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• Cheating on Technical Debt

  - by Tony Davis

  One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code debt, is a convenient term to cover all the compromises between the ideal solution and the actual solution, reflecting the reality of the pressures of commercial coding. The one time you’re guaranteed to hear one developer, or DBA, pass judgment on another is when he or she inherits their project, and is surprised by the amount of technical debt left lying around in the form of inelegant architecture, incomplete tests, confusing interface design, no documentation, and so on. It is often expedient for a Project Manager to ignore the build-up of technical debt, the cut corners, not-quite-finished features and rushed designs that mean progress is satisfyingly rapid in the short term. It’s far less satisfying for the poor person who inherits the code. Nothing sends a colder chill down the spine than the dawning realization that you’ve inherited a system crippled with performance and functional issues that will take months of pain to fix before you can even begin to make progress on any of the planned new features. It’s often hard to justify this ‘debt paying’ time to the project owners and managers. It just looks as if you are making no progress, in marked contrast to your predecessor. There can be many good reasons for allowing technical debt to build up, at least in the short term. Often, rapid prototyping is essential, there is a temporary shortfall in test resources, or the domain knowledge is incomplete. It may be necessary to hit a specific deadline with a prototype, or proof-of-concept, to explore a possible market opportunity, with planned iterations and refactoring to follow later. However, it is a crime for a developer to build up technical debt without making this clear to the project participants. He or she needs to record it explicitly. A design compromise made in to order to hit a deadline, be it an outright hack, or a decision made without time for rigorous investigation and testing, needs to be documented with the same rigor that one tracks a bug. What’s the best way to do this? Ideally, we’d have some kind of objective assessment of the level of technical debt in a software project, although that smacks of Science Fiction even as I write it. I’d be interested of hear of any methods you’ve used, but I’m sure most teams have to rely simply on the integrity of their colleagues and the clear perceptions of the project manager… Cheers, Tony.

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• Going by the eBook

  - by Tony Davis

  The book and magazine publishing world is rapidly going digital, and the industry is faced with making drastic changes to their ways of doing business. The sudden take-up of digital readers by the book-buying public has surprised even the most technological-savvy of the industry. Printed books just aren't selling like they did. In contrast, eBooks are doing well. The ePub file format is the standard around which all publishers are converging. ePub is a standard for formatting book content, so that it can be reflowed for various devices, with their widely differing screen-sizes, and can be read offline. If you unzip an ePub file, you'll find familiar formats such as XML, XHTML and CSS. This is both a blessing and a curse. Whilst it is good to be able to use familiar technologies that have been developed to a level of considerable sophistication, it doesn't get us all the way to producing a viable publication. XHTML is a page-description language, not a book-description language, as we soon found out during our initial experiments, when trying to specify headers, footers, indexes and chaptering. As a result, it is difficult to predict how any particular eBook application will decide to render a book. There isn't even a consensus as to how the cover image is specified. All of this is awkward for the publisher. Each book must be created and revised in a form from which can be generated a whole range of 'printed media', from print books, to Mobi for kindles, ePub for most Tablets and SmartPhones, HTML for excerpted chapters on websites, and a plethora of other formats for other eBook readers, each with its own idiosyncrasies. In theory, if we can get our content into a clean, semantic XML form, such as DOCBOOKS, we can, from there, after every revision, perform a series of relatively simple XSLT transformations to output anything from a HTML article, to an ePub file for reading on an iPad, to an ICML file (an XML-based file format supported by the InDesign tool), ready for print publication. As always, however, the task looks bigger the closer you get to the detail. On the way to the utopian world of an XML-based book format that encompasses all the diverse requirements of the different publication media, ePub looks like a reasonable format to adopt. Its forthcoming support for HTML 5 and CSS 3, with ePub 3.0, means that features, such as widow-and-orphan controls, multi-column flow and multi-media graphics can be incorporated into eBooks. This starts to make it possible to build an "app-like" experience into the eBook and to free publishers to think of putting context before container; to think of what content is required, be it graphical, textual or audio, from the point of view of the user, rather than what's possible in a given, traditional book "Container". In the meantime, there is a gap between what publishers require and what current technology can provide and, of course building this app-like experience is far from plain sailing. Real portability between devices is still a big challenge, and achieving the sort of wizardry seen in the likes of Theodore Grey's "Elements" eBook will require some serious device-specific programming skills. Cheers, Tony.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar’s Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a ‘perfect storm’ of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one’s work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven’t far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it’s a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it’s more important not to let such fears lead to writer’s block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what’s involved in getting an application that is ‘done’ ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we’d love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to ‘throw your hat into the ring’, drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• At which architecture level are you running BDD tests (e.g. Cucumber)

  - by Pete

  I have in the last year gotten quite fond of using SpecFlow (which is a .NET port of Cucumber) I have used it both to test a ASP.NET MVC application at the web layer, i.e. using browser automation, but also at the controller layer. The first gives me a higher confidence in the correctness of the application, because JavaScript is tested, and improper controller configuration is also caught. But those tests are slower to execute, and more complex to implement, than those just testing on the controller layer. My tests are full functional tests, i.e. they exercise all layers of the application, all the way down to the database. So the first thing before any scenario is that the database is cleared of data, allowing the test to assume that only data specified in the "Given" block exists. Then I see example on how to use it, where they test just exercise the model layer. So what are your experiences with these tools? Which layer of the application do you test?

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• SQL Server Optimizer Malfunction?

  - by Tony Davis

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially "stuck in 1997". It was during his fascinating "Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism" session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often delivers flawed plans based on assumptions that are no longer valid with today’s hardware. In 1997, when Microsoft engineers re-designed the database engine for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server got its initial implementation of a cost-based optimizer. Up to SQL Server 2000, the developer often had to deploy a steady stream of hints in SQL statements to combat the occasionally wilful plan choices made by the optimizer. However, with each successive release, the optimizer has evolved and improved in its decision-making. It is still prone to the occasional stumble when we tackle difficult problems, join large numbers of tables, perform complex aggregations, and so on, but for most of us, most of the time, the optimizer purrs along efficiently in the background. Adam, however, challenged further any assumption that the current optimizer is competent at providing the most efficient plans for our more complex analytical queries, and in particular of offering up correctly parallelized plans. He painted a picture of a present where complex analytical queries have become ever more prevalent; where disk IO is ever faster so that reads from disk come into buffer cache faster than ever; where the improving RAM-to-data ratio means that we have a better chance of finding our data in cache. Most importantly, we have more CPUs at our disposal than ever before. To get these queries to perform, we not only need to have the right indexes, but also to be able to split the data up into subsets and spread its processing evenly across all these available CPUs. Improvements such as support for ColumnStore indexes are taking things in the right direction, but, unfortunately, deficiencies in the current Optimizer mean that SQL Server is yet to be able to exploit properly all those extra CPUs. Adam’s contention was that the current optimizer uses essentially the same costing model for many of its core operations as it did back in the days of SQL Server 7, based on assumptions that are no longer valid. One example he gave was a "slow disk" bias that may have been valid back in 1997 but certainly is not on modern disk systems. Essentially, the optimizer assesses the relative cost of serial versus parallel plans based on the assumption that there is no IO cost benefit from parallelization, only CPU. It assumes that a single request will saturate the IO channel, and so a query would not run any faster if we parallelized IO because the disk system simply wouldn’t be able to handle the extra pressure. As such, the optimizer often decides that a serial plan is lower cost, often in cases where a parallel plan would improve performance dramatically. It was challenging and thought provoking stuff, as were his techniques for driving parallelism through query logic based on subsets of rows that define the "grain" of the query. I highly recommend you catch the session if you missed it. I’m interested to hear though, when and how often people feel the force of the optimizer’s shortcomings. Barring mistakes, such as stale statistics, how often do you feel the Optimizer fails to find the plan you think it should, and what are the most common causes? Is it fighting to induce it toward parallelism? Combating unexpected plans, arising from table partitioning? Something altogether more prosaic? Cheers, Tony.

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• What should a game have in order to keep humans playing it?

  - by Adam Davis

  In many entertainment professions there suggestions, loose rules, or general frameworks one follows that appeal to humans in one way or another. For instance, many movies and books follow the monomyth. In video games I find many types of games that attract people in different ways. Some are addicted to facebook gem matching games. Others can't get enough of FPS games. Once in awhile, though, you find a game that seems to transcend stereotypes and appeals almost immediately to everyone that plays it. For instance, Plants Versus Zombies seems to have a very, very large demographic of players. There are other games similar in reach. I'm curious what books, blogs, etc there are that explore these game types and styles, and tries to suss out one or more popular frameworks/styles that satisfy people, while keeping them coming back for more.

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• Playing part of a sfx audio file in HTML5 using WebAudio

  - by Matthew James Davis

  I have compiled all of my sound effects into one sequenced .ogg file. I have the start and stop times for each sound effect. How do I play the individual effects? That is, how do I play part of an audio file. More specificially, I've created a dictionary { 'sword_hit': { src: 'sfx.ogg', start: 265, // ms length: 212 // ms } } that my play_sound() function can use to look up 'sword_hit' and play the correct audio file at the correct start time for the correct duration. I simply need to know how to tell the WebAudio API to start playing at start ms and only play for length ms.

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• Head in the Clouds

  - by Tony Davis

  We're just past the second anniversary of the launch of Windows Azure. A couple of years' experience with Azure in the industry has provided some obvious success stories, but has deflated some of the initial marketing hyperbole. As a general principle, Azure seems to work well in providing a Service-Oriented Architecture for services in enterprises that suffer wide fluctuations in demand. Instead of being obliged to provide hardware sufficient for the occasional peaks in demand, one can hire capacity only when it is needed, and the cost of hosting an application is no longer a capital cost. It enables companies to avoid having to scale out hardware for peak periods only to see it underused for the rest of the time. A customer-facing application such as a concert ticketing system, which suffers high demand in short, predictable bursts of activity, is a great example of an application that would work well in Azure. However, moving existing applications to Azure isn't something to be done on impulse. Unless your application is .NET-based, and consists of 'stateless' components that communicate via queues, you are probably in for a lot of redevelopment work. It makes most sense for IT departments who are already deep in this .NET mindset, and who also want 'grown-up' methods of staging, testing, and deployment. Azure fits well with this culture and offers, as a bonus, good Visual Studio integration. The most-commonly stated barrier to porting these applications to Azure is the problem of reconciling the use of the cloud with legislation for data privacy and security. Putting databases in the cloud is a sticky issue for many and impossible for some due to compliance and security issues, the need for direct control over data, and so on. In the face of feedback from the early adopters of Azure, Microsoft has broadened the architectural choices to cater for a wide range of requirements. As well as SQL Azure Database (SAD) and Azure storage, the unstructured 'BLOB and Entity-Attribute-Value' NoSQL storage alternative (which equates more closely with folders and files than a database), Windows Azure offers a wide range of storage options including use of services such as oData: developers who are programming for Windows Azure can simply choose the one most appropriate for their needs. Secondly, and crucially, the Windows Azure architecture allows you the freedom to produce hybrid applications, where only those parts that need cloud-based hosting are deployed to Azure, whereas those parts that must unavoidably be hosted in a corporate datacenter can stay there. By using a hybrid architecture, it will seldom, if ever, be necessary to move an entire application to the cloud, along with personal and financial data. For example that we could port to Azure only put those parts of our ticketing application that capture and process tickets orders. Once an order is captured, the financial side can be processed in our own data center. In short, Windows Azure seems to be a very effective way of providing services that are subject to wide but predictable fluctuations in demand. Have you come to the same conclusions, or do you think I've got it wrong? If you've had experience with Azure, would you recommend it? It would be great to hear from you. Cheers, Tony.

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• Is SOAP Http POST more complicated than I thought

  - by Pete Petersen

  I'm currently writing a bit of code to send some xml data to a web service via HTTP POST. I thought this would be really simple and have written the following example code (C#) Console.WriteLine("Press enter to send data..."); while (Console.ReadLine() != "q") { HttpWebRequest httpWReq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(@"http://localhost:8888/"); Foo fooItem = new Foo { Member1 = "05", Member2 = "74455604", Member3 = "15101051", Member4 = 1, Member5 = "fsf", Member6 = 6.52, }; ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding(); string postData = fooItem.ToXml(); byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData); httpWReq.Method = "POST"; httpWReq.ContentType = "application/xml"; httpWReq.ContentLength = data.Length; using (Stream stream = httpWReq.GetRequestStream()) { stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length); } HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)httpWReq.GetResponse(); string responseString = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd(); Console.WriteLine("Received " + responseString); Console.WriteLine("Press enter to send data..."); } This is all I thought would be necessary, however I have now been given the details for the web service. This included some information which is unfarmiliar to me and I'm unsure whether I need to include it. The information I was sent was <url>http://sometext/soap/rpc</url> <namespace>http://sometext/a.services</namespace> <method>receiveInfo</method> <parm-id>xmldata</parm-id> (Input data) (Actual XML data as string) <parm-id>status</parm-id> (Output data) <userid>user</userid> <password>pass</password> <secure>false</secure> I guess this means I need to include a username and password somehow, but I'm not sure what the namespace or method fields are used for. Could anyone give me a hint? Sorry I've never used webservices before.

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• Comparing Apples and Pairs

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent study, High Costs and Negative Value of Pair Programming, by Capers Jones, pulls no punches in its assessment of the costs-to- benefits ratio of pair programming, two programmers working together, at a single computer, rather than separately. He implies that pair programming is a method rushed into production on a wave of enthusiasm for Agile or Extreme Programming, without any real regard for its effectiveness. Despite admitting that his data represented a far from complete study of the economics of pair programming, his conclusions were stark: it was 2.5 times more expensive, resulted in a 15% drop in productivity, and offered no significant quality benefits. The author provides a more scientific analysis than Jon Evans’ Pair Programming Considered Harmful, but the theme is the same. In terms of upfront-coding costs, pair programming is surely more expensive. The claim of productivity loss is dubious and contested by other studies. The third claim, though, did surprise me. The author’s data suggests that if both the pair and the individual programmers employ static code analysis and testing, then there is no measurable difference in the resulting code quality, in terms of defects per function point. In other words, pair programming incurs a massive extra cost for no tangible return in investment. There were, inevitably, many criticisms of his data and his conclusions, a few of which are persuasive. Firstly, that the driver/observer model of pair programming, on which the study bases its findings, is far from the most effective. For example, many find Ping-Pong pairing, based on use of test-driven development, far more productive. Secondly, that it doesn’t distinguish between “expert” and “novice” pair programmers– that is, independently of other programming skills, how skilled was an individual at pair programming. Thirdly, that his measure of quality is too narrow. This point rings true, certainly at Red Gate, where developers don’t pair program all the time, but use the method in short bursts, while tackling a tricky problem and needing a fresh perspective on the best approach, or more in-depth knowledge in a particular domain. All of them argue that pair programming, and collective code ownership, offers significant rewards, if not in terms of immediate “bug reduction”, then in removing the likelihood of single points of failure, and improving the overall quality and longer-term adaptability/maintainability of the design. There is also a massive learning benefit for both participants. One developer told me how he once worked in the same team over consecutive summers, the first time with no pair programming and the second time pair-programming two-thirds of the time, and described the increased rate of learning the second time as “phenomenal”. There are a great many theories on how we should develop software (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.), but woefully little scientific research in their effectiveness. For a group that spends so much time crunching other people’s data, I wonder if developers spend enough time crunching data about themselves. Capers Jones’ data may be incomplete, but should cause a pause for thought, especially for any large IT departments, supporting commerce and industry, who are considering pair programming. It certainly shouldn’t discourage teams from exploring new ways of developing software, as long as they also think about how to gather hard data to gauge their effectiveness.

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• virtual install from ISO not getting virtual kernel

  - by Pete

  I have a KVM host (12.04.5) that I have been installing guests on in variety of ways. I just noticed recently one of my guests was running a generic kernel when I'm fairly certain I specified minimum virtual machine during install from a 12.04.2 server iso. From what I understand it should be running a stripped down kernel "optimized" for VMs. I set up another server to test, this time using a 14.04.1, and sure enough I ended up with uname -r returning 3.13.0-32-generic. It seems that if I use an .iso to install, I end up with generic regardless. However building with the vmbuilder ... --flavour virtual --suite precise ... (I don't have trusty available yet) script gives me an ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS system running kernel 3.2.0-67-virtual. The server FAQ mentions I should be getting the virtual kernel. What are practical advantages of using linux-image-virtual kernel? gives me the impression that it doesn't really matter functionally (in my case I only have a couple VMs running). I first thought was maybe I was somehow not applying the correct options because the installer F4 menu doesn't really give great feedback if the mode has been selected or not. Looking in the log /var/log/installers/syslog I see Command line: file=/cdrom/preceed/ubuntu-server-minimalvm.seed ... I know that I can install the virtual kernel package down the road, but why am I not, or should I be getting the virtual flavor of kernel from an ISO install when doing an minimum VM install?

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• We have our standards, and we need them

  - by Tony Davis

  The presenter suddenly broke off. He was midway through his section on how to apply to the relational database the Continuous Delivery techniques that allowed for rapid-fire rounds of development and refactoring, while always retaining a “production-ready” state. He sighed deeply and then launched into an astonishing diatribe against Database Administrators, much of his frustration directed toward Oracle DBAs, in particular. In broad strokes, he painted the picture of a brave new deployment philosophy being frustratingly shackled by the relational database, and by especially by the attitudes of the guardians of these databases. DBAs, he said, shunned change and “still favored tools I’d have been embarrassed to use in the ’80′s“. DBAs, Oracle DBAs especially, were more attached to their vendor than to their employer, since the former was the primary source of their career longevity and spectacular remuneration. He contended that someone could produce the best IDE or tool in the world for Oracle DBAs and yet none of them would give a stuff, unless it happened to come from the “mother ship”. I sat blinking in astonishment at the speaker’s vehemence, and glanced around nervously. Nobody in the audience disagreed, and a few nodded in assent. Although the primary target of the outburst was the Oracle DBA, it made me wonder. Are we who work with SQL Server, database professionals or merely SQL Server fanbois? Do DBAs, in general, have an image problem? Is it a good career-move to be seen to be holding onto a particular product by the whites of our knuckles, to the exclusion of all else? If we seek a broad, open-minded, knowledge of our chosen technology, the database, and are blessed with merely mortal powers of learning, then we like standards. Vendors of RDBMSs generally don’t conform to standards by instinct, but by customer demand. Microsoft has made great strides to adopt the international SQL Standards, where possible, thanks to considerable lobbying by the community. The implementation of Window functions is a great example. There is still work to do, though. SQL Server, for example, has an unusable version of the Information Schema. One cast-iron rule of any RDBMS is that we must be able to query the metadata using the same language that we use to query the data, i.e. SQL, and we do this by running queries against the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Developers who’ve attempted to apply a standard query that works on MySQL, or some other database, but doesn’t produce the expected results on SQL Server are advised to shun the Standards-based approach in favor of the vendor-specific one, using the catalog views. The argument behind this is sound and well-documented, and of course we all use those catalog views, out of necessity. And yet, as database professionals, committed to supporting the best databases for the business, whatever they are now and in the future, surely our heart should sink somewhat when we advocate a vendor specific approach, to a developer struggling with something as simple as writing a guard clause. And when we read messages on the Microsoft documentation informing us that we shouldn’t rely on INFORMATION_SCHEMA to identify reliably the schema of an object, in SQL Server!

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• Do Not Track feature of IE10

  - by Pete Herbert Penito

  One of our clients is getting a bit worried about the new "Do Not Track" feature of Internet Explorer 10. Her site is heavily dependent on php sessions (as I imagine many other sites are). This was what she was reading: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18288710 I need some clarification, will this affect how sessions (or cookies) work on normal web sites that use the PHP $_SESSION array? Or is it regarding only how advertising works (engadget's article seems to insinuate this)? Can anyone provide a more technical overview (and the ramifications) of PHP-powered websites?

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• Do you count a Masters in CS as a negative? [closed]

  - by Pete Hodgson

  In my experience interviewing developers I feel like candidates who've achieved a Masters in Comp Sci tend to be worse programmers on average that those who don't have a Masters. Is that just me, or have others noticed this phenomenon? If so, why would that be the case? UPDATE I appreciate the thoughtful comments. I think I should have been clearer in the comparison I'm making. Given two candidates who graduated from college around the same time, someone who went on to gain a Masters seems on average to be a worse programmer than someone who spent all their time in industry.

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• Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion Spotlight - Part IV

  - by Ted Davis

  Welcome to the final Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion Spotlight Part IV.  Two days left till the Big Show. You are gearing up. We are gearing up. You can feel the excitement.  We can feel the excitement. This. Will. Be. The. Best. Show. EVER. See you at the Partner Pavilion (Moscone south # 1033) at Oracle OpenWorld. - Oracle Linux / Oracle VM Team HP and Oracle are pleased to announce another Oracle Validated Configuration based on the ProLiant DL980 server. Many choose to deploy Oracle workloads on the ProLiant DL980 based on the cost/performance ratio they achieve running Oracle Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. You can be confident that Oracle Validated Configurations based on ProLiant servers will help you achieve your most demanding performance goals. QLogic The QLogic-Oracle partnership spans over 20 years resulting in the most comprehensive line of Oracle Linux I/O adapter technology. Interface options include Ethernet, Fibre-Channel, and FCoE. Host side connectivity is offered in both low profile PCIe and Express Module PCIe form factors. QLogic software drives are jointly qualified and “in-box” with Oracle Linux 5.x, 6,x and Oracle VM enabling simplified installation and management while simultaneously taking risk out of the solution. Bringing innovations such as NPIV, T10-PI, and intelligent caching adapter technology to the Oracle Linux environment further strengthens the QLogic advantage. A big thank you to all of our Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion participants. We - they- look forward to meeting you next week at Oracle OpenWorld. If you've missed our three previous Partner Spotlight's - here are the links: Part I, Part II, Part III. 

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• You are or will be a laid off programmer - what do you do a year ago, right now, tomorrow, and next week?

  - by Adam Davis

  Many programmers, software engineers, and other technology professionals are out of work, facing layoffs, or are unprepared for layoffs though they feel secure right now. What should every programmer do right now (even if secure in their current job) to prepare them for layoffs down the road? If your boss came to your cubicle while you read this and laid you off: What would you do immediately after? What would you do tomorrow? What would you do next week? It obvious that one should always have an up to date resume, always get recommendations from people when they see you at your best (not when you're looking for a new job), etc. What are the things, step by step, that every programmer should do (or should consider doing) long before they are laid off, when they're laid off, and shortly after being laid off? This is a question with many possible facets. While I want to encourage discussion to center around programming career based answers, please reconsider before downvoting someone because they're thinking in terms of how they're going to prevent going into debt. Bonus catch-22 type question: You can study a new language or technology while out of work, but most places want you to have more than 1-2 months experience in a working environment, not just from a learning exercise. Is it worthwhile to place a priority on new (ideally in demand) skills, or should you instead hone existing skills?

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• Toshiba Tecra A8 display resizes to 4:3 when an External display is used

  - by Pete

  I am very new to this so please excuse me if the solution is simple. I am running an old Toshiba Tecra A8 laptop and the screen is fine until I attach an external monitor via VGA then the laptops monitor resizes itself and changes ratios to 3:4 is there a fix for this or am I out of luck? As additional information: I have tried 3 or 4 different monitors and it happens with all of them, except that the external monitors hold the 3:4 display ration but get stretched out. Feel free to add comments requesting more information if needed for a fix.

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• Data Model Dissonance

  - by Tony Davis

  So often at the start of the development of database applications, there is a premature rush to the keyboard. Unless, before we get there, we’ve mapped out and agreed the three data models, the Conceptual, the Logical and the Physical, then the inevitable refactoring will dog development work. It pays to get the data models sorted out up-front, however ‘agile’ you profess to be. The hardest model to get right, the most misunderstood, and the one most neglected by the various modeling tools, is the conceptual data model, and yet it is critical to all that follows. The conceptual model distils what the business understands about itself, and the way it operates. It represents the business rules that govern the required data, its constraints and its properties. The conceptual model uses the terminology of the business and defines the most important entities and their inter-relationships. Don’t assume that the organization’s understanding of these business rules is consistent or accurate. Too often, one department has a subtly different understanding of what an entity means and what it stores, from another. If our conceptual data model fails to resolve such inconsistencies, it will reduce data quality. If we don’t collect and measure the raw data in a consistent way across the whole business, how can we hope to perform meaningful aggregation? The conceptual data model has more to do with business than technology, and as such, developers often regard it as a worthy but rather arcane ceremony like saluting the flag or only eating fish on Friday. However, the consequences of getting it wrong have a direct and painful impact on many aspects of the project. If you adopt a silo-based (a.k.a. Domain driven) approach to development), you are still likely to suffer by starting with an incomplete knowledge of the domain. Even when you have surmounted these problems so that the data entities accurately reflect the business domain that the application represents, there are likely to be dire consequences from abandoning the goal of a shared, enterprise-wide understanding of the business. In reading this, you may recall experiences of the consequence of getting the conceptual data model wrong. I believe that Phil Factor, for example, witnessed the abandonment of a multi-million dollar banking project due to an inadequate conceptual analysis of how the bank defined a ‘customer’. We’d love to hear of any examples you know of development projects poleaxed by errors in the conceptual data model. Cheers, Tony

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• When module calling gets ugly

  - by Pete

  Has this ever happened to you? You've got a suite of well designed, single-responsibility modules, covered by unit tests. In any higher-level function you code, you are (95% of the code) simply taking output from one module and passing it as input to the next. Then, you notice this higher-level function has turned into a 100+ line script with multiple responsibilities. Here is the problem. It is difficult (impossible) to test that script. At least, it seems so. Do you agree? In my current project, all of the bugs came from this script. Further detail: each script represents a unique solution, or algorithm, formed by using different modules in different ways. Question: how can you remedy this situation? Knee-jerk answer: break the script up into single-responsibility modules. Comment on knee-jerk answer: it already is! Best answer I can come up with so far: create higher-level connector objects which "wire" modules together in particular ways (take output from one module, feed it as input to another module). Thus if our script was: FooInput fooIn = new FooInput(1, 2); FooOutput fooOutput = fooModule(fooIn); Double runtimevalue = getsomething(fooOutput.whatever); BarInput barIn = new BarInput( runtimevalue, fooOutput.someOtherValue); BarOutput barOut = barModule(BarIn); It would become with a connector: FooBarConnectionAlgo fooBarConnector = new fooBarConnector(fooModule, barModule); FooInput fooIn = new FooInput(1, 2); BarOutput barOut = fooBarConnector(fooIn); So the advantage is, besides hiding some code and making things clearer, we can test FooBarConnectionAlgo. I'm sure this situation comes up a lot. What do you do?

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• ORACLE UNIVERSITY

  - by mseika

  Expert Seminar in Dubai: Oracle Database Security Audit with Pete Finnigan Oracle University's Expert Seminars are delivered by the best Oracle Gurus in the industry from all over the world. These unique and informative seminars are designed to provide you with expert insight in your area of interest. Pete Finnigan is delivering the Expert Seminar ‘Oracle Database Security Audit’ on 16-17 January 2013 in Dubai. You can find more information here. Please note: Your OPN discount is applied to the standard price shown on the website. For assistance with bookings contact Oracle University: eMail: [email protected] Telephone: +971 4 39 09 050

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• Transferring local site to shared hosting

  - by Pete

  I'm looking to setup a simple online text processing tool similar to the Clang demo. The processing program itself is a C++ program which I can modify to provide the desired output I need. Since I use Linux+Perl daily and have used Apache in the past, I'd like to get this working locally first. My two questions are: Is it possible to do this with only Apache and Perl? I've looked into frameworks for doing this and quickly ran into The Paradox Of Choice. Will I be able to easily transfer a working local site to a shared hosting service? I want to administer as little as possible. My understanding is since this needs to run a C++ program that CGI is a requirement and thus I need to administer the httpd server. Hopefully this doesn't mean a VPS. Thanks

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• Is there a library that handles hexagon tiled 2D maps?

  - by Pete Mancini

  It would represent a map that is semi-square of arbitrary size. It would have a simple system for representation of the map coordinates such as 0101 (first column, 1st hex). I'd want the map to be able to tell me the distance between two points, and what other hexes lay between those two points as a list or array. I don't care as much about the language but c# or python would be ideal. Does one exist?

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• Why does 12.04 try but fail to hibernate, even after I enabled hibernation?

  - by Roger Davis

  Regarding the below (-----) info from another post, my system will try (as is said below) to hibernate, but it won't get all the way there. Hard drive activity stops, but it does not shut down. If I turn the power off, then back on, it will start, but I have to "restore previous session" in the browser and other open apps don't restart, with the accompanying hassle. So because it tries, will the suggested fix then cause it to work correctly, or is the literal "try" not really what he means?!? PLEASE NOTE - this is a desktop system, not a laptop. Before enabling hibernation, please try to test whether it works correctly by running pm-hibernate in a terminal. The system will try to hibernate. If you are able to start the system again then you are more or less safe to add an override. To do so, start editing sudo nano /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla Fill it with this [Re-enable hibernate by default] Identity=unix-user:* Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate ResultActive=yes Save by pressing Ctrl-O and exit nano by pressing Ctrl-X Restart and hibernation is back!

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