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• Coders For Charities

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Last weekend I had the opportunity to give back to the community doing what I love. As geeks we don’t usually have this opportunity. The event is called Coders 4 Charities (C4C) and it’s a grueling weekend of coding for nearly 30 hours over the weekend. When you finish you get to present to the charity and all of the other groups what you have completed. From the site: Coders For Charities is a 3-day charity event that pairs charities and local software developers. Charities often do not have the funds to implement a new website or intranet or database solution. Software developers often do not volunteer for charities because their skills do not apply. This event is the perfect marriage of these two needs; software developers volunteering their time to help charities better serve their community though the latest technology! The actual event was lined with multiple charities and about 50 developers, designers, business analysts, etc, each working with a different charity to come up with a solution that they could implement in less than 3 days. C4C provided a place and food for us so that we wouldn’t have to leave much during the time we had to implement our solution. They also provided games like Rock Band so we could get away and clear our minds for a few moments if necessary. I don’t think we made it down there to play, but the food and drinks were a huge help for us. The charity we we picked was Harvest Home. They had a need for an online intranet site where they could track membership and gardening. Over the next few days we worked on a site we could give them. Below is a screen shot with private data marked out. It was an awesome and humbling experience to be able to give back to a charity and I’m happy I was a part of it. I would definitely do it again. How often do we get to use our abilities to volunteer our time to a charity?

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Ajax application: using SOAP vs REST ?

  - by coder

  I'm building an ajax heavy application (client-side strictly html/css/js) which will be getting all the data and using server business logic via webservices. I know REST seems to be the hot topic but I can't find any good arguments. The main argument seems to be its "light-weight". My impression so far is that wsdl/soap based services are more expressive and allow for more a more complex transfer of data. It appears that soap would be more useful in the application I'm building where the only code consuming the services will be the js downloaded in the client browser. REST on the other hand seems to have a smaller entry barrier and so can be more useful for services like twitter in allowing other developers to consume these services easily. Also, REST seems to Te better suited for simple data transfers. So in summary SOAP is useful for complex data transfer and REST is useful in simple data transfer. I'm currently under the impression that using SOAP would be best due to the complexity of the messages but perhaps there's other factors. What are your thoughts on the pros/cons of soap/rest for a heavy ajax web app? EDIT: While the wsdl is in xml, the data I'm transferring back and forth is actually in JSON. It just appears more natural to use wsdl/soap here due to the nature of the app. The verbs GET and POST may not be enough. I may want to say something like: processQueue, or executeTimer. This is why my conclusion has been wsdl/soap would be good for bridging a complex layer between two applications (client and server) whereas REST would be better (due to its simplicity) for allowing many developer-users to consume resources programmatically. So you could say the choice falls along two lines Will the app be verb-oriented (completing tasks: use soap) or noun-oriented (consuming resources: use REST) Will the api be consumed by few developers or many developers (REST is strong for many developers)? Since such an ajax heavy app would potentially use many verbs and would only be used by the client developer it appears soap/wsdl would be the best fit.

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• Microsoft C# Most Valuable Professional

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Visual C#. For those that don’t know it’s an annual award based on nominations from peers and Microsoft. Although there are just over 4,000 MVPs worldwide from all kinds of specializations, there are less than 100 C# MVPs in the US. There is more information at the site: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft. With fewer than 5,000 awardees worldwide, Microsoft MVPs represent a highly select group of experts. MVPs share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. To recognize the contributions they make, MVPs from around the world have the opportunity to meet Microsoft executives, network with peers, and position themselves as technical community leaders. Here is my profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/profile/rob.reynolds I want to thank those that nominated me, without nominations this would never have happened. Thanks to Microsoft for liking me and finding my achievements and contributions to the community to be worth something. It’s good to know when you put in a lot of hard work that you get rewarded! I also want to thank many of the people I have worked with over the last 7 years. You guys have been great and I’m definitely standing on the shoulders of giants! Thanks to KDOT for giving me that first shot into professional programming and the experience and all of the training! A special thanks to @drusellers for kick starting me when I went stale in my learning back in 2007 and for always pushing me and bouncing ideas off of me. Without you I don’t think I would have made it this far. Thanks Alt.NET for keeping it fresh and funky! A very special thank you goes out to my wife for supporting me and locking me in the basement to work on all of my initiatives!

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• From Zero To Deployed Contest&ndash;Prizes Announced

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Do you have what it takes to meet the challenge? We’ll make it worth it. You may have noticed at the end of my last post I threw down the community challenge to get from zero to deployed faster than me. The Challenge My time was 13:48 to be from zero to deployed. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Here are the links to the videos: #1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZIUVfHWsbc #2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7WluaXIya0 #3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqPh7wbWsLc The Rules Let’s revisit those ground rules before I tell you what the prizes will be: Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) The Prizes The prize package for the best time is:                      $50 Gift Card or equivalent – Provided by yours truly. AppHarbor $100 service credit – AppHarbor will provide a $100 credit for their services once they launch payments. Thank you to the folks at AppHarbor! ReSharper - Jetbrains will provide a FULL license of ReSharper Personal. This license is a $199 value. Thank you to the folks at Jetbrains! Telerik Ultimate Collection for .NET – Telerik will provide a license to pretty much every .NET tool they offer. This license is a $1999 value. A big thank you to the folks at Telerik!! This is a total value of $2348!!! The prize package for the person that has the most creative video(s) with a time better than mine (if there are at least 5 responses):           $20 Gift card or equivalent – Provided by this guy. AppHarbor $50 service credit – same deal as above. Thank you AppHarbor! Twilio T-Shirt - Twilio has donated a shirt and will ship your size to you (this may be subject to US residents only). This is a $25 value. Thank you to the folks at Twilio!

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• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

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• Stagnating in programming

  - by Coder

  Time after time this question came up in my mind, but up until today I wasn't thinking about it much. I have been programming for maybe around 8 years now, and for the last two years it seems I'm not as keen to pick up new technologies anymore. Maybe that's a burnout or something, but I'd say it's experience and what I like, that's stopping me from running after the latest and greatest. I'm C++ developer, by this I mean, I love close to metal programming. I have no problems tracing problems through assembly, using tools like WinDbg or HexView. When I use constructs, I think about how they are realized underneath, how the bits are set and unset under the hood. I love battling with complex threading problems and doing everything hardcore way, even by hand if the regular solutions seem half baked. But I also love the C++0x stuff, and use it a lot. And all C++ code as long as it's not cumbersome compared to C counterparts, sometimes I also fall back to sort of "Super C" if the C++ way is ugly. And then there are all other developers who seem to be way more forward looking, .Net 4.0 MVC, WPF, all those Microsoft X#s, LINQ languages, XML and XSLT, mobile devices and so on. I have done a considerable amount of .NET, SQL, ASPX programming, but the further I go, the less I want to try those technologies. Is that bad? Almost every day I hear people saying that managed code is the only way forward, WPF is the way to go. I hear that C++ is godawful, and you can't code anything in it that's somewhat stable. But I don't buy it. With the experience I have, and the knowledge of how native code is compiled and executes, I can say I find it extremely rare that C++ code is unstable, or leaks, or causes crashes that takes more than 30 seconds to identify and fix. And to tell the truth, I've seen enough problems with other "cool" languages that I'd say C++ is even more stable and production proof than the safe languages, at least for me. The only thing that scares me in C++ is new frameworks, I don't trust them, and I use them extra sparingly. STL - yes, ATL - very sparingly, everything else... Well, not very keen on it. Most huge problems I've ran into, all were related to frameworks, not the language itself. Some overrided operator here, bad hierarchy there, poor class design here, mystical castings there. Other than that, C/C++ (yes, I use them together) still seems a very controlled and stable way to develop applications. Am I stagnating? Should I switch a profession, or force myself in all that marketing hype? Are there more developers who feel the same way?

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• RoundhousE now supports Oracle, SQL2000

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  RoundhousE, the database migration software that is based on sql scripts has added support for Oracle and SQL 2000.  There have also been numerous other little things, including better logging and a script run errors table. The script errors table captures what went wrong when/if your scripts are not quite up to par or there is some other issue. A special thanks goes out to http://twitter.com/PascalMestdach and http://twitter.com/jochenjonc. They worked hard on this and all I did was provide guidance and help bring it back to the trunk. This is what an entry in the database looks like: This is a preview of new log: ================================================== Versioning ================================================== Attempting to resolve version from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\sample\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml using //buildInfo/version. Found version 0.5.0.188 from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\sample\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml. Migrating TestRoundhousE from version 0 to 0.5.0.188. Versioning TestRoundhousE database with version 0.5.0.188 based on http://roundhouse.googlecode.com/svn. ================================================== Migration Scripts ================================================== Looking for Update scripts in "C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\sample\deployment\..\db\TestRoundhousE\up". These should be one time only scripts. -------------------------------------------------- Running 0001_CreateTables.sql on (local) - TestRoundhousE. Running 0002_ChangeTable.sql on (local) - TestRoundhousE. Running 0003_TestBatchSplitter.sql on (local) - TestRoundhousE. -------------------------------------------------- But what are you waiting for? Head out and grab the latest release today!

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• Is it ok to replace optimized code with readable code?

  - by Coder

  Sometimes you run into a situation where you have to extend/improve an existing code. You see that the old code is very lean, but it's also difficult to extend, and takes time to read. Is it a good idea to replace it with modern code? Some time ago I liked the lean approach, but now, it seems to me that it's better to sacrifice a lot of optimizations in favor of higher abstractions, better interfaces and more readable, extendable code. The compilers seem to be getting better as well, so things like struct abc = {} are silently turned into memsets, shared_ptrs are pretty much producing the same code as raw pointer twiddling, templates are working super good because they produce super lean code, and so on. But still, sometimes you see stack based arrays and old C functions with some obscure logic, and usually they are not on the critical path. Is it good idea to change such code if you have to touch a small piece of it either way?

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• Why do some user agents have spam urls in them?

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  If you go to (say) the last 100 entries (visits) to the botsvsbrowsers.com website (exact link, feel free to take a look: http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html ), you'd notice that almost every User Agent that has the keywords "Opera" and "Presto" inside them, will almost certainly have a web link (URL/Web Address) inside it, and it won't just be a normal web address, but a HTML anchor tag/link to that address. Why is this so, I could not even find a single discussion about it on the internet, nowhere, I tried varying my search terms many times. If the user agent contains the words "Opera" and "Presto" it doesnt mean it will have this weblink, but it means there is about an 80% change that it will. A typical anchor tag/link inside a user agent will look like this: Mozilla/4.0 <a href="http://osis-uk.co.uk/disabled-equipment">disability equipment</a> (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60 If you check it out at the website, http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html you will notice that the back and forward arrows are in there unescaped format. This isn't just true for botsvsbrowsers, but several other user agent listing sites. I'm really confused and feel line I'm in a room full of 10,000 people and am the only one seeing this ghost :). If I'm doing statistical analysis, should I include or exclude this type of user agent from my listing (ie: are these just normal users who've set their user agents to attempt to drive some traffic to their sites as they browser the web), or is there something else going on? The fact that it is so consistent in terms of its format leads me to believe that it is an automated process (the setting or alteration of the user agent) so I cannot decide or understand the process by which this change is made (I know how to change a user agent), but unsure which program or facility is doing this, especially since it is exclusive to Opera (Presto) user agents that are beyond I think an 8 or 9 point something browser version. I've run some statistical tests, parsing entries from all over the place, writing custom programs, to get a better understanding of this. Keep in mind that I see normal URL's in user agents infrequently, they are just text such as +http://www.someSite.com appended to a user agent normally, especially if its a crawler or bot it provided its service URL, this is normal and isnt done with an embedded link (A HREF=) etc, so I'm not talking about "those".

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• ATI Radeon HD 6870 Driver fails to install default-policy.sh does not support version

  - by Rogue Coder

  I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 Beta, with everything updated completely. I'm using Ubuntu Classic, because Unity fails to run, supposedly because of my video card. The drivers for the Radeon HD 6870 series is apparently lacking, but I found a post stating the newest version has full support for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. That post is slightly old, so i grabbed 11.3 for Ubuntu x86 off the ATI website. When I run the installation program, I receive the following error: > ./ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run Created directory fglrx-install.uREFoO Verifying archive integrity... All good. Uncompressing ATI Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver-8.831.2......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.38-8-generic-pae:; make sure that the version is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.38-8-generic-pae:; make sure that the version is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.uREFoO > I would love to get the latest ATI drivers working so that I can try out Unity!

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• AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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• Biggest mistake you've ever made

  - by Rogue Coder

  Similar to the question I read on Server Fault, what is the biggest mistake you've ever made in an IT related position. Some examples from friends: I needed to do some work on a production site so I decided to copy over the live database to the beta site. Pretty standard, but when I went to the beta site it was still pulling out-of-date info. OOPS! I had copied the beta database over to the live site! Thank god for backups. And for me, I created a form for an event that was to be held during a specific time range. Participants would fill out the form for a chance to win, and we would send the event organizers a CSV from the database. I went into the database, and found ONLY 1 ENTRY, MINE. Upon investigating, it appears as though I forgot an auto increment key, and because of the server setup there was no way to recover the lost data. I am aware this question is similar to ones on Stack Overflow but the ones I found seemed to receive generic answers instead of actual stories :) What is the biggest coding error/mistake ever…

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• Yahoo hosts Cracks / Warez on its OWN server!

  - by Naughty.Coder

  I can not believe no body has done anything regarding this issue. Yahoo bought a website called dvd4arab.com 4-5 years back. This site has all copyrighted / illegal material you can imagine .. Music/ Movies/ Software and games. I believe most of them hosted somewhere on file-sharing websites, but there are attachments in the forum. How to report this? and to whom? The series of buying is like this: Dvd4arab sold to Maktoob, Yahoo bought Maktoob, Microsoft bought Yahoo

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• UppercuT and Mercurial (hg)

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  I mentioned this awhile back on twitter, but UppercuT (UC) has support for Mercurial for versioning your assemblies. In the settings file, all you need to do it tell UC to use hg. When you build your assemblies, they will use the changeset number in the version, and in the informational version, you get the hash, just like you do when using Git. Pretty sweet. By the way, UC also supports .NET 4.0 as of last week. With this knowledge you shall build.

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• Puppet: Getting Started On Windows

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-getting-started-on-windows.aspxNow that we’ve talked a little about Puppet. Let’s see how easy it is to get started. Install Puppet Let’s get Puppet Installed. There are two ways to do that: With Chocolatey: Open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: choco install puppet Download and install Puppet manually - http://puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options Run Puppet Let’s make pasting into a console window work with Control + V (like it should): choco install wincommandpaste If you have a cmd.exe command shell open, (and chocolatey installed) type: RefreshEnv The previous command will refresh your environment variables, ala Chocolatey v0.9.8.24+. If you were running PowerShell, there isn’t yet a refreshenv for you (one is coming though!). If you have to restart your CLI (command line interface) session or you installed Puppet manually open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: puppet resource user Output should look similar to a few of these: user { 'Administrator': ensure => 'present', comment => 'Built-in account for administering the computer/domain', groups => ['Administrators'], uid => 'S-1-5-21-some-numbers-yo-500', } Let's create a user: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => present, groups => ['Users'], }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: created Run the 'puppet resource user' command again. Note the user we created is there! Let’s clean up after ourselves and remove that user we just created: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => absent, }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: removed Run the 'puppet resource user' command one last time. Note we just removed a user! Conclusion You just did some configuration management /system administration. Welcome to the new world of awesome! Puppet is super easy to get started with. This is a taste so you can start seeing the power of automation and where you can go with it. We haven’t talked about resources, manifests (scripts), best practices and all of that yet. Next we are going to start to get into more extensive things with Puppet. Next time we’ll walk through getting a Vagrant environment up and running. That way we can do some crazier stuff and when we are done, we can just clean it up quickly.

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• What is the most effective way to add functionality to unfamiliar, structurally unsound code?

  - by Coder

  This is probably something everyone has to face during the development sooner or later. You have an existing code written by someone else, and you have to extend it to work under new requirements. Sometimes it's simple, but sometimes the modules have medium to high coupling and medium to low cohesion, so the moment you start touching anything, everything breaks. And you don't feel that it's fixed correctly when you get the new and old scenarios working again. One approach would be to write tests, but in reality, in all cases I've seen, that was pretty much impossible (reliance on GUI, missing specifications, threading, complex dependencies and hierarchies, deadlines, etc). So everything sort of falls back to good ol' cowboy coding approach. But I refuse to believe there is no other systematic way that would make everything easier. Does anyone know a better approach, or the name of the methodology that should be used in such cases?

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• Input Handling and Game loop

  - by Bob Coder

  So, I intercept the WM_KEYDOWN and other messages. Thing is, my game can't/shouldn't react to these messages just yet, since my game might be currently drawing to the screen or in the middle of updating my game entities. So the idea is to keep a keyboardstate and mousestate, which is updated by the part of my code that intercepts the windows messages. These states just keep track of which keys/buttons are currently pressed. Then, at the start of my game's update function, I access these keyboard and mouse states and my game reacts to the user input. Now, which is the best way to access these states? I assume that windows messages can be sent whenever, so the keyboard/mouse states are constantly being edited. Accessing say a list of currently pressed keys in the keyboard state the same time another part of the code is editing the list would cause problems. Should I make a deep copy of a state and act on that? How would I deal with the garbage generated though, this would take place every frame.

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• UppercuT v1.0 and 1.1&ndash;Linux (Mono), Multi-targeting, SemVer, Nitriq and Obfuscation, oh my!

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on Linux using Mono! This is thanks mostly to Svein Ackenhausen for the patches and working with me on getting it all working while not breaking the windows builds!  This means you can use mono on Windows or Linux. Notice the shell files to execute with Linux that come as part of UC now. Multi-Targeting Perhaps one of the hardest things to do that requires an automated build is multi-targeting. At v1 this is early, and possibly prone to some issues, but available.  We believe in making everything stupid simple, so it’s as simple as adding a comma to the microsoft.framework property. i.e. “net-3.5, net-4.0” to suddenly produce both framework builds. When you build, this is what you get (if you meet each framework’s requirements): At this time you have to let UC override the build location (as it does by default) or this will not work.  Semantic Versioning By now many of you have been using UppercuT for awhile and have watched how we have done versioning. Many of you who use git already know we put the revision hash in the informational/product version as the last octet. At v1, UppercuT has adopted the semantic versioning scheme. What does that mean? This is a short read, but a good one: http://SemVer.org SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is really using versioning what it was meant for. You have three octets. Major.Minor.Patch as in 1.1.0.  UC will use three different versioning concepts, one for the assembly version, one for the file version, and one for the product version. All versions - The first three octects of the version are owned by SemVer. Major.Minor.Patch i.e.: 1.1.0 Assembly Version - The assembly version would much closer follow SemVer. Last digit is always 0. Major.Minor.Patch.0 i.e: 1.1.0.0 File Version - The file version occupies the build number as the last digit. Major.Minor.Patch.Build i.e.: 1.1.0.2650 Product/Informational Version - The last octect of your product/informational version is the source control revision/hash. Major.Minor.Patch.RevisionOrHash i.e. (TFS/SVN): 1.1.0.235 i.e. (Git/HG): 1.1.0.a45ace4346adef0 SemVer is not on by default, the passive versioning scheme is still in effect. Notice that version.use_semanticversioning has been added to the UppercuT.config file (and version.patch in support of the third octet): Gems Support Gems support was added at v1. This will probably be deprecated as some point once there is an announced sunset for Nu v1. Application gems may keep it around since there is no alternative for that yet though (CoApp would be a possible replacement). Nitriq Support Nitriq is a code analysis tool like NDepend. It’s built by Mr. Jon von Gillern. It uses LINQ query language, so you can use a familiar idiom when analyzing your code base. It’s a pretty awesome tool that has a free version for those looking to do code analysis! To use Nitriq with UC, you are going to need the console edition.  To take advantage of Nitriq, you just need to update the location of Nitriq in the config: Then add the nitriq project files at the root of your source. Please refer to the Nitriq documentation on how these are created. UppercuT v1.1 Obfuscation One thing I started looking into was an easy way to obfuscate my code. I came across EazFuscator, which is both free and awesome. Plus the GUI for it is super simple to use. How do you make obfuscation even easier? Make it a convention and a configurable property in the UC config file! And the code gets obfuscated! Closing Definitely get out and look at the new release. It contains lots of chocolaty (sp?) goodness. And remember, the upgrade path is almost as simple as drag and drop!

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• Chicago Alt.NET Presentation Aftermath

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Right now I’m on the train on my way back from Chicago. It’s interesting to be drinking a Corona and hanging out in the lounge while I’m watching the miles go by. Chicago was a nice time. I had never been so we decided to vacation in Chicago and see the sites – posts coming at the other blog. My presentation was on UppercuT. It was a small group that came to the presentation which makes for an more engaging audience. Overall it was a pretty good presentation and I enjoyed it. We got a little comfortable and ventured off track for a few minutes and talked about RoundhousE as well. I would definitely come back out to Chicago and present or go to a Code Camp. The slides for the presentation are here: presentation slides. I had a good question that came about when working on Open Source. I’ll catch that in the next post.

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• Topeka Dot Net User Group (DNUG) Meeting &ndash; April 6, 2010

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Topeka DNUG is free for anyone to attend! Mark your calendars now! SPEAKER: Troy Tuttle is a self-described pragmatic agilist, and Kanban practitioner, with more than a decade of experience in delivering software in the finance and health industries and as a consultant. He advocates teams improve their performance through pursuit of better practices like continuous integration and automated testing. Troy is the founder of the Kansas City Limited WIP Society and is a speaker at local area groups on team related topics. He currently works as a Project Lead Consultant with AdventureTech Group of Kansas City, KS. TOPIC: Why Kanban? Kanban is receiving a large amount of attention recently. What does it offer compared to other approaches? Answering that question may require you to hit the “reset” button on previously held biases and assumptions. Kanban blends Lean thought with ideas from first generation agile methodologies. To get started with Kanban, we will examine what steps are necessary to establish a transparent, work-limited, pull system. We will highlight the perils of allowing too much work-in-progress and how it affects development performance. Once established, Kanban teams need only a few metrics and tools to monitor their performance and improvement. WHERE: Federal Home Loan Bank Topeka on the Security Benefit Campus – Directions? WHEN: 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM on April 6th, 2010 REGISTER: http://topekadotnet.wufoo.com/forms/topeka-dnug-meeting-attendance/ ADDITIONAL INFO: As always, please sign in and out of FHLBank to help them with their accountability. Please park in the visitors section at the front of the building when you arrive. If  there are no spots in visitors you may park in the overflow lot at the far east end of the facility.  Lunch will be provided and we will have some great door prizes!

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• Temporary R+W CIFS share for non-root accounts?

  - by Coder

  I want to set up a cross platform mail client (Thunderbird), and so far I want to use NAS as a profile store. The NAS is CIFS based, and can be mounted on both Windows and Ubuntu. Also the locking works fine for mutex, and setup seems to work as a proof of concept. The problem is the Linux mount. Since I'm using a laptop, I'm not always connected to network, hence, I can't use the /etc/fstab to set up CIFS share with a modified group id. And the share has to be mounted using mount -t cifs ..., which causes it to be owned by root, and owned so badly, that it can't be chowned to the regular user account. This causes read only issues for Thunderbird, which seem to be solved if Thunderbird is launched via sudo. But I would like to avoid that and use a script to mount the share on-demand to a profile location, with profile based privileges and access rights. Is there a way to achieve that?

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• I owe you an explanation

  - by Blueberry Coder

  Welcome to my blog! I am Frédéric Desbiens, a new member of the ADF Product Management team.  I joined Oracle only a few weeks ago. My boss is Grant Ronald, and I have the privilege to work in the same team as Susan Duncan, Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger and Chris Muir. I share with them a passion for all things Java and ADF. With this blog, I hope to help you be more successful with our products – whether you are a customer or a partner. You may have heard of me before. Maybe you have my book in your bookshelf; or maybe we met at a conference. I went to JavaOne, ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle OpenWorld in the past, when I worked for a major consulting firm. I will spare you all the details of my career; you can have a look at my LinkedIn profile if you are curious about my past.  Usually, my posts will be of a technical nature, and will focus on Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper. SOA and portals have always been two topics of interest for me, however, and I will write about them. Over time, you will probably get acquainted with my « strategic » side as well. I devour history books, and always had a tendency to look at the big picture. I will probably not resist to the temptation of mixing IT and history, but this will be occasional, I promise!  At this point, I owe you an explanation about the title of the blog. I am French-Canadian, and wanted to evoke my roots in an obvious yet unobtrusive way. I was born in Chicoutimi, which is one of the main cities found in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. Traditionally, a large part of the wild blueberry production of the province of Québec come from there. A common nickname for the inhabitants is thus Les Bleuets, « The Blueberries » in English. I hope to see you around. You can also follow me on Twitter under  @BlueberryCoder.

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• Saddling your mountain lion with JDeveloper

  - by Blueberry Coder

  Last October, Apple released Java Update 2012-006. This patch brought the Apple-provided JDK for OS X Lion v10.7 and OS X Mountain Lion v10.8 to version 1.6.0_37. At the same time, it disabled the Apple Java plugins and removed the Java Preferences panel that enabled users to manage the various Java releases on their computer. On the Windows and Linux platforms, JDeveloper 11g R1 has been certified  to run on Java 7 since patch set 5. This is not the case on OS X.   ( The above is not a typo. Apple's OS for personal computer is now known as OS X; the « Mac » prefix has been dropped with the 10.8 release. And it's pronounced « Oh-Ess-Ten », by the way. Yes, I am a nitpicker. I know... ) Please note JDeveloper 11g R2 is not certified either. On any platform. It will generally work, but there are known issues with ADF Mobile. Personally, I would recommend to wait for 12c before going to JDK 7.  Now, suppose you have installed Oracle's JDK 7 on your Mac. JDeveloper will not run on it. It will even not install. Susan and I discovered this the hard way while setting up the ADF Mobile hands-on lab we ran at the UKOUG 2012 conference. The lab was a great success nevertheless, attracting nearly a hundred delegates. It was great to see the interest ADF Mobile already generates, especially among PL/SQL Developers and DBAs. But what did we do to make it work?  While Java Update 2012-006 removed the Java Preferences panel, it leaved in place OS X's command-line Java infrastructure. Thus, it is possible to invoke the Apple JDK 6 to start the JDeveloper installer. Suppose your user is named « Fred », and that the JDeveloper installer is on your desktop. You can execute the following command in a terminal window (on a single line) to start the installer:  /usr/libexec/java_home --version 1.6.0  --exec java -jar /Users/Fred/Desktop/jdevstudio11116install.jar  The JDeveloper installer, being provided a valid JDK reference, will set up the IDE and embedded WebLogic Server instance accordingly. Clever engineering at its finest!

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• (Where) Can I learn creating art for my 2D games?

  - by Poorly paid coder

  I'm currently bad at drawing. If I want to create something looking acceptable, it usually takes me hours and hours to fiddle around just to get the basic looks right. I think that I'm not completely skill-less, I just lack simple drawing techniques.. Am I a hopeless case? Where is a good place to start out in drawing for 2D games? I'd like to be able to create acceptably good backgrounds, terrains / tilemaps, characters and weapons

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