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• Mail Server with Google Apps

  - by Daniel Fukuda

  Hello, Is there any mail server that has a feature to download (POP3) emails from another mail server like Google Apps (Gmail for your own domain), store it and then allow to users to download (POP3/IMAP) emails to their own mail client like Outlook/Live Mail? So I want it to become like a "middle mail server". I hope you guys understand it. My main reason to do so is that Google Apps got limited space for each mailbox and I also want to have emails in one space so its easy to archive and backup.

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• Windows 7 immediately disconnects a USB drive

  - by Daniel Saner

  I am having a problem with Windows 7 x64 consistently disconnecting one specific USB mass storage drive immediately after it is connected. The drive in question is a Cowon C2 digital music player which works in standard mass storage controller mode (i.e. no device-specific drivers needed/available). When I connect the player, Windows plays the "USB connect" sound and the device appears (under its correct name) in the device manager, but it never appears as a drive. The player itself displays "USB Connected" for a split-second before reporting that it has been disconnected again. Since the player, by design, reboots after it has been disconnected, Windows plays the "USB disconnect" sound before restarting the whole cycle once the player has powered back on. I am connecting the player through an Intel X79 Chipset motherboard (Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3) to Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. The player used to work fine the first few times I connected it, showing up as an external drive; it only recently stopped working. It is not a problem with the player, since it works fine when connected to another computer, even such running the exact same operating system. It is also not a problem with the USB controller, since the issue is the same on both the Intel USB 2.0 and the Fresco Logic FL1009 USB 3.0 controller ports. I have also not had the problem with any other drive so far. Among the things I have tried so far: Disabling USB legacy mode in BIOS Disabling energy-saving power down for all USB controllers in Windows' device manager Removing and reinstalling Windows' USB mass storage driver Removing and reinstalling Intel and Fresco Logic USB controller driver Restoring the player to factory defaults None of these made a difference. Again, the player used to work fine on the exact same system just days ago; I didn't install any new hardware or drivers on it since then. I would be very grateful for any hints on what else to try. Edit: Here is another new hint; I found out that when I connect the drive before booting Windows, it is available in Windows Explorer as it should, and does not automatically disconnect. If I remove and reconnect it though, the infinite connect/disconnect-loop starts anew.

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• How can I select multiple windows to tile in Window 7 (like you could in previous versions)?

  - by Daniel

  I've disabled Aero Snap, is there any way to restore the old method of window arrangement allowing you to do side by side, or top and bottom, etc.? All you had to do before is select the windows you want and right click. I know the menu is still there in Windows 7 but it is only for the whole Task Bar, and you can also do it from the Task Manager but that is more complex to get too. After looking all around I cannot find a way to restore any such right click menu for each application. Is there a way to tile like this for individual windows or groups?

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• How can I open a file as read-only from Windows Explorer?

  - by Daniel Daranas

  Is there an easy way to open a file as read-only from Windows Explorer? My inmediate interest is in a Microsoft Access file. I am doing some sanity checks in old MS Access databases and I see that their date is automatically updated when I open them. I don't like this, since it will look like all the old files have been modified today. I am working with Windows XP. Update: As Yoda said, "Do, or do not. There is no try." In my case, it was "do not". I ended up copying the entire (big) folder tree to MyDocuments, and then opening all the databases from there.

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• Searching major search engines with text such as <%#

  - by Daniel Dyson

  If I type '<%# vs <%"' into any of the major search engines, everything is stripped out except the 'vs'. I understand why they do this. I would just like to know if anyone knows of a way to escape illegal characters so that they are searched properly. I know this is not strictly a programming question, but it is relevant.

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• Can't create/write to file '#sql_1fc7_3.MYD' (Errcode: 17)

  - by daniel

  Can't create/write to file '#sql_1fc7_3.MYD' (Errcode: 17) how can i fix that?

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• Kill your temp tables using keyboard shortcuts : SSMS

  - by jamiet

  Here’s a nifty little SSMS trick that my colleague Tom Hunter educated me on the other day and I thought it was worth sharing. If you’re a keyboard shortcut junkie then you’ll love it. How often when working with code in SSMS that contains temp tables do you see the following message: Msg 2714, Level 16, State 6, Line 78 There is already an object named '#table' in the database. Quite often I would imagine, it happens to me all the time! Usually I write a bit of code at the top of the query window that goes and drops the table if it exists but there’s a much easier way of dealing with it. Remember that temp tables disappear as soon as your sessions ends hence wouldn’t it be nice if there were a quick way of recycling (i.e. stopping and restarting) your session? Well turns out there is and all it takes is a sequence of 4 keystrokes: Bring up the context menu using that mythically-named button that usually sits 3 to the right of the space bar ‘C’ for “Connection” ‘H’ for “Change Connection…” ‘Enter’ to select the same connection you had open last time (screenshots below) Once you’ve done it a few times you’ll probably have the whole sequence down to less than a second. Such a simple little trick, I’m annoyed with myself for it not occurring to me before! The only caveat is that you’ll need a “USE <database>” directive at the top of your query window but I don’t think that’s much of a bind! That is all other than to say if you like little SSMS titbits like this then Lee Everest’s blog is a good one to keep an eye on! @jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Retro Video Game Collection

  - by Matt Christian

  Recently I've decided, in true nerd fashion, to collect either comic books or video games.  Considering I'm much more versed in the technological arts and not in ACTUAL art, I thought collecting old video games would be an interesting venture.  After all, I am a self-described compulsive shopper (my bank statement at the end of the month has a purchase every few days).  (Don't worry, I'm not in debt and still pay my bills on time!) I went to a local video game store in Stevens Point called Gaming Generations which is a neat little shop with loads of old games for great prices.  For example, any NES cartridge on the shelf (not behind glass) is, at most, $4.99 with the cheaper ones around $1.99.  During my first round at GG, I picked up the following: NES: - Fester's Quest - Adventures of Link (Zelda 2, grey cart) - Little Nemo - Total Recall - The Goonies 2 PSX: - Galerians N64: - Mission: Impossible - Hybrid Heaven I was a little cautious, would I even like collecting old games?  As soon as I popped a few of those games in I knew right away the answer was an astounding YES!  Not only is it fun to bring back memories of all these old games, but searching for them in stores is also a blast and saying 'I have that one, I need the second one.' After finding such joy in buying these games, I decided to go search through 4-5 stores in Wausau for old games as well.  While the prices were a bit higher and selection smaller, the search was still fun.  I found the following: NES: - Maniac Mansion - T&C Surf - Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers - TMNT (the first one) - Mission: Impossible N64: - Turok - Turok 2 Genesis: - Sonic the Hedgehog Dreamcast: - Shenmue And I found a Gamegear for $5!  Now I just need to find games for it... Tonight I will go on one more small expedition into the used, once again stopping at GG and another second hand store to see if I can find any items for my collection.

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• ODI 11g – Expert Accelerator for Model Creation

  - by David Allan

  Following on from my post earlier this morning on scripting model and topology creation tonight I thought I’d add a little UI to make those groovy functions a little more palatable. In OWB we have experts for capturing user input, with the groovy console we open up opportunities to build UI around the scripts in a very easy way – even I can do it;-) After a little googling around I found some useful posts on SwingBuilder, the most useful one that I used for the dialog below was this one here. This dialog captures user input for the technology and context for the model and logical schema etc to be created. You can see there are a variety of interesting controls, and its really easy to do. The dialog captures the users input, then when OK is pressed I call the functions from the earlier post to create the logical schema (plus all the other objects) and model. The image below shows what was created, you can see the model (with typo in name), the model is Oracle technology and references the logical schema ORACLE_SCOTT (that I named in dialog above), the logical schema is mapped via the GLOBAL context to the data server ORACLE_SCOTT_DEV (that I named in dialog above), and the physical schema used was just the user name that I connected with – so if you wanted a different user the schema name could be added to the dialog. In a nutshell, one dialog that encapsulates a simpler mechanism for creating a model. You can create your own scripts that use dialogs like this, capture input and process. You can find the groovy script for this is here odi_create_model.groovy, again I wrapped the user capture code in a groovy function and return the result in a variable and then simply call the createLogicalSchema and createModel functions from the previous posting. The script I supplied above has everything you will need. To execute use Tools->Groovy->Open Script and then execute the green play button on the toolbar. Have fun.

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• Windows 7 complaint

  - by Chris Williams

  Let me start by saying that I love Windows 7. I think it's the best OS that Microsoft has put out in ages, possibly ever. However, I do have one little complaint. Actually it's not that little, it's become a real pain in the butt for me. I'm talking about Forced Updates. Yes, I know it's always been a problem and that Windows would occasionally force a reboot while you were away, in order to install some important update. That's not quite what I'm referring to. I mean the new "feature" where you don't have the choice to skip updates when shutting down. This isn't a big deal to those of you with desktop machines, but for those of us with laptops, it is rapidly becoming an unforgivable pain in the ass. Let me see if I can make myself a little clearer... If I am shutting down my LAPTOP, 99% of the time it's because I need to get up and go. Not wait around for FORCED UPDATES!! I travel a lot, and there are few things more annoying than shutting down to head to the airport, or shutting down so I can board my flight, or shutting down because we're about to land, etc... and having to wait 5-10 minutes while Win 7 does it's thing. It's damn inconvenient. There has to be a way you can detect if I'm on a laptop and give me the option to postpone updates, or skip them or (here's a thought) run them on startup instead of on shutdown. I'm usually not in a hurry when my machine is booting up, but if I'm powering down it's because I'm ready to GO! Please fix this. Windows 7 rocks in almost every other way I can think of.

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• Did Microsoft designers got their butts kicked 3 years ago?

  - by John Conwell

  This is something I've been wondering about for about a year now.  Microsoft has a history of creating very useful products, with lots of useful features.  But useful does not mean usable.  A lot of stuff coming out of Redmond the past 10 years don't really seem to have been well thought out from a user design point of view.  Lots of extra steps, lots of popup windows...very little innovative thinking going on about the user experience of these products.But about a year ago I started seeing changes in the new products coming out of Microsoft.  Windows 7 is a good example of a big change.  They really got their asses handed to them on Vista, so they had to make a change.  But it looks like this change in philosophy has bled over to other areas.  The new Office (2010) lineup has a lot of changes in it to make it way more usable. Given that big changes like this take about 3 years to go from start to actually shipping product, I'm curious what happened internally at Microsoft that really drove this change in product design.  I think that Microsoft got so focused on just adding new functionality for so long, they forgot about the little things that can really make or break a product.  Office 2010 is full of these little things that make it much nicer to use.  I just hope its not too late for them.

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• Level Creating Help

  - by Brandon oubiub

  I am making a little 2d overhead RPG type game just for fun. I have almost all the basic stuff set up, but I just need a little help on level creation. I can already make a level and place each tile how I want it, but having to place each tile gets annoying after a while. I noticed that in a lot of games, even extremely simple ones, they have LOTS of levels with LOTS of tiles in each. Creating all that in this fashion would take forever. So I guess my question is, as a game developer, am I supposed to do all that, or maybe make a little level editor so I can see things as I create it? What do game developers do? I'm using Java. EDIT: Okay, say if I had an image for a map, that I made in MS paint or photoshop, and each pixel represent a tile value, could I somehow in Java detect what color an individual pixel is? If so, that would be perfect. If so, how?

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• Why do some bad websites rank well?

  - by BradB

  Consider the following scenario: you are pitching SEO/Website Optimisation to a prospective client and you explain to them the importance of great copy and content, how acquiring links (ethically) can increase page rank, why the quality of the HTML build matters (H1, H2 tags, w3c validation etc), why keyword research is beneficial, you may drop in a few Google Webmaster Guideline or Matt Cutts references to back up your claims and rubbish the "back hat" approach as being no longer effective for good measure. Your advice is ethical and in the eyes of best practices, spot on. Then, the client points out to you some of their long established competitors on Google and you see these competitor websites ranking in the top spots (1 to 3) for medium to highly competitive search phrases that your client wants to compete for. These websites totally contradict your ethical approach and pretty much violate every best practice previously noted. They even out perform other "white hat" competitors who are in accordance with the above guidelines. I experienced this today. One of these well ranking websites had: About six microsites with more or less the same copy and a slightly varied layout Little or not textual content I would almost say duplicate content across the sites, but there was so little of it it could barely qualify for being duplicate All the content in Flash (with a music track that kicked in on each page load, not so much of an SEO issue - but it helps paint the picture) Keyword stuffing behind the Flash file with a bunch of black text on black background in the style of keyword 1 keyword 2,keyword1,keyword 2,keyword 2 keyword 3 and so on... The exact keyword stuffed combination present on every page of the website A bunch of clearly self made links from poor quality forums and directories with little or no Page Rank Links exchanged across the microsites How do you explain your way out of this when this hard evidence is sat in front of you undermining your great pitch?

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• git for personal (one-man) projects. Overkill?

  - by Anto

  I know, and use, two version control systems: Subversion and git. Subversion, as of now, gets used for personal projects where I am the only developer and git gets used for open source projects and projects where I believe others will also work on the project. This is mostly because of git's amazing forking and merging capabilities, where everyone may work on their own branch; very handy. Now, I use Subversion for personal projects, as I think git makes little sense there. It seems to be a little bit of overkill. It is OK for me if it is centralized (on my home server, usually) when I am the only developer; I take regular backups anyway. I don't need the ability to make my own branch, the main branch is my branch. Yes, SVN has simple support for branching, but much more powerful support for it makes no sense, I think. Merging can be a pain with it, or at least from my little experience. Is there any good reason for me to use git on personal projects, or is it just simply overkill?

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• Custom field names in Rails error messages

  - by Madhan ayyasamy

  The defaults in Rails with ActiveRecord is beautiful when you are just getting started and are created everything for the first time. But once you get into it and your database schema becomes a little more solidified, the things that would have been easy to do by relying on the conventions of Rails require a little bit more work.In my case, I had a form where there was a database column named “num_guests”, representing the number of guests. When the field fails to pass validation, the error messages is something likeNum guests is not a numberNot quite the text that we want. It would be better if it saidNumber of guests is not a numberAfter doing a little bit of digging, I found the human_attribute_name method. You can override this method in your model class to provide alternative names for fields. To change our error message, I did the followingclass Reservation ... validates_presence_of :num_guests ... HUMAN_ATTRIBUTES = { :num_guests = "Number of guests" } def self.human_attribute_name(attr) HUMAN_ATTRIBUTES[attr.to_sym] || super endendSince Rails 2.2, this method is used to support internationalization (i18n). Looking at it, it reminds me of Java’s Resource Bundles and Spring MVC’s error messages. Messages are defined based off a key and there’s a chain of look ups that get applied to resolve an error’s message.Although, I don’t see myself doing any i18n work in the near-term, it is cool that we have that option now in Rails.

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• Cleaning your BizTalk Build Server

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Just a little note for myself this one.At one of my customers where it is still BizTalk 2006 one of the build servers is intermittently getting issues so I wanted to run a script periodically to clean things up a little.  The below script is an example of how you can stop cruise control and all of the biztalk services, then clean the biztalk databases and reset the backup process and then click everything off again.This should keep the server a little cleaner and reduce the number of builds that occasionally fail for adhoc environmental issues.REM Server Clean ScriptREM =================== REM This script is ran to move the build server back to a clean state echo Stop Cruise Controlnet stop CCService echo Stop IISiisreset /stop echo Stop BizTalk Servicesnet stop BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Stop SSOnet stop ENTSSO echo Stop SQL Job Agentnet stop SQLSERVERAGENT echo Clean Message Boxsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_CleanupMsgbox"sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_PurgeSubscriptions"  echo Clean Tracking Databasesqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Exec dtasp_CleanHMData" echo Reset TDDS Stream Statussqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Update TDDS_StreamStatus Set lastSeqNum = 0" echo Force Full Backupsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMgmtDB -Q "Exec sp_ForceFullBackup" echo Clean Backup Directorydel E:\BtsBackups\*.* /q  echo Start SSOnet start ENTSSO echo Start SQL Job Agentnet start SQLSERVERAGENT echo Start BizTalk Servicesnet start BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Start IISiisreset /start echo Start Cruise Controlnet start CCService

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• Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. As per Brian's post I am Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1 first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. Figure: Hopefully this will be more uneventful It takes a little while for your system to be checked to see what components need updating. On my main computer this was pretty quick, but on the laptop it took some time. Figure: There are a lot of components to update With this update also comes an update to .NET as well as many other components. Figure: I downloaded the full 1.5GB’s, but you could do a web install It depends on how good you internet connection is to how long it would take to download, but as I am now in the US I decided not to trust the internet connection speeds. It took around 30-40 minutes to download the full thing which is a little slow. Figure: I did not need to download, but that would increase the install time So on my main computer again this was fast, but again on my netbook this took a little while. Figure: The actual install took around 30-40 minutes (2 hours on netbook) I was pretty impressed with the speed of the install, and as Team Explore is now out of the box with Visual Studio 2010 I don’t get the problem of the SP being installed before Team Explorer and having a disjointed experience Figure: As I suspected, no problems with the install Figure: Checking in Visual Studio shows that all the servicing points were successful This was an easy experience even if the SP was over 1.5GB’s to download Hopefully I will be discovering things that work better for a good while to come, as well as not seeing holes in the product that I had no encountered yet. What were your experiences of installing Visual Studio 2010 Service pack 1?

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• Where to Start?

  - by freemann098

  my name is Chase. I've been programming for over 3 years now and I've made very little progress towards game development. I blame myself for it due to reasons. I have experience in many languages such as C++, C#, and Java. I have a little bit of knowledge in JavaScript/HTML and Python. My question is where to start on actually understanding jumping into game development. Whenever I watch game development tutorials it mostly makes sense until points of things like OpenGL or advanced topics that make no sense at all. An example is something like glOrhho Matrix or whatever. Videos either don't explain things like this or they're not explained very well. Do I not know enough basics? I find myself always copying code from a video but understanding very little of it. It's like i'm memorizing things I don't understand which makes it hard to program at all. If I were to want to get to the point where I could write my own game engine or just a game by myself in general in C++ using at the most documentation how would I start at mastering to that level. Should I learn C first, or get really good at basics in general with C++. I know there is a similar posted question on this site but it's not the same due to the fact the person asking the question has a well knowledge level in programming. I'm stuck in a loop of learning the same things but if I go farther I don't understand. I'm stuck in the same spot and need to make progress.

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• How do you apply to a company way out of your league?

  - by emcb

  First, my background: I'm in the market for a new job I have ~2 years experience under my belt Nothing on my resume would JUMP out at you Thus far in my career I've been able to become productive quickly and have been continually praised by managers and coworkers for my abilities to learn and produce. I don't mean to be bragging here, but I want to get across that (at least in my mind) I could be categorized as "very promising young developer" I've been job hunting for a little while now and like most job seekers I've found a handful of companies that are basically "dream" jobs (think Fog Creek or 37Signals). If I were to apply to a company like that in the normal recruitment channels, my resume would probably not make it past the first set of filters. Now, I accept that I'm a longshot for a job at the hottest companies out there, but in my job search I've had a little success in applying for positions I'm not qualified for simply by doing something a little different: sending an email outlining how I don't meet the qualifications but stating why I would do well in the job anyways. In other cases, I've outright asked for a small project/problem that would be representative of the work to prove I can do the job, since I didn't have the specific skills on my resume yet. What I'm wondering is: If I'm not qualified on paper for a particular job, what creative/unique/impressive methods have you thought of or seen work to at least get an interview? For the sake of argument, assume I really am a "very promising young developer". I would love to hear from people who are responsible for hiring - I'd like to hear examples of techniques that got someone noticed when they otherwise wouldn't have. Clarification: I know that I need to continue building my resume to continue advancing. But I'm in the job search NOW, so I'm looking for other approaches

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• Hobbyist transitioning to earn money on paid work?

  - by Chelonian

  I got into hobbyist Python programming some years ago on a whim, having never programmed before other than BASIC way back when, and little by little have cobbled together a, in my opinion, nice little desktop application that I might try to get out there in some fashion someday. It's roughly 15,000 logical lines of code, and includes use of Python, wxPython, SQLite, and a number of other libraries, works on Win and Linux (maybe Mac, untested) and I've gotten some good feedback about the application's virtues from non-programmer friends. I've also done a small application for data collection for animal behavior experiments, and an ad hoc tool to help generate a web page...and I've authored some tutorials. I consider my Python skills to be appreciably limited, my SQL skills to be very limited, but I'm not totally out to sea, either (e.g. I did FizzBuzz in a few minutes, did a "Monty Hall Dilemma" simulator in some minutes, etc.). I also put a strong premium on quality user experience; that is, the look and feel matters much to me and the software looks quite good, I feel. I know no other programming languages yet. I also know the basics of HTML/CSS (not considering them programming languages) and have created an artist's web page (that was described by a friend as "incredibly slick"...it's really not, though), and have a scientific background. I'm curious: Aside from directly selling my software, what's roughly possible--if anything--in terms of earning either side money on gigs, or actually getting hired at some level in the software industry, for someone with this general skill set?

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• Internal Libraries (Subversion Externals, 'library' branch, or just another folder)

  - by Ntsc

  Currently working on multiple projects that need to share internal libraries. The internal libraries are updated continually. Currently only 1 project needs to be stable but soon we will need to have both projects stable at any given time. What is the best way to SVN internal libraries? Currently we are using the 'just another folder' like so... trunk\project1 trunk\project2 trunk\libs It causes a major headache when a shared library is updated for project1 and project2 is now dead until the parts that use the library are updated. So after doing some research on SVN externals I thought of this... trunk\project1\libs (external to trunk\libs @ some revision) trunk\project2\libs (external to trunk\libs @ different revision) trunk\libs\ I'm a little worried about how externals work with commits and not making library commits so complicated that I am the only one capable of doing it (mostly worried about branches with externals as we use them extensively). On top of that we have multiple programming languages within each project some of which don't support per-project library directories (at least not easily) so we would need to check out on a per project basis instead of checking out the trunk. There is also the 'vendor' style branching of libraries but it has the same problem as above where the library would have to be a sub folder of each project and is maybe a little to complicated for how little projects we have. Any insight would be nice. I've spent quite a bit of time reading the Subversion book and feeling like I'm getting no where.

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• Bug Triage

  In this blog post brain dump, I'll attempt to describe the process my team tries to follow when dealing with new bug reports (specifically, code defect reports). This is not official Microsoft policy, just the way we do things… if you do things differently and want to share, you can do so at the bottom in the comments (or on your blog).Feature Triage TeamA subset of the feature crew, the triage team (which has representations from the PM, Dev and QA disciplines), looks at all unassigned bugs at regular intervals. This can be weekly or daily (or other frequency) dependent on which part of the product cycle we are in and what the untriaged bug load looks like. They discuss each bug considering the evidence and make a decision of whether the bug goes from Not Yet Assigned to Assigned (plus the name of the DEV to fix this) or whether it goes from Active to Resolved (which means it gets assigned back to the requestor for closure or further debate if they were not present at the triage meeting). Close to critical milestones, the feature triage team needs to further justify bugs they take to additional higher-level triage teams.Bug Opened = Not Yet AssignedSomeone (typically an SDET from the QA team) creates the bug item (e.g. in TFS), ensuring they populate all the relevant fields including: Title, Description, Repro Steps (including the Actual Result at the end of the steps), attachments of code and/or screenshots, Build number that they observed the issue in, regression details if applicable, how it was found, if a test case exists or needs to be created etc. They also indicate their opinion on the Priority and Severity. The bug status is left as Not Yet Assigned."Issue" versus "Fix for issue"The solution to some bugs is easy to determine, e.g. "bug: the column name is misspelled". Obviously the fix is to correct the spelling – still, the triage team should be explicit and enter the correct spelling in the bug's Description. Note that a bad bug name here would be "bug: fix the spelling of the column" (it describes the solution, rather than the problem).Other solutions are trickier to establish, e.g. "bug: the column header is not accessible (can only be clicked on with the mouse, not reached via keyboard)". What is the correct solution here? The last thing to do is leave this undetermined and just assign it to a developer. The solution has to be entered in the description. Behind this type of a bug usually hides a spec defect or a new feature request.The person opening the bug should focus on describing the issue, rather than the solution. The person indicates what the fix is in their opinion by stating the Expected Result (immediately after stating the Actual Result). If they have a complex suggested solution, that should be split out in a separate part, but the triage team has the final say before assigning it. If the solution is lengthy/complicated to describe, the bug can be assigned to the PM. Note: the strict interpretation suggests that any bug with no clear, obvious solution is always a hole in the spec and should always go to the PM. This also ensures the spec gets updated.Not Yet Assigned - Not Yet Assigned (on someone else's plate)If the bug is observed in our feature, but the cause is actually another team, we change the Area Path (which is the way we identify teams in TFS) and leave it as Not Yet Assigned. The triage team may add more comments as appropriate including potentially changing the repro steps. In some cases, we may even resolve the bug in our area path and open a new bug in the area path of the other team.Even though there is no action on a dev on the team, the bug still needs to be tracked. One way of doing this is to implement some notification system that informs the team when the tracked bug changed status; another way is to occasionally run a global query (against all area paths) for bugs that have been opened by a member of the team and follow up with the current owners for stale bugs.Not Yet Assigned - ResolvedThis state transition can only be made by the Feature Triage Team.0. Sometimes the bug description is not clear and in that case it gets Resolved as More Information Needed, so the original requestor can provide it.After understanding what the bug item is about, the first decision is to determine whether it needs to go to a dev.1. If it is a known bug, it gets resolved as "Duplicate" and linked to the existing bug.2. If it is "By Design" it gets resolved as such, indicating that the triage team does not think this is a bug.3. If the bug does not repro on latest bits, it is resolved as "No Repro"4. The most painful: If it is decided that we cannot fix it for this release it gets resolved as "Postponed" or "Won't Fix". The former is typically due to resources and time constraints, while the latter is due to deciding that it is not important enough to consume our resources in any release (yes, not all bugs must be fixed!). For both cases, there are other factors that contribute to the decision such as: existence of a reasonable workaround, frequency we expect users to encounter the issue, dependencies on other team to offer a solution, whether it breaks a core scenario, whether it prohibits customer feedback on a major feature, is it a regression from a previous release, impact of the fix on other partner teams (e.g. User Education, User Experience, Localization/Globalization), whether this is the right fix, does the fix impact performance goals, and last but not least, severity of bug (e.g. loss of customer data, security threat, crash, hang). The bar for fixing a bug goes up as the release date approaches. The triage team becomes hardnosed about which bugs to take, while the developers are busy resolving assigned bugs thus everyone drives for Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB). ZBB is when you have 0 active bugs older than 48 hours.Not Yet Assigned - AssignedIf the bug is something we decide to fix in this release and the solution is known, then it is assigned to a DEV. This is either the developer that will do the work, or a Lead that can further assign it to one of his developer team based on a load balancing algorithm of their choosing.Sometimes, the triage team needs the dev to do some investigation work before deciding whether to take the fix; similarly, the checkin for the fix may be gated on code review by the triage team. In these cases, these instructions are provided in the comments section of the bug and when the developer is done they notify the triage team for final decision.Additionally, a Priority and Severity (from 0 to 4) has to be entered, e.g. a P0 means "drop anything you are doing and fix this now" whereas a P4 is something you get to after all P0,1,2,3 bugs are fixed.From a testing perspective, if the bug was found through ad-hoc testing or an external team, the decision is made whether test cases should be added to avoid future regressions. This is communicated to the QA team.Assigned - ResolvedWhen the developer receives the bug (they should be checking daily for new bugs on their plate looking at bugs in order of priority and from older to newer) they can send it back to triage if the information is not clear. Otherwise, they investigate the bug, setting the Sub Status to "Investigating"; if they cannot make progress, they set the Sub Status to "Blocked" and discuss this with triage or whoever else can help them get unblocked. Once they are unblocked, they set the Sub Status to "Working on Solution"; once they are code complete they send a code review request, setting the Sub Status to "Fix Available". After the iterative code review process is over and everyone is happy with the fix, the developer checks it in and changes the state of the bug from Active (and Assigned to them) to Resolved (and Assigned to someone else).The developer needs to ensure that when the status is changed to Resolved that it is assigned to a QA person. For example, maybe the PM opened the bug, but it should be a QA person that will verify the fix - the developer needs to manually change the assignee in that case. Typically the QA person will send an email to the original requestor notifying them that the fix is verified.Resolved - ??In all cases above, note that the final state was Resolved. What happens after that? The final step should be Closed. The bug is closed once the QA person verifying the fix is happy with it. If the person is not happy, then they change the state from Resolved to Active, thus sending it back to the developer. If the developer and QA person cannot reach agreement, then triage can be brought into it. An easy way to do that is change the status back to Not Yet Assigned with appropriate comments so the triage team can re-review.It is important to note that only QA can close a bug. That means that if the opener of the bug was a PM, when the bug gets resolved by the dev it may land on the PM's plate and after a quick review, the PM would re-assign to an SDET, which is the only role that can close bugs. One exception to this is if the person that filed the bug is external: in that case, we leave it Resolved and assigned to them and also send them a notification that they need to verify the fix. Another exception is if specialized developer knowledge is needed for verifying the bug fix (e.g. it was a refactoring suggestion bug typically not observable by the user) in which case it is fine to have a developer verify the fix, and ideally a different developer to the one that opened the bug.Other links on bug triageA quick search reveals that others have talked about this subject, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.Your take?If you have other best practices your team uses to deal with incoming bug reports, feel free to share in the comments below or on your blog. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• "Parallel Programming Talk" show

  Over at the Intel Software Network Aaron Tersteeg runs a "Parallel Programming Talk" audio show on which I was invited as a guest (for the 55th episode) to talk about Microsoft's parallelism offerings in Visual Studio 2010. The call started at 7:45AM, so if my voice sounds croaky to you, now you know why ;)Check out the 20-minute chat (and related hyperlinks) on Aaron's blog. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• GPGPU

  WhatGPU obviously stands for Graphics Processing Unit (the silicon powering the display you are using to read this blog post). The extra GP in front of that stands for General Purpose computing.So, altogether GPGPU refers to computing we can perform on GPU for purposes beyond just drawing on the screen. In effect, we can use a GPGPU a bit like we already use a CPU: to perform some calculation (that doesn’t have to have any visual element to it). The attraction is that a GPGPU can be orders of magnitude faster than a CPU.WhyWhen I was at the SuperComputing conference in Portland last November, GPGPUs were all the rage. A quick online search reveals many articles introducing the GPGPU topic. I'll just share 3 here: pcper (ignoring all pages except the first, it is a good consumer perspective), gizmodo (nice take using mostly layman terms) and vizworld (answering the question on "what's the big deal").The GPGPU programming paradigm (from a high level) is simple: in your CPU program you define functions (aka kernels) that take some input, can perform the costly operation and return the output. The kernels are the things that execute on the GPGPU leveraging its power (and hence execute faster than what they could on the CPU) while the host CPU program waits for the results or asynchronously performs other tasks.However, GPGPUs have different characteristics to CPUs which means they are suitable only for certain classes of problem (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others (e.g. algorithms with branching or recursion or other complex flow control). You also pay a high cost for transferring the input data from the CPU to the GPU (and vice versa the results back to the CPU), so the computation itself has to be long enough to justify the overhead transfer costs. If your problem space fits the criteria then you probably want to check out this technology.HowSo where can you get a graphics card to start playing with all this? At the time of writing, the two main vendors ATI (owned by AMD) and NVIDIA are the obvious players in this industry. You can read about GPGPU on this AMD page and also on this NVIDIA page. NVIDIA's website also has a free chapter on the topic from the "GPU Gems" book: A Toolkit for Computation on GPUs.If you followed the links above, then you've already come across some of the choices of programming models that are available today. Essentially, AMD is offering their ATI Stream technology accessible via a language they call Brook+; NVIDIA offers their CUDA platform which is accessible from CUDA C. Choosing either of those locks you into the GPU vendor and hence your code cannot run on systems with cards from the other vendor (e.g. imagine if your CPU code would run on Intel chips but not AMD chips). Having said that, both vendors plan to support a new emerging standard called OpenCL, which theoretically means your kernels can execute on any GPU that supports it. To learn more about all of these there is a website: gpgpu.org. The caveat about that site is that (currently) it completely ignores the Microsoft approach, which I touch on next.On Windows, there is already a cross-GPU-vendor way of programming GPUs and that is the DirectX API. Specifically, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, the DirectX 11 API offers a dedicated subset of the API for GPGPU programming: DirectCompute. You use this API on the CPU side, to set up and execute the kernels that run on the GPU. The kernels are written in a language called HLSL (High Level Shader Language). You can use DirectCompute with HLSL to write a "compute shader", which is the term DirectX uses for what I've been referring to in this post as a "kernel". For a comprehensive collection of links about this (including tutorials, videos and samples) please see my blog post: DirectCompute.Note that there are many efforts to build even higher level languages on top of DirectX that aim to expose GPGPU programming to a wider audience by making it as easy as today's mainstream programming models. I'll mention here just two of those efforts: Accelerator from MSR and Brahma by Ananth. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• DirectCompute

  In my previous blog post I introduced the concept of GPGPU ending with:On Windows, there is already a cross-GPU-vendor way of programming GPUs and that is the Direct X API. Specifically, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, the DirectX 11 API offers a dedicated subset of the API for GPGPU programming: DirectCompute. You use this API on the CPU side, to set up and execute the kernels on the GPU. The kernels are written in a language called HLSL (High Level Shader Language). You can use DirectCompute with HLSL to write a "compute shader", which is the term DirectX uses for what I've been referring to in this post as "kernel".In this post I want to share some links to get you started with DirectCompute and HLSL.1. Watch the recording of the PDC 09 session: DirectX11 DirectCompute.2. If session recordings is your thing there are two more on DirectCompute from nvidia's GTC09 conference 1015 (pdf, mp4) and 1411 (mp4 plus the presenter's written version of the session).3. Over at gamedev there is an old Compute Shader tutorial. At the same site, there is a 3-part blog post on Compute Shader: Introduction, Resources and Addressing.4. From PDC, you can also download the DirectCompute Hands On Lab.5. When you are ready to get your hands even dirtier, download the latest Windows DirectX SDK (at the time of writing the latest is dated Feb 2010).6. Within the SDK you'll find a Compute Shader Overview and samples such as: Basic, Sort, OIT, NBodyGravity, HDR Tone Mapping.7. Talking of DX11/DirectCompute samples, there are also a couple of good ones on this URL.8. The documentation of the various APIs is available online. Here are just some good (but far from complete) taster entry points into that: numthreads, SV_DispatchThreadID, SV_GroupThreadID, SV_GroupID, SV_GroupIndex, D3D11CreateDevice, D3DX11CompileFromFile, CreateComputeShader, Dispatch, D3D11_BIND_FLAG, GSSetShader. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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