Rails 3. AND, no Passenger (not that I really understand the difference in CGI or mod_rails or whatever, but they say Passenger is the simplest). So I'm to understand that if I build an app in Rails 3, it won't run at all on this host? But damn, I already have these accounts under my reseller account there, all running static html and/or PHP stuff, right? So what now? How do I get all of this under one simple (and affordable) roof? Forgive my ignorance, but I just don't get it. Managing a VPS is cool and all, but entails learning server admin stuff and security... And it's expensive. I get that a shared and/or reseller "server-based" (forgive the terminology) may be inadequate for large-scale apps that use a lot of bandwidth... But what about for those of us who are building real (but small and low bandwidth) apps (with Rails) and who want to deploy them simply, cheaply, using the same conceptual approach as PHP? Even after learning all of this Ruby and Rails stuff for months, I'm questioning whether it's worth it when it comes to deployment. I want to build a small app, upload it to my home directory on a shared server account, and just make it run. Why should that be so hard? Am I just choosing the wrong language/framework? Forgive my ignorance in the subject; these questions are not rhetorical; just trying to learn here. So: 1) I'd appreciate if someone could give me a good rundown of how to understand deployment in Rails vs. PHP. 2) I'd appreciate if someone could address my issue with running a hosting/web business around reseller hosting (Hostgator) while also being able to host Rails apps. Can it be done? And how can a company like Hostgator completely ignore what's current in Rails/Ruby? Thanks.

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• Identity in .NET 4.5&ndash;Part 3: (Breaking) changes

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I recently started porting a private build of Thinktecture.IdentityModel to .NET 4.5 and noticed a number of changes. The good news is that I can delete large parts of my library because many features are now in the box. Along the way I found some other nice additions. ClaimsIdentity now has methods to query the claims collection, e.g. HasClaim(), FindFirst(), FindAll(). ClaimsPrincipal has those methods as well. But they work across all contained identities. Nice! ClaimsPrincipal.Current retrieves the ClaimsPrincipal from Thread.CurrentPrincipal. Combined with the above changes, no casting necessary anymore. SecurityTokenHandler now has read and write methods that work directly with strings. This makes it much easier to deal with non-XML tokens like SWT or JWT. A new session security token handler that uses the ASP.NET machine key to protect the cookie. This makes it easier to get started in web farm scenarios. No need for a custom service host factory or the federation behavior anymore. WCF can be switched into “WIF mode” with the useIdentityConfiguration switch (odd name though). Tooling has become better and the new test STS makes it very easy to get started. On the other hand – and that was kind of expected – to bring claims into the core framework, there are also some breaking changes for WIF code. If you want to migrate (and I would recommend that), most changes to your code are mechanical. The following is a brain dump of the changes I encountered. Assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel is gone. The new functionality is now in mscorlib, System.IdentityModel(.Services) and System.ServiceModel. All the namespaces have changed as well. No IClaimsPrincipal and IClaimsIdentity anymore. Configuration section has been split into <system.identityModel /> and <system.identityModel.services />. WCF configuration story has changed as well. Claim.ClaimType is now Claim.Type. ClaimCollection is now IEnumerable<Claim>. IsSessionMode is now IsReferenceMode. Bootstrap token handling is different now. ClaimsPrincipalHttpModule is gone. This is not really needed anymore, apart from maybe claims transformation (see here). Various factory methods on ClaimsPrincipal are gone (e.g. ClaimsPrincipal.CreateFromIdentity()). SecurityTokenHandler.ValidateToken now returns a ReadOnlyCollection<ClaimsIdentity>. Some lower level helper classes are gone or internal now (e.g. KeyGenerator). The WCF WS-Trust bindings are gone. I think this is a pity. They were *really* useful when doing work with WSTrustChannelFactory. Since WIF is part of the Windows operating system and also supported in future versions of .NET, there is no urgent need to migrate to the 4.5 claims model. But obviously, going forward, at some point you want to make the move.

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• Is this over-abstraction? (And is there a name for it?)

  - by mwhite

  I work on a large Django application that uses CouchDB as a database and couchdbkit for mapping CouchDB documents to objects in Python, similar to Django's default ORM. It has dozens of model classes and a hundred or two CouchDB views. The application allows users to register a "domain", which gives them a unique URL containing the domain name that gives them access to a project whose data has no overlap with the data of other domains. Each document that is part of a domain has its domain property set to that domain's name. As far as relationships between the documents go, all domains are effectively mutually exclusive subsets of the data, except for a few edge cases (some users can be members of more than one domain, and there are some administrative reports that include all domains, etc.). The code is full of explicit references to the domain name, and I'm wondering if it would be worth the added complexity to abstract this out. I'd also like to know if there's a name for the sort of bound property approach I'm taking here. Basically, I have something like this in mind: Before in models.py class User(Document): domain = StringProperty() class Group(Document): domain = StringProperty() name = StringProperty() user_ids = StringListProperty() # method that returns related document set def users(self): return [User.get(id) for id in self.user_ids] # method that queries a couch view optimized for a specific lookup @classmethod def by_name(cls, domain, name): # the view method is provided by couchdbkit and handles # wrapping json CouchDB results as Python objects, and # can take various parameters modifying behavior return cls.view('groups/by_name', key=[domain, name]) # method that creates a related document def get_new_user(self): user = User(domain=self.domain) user.save() self.user_ids.append(user._id) return user in views.py: from models import User, Group # there are tons of views like this, (request, domain, ...) def create_new_user_in_group(request, domain, group_name): group = Group.by_name(domain, group_name)[0] user = User(domain=domain) user.save() group.user_ids.append(user._id) group.save() in group/by_name/map.js: function (doc) { if (doc.doc_type == "Group") { emit([doc.domain, doc.name], null); } } After models.py class DomainDocument(Document): domain = StringProperty() @classmethod def domain_view(cls, *args, **kwargs): kwargs['key'] = [cls.domain.default] + kwargs['key'] return super(DomainDocument, cls).view(*args, **kwargs) @classmethod def get(cls, *args, **kwargs, validate_domain=True): ret = super(DomainDocument, cls).get(*args, **kwargs) if validate_domain and ret.domain != cls.domain.default: raise Exception() return ret def models(self): # a mapping of all models in the application. accessing one returns the equivalent of class BoundUser(User): domain = StringProperty(default=self.domain) class User(DomainDocument): pass class Group(DomainDocument): name = StringProperty() user_ids = StringListProperty() def users(self): return [self.models.User.get(id) for id in self.user_ids] @classmethod def by_name(cls, name): return cls.domain_view('groups/by_name', key=[name]) def get_new_user(self): user = self.models.User() user.save() views.py @domain_view # decorator that sets request.models to the same sort of object that is returned by DomainDocument.models and removes the domain argument from the URL router def create_new_user_in_group(request, group_name): group = request.models.Group.by_name(group_name) user = request.models.User() user.save() group.user_ids.append(user._id) group.save() (Might be better to leave the abstraction leaky here in order to avoid having to deal with a couchapp-style //! include of a wrapper for emit that prepends doc.domain to the key or some other similar solution.) function (doc) { if (doc.doc_type == "Group") { emit([doc.name], null); } } Pros and Cons So what are the pros and cons of this? Pros: DRYer prevents you from creating related documents but forgetting to set the domain. prevents you from accidentally writing a django view - couch view execution path that leads to a security breach doesn't prevent you from accessing underlying self.domain and normal Document.view() method potentially gets rid of the need for a lot of sanity checks verifying whether two documents whose domains we expect to be equal are. Cons: adds some complexity hides what's really happening requires no model modules to have classes with the same name, or you would need to add sub-attributes to self.models for modules. However, requiring project-wide unique class names for models should actually be fine because they correspond to the doc_type property couchdbkit uses to decide which class to instantiate them as, which should be unique. removes explicit dependency documentation (from group.models import Group)

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• SSMS Tools Pack 2.7 is released. New website, improved licensing and features.

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  New website Nice, isn't it? Cleaner, simpler, better looking and more modern. If you have any suggestions for further improvements I'd be glad to hear them. Simpler licensing With SSMS tools Pack 2.7 the licensing is finally where it should be. It is now based on the activate/deactivate model. This way you can move a license from machine to machine with simple deactivation on one and reactivation on another machine. Much better, no? Because of very good feedback I have added an option for 6 machines and lowered the 4 machines option to 3 machines. This should make it much simpler for you to choose the right option for yourself. Improved features Version 2.5.3 was already extremely stable and 2.7 continues with that tradition. Because of that I could fully focus on features and why 3.0 will rock even more that 2.7! ;) In version 2.7 I have addressed quite a few improvements you were requesting for a while now. SQL History This is probably the biggest time saver out there, therefore it's only fair it gets a few important updates. If you have an existing .sql file opened, the Window Content History now saves your code to that existing file and also makes a backup in the SQL History log default location. Search is still done through the SQL History log but the Tab Sessions Restore opens your existing .sql file. This way you don't have to remember to save your existing files by yourself anymore. A bug when you couldn't search properly if you copied the log files to a new location was fixed. Unfortunately this removed the option to filter a search with the time component. The smallest search interval is now one day. The SSMS Tools Pack now remembers the visibility of the Current Window History window when you exit SSMS. SQL Snippets You can now set the position of the cursor in your snippets by placing {C} somewhere in your snippet. It's a small improvement but can be a huge time saver since you don't have to move through the snippet to the desired location anymore. Run script on multiple databases Database choices can now be saved with a name and then loaded again next time. You can also choose to run the script in a new window for each chosen database. Search through grid results You can now go previous/next search result with the Prev/Next control inside the search window. This is extremely useful if you have a large resultset. IT saves you the scrolling. CRUD generator Four new variables have been added: |CurrentDate| writes current date in format yyyy-MM-dd to your script |CurrentTime| writes current time in 24h format HH:mm:ss to your script |CurrentWinUser| writes current Windows logged on user to your script |CurrentSqlUser| writes current SQL logged on login to your script This was actually quite a requested feature so if you have any other ideas for extra variables, do let me know. That's about it. I hope you're going to enjoy this version as much as the previous ones. Have fun!

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• Using NSpec at various architectural layers

  - by nono

  Having read the quick start at nspec.org, I realized that NSpec might be a useful tool in a scenario which was becoming a bit cumbersome with NUnit alone. I'm adding an OAuth (or, DotNetOpenAuth) to a website and quickly made a mess of writing test methods such as [Test] public void UserIsLoggedInLocallyPriorToInvokingExternalLoginAndExternalLoginSucceedsAndExternalProviderIdIsNotAlreadyAssociatedWithUserAccount() { ... } ... and I wound up with maybe a dozen permutations of this theme, for the user already being logged in locally and not locally, the external login succeeding or failing, etc. Not only were the method names unwieldy, but every test needed a setup that contained parts in common with a different set of other tests. I realized that NSpec's incremental setup capabilities would work great for this, and for a while I was trucking a long wonderfully, with code like act = () => { actionResult = controller.ExternalLoginCallback(returnUrl); }; context["The user is already logged in"] = () => { before = () => identity.Setup(x => x.IsAuthenticated).Returns(true); context["The external login succeeds"] = () => { before = () => oauth.Setup(x => x.VerifyAuthentication(It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(new AuthenticationResult(true, providerName, "provideruserid", "username", new Dictionary<string, string>())); context["External login already exists for current user"] = () => { before = () => authService.Setup(x => x.ExternalLoginExistsForUser(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(true); it["Should add 'login sucessful' alert"] = () => { var alerts = (IList<Alert>)controller.TempData[TempDataKeys.AlertCollection]; alerts[0].Message.should_be_same("Login successful"); alerts[0].AlertType.should_be(AlertType.Success); }; it["Should return a redirect result"] = () => actionResult.should_cast_to<RedirectToRouteResult>(); }; context["External login already exists for another user"] = () => { before = () => authService.Setup(x => x.ExternalLoginExistsForAnyOtherUser(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(true); it["Adds an error alert"] = () => { var alerts = (IList<Alert>)controller.TempData[TempDataKeys.AlertCollection]; alerts[0].Message.should_be_same("The external login you requested is already associated with a different user account"); alerts[0].AlertType.should_be(AlertType.Error); }; it["Should return a redirect result"] = () => actionResult.should_cast_to<RedirectToRouteResult>(); }; This approach seemed to work magnificently until I prepared to write test code for my ApplicationServices layer, to which I delegate viewmodel manipulation from my MVC controllers, and which coordinates the operations of the lower data repository layer: public void CreateUserAccountFromExternalLogin(RegisterExternalLoginModel model) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public void AssociateExternalLoginWithUser(string userName, string provider, string providerUserId) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public string GetLocalUserName(string provider, string providerUserId) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } I have no idea what in the world to name the test class, the test methods, or even if I should perhaps include the testing for this layer into the test class from my large code snippet above, so that a single feature or user action could be tested without regard to architectural layering. I can't find any tutorials or blog posts which cover more than simple examples, so I would appreciate any recommendations or pointing in the right direction. I would even welcome "your question is invalid"-type answers as long as some explanation is provided.

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• What do you need to know to be a world-class master software developer? [closed]

  - by glitch

  I wanted to bring up this question to you folks and see what you think, hopefully advise me on the matter: let's say you had 30 years of learning and practicing software development in front of you, how would you dedicate your time so that you'd get the biggest bang for your buck. What would you both learn and work on to be a world-class software developer that would make a large impact on the industry and leave behind a legacy? I think that most great developers end up being both broad generalists and specialists in one-two areas of interest. I'm thinking Bill Joy, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, K&R and so on. I'm thinking that perhaps one approach would be to break things down by categories and establish a base minimum of "software development" greatness. I'm thinking: Operating Systems: completely internalize the core concepts of OS, perhaps gain a lot of familiarity with an OSS one such as Linux. Anything from memory management to device drivers has to be complete second nature. Programming Languages: this is one of those topics that imho has to be fully grokked even if it might take many years. I don't think there's quite anything like going through the process of developing your own compiler, understanding language design trade-offs and so on. Programming Language Pragmatics is one of my favorite books actually, I think you want to have that internalized back to back, and that's just the start. You could go significantly deeper, but I think it's time well spent, because it's such a crucial building block. As a subset of that, you want to really understand the different programming paradigms out there. Imperative, declarative, logic, functional and so on. Anything from assembly to LISP should be at the very least comfortable to write in. Contexts: I believe one should have experience working in different contexts to truly be able to appreciate the trade-offs that are being made every day. Embedded, web development, mobile development, UX development, distributed, cloud computing and so on. Hardware: I'm somewhat conflicted about this one. I think you want some understanding of computer architecture at a low level, but I feel like the concepts that will truly matter will be slightly higher level, such as CPU caching / memory hierarchy, ILP, and so on. Networking: we live in a completely network-dependent era. Having a good understanding of the OSI model, knowing how the Web works, how HTTP works and so on is pretty much a pre-requisite these days. Distributed systems: once again, everything's distributed these days, it's getting progressively harder to ignore this reality. Slightly related, perhaps add solid understanding of how browsers work to that, since the world seems to be moving so much to interfacing with everything through a browser. Tools: Have a really broad toolset that you're familiar with, one that continuously expands throughout the years. Communication: I think being a great writer, effective communicator and a phenomenal team player is pretty much a prerequisite for a lot of a software developer's greatness. It can't be overstated. Software engineering: understanding the process of building software, team dynamics, the requirements of the business-side, all the pitfalls. You want to deeply understand where what you're writing fits from the market perspective. The better you understand all of this, the more of your work will actually see the daylight. This is really just a starting list, I'm confident that there's a ton of other material that you need to master. As I mentioned, you most likely end up specializing in a bunch of these areas as you go along, but I was trying to come up with a baseline. Any thoughts, suggestions and words of wisdom from the grizzled veterans out there who would like to share their thoughts and experiences with this? I'd really love to know what you think!

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• Concurrent Affairs

  - by Tony Davis

  I once wrote an editorial, multi-core mania, on the conundrum of ever-increasing numbers of processor cores, but without the concurrent programming techniques to get anywhere near exploiting their performance potential. I came to the.controversial.conclusion that, while the problem loomed for all procedural languages, it was not a big issue for the vast majority of programmers. Two years later, I still think most programmers don't concern themselves overly with this issue, but I do think that's a bigger problem than I originally implied. Firstly, is the performance boost from writing code that can fully exploit all available cores worth the cost of the additional programming complexity? Right now, with quad-core processors that, at best, can make our programs four times faster, the answer is still no for many applications. But what happens in a few years, as the number of cores grows to 100 or even 1000? At this point, it becomes very hard to ignore the potential gains from exploiting concurrency. Possibly, I was optimistic to assume that, by the time we have 100-core processors, and most applications really needed to exploit them, some technology would be around to allow us to do so with relative ease. The ideal solution would be one that allows programmers to forget about the problem, in much the same way that garbage collection removed the need to worry too much about memory allocation. From all I can find on the topic, though, there is only a remote likelihood that we'll ever have a compiler that takes a program written in a single-threaded style and "auto-magically" converts it into an efficient, correct, multi-threaded program. At the same time, it seems clear that what is currently the most common solution, multi-threaded programming with shared memory, is unsustainable. As soon as a piece of state can be changed by a different thread of execution, the potential number of execution paths through your program grows exponentially with the number of threads. If you have two threads, each executing n instructions, then there are 2^n possible "interleavings" of those instructions. Of course, many of those interleavings will have identical behavior, but several won't. Not only does this make understanding how a program works an order of magnitude harder, but it will also result in irreproducible, non-deterministic, bugs. And of course, the problem will be many times worse when you have a hundred or a thousand threads. So what is the answer? All of the possible alternatives require a change in the way we write programs and, currently, seem to be plagued by performance issues. Software transactional memory (STM) applies the ideas of database transactions, and optimistic concurrency control, to memory. However, working out how to break down your program into sufficiently small transactions, so as to avoid contention issues, isn't easy. Another approach is concurrency with actors, where instead of having threads share memory, each thread runs in complete isolation, and communicates with others by passing messages. It simplifies concurrent programs but still has performance issues, if the threads need to operate on the same large piece of data. There are doubtless other possible solutions that I haven't mentioned, and I would love to know to what extent you, as a developer, are considering the problem of multi-core concurrency, what solution you currently favor, and why. Cheers, Tony.

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• EPPM Is a Must-Have Capability as Global Energy and Power Industries Eye US$38 Trillion in New Investments

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} “The process manufacturing industry is facing an unprecedented challenge: from now until 2035, cumulative worldwide investments of US$38 trillion will be required for drilling, power generation, and other energy projects,” Iain Graham, director of energy and process manufacturing for Oracle’s Primavera, said in a recent webcast. He adds that process manufacturing organizations such as oil and gas, utilities, and chemicals must manage this level of investment in an environment of constrained capital markets, erratic supply and demand, aging infrastructure, heightened regulations, and declining global skills. In the following interview, Graham explains how the right enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) technology can help the industry meet these imperatives. Q: Why is EPPM so important for today’s process manufacturers? A: If the industry invests US$38 trillion without proper cost controls in place, a huge amount of resources will be put at risk, especially when it comes to cost overruns that may occur in large capital projects. Process manufacturing companies must not only control costs, but also monitor all the various contractors that will be involved in each project. If you’re not managing your own workers and all the interdependencies among the different contractors, then you’ve got problems. Q: What else should process manufacturers look for? A: It’s also important that an EPPM solution has the ability to manage more than just capital projects. For example, it’s best to manage maintenance and capital projects in the same system. Say you’re due to install a new transformer in a power station as part of a capital project, but routine maintenance in that area of the facility is scheduled for that morning. The lack of coordination could lead to unforeseen delays. There are also IT considerations that impact capital projects, such as adding servers and network cable for a control system in a power station. What organizations need is a true EPPM system that’s not just for capital projects, maintenance, or IT activities, but instead an enterprisewide solution that provides visibility into all types of projects. Read the complete Q&A here and discover the practical framework for successfully managing this massive capital spending.

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• return the result of a query and the total number of rows in a single function

  - by csotelo

  This is a question as might be focused on working in the best way, if there are other alternatives or is the only way: Using Codeigniter ... I have the typical 2 functions of list records and show total number of records (using the page as an alternative). The problem is that they are rather large. Sample 2 functions in my model: count Rows: function get_all_count() { $this->db->select('u.id_user'); $this->db->from('user u'); if($this->session->userdata('detail') != '1') { $this->db->join('management m', 'm.id_user = u.id_user', 'inner'); $this->db->where('id_detail', $this->session->userdata('detail')); if($this->session->userdata('management') === '1') { $this->db->or_where('detail', 1); } else { $this->db->where("id_profile IN ( SELECT e2.id_profile FROM profile e, profile e2, profile_path p, profile_path p2 WHERE e.id_profile = " . $this->session->userdata('profile') . " AND p2.id_profile = e.id_profile AND p.path LIKE(CONCAT(p2.path,'%')) AND e2.id_profile = p.id_profile )", NULL, FALSE); $this->db->where('MD5(u.id_user) <>', $this->session->userdata('id_user')); } } $this->db->where('u.id_user <>', 1); $this->db->where('flag <>', 3); $query = $this->db->get(); return $query->num_rows(); } results per page function get_all($limit, $offset, $sort = '') { $this->db->select('u.id_user, user, email, flag'); $this->db->from('user u'); if($this->session->userdata('detail') != '1') { $this->db->join('management m', 'm.id_user = u.id_user', 'inner'); $this->db->where('id_detail', $this->session->userdata('detail')); if($this->session->userdata('management') === '1') { $this->db->or_where('detail', 1); } else { $this->db->where("id_profile IN ( SELECT e2.id_profile FROM profile e, profile e2, profile_path p, profile_path p2 WHERE e.id_profile = " . $this->session->userdata('profile') . " AND p2.id_profile = e.id_profile AND p.path LIKE(CONCAT(p2.path,'%')) AND e2.id_profile = p.id_profile )", NULL, FALSE); $this->db->where('MD5(u.id_user) <>', $this->session->userdata('id_user')); } } $this->db->where('u.id_user <>', 1); $this->db->where('flag <>', 3); if($sort) $this->db->order_by($sort); $this->db->limit($limit, $offset); $query = $this->db->get(); return $query->result(); } You see, I repeat the most of the functions, the difference is that only the number of fields and management pages. I wonder if there is any alternative to get as much results as the query in a single function. I have seen many tutorials, and all create 2 functions: one to count and another to show results ... Will there be more optimal?

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• How do you go from a so so programmer to a great one? [closed]

  - by Cervo

  How do you go from being an okay programmer to being able to write maintainable clean code? For example David Hansson was writing Basecamp when in the process he created Rails as part of writing Basecamp in a clean/maintainable way. But how do you know when there is value in a side project like that? I have a bachelors in computer science, and I am about to get a masters and I will say that colleges teach you to write code to solve problems, not neatly or anything. Basically you think of a problem, come up with a solution, and write it down...not necessarily the most maintainable way in the world. Also my first job was in a startup, and now my third is in a small team in a large company where the attitude was/is get it done yesterday (also most of my jobs are mainly database development with SQL with a few ASP.NET web pages/.NET apps on the side). So of course cut/paste is more favored than making things more cleanly. And they would rather have something yesterday even if you have to rewrite it next month rather than to have something in a week that lasts for a year. Also spaghetti code turns up all over the place, and it takes very smart people to write/understand/maintain spaghetti code...However it would be better to do things so simple/clean that even a caveman/woman could do maintenance. Also I get very bored/unmotivated having to go modify the same things cut/pasted in a few locations. Is this the type of skill that you need to learn by working with a serious software organization that has an emphasis on maintenance and maybe even an architect who designs a system architecture and reviews code? Could you really learn it by volunteering on an open source project (it seems to me that a full time programmer job is way more practice than a few hours a week on an open source project)? Is there some course where you can learn this? I can attest that graduate school and undergraduate school do not really emphasize clean software at all. They just teach the structures/algorithms and then send you off into the world to solve problems. Overall I think the first thing is learning to write clean/maintainable code within the bounds of the project in order to become a good programmer. Then the next thing is learning when you need to do a side project (like a framework) to make things more maintainable/clean even while you still deliver things for the deadline in order to become a great programmer. For example, you are making an SQL report and someone gives you 100 calculations for individual columns. At what point does it make sense to construct a domain specific language to encode the rules in simply and then generate all the SQL as opposed to cut/pasting the query from the table a bunch of times and then adjusting each query to do the appropriate calculations. This is the type of thing I would say a great programmer would know. He/she would maybe even know ways to avoid the domain specific language and to still do all the calculations without creating an unmaintainable mess or a ton of repetitive code to cut/paste everywhere.

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• How to get the height of an image and apply that height to a div? [migrated]

  - by Mick79

  I am building a mobile web app and I'm using jquerytools slider on it. i want te slider to show (in proper ratio) across all mobile devices so width of the images is 100% and height is auto in css. However as all the elements are floated and jquerytools slider requires the position be set to absolute, the containing div (#header) doesn't stretch to fit the content. I am trying to use jquery to get the height of the height of the img and apply that height to the header.... however I am having no luck. CSS: #header{ width:100%; position:relative; z-index: 20; /* box-shadow: 0 0 10px white; */ overflow: auto; } .scrollable { position:relative; overflow:hidden; width: 100%; height: 100%; /* box-shadow: 0 0 20px purple; */ /* height:198px; */ z-index: 20; overflow: auto; } .scrollable .items { /* this cannot be too large */ width:1000%; position:absolute; clear:both; /* box-shadow: 0 0 30px green; */ } .items div { float:left; width:10%; height:100%; } /* single scrollable item */ .scrollable img { /* float:left; */ width:100%; height: auto; /* height:198px; */ } /* active item */ .scrollable .active { border:2px solid #000; position:relative; cursor:default; } HTML <div id=header><!-- root element for scrollable --> <div class="scrollable" id="scrollable"> <!-- root element for the items --> <div class="items"> <div> <img src="img/img2.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img1.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img3.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img4.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img6.jpg" /> </div> </div><!-- items --> </div><!-- scrollable --> </div><!-- header -->

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• The new direction of the gaming industry

  - by raccoon_tim

  Just recently I read a great blog post by David Darling, the founder of Codemasters: http://www.develop-online.net/blog/347/Jurassic-consoles-could-become-extinct. In the blog post he talks about how traditional retail games are experiencing a downfall thanks to the increasing popularity of digital distribution. I personally think of retail games as being relics of the past. It does not really make much sense to still keep distributing boxed games when the same game can be elegantly downloaded and updated over the air through a digital distribution channel. The world is not all rainbows, however. One big issue with mixing digital distribution with boxed retail games is that resellers will not condone you selling your game for 10€ digitally while their selling the same game for 70€. The only way to get around this issue is to move to full digital distribution. This has the added benefit of minimizing piracy as the game can be tightly bound to the service you downloaded the game from. Many players are, however, complaining about not being able to play the games offline. Having games tightly bound to the internet is a problem when games are bought from a retailer as we tend to expect that once we have the product we can use it anywhere because we physically own it. The truth is that we don’t actually own the product. Instead, the typical EULA actually states that we only have a license to use the product. We’re not, for instance, allowed to disassemble the product, which the owner is indeed permitted to do. Digital distribution allows us to provide games as services, instead of selling them as standalone products. This means that for a service to work you have to be connected to the internet but you still have the same rights to use the product. It’s really straightforward; if you downloaded a client from the internet you are expected to have an internet connection so you’re able to connect to the server. A game distributed digitally that is built using a client-server architecture has the added benefit of allowing you to play anywhere as long as you have the client installed and you are able to log in with your user information. Your save games can be backed up and your game can continue anywhere. Another development we’re seeing in the gaming industry is the increasing popularity of free-to-play games. These are games that let you play for free but allow you to boost your gaming experience with real world money. The nature of these games is that players are constantly rewarded with new content and the game can evolve according to their way of playing and their wishes can be incorporated into the product. Free-to-play games can quickly gain a large player basis and monetization is done by providing players valuable things to buy making their gaming experience more fun. I am personally very excited about free-to-play games as it’s possible to start building the game together with your players and there is no need to work on the game for 5 years from start to finish and only then see if it’s actually something the players like. This is a typical problem with big movie-like retail games and recent news about Radical Entertainment practically closing its doors paints a clear picture of what can happen when the risk does not pay off: http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/25874/Prototype-Developer-Radical-Entertainment-Closes/.

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• High Resolution Timeouts

  - by user12607257

  The default resolution of application timers and timeouts is now 1 msec in Solaris 11.1, down from 10 msec in previous releases. This improves out-of-the-box performance of polling and event based applications, such as ticker applications, and even the Oracle rdbms log writer. More on that in a moment. As a simple example, the poll() system call takes a timeout argument in units of msec: System Calls poll(2) NAME poll - input/output multiplexing SYNOPSIS int poll(struct pollfd fds[], nfds_t nfds, int timeout); In Solaris 11, a call to poll(NULL,0,1) returns in 10 msec, because even though a 1 msec interval is requested, the implementation rounds to the system clock resolution of 10 msec. In Solaris 11.1, this call returns in 1 msec. In specification lawyer terms, the resolution of CLOCK_REALTIME, introduced by POSIX.1b real time extensions, is now 1 msec. The function clock_getres(CLOCK_REALTIME,&res) returns 1 msec, and any library calls whose man page explicitly mention CLOCK_REALTIME, such as nanosleep(), are subject to the new resolution. Additionally, many legacy functions that pre-date POSIX.1b and do not explicitly mention a clock domain, such as poll(), are subject to the new resolution. Here is a fairly comprehensive list: nanosleep pthread_mutex_timedlock pthread_mutex_reltimedlock_np pthread_rwlock_timedrdlock pthread_rwlock_reltimedrdlock_np pthread_rwlock_timedwrlock pthread_rwlock_reltimedwrlock_np mq_timedreceive mq_reltimedreceive_np mq_timedsend mq_reltimedsend_np sem_timedwait sem_reltimedwait_np poll select pselect _lwp_cond_timedwait _lwp_cond_reltimedwait semtimedop sigtimedwait aiowait aio_waitn aio_suspend port_get port_getn cond_timedwait cond_reltimedwait setitimer (ITIMER_REAL) misc rpc calls, misc ldap calls This change in resolution was made feasible because we made the implementation of timeouts more efficient a few years back when we re-architected the callout subsystem of Solaris. Previously, timeouts were tested and expired by the kernel's clock thread which ran 100 times per second, yielding a resolution of 10 msec. This did not scale, as timeouts could be posted by every CPU, but were expired by only a single thread. The resolution could be changed by setting hires_tick=1 in /etc/system, but this caused the clock thread to run at 1000 Hz, which made the potential scalability problem worse. Given enough CPUs posting enough timeouts, the clock thread could be a performance bottleneck. We fixed that by re-implementing the timeout as a per-CPU timer interrupt (using the cyclic subsystem, for those familiar with Solaris internals). This decoupled the clock thread frequency from timeout resolution, and allowed us to improve default timeout resolution without adding CPU overhead in the clock thread. Here are some exceptions for which the default resolution is still 10 msec. The thread scheduler's time quantum is 10 msec by default, because preemption is driven by the clock thread (plus helper threads for scalability). See for example dispadmin, priocntl, fx_dptbl, rt_dptbl, and ts_dptbl. This may be changed using hires_tick. The resolution of the clock_t data type, primarily used in DDI functions, is 10 msec. It may be changed using hires_tick. These functions are only used by developers writing kernel modules. A few functions that pre-date POSIX CLOCK_REALTIME mention _SC_CLK_TCK, CLK_TCK, "system clock", or no clock domain. These functions are still driven by the clock thread, and their resolution is 10 msec. They include alarm, pcsample, times, clock, and setitimer for ITIMER_VIRTUAL and ITIMER_PROF. Their resolution may be changed using hires_tick. Now back to the database. How does this help the Oracle log writer? Foreground processes post a redo record to the log writer, which releases them after the redo has committed. When a large number of foregrounds are waiting, the release step can slow down the log writer, so under heavy load, the foregrounds switch to a mode where they poll for completion. This scales better because every foreground can poll independently, but at the cost of waiting the minimum polling interval. That was 10 msec, but is now 1 msec in Solaris 11.1, so the foregrounds process transactions faster under load. Pretty cool.

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• How can I change the color of the text in my iFrame? [closed]

  - by VinylScratch

  I have code here: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Frag United Banlist</title> </head> <body> <h1>Tekkit Banlist</h1> <?php // change these things $server = "server-host"; $dbuser = "correct-user"; $dbpass = "correct-password"; $dbname = "correct-database"; mysql_connect($server, $dbuser, $dbpass); mysql_select_db($dbname); $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM banlist ORDER BY id DESC"); //This will display the most recent by id edit this query how you see fit. Limit, Order, ect. echo "<table width=100% border=1 cellpadding=3 cellspacing=0>"; echo "<tr style=\"font-weight:bold\"> <td>ID</td> <td>User</td> <td>Reason</td> <td>Admin/Mod</td> <td>Time</td> <td>Ban Length</td> </tr>"; while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){ if($col == "#eeeeee"){ $col = "#ffffff"; }else{ $col = "#eeeeee"; } echo "<tr bgcolor=$col>"; echo "<td>".$row['id']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['user']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['reason']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['admin']."</td>"; //Convert Epoch Time to Standard format $datetime = date("F j, Y, g:i a", $row['time']); echo "<td>$datetime</td>"; $dateconvert = date("F j, Y, g:i a", $row['length']); if($row['length'] == "0"){ echo "<td>None</td>"; }else{ echo "<td>$dateconvert</td>"; } echo "<td>".$row['id']."</td>"; echo "</tr>"; } echo"</table>" ?> </div> </body></html> And I am trying to make it so that when I put it in this iframe: <iframe src="http://bans.fragunited.net/" width="100%" length="100%"><p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p></iframe> But if you go to this page, fragunited.net/bans, (not bans.fragunited.net) the text is black and I want it to be white so you can actually see it. Sorry for the large amount of code, however I don't know where you have to put the code to change the color.

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• Windows Server 2012 Branchcache vs. DFS-R

  - by TheCleaner

  Warning, subjective question ahead! But hopefully a good one that won't get closed. SCENARIO: I have a branch office that currently has no on-premise server. They access everything including a DC across a 12Mbps WAN link (MPLS). The link isn't saturated, averaging around 20% utilization. The circuit is very stable and has a high SLA and excellent uptime. However, large file transfers (mainly reads, not writes) from the file server across the WAN can be slow. We don't currently utilize DFS. RESEARCH DONE: I'm aware of WAN acceleration, using either dedicated hardware (Riverbed) or a dedicated software VM (Silver Peak) for example. But the pricing is outside of our current budget and the need isn't quite there yet from our perspective (since the issue is mainly in a "pull" scenario not necessarily push/pull). I'm mainly looking at deploying a Windows server at this branch office and either utilizing DFS-R or BranchCache. Looking at a table comparison and assuming we are looking at a "hosted branchcache server" and not simply distributed: It would appear there are benefits to both, even if both are "hosted" on a server. QUESTIONS I ACTUALLY HAVE: In what scenarios do each of these techs shine and where do you choose one over the other? Looking at a hosted Branchcache server, can you set "pre-fetching" of certain folders/files on the central file server so that they are immediately accessible locally at the branch? Do you have to do this on a schedule (if it is possible)? Looking at DFS-R my concern (and apparently solved with 3rd party apps) is file locking and making sure the file gets updated properly during a write operation (ie, making sure if both copies are accessed and both are written to, which file takes precedence and what happens to the changes?). Ideal it would seem would be to lock any alternate replicas of the data, but is it really that big of an issue? Does Branchcache lock the central file for editing? Does branchcache only transmit the deltas back to the central file of what has changed? Would either technology be ill advised if the branch office server was going to be utilized as a domain controller as well?

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