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• A story of Murphy&ndash;my technical issues at TechDays Switzerland #chtd

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I had two sessions at the recent Swiss TechDays. While the first one (Advanced Development for Windows Phone 8) went extremely well (I think), I had a very annoying technical issue in the beginning of my second session. First let me add that I talked to Microsoft about that and I hope they will change a few things in the room assignment for next year. My two sessions were one right after the other, with only 15 minutes break to change room. I don’t mind having two sessions so close from each other, but I would really like them to be in the same room in order to avoid having to move my laptops (plural, that will become important later) and redoing the tech check. That being said, I am guilty of not checking where my talks would be before the day before the conference, and when I did notice, it was too late to change it. After my first session, I quickly moved to the other room and setup my main laptop, a Dell Precision. We tested the video output (VGA) and didn’t notice anything special. The projectors are using a fairly high resolution (kudos to the Basel conference center for not having old school 1024x768 projectors anymore, that makes Blend really hard to demo ;) but since everything went great during the first talk, I was not worried. In fact I even had some time to chat with some early attendees about my Microsoft Surface and the Samsung Slate 7, which I had carried with me in addition to the Precision. I just thought it would be nice to show the hardware that Windows 8 can run on, without thinking any further. When the session started, I immediately noticed that the main screen was not showing anything. I thought I had just forgotten to switch to “duplicate” for the video output, and did that with a quick Win-P. However it didn’t “hold”. After 2 seconds, it reverted back to a black display for my attendees. Then I started to really worry. We tried everything, switching from VGA to HDMI, changing the resolution, setting the projector as primary display, but nothing did the trick. The projector was just refusing to show my screen. Now, to show you how despaired I started to be, I even considered using the “extend” setting (which worked just fine), and to use one of the feedback monitors on the floor but really it was super cumbersome. Eventually, my last resort arrived: I started my Samsung Slate 7, which by chance has Visual Studio 12 and Blend 5 installed, plugged the HDMI projector in the dock (yes, I had the dock with me, which I usually don’t!), connected it to internet (had to enter a long password for that), loaded the source code from my main machine using a USB stick and…. finally started to give my presentation. All in all I think we lost about 10 minutes. Amongst the most horrible minutes of my whole life, truly (yes I am blessed, I didn’t have that many horrible minutes in my life ;) I really want to apologize to my attendees. We joked a bit during the attempts to resolve the issue, the reactions I had after the session were all very nice and sympathetic. Only a handful of people left my session while I was having the issues, and I really don’t blame them (who knew how long the problem would last!!). But still, I probably talked at more than 60 sessions over the years, and this was by far my most painful moment. What did I learn? So what did I learn from this? Well from now on I will always have my slate ready with the latest source code, internet connection and every tool I might need during the presentation. This way, if I detect even a hint that the Precision might not work, I will just switch to the Slate. The experience of presenting on the slate is actually not bad at all, it is just a bit slow for my taste, but it does work. By the way, I will be posting the code and slides for my sessions very soon, I just need to “clean it and zip it”. Stay tuned, and thanks again for your patience in that horrible circumstance. Cheers Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Setting up a Carousel Component in ADF Mobile

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  The Carousel component is one of the slickier ways of showing collections of data, and on a mobile device it works really great with the finger swipe gesture. Using the Carousel component in ADF Mobile is similar to using it in regular web ADF applications, with one major change - right now you can't drag a collection from the data control palette and drop it as a carousel. So here is a quick work around for that, and details about setting up carousels in your application. First thing you'll need is a data control that returns an array of records. In my demo I'm using the Emps collection that you can get from following this tutorial. Then you drag the emps and drop it in your amx page as an ADF mobile iterator. We are doing this as a short cut to getting the right binding needed for a carousel in our page. If you look now in your page's binding you'll see something like this: You can now remark the whole iterator code in your page's source. Next let's add the carousel From the component palette drag the carousel (from the data view category) to the page. Next drag a carousel item and drop it in the nodestamp facet of the carousel. Now we'll hook up the carousel to the binding we got from the iterator - this is quite simple just copy the var and value attributes from the iterator tag to the carousel tag: var="row" value="#{bindings.emps.collectionModel}" Next drop a panelForm, or another layout panel in to the carousel item. Into that panelForm you can now drop items and bind their value property to row.attributeNames - basically copying the way it is in the fields in the iterator for example: value="#{row.hireDate}". By the way you can also copy other attributes like the label. And that's it. Your code should end up looking something like this:     <amx:carousel id="c1" var="row" value="#{bindings.emps.collectionModel}">      <amx:facet name="nodeStamp">        <amx:carouselItem id="ci1">          <amx:panelFormLayout id="pfl1">            <amx:inputText label="#{bindings.emps.hints.salary.label}" value="#{row.salary}" id="it1"/>            <amx:inputText label="#{bindings.emps.hints.name.label}" value="#{row.name}" id="it2"/>          </amx:panelFormLayout>        </amx:carouselItem>      </amx:facet>    </amx:carousel> And when you run your application it will look like this:

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• You Probably Already Have a “Private Cloud”

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of the word “Cloud”. It’s too marketing-oriented, gimmicky and non-specific. A better definition (in many cases) is “Distributed Computing”. That means that some or all of the computing functions are handled somewhere other than under your specific control. But there is a current use of the word “Cloud” that does not necessarily mean that the computing is done somewhere else. In fact, it’s a vector of Cloud Computing that can better be termed “Utility Computing”. This has to do with the provisioning of a computing resource. That means the setup, configuration, management, balancing and so on that is needed so that a user – which might actually be a developer – can do some computing work. To that person, the resource is just “there” and works like they expect, like the phone system or any other utility. The interesting thing is, you can do this yourself. In fact, you probably already have been, or are now. It’s got a cool new trendy term – “Private Cloud”, but the fact is, if you have your setup automated, the HA and DR handled, balancing and performance tuning done, and a process wrapped around it all, you can call yourself a “Cloud Provider”. A good example here is your E-Mail system. your users – pretty much your whole company – just logs into e-mail and expects it to work. To them, you are the “Cloud” provider. On your side, the more you automate and provision the system, the more you act like a Cloud Provider. Another example is a database server. In this case, the “end user” is usually the development team, or perhaps your SharePoint group and so on. The data professionals configure, monitor, tune and balance the system all the time. The more this is automated, the more you’re acting like a Cloud Provider. Lots of companies help you do this in your own data centers, from VMWare to IBM and many others. Microsoft's offering in this is based around System Center – they have a “cloud in a box” provisioning system that’s actually pretty slick. The most difficult part of operating a Private Cloud is probably the scale factor. In the case of Windows and SQL Azure, we handle this in multiple ways – and we're happy to share how we do it. It’s not magic, and the algorithms for balancing (like the one we started with called Paxos) are well known. The key is the knowledge, infrastructure and people. Sure, you can do this yourself, and in many cases such as top-secret or private systems, you probably should. But there are times where you should evaluate using Azure or other vendors, or even multiple vendors to spread your risk. All of this should be based on client need, not on what you know how to do already. So congrats on your new role as a “Cloud Provider”. If you have an E-mail system or a database platform, you can just put that right on your resume.

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• Antenna Aligner Part 4: Role'ing in the deep

  - by Chris George

  Since last time I've been trying to sort out the general workflow of the app. It's fundamentally not hard, there is a list of transmitters, you select a transmitter and it shows the compass view. Having done quite a bit of ajax/asp.net/html in the past, I immediately started off by creating two divs within my 'page', one for the list, one for the compass. Then using the onClick event in the list, this will switch the display attribute on the divs. This seemed to work, but did lead to some dodgy transitional redrawing artefacts which I was not happy with. So after some Googling I realised I was doing it all wrong! JQuery mobile has the concept of giving an object in html a data-role. By giving a div the attribute data-role="page" it is then treated as a separate page on the mobile device. Within the code, this is referenced like a html anchor in the form #mypage. Using this system, page transitions such as fade or slide are automatically applied which adds to the whole authenticity of the app! Here is a simple example: . <a href="#'compasspage">compass</a> . <div data-role="page" id="compasspage" data-add-back-btn="true"> But I don't want just a static link, I want to dynamically create my list, and get each list elements to switch to the compass page with the right information. So here is the jquery that I used to dynamically inject new <li> rows into the <ul> block. $('ul').append($('<li/>', {    //here appendin `<li>`     'data-role': "list-divider" }).append($('<a/>', {    //here appending `<a>` into `<li>`     'href': '#compasspage',     'data-transition': 'none',     'onclick': 'selectTx(' + i + ')',     'html': buttonHtml }))); $('ul').listview('refresh'); This is called within a for loop so the first 5 appropriate transmitters are used. There are several things of interest to note here. Firstly, I could not find a more elegant way to tell the target page which transmitter I've clicked on, so I have used the onclick event as well as the href attribute. The onclick event fires 'selectTx' which simply sets a global member variable to the specific index number I've clicked on. Yes it's not nice, but it works. Secondly, the data-transition attribute is set to 'none'. I wanted the transition between the pages to be a whooshy slidey effect. However this worked going to the compass page, but returning to the list page gave some undesirable visual artefacts (flickering, redrawing etc.). So I decided to remove the transitions all together, which was a shame. Thirdly, rather than embedding loads of html into the append command, I removed this out into a variable 'buttonHtml'. Doing this really tidied up my code. Until next time!

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• PowerShell: Read Excel to Create Inserts

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data. One of those options is to use PowerShell. There are a lot of ways even with that choice, but the one I show is to read two columns from the spreadsheet and output statements that would insert the data using a stored procedure. Of course, you could re-write this as INSERT statements, out to a text file for bcp, or even use a database connection in the script to move the data directly from Excel into SQL Server. This snippet won’t run on your system, of course – it assumes a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet located at c:\temp called VendorList.xlsx. It looks for a tab in that spreadsheet called Vendors. The statement that does the writing just uses one column: Vendor Code. Here’s the breakdown of what I’m doing: In the first block, I connect to Microsoft Office Excel. That connection string is specific to Excel 2007, so if you need a different version you’ll need to look that up. In the second block I set up a selection from the entire spreadsheet based on that tab. Note that if you’re only after certain data you shouldn’t get the whole spreadsheet – that’s just good practice. In the next block I create the text I want, inserting the Vendor Code field as I go. Finally I close the connection. Enjoy! $ExcelConnection= New-Object -com "ADODB.Connection" $ExcelFile="c:\temp\VendorList.xlsx" $ExcelConnection.Open("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;` Data Source=$ExcelFile;Extended Properties=Excel 12.0;") $strQuery="Select * from [Vendors$]" $ExcelRecordSet=$ExcelConnection.Execute($strQuery) do { Write-Host "EXEC sp_InsertVendors '" $ExcelRecordSet.Fields.Item("Vendor Code").Value "'" $ExcelRecordSet.MoveNext()} Until ($ExcelRecordSet.EOF) $ExcelConnection.Close() Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Hell and Diplomacy: Notes on Software Integration

  - by ericajanine

  Well, I'm getting cabin fever and short-timer's ADD all at the same time. I haven't been anywhere outside of my greater city area in FOREVER and I'm only days away from my vacation. I have brainlock because the last few days have been non-stop diffusing amazingly hostile conversations. I think I'll write about that. So then, I "do" software. At the end of the day, software is pretty straightforward. Software is that thing we love and try to make do things not currently in play, in existence. If a process around getting software to do something is broken (like most actually are), then we should acknowledge it and move on. We are professional. We are helpful beyond the normal call of duty. We live and breathe making the lives better for those apps being active in the world. But above all--the shocker: We are SERVICE. In a service frame of mind, all perspectives shift to what is best overall for system stabilization vs. what must be in production to meet business objectives. It doesn't matter how much you like or dislike the creator of said software. It doesn't matter what time you went to bed last night or if your mate appreciates your Death March attitude. Getting a product in and when is an age-old dilemma in a software environment where more than, say, 3 people are involved. We know this. Taking a servant's perspective eliminates the drama surrounding what a group of half-baked developers forgot to tell each other in the 11th hour about their trampling changes before check-in. We, my counterparts in society, get paid to deal with that drama. I get paid to diffuse that drama and make everything integrate as smoothly as possible. At the end of the day, attacking someone over a minor detail not only makes things worse, it's against the whole point of our real existence. Being in support or software integration means you are to keep your eyes on the end game. That end game? It's making a solution work for all stakeholders, not just you or your immediate superior. Development and technology groups exist because business groups need them to exist and solve their issues. The end game? Doing what is best for those business groups ultimately. Period. Note: That does not mean you let your business users solely dictate when and if something gets changed in an environment you ultimately own. That's just crazy. Software and its environments are legitimately owned by those who manage it directly, no matter how important a business group believes it is to the existence of mankind. So, you both negotiate the terms of changing that environment and only do so upon that negotiation. Diplomacy is in order. So, to finish my thoughts: If you have no ability to keep your mouth shut in a situation where a business or development group truly need your help to make something work even beyond a deadline, find another profession. Beating up someone verbally because they screw up means a service attitude is not at the forefront of your motivation for doing what is ultimately their work and their product. Software, especially integration, requires a strong will and a soft touch to keep it on track. Not a hammer covered in broken glass.

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• SQL Authority News – Presenting at SQL Bangalore on May 3, 2014 – Performing an Effective Presentation

  - by Pinal Dave

  SQL Bangalore is a wonderful community and we always have a great response when we present on technology. It is SQL User Group and we discuss everything SQL there. This month we have SQL Server 2014 theme and we are going to have a community launch on this subject. We have the best of the best speakers presenting on SQL Server 2014 technology. Looking at the whole line of celebrity speakers, I have decided not to present on SQL Server. I will be presenting on the performance tuning subject, but with the twist of soft skills. I will be presenting on “Performing an Effective Presentation“. Trust me, you do not want to miss this presentation, I will be presenting on how to present effectively when presenting SQL Server topics. What this session will NOT have I personally believe that we all are good presenters most of the time. We can all easily call out if someone is bad presenter. There is no point talking about basics like bigger bullet points, talk loudly, talk with confidence, use better analogies etc. In simple words – this is not going to some philosophy session and boring notes. What this session will have Well, this session will tell stories of my life. It will tell how we can present about technology and SQL Server with the help of stories and personal experience. I am going to tell stories about two legends  who have inspired me. Right after that we will be doing two exercises together where we will learn quickly and effectively, how to become better speaker – instantly! There is no video recording of this session. If you want to get resources from this session, please sign up my newsletter at http://bit.ly/sqllearn Here are few of the slides from this presentation: Here is the details about the event and location Venue:Microsoft Corporation, Signature Building,Embassy Golf Links Business Park, Intermediate Ring Road, Domlur, Bangalore – 560071 The agenda is amazing – we have top line SQL Speakers. Everyone is welcome and don’t forget to get your friend along for this event. Loads to learn and tons to share !!! Keynote (20 mins) by Anupam Tiwari – Business Program Manager – GTSC Backup Enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Amit Banerjee – PFE Microsoft Performance Enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Sourabh Agarwal - PFE Microsoft LUNCH BREAK Performing an effective Presentation by Pinal Dave – Community Member (SQLAuthority.com) InMemory Enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Balmukund Lakhani – Support Escalation Engg. Microsoft Some more lesser known enhancements with SQL Server 2014 by Vinod Kumar – Technical Architect Microsoft MTC Power Packed – Power BI with SQL Server by Kane Conway – Support Escalation Engg. Microsoft I am very big fan of Amit, Balmukund and Vinod – I have always watched their session and this time, I am going to once again attend their session without missing a single min. They are SQL legends, I am going to be there and learn when they are sharing their knowledge.  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL

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• SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration.  For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• What You Can Learn from the NFL Referee Lockout

  - by Christina McKeon

  American football is a lot like religion. The fans are devoted followers that take brand loyalty to a whole new level. These fans that worship their teams each week showed that they are powerful customers whose voice has an impact. Yesterday, these fans proved that their opinion could force the hand of a large and powerful institution. With a three-month NFL referee lockout that seemed like it was nowhere close to resolution, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks competed last Monday night. For those of you that might have been out of the news cycle the past few days, Green Bay lost the game due to a controversial call that many experts and analysts agree should have resulted in Green Bay winning the game. Outrage ensued. The NFL had pulled replacement referees from the high school ranks, and these replacements did not have the knowledge and experience to handle high intensity NFL games. Fans protested about their customer experience. Their anger-filled rants were heard in social media, in the headlines of newspapers, on radio, and on national TV. Suddenly, the NFL was moved to reach an agreement with the referees. That agreement was reached late in the night on Wednesday with many believing that the referees had the upper hand forcing the owners into submission. Some might argue that the referees benefited, not the fans. Since the fans wanted qualified and competent referees, I would say the fans did benefit. The referees are scheduled to return to the field this Sunday, so the fans got what they wanted. What can you learn from this negative customer experience? Customers are in control. NFL owners thought they were controlling this situation with the upper hand over referees. The owners figured out they weren’t in control when their fans reacted negatively. Customers can make or break you more now than ever before, which is why it is more important to connect with them, engage them in a personal manner, and create rewarding relationships. Protect your brand. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL put their brand and each team’s brand at risk with replacement referees. Think about each business decision you make, and how it may impact your brand at different points in time. A decision that results in a gain today could result in a larger loss down the road. Customer experience matters. The NFL likely foresaw declining revenues in ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and other areas if the lockout continued. While fans primarily spoke with their minds in the days following the Green Bay debacle, their wallets would be the next things to speak. Customer experience directly affects your success and is one of the few areas where you can differentiate your business. What would you do if your brand got such negative attention? Would you be prepared to navigate such stormy waters? Would you be able to prevent such a fiasco? If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, consider joining us October 3-5, 2012 at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit in San Francisco. You’ll have the opportunity to learn even more about customer experience from industry experts such as best-selling author Seth Godin, Paul Hagen and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, Inc., George Kembel from the Stanford d.School, Bruce Temkin of The Temkin Group, and Gene Alvarez from Gartner Inc.. There will also be plenty of your peers and customer experience experts available for networking and discussions.

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• what is the best way to use loops to detect events while the main loop is running?

  - by yao jiang

  I am making an "game" that has pathfinding using pygame. I am using Astar algo. I have a main loop which draws the whole map. In the loop I check for events. If user press "enter" or "space", random start and end are selected, then animation starts and it will try to get from start to end. My draw function is stupid as hell right now, it works as expected but I feel that I am doing it wrong. It'll draw everything to the end of the animation. I am also detecting events in there as well. What is a better way of implementing the draw function such that it will draw one "step" at a time while checking for events? animating = False; while loop: check events: if not animating: # space or enter press will choose random start/end coords if enter_pressed or space_pressed: start, end = choose_coords route = find_route(start, end) draw(start, end, grid, route) else: # left click == generate an event to block the path # right click == user can choose a new destination if left_mouse_click: gen_event() reroute() elif right_mouse_click: new_end = new_end() new_start = current_pos() route = find_route(new_start, new_end) draw(new_start, new_end, grid, route) # draw out the grid def draw(start, end, grid, route_coord): # draw the end coords color = red; pick_image(screen, color, width*end[1],height*end[0]); pygame.display.flip(); # then draw the rest of the route for i in range(len(route_coord)): # pausing because we want animation time.sleep(speed); # get the x/y coords x,y = route_coord[i]; event_on = False; if grid[x][y] == 2: color = green; elif grid[x][y] == 3: color = blue; for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN: if event.button == 3: print "destination change detected, rerouting"; # get mouse position, px coords pos = pygame.mouse.get_pos(); # get grid coord c = pos[0] // width; r = pos[1] // height; grid[r][c] = 4; end = [r, c]; elif event.button == 1: print "user generated event"; pos = pygame.mouse.get_pos(); # get grid coord c = pos[0] // width; r = pos[1] // height; # mark it as a block for now grid[r][c] = 1; event_on = True; if check_events([x,y]) or event_on: # there is an event # mark it as a block for now grid[y][x] = 1; pick_image(screen, event_x, width*y, height*x); pygame.display.flip(); # then find a new route new_start = route_coord[i-1]; marked_grid, route_coord = find_route(new_start, end, grid); draw(new_start, end, grid, route_coord); return; # just end draw here so it wont throw the "index out of range" error elif grid[x][y] == 4: color = red; pick_image(screen, color, width*y, height*x); pygame.display.flip(); # clear route coord list, otherwise itll just add more unwanted coords route_coord_list[:] = [];

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• Ti Launchpad

  - by raysmithequip

  Just thought I would get a couple of notes up here for reference to anyone that is interested...it is now Feb 2011 and I have not been posting here enough to remember this blog. Back in Nov 2010 I ordered the Ti launchpad msp430, it is a little target board kit replete with a mini USB cable, two very inexpensive programmable mcu's and a couple of pin headers with a couple of led's on board, a spi connector some on board jumpers and two programmable micro switches....all for less than $5.00...INCLUDING SHIPPING!!....not bad when the ardruino's are running around 20.00 for the target board, atmega328 and cable off of eBay...I wont even mention the microchip pic right now.  Naw, for $5.00 the Ti launchpad kit is about the cheapest fun around...if-uns your a geek that is... Well, the launchpad was backordered for almost two months, came like Xmas eve in fact...I had almost forgotten it!! And really, it was way late and not my idea of an Xmas present for myself.  That would of been the web expressions 4 I bought a few weeks back.  With all the holidays, I did not even look at it till last week, in fact I passed the wrapped board around at my local ham club meeting during points of personal privilege....some oh's and ahhs but mostly duhs...I actually ordered it to avoid downloading the huge code compressor studio 4 (CCS) that was supposed to be included on the cd.  No cd.  I had already downloaded IAR  another programming IDE for these little micro bugs. In my spare time I toyed with IAR and the launchpad board but after about two days of playing delete the driver with windows I decided to just download CCS 4, the code limited version, and give that a shot......CCS 4, is a good rewrite from the earlier versions, it is based on Eclipse as an IDE and includes the drivers for the msp430 target board I received in the kit.  Once installed I quickly configured the debugger for the target chip which was already plugged into the dip socket at the factory, msp430G2131 from he drop down list and clicked ok...I was in!! The CCS4 is full of bells and whistles compared to the IAR, which I would of preferred for the simplicity.  But the code compressor studio really does have it all!!..the code limited version is free, and of all things will give you java script editor box.  The whole layout in debugger mode reminds me of any modern programmer IDE...I mean sure give me Tex anytime but you simply must admire all the boxes and options included in the GUI.  It was a simple matter to check the assembly code in the flash and ram memory that came preloaded for the launchpad kit.  Assembly.  I am right now looking for my old assembly textbooks...sure I remember how to use mov and add etc but a couple of the commands are a little more than vague anymore.  Still, these little mcu's are about 50 cents each and might just work in a couple of projects I have lined up for the near future.  I may document the code here.  Luckily, I plan to write the code in c++ for the main project but if it has to be assembly, no prob.  For reference, the program that came already on the 2131 in the kit was a temperature indicator that alternately flashed red and green leds and changed the intensity of either depending on whether the temp was rising or falling...neat.  Neat enough that it might be worthwhile banging out a little GUI in windows 7 to test the new user device system calls, maybe put a temp gauge widget up on the desktop...just to keep from getting bored.  If you see some assembly code on this blog, you know I was doing something with one of the many mcu's out there.....thats all for now, more to follow...a bit later, of course.

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• Slick2D Rendering Lots of Polygons

  - by Hazzard

  I'm writing an little isometric game using Slick. The world terrain is made up of lots of quadrilaterals. In a small world that is 128 by 128 squares, over 16,000 quadrilaterals need to be rendered. This puts my pretty powerful computer down to 30 fps. I've though about caching "chunks" of the world so only single chunks would ever need updating at a time, but I don't know how to do this, and I am sure there are other ways to optimize it besides that. Maybe I'm doing the whole thing wrong, surely fancy 3D games that run fine on my machine are more intensive than this. My question is how can I improve the FPS and am I doing something wrong? Or does it actually take that much power to render those polygons? -- Here is the source code for the render method in my game state. It iterates through a 2d array or heights and draws polygons based on the height. public void render(GameContainer container, StateBasedGame game, Graphics gfx) throws SlickException { gfx.translate(offsetX * d + container.getWidth() / 2, offsetY * d + container.getHeight() / 2); gfx.scale(d, d); for (int y = 0; y < placeholder.length; y++) {// x & y are isometric // diag for (int x = 0; x < placeholder[0].length; x++) { Polygon poly; int hor = TestState.TILE_WIDTH * (x - y);// hor and ver are orthagonal int W = TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y) - 1 * heights[y + 1][x];//points to go off of int S = TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y) - 1 * heights[y + 1][x + 1]; int E = TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y) - 1 * heights[y][x + 1]; int N = TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y) - 1 * heights[y][x]; if (placeholder[y][x] == null) { poly = new Polygon();//Create actual surface polygon poly.addPoint(-TestState.TILE_WIDTH + hor, W); poly.addPoint(hor, S + TestState.TILE_HEIGHT); poly.addPoint(TestState.TILE_WIDTH + hor, E); poly.addPoint(hor, N - TestState.TILE_HEIGHT); float z = ((float) heights[y][x + 1] - heights[y + 1][x]) / 32 + 0.5f; placeholder[y][x] = new Tile(poly, new Color(z, z, z)); //ShapeRenderer.fill(placeholder[y][x]); } if (true) {//ONLY draw tile if it's on screen gfx.setColor(placeholder[y][x].getColor()); ShapeRenderer.fill(placeholder[y][x]); //gfx.fill(placeholder[y][x]); //placeholder[y][x]. //DRAW EDGES if (y + 1 == placeholder.length) {//draw South foundation edges gfx.setColor(Color.gray); Polygon found = new Polygon(); found.addPoint(-TestState.TILE_WIDTH + hor, W); found.addPoint(hor, S + TestState.TILE_HEIGHT); found.addPoint(hor, TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y + 1)); found.addPoint(-TestState.TILE_WIDTH + hor, TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y)); gfx.fill(found); } if (x + 1 == placeholder[0].length) {//north gfx.setColor(Color.darkGray); Polygon found = new Polygon(); found.addPoint(TestState.TILE_WIDTH + hor, E); found.addPoint(hor, S + TestState.TILE_HEIGHT); found.addPoint(hor, TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y + 1)); found.addPoint(TestState.TILE_WIDTH + hor, TestState.TILE_HEIGHT * (x + y)); gfx.fill(found); }//*/ } } } }

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• New Analytic settings for the new code

  - by Steve Tunstall

  If you have upgraded to the new 2011.1.3.0 code, you may find some very useful settings for the Analytics. If you didn't already know, the analytic datasets have the potential to fill up your OS hard drives. The more datasets you use and create, that faster this can happen. Since they take a measurement every second, forever, some of these metrics can get in the multiple GB size in a matter of weeks. The traditional 'fix' was that you had to go into Analytics -> Datasets about once a month and clean up the largest datasets. You did this by deleting them. Ouch. Now you lost all of that historical data that you might have wanted to check out many months from now. Or, you had to export each metric individually to a CSV file first. Not very easy or fun. You could also suspend a dataset, and have it not collect data at all. Well, that fixed the problem, didn't it? of course you now had no data to go look at. Hmmmm.... All of this is no longer a concern. Check out the new Settings tab under Analytics... Now, I can tell the ZFSSA to keep every second of data for, say, 2 weeks, and then average those 60 seconds of each minute into a single 'minute' value. I can go even further and ask it to average those 60 minutes of data into a single 'hour' value.  This allows me to effectively shrink my older datasets by a factor of 1/3600 !!! Very cool. I can now allow my datasets to go forever, and really never have to worry about them filling up my OS drives. That's great going forward, but what about those huge datasets you already have? No problem. Another new feature in 2011.1.3.0 is the ability to shrink the older datasets in the same way. Check this out. I have here a dataset called "Disk: I/O opps per second" that is about 6.32M on disk (You need not worry so much about the "In Core" value, as that is in RAM, and it fluctuates all the time. Once you stop viewing a particular metric, you will see that shrink over time, just relax).  When one clicks on the trash can icon to the right of the dataset, it used to delete the whole thing, and you would have to re-create it from scratch to get the data collecting again. Now, however, it gives you this prompt: As you can see, this allows you to once again shrink the dataset by averaging the second data into minutes or hours. Here is my new dataset size after I do this. So it shrank from 6.32MB down to 2.87MB, but i can still see my metrics going back to the time I began the dataset. Now, you do understand that once you do this, as you look back in time to the minute or hour data metrics, that you are going to see much larger time values, right? You will need to decide what size of granularity you can live with, and for how long. Check this out. Here is my Disk: Percent utilized from 5-21-2012 2:42 pm to 4:22 pm: After I went through the delete process to change everything older than 1 week to "Minutes", the same date and time looks like this: Just understand what this will do and how you want to use it. Right now, I'm thinking of keeping the last 6 weeks of data as "seconds", and then the last 3 months as "Minutes", and then "Hours" forever after that. I'll check back in six months and see how the sizes look. Steve 

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• Screen Aspect Ratio

  - by Bill Evjen

  Jeffrey Dean, Pixar Aspect Ratio is very important to home video. What is aspect ratio – the ratio from the height to the width 2.35:1 The image is 2.35 times wide as it is high Pixar uses this for half of our movies This is called a widescreen image When modified to fit your television screen They cut this to fit the box of your screen When a comparison is made huge chunks of picture is missing It is harder to find what is going on when these pieces are missing The whole is greater than the pieces themselves. If you are missing pieces – you are missing the movie The soul and the mood is in the film shots. Cutting it to fit a screen, you are losing 30% of the movie Why different aspect ratios? Film before the 1950s 1.33:1 Academy Standard There were all aspects of images though. There was no standard. Thomas Edison developed projecting images onto a wall/screen He didn’t patent it as he saw no value in it. Then 1.37:1 came about to add a strip of sound This is the same size as a 35mm film Around 1952 – TV comes along NTSC Television followed the Academy Standard (4x3) Once TV came out, movie theater attendance plummets So Film brought forth color to combat this. Also early 3D Also Widescreen was brought forth. Cinema-Scope Studios at the time made movies bigger and bigger There was a Napoleon movie that was actually 4x1 … really wide. 1.85:1 Academy Flat 2.35:1 Anamorphic Scope (aka Panavision/Cinemascope) Almost all movies are made in these two aspect ratios Pixar has done half in one and half in the other Why choose one over the other? Artist choice It is part of the story the director wants to tell Can we preserve the story outside of the theaters? TVs before 1998 – they were very square Now TVs are very wide Historical options Toy Story released as it was and people cut it in a way that wasn’t liked by the studio Pan and Scan is another option Cut and then scan left or right depending on where the action is Frame Height Pixar can go back and animate more picture to account for the bottom/top bars. You end up with more sky and more ground The characters seem to get lost in the picture You lose what the director original intended Re-staging For animated movies, you can move characters around – restage the scene. It is a new completely different version of the film This is the best possible option that Pixar came up with They have stopped doing this really as the demand as pretty much dropped off Why not 1.33 today? There has been an evolution of taste and demands. VHS is a linear item The focus is about portability and not about quality Most was pan and scan and the quality was so bad – but people didn’t notice DVD was introduced in 1996 You could have more content – two versions of the film You could have the widescreen version and the 1.33 version People realized that they are seeing more of the movie with the widescreen High Def Televisions (16x9 monitors) This was introduced in 2005 Blu-ray Disc was introduced in 2006 This is all widescreen You cannot find a square TV anymore TVs are roughly 1.85:1 aspect ratio There is a change in demand Users are used to black bars and are used to widescreen Users are educated now What’s next for in-flight entertainment? High Def IFE Personal Electronic Devices 3D inflight

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Phil Factor

  Around twenty-five years ago, I was trying to solve the problem of recruiting suitable developers for a large business. I visited the local University (it was a Technical College then). My mission was to remind them that we were a large, local employer of technical people and to suggest that, as they were in the business of educating young people for a career in IT, we should work together. I anticipated a harmonious chat where we could suggest to them the idea of mentioning our name to some of their graduates. It didn’t go well. The academic staff displayed a degree of revulsion towards the whole topic of IT in the world of commerce that surprised me; tweed met charcoal-grey, trainers met black shoes. However, their antipathy to commerce was something we could have worked around, since few of their graduates were destined for a career as university lecturers. They asked me what sort of language skills we needed. I tried ducking the invidious task of naming computer languages, since I wanted recruits who were quick to adapt and learn, with a broad understanding of IT, including development methodologies, technologies, and data. However, they pressed the point and I ended up saying that we needed good working knowledge of C and BASIC, though FORTRAN and COBOL were, at the time, still useful. There was a ghastly silence. It was as if I’d recommended the beliefs and practices of the Bogomils of Bulgaria to a gathering of Cardinals. They stared at me severely, like owls, until the head of department broke the silence, informing me in clipped tones that they taught only Modula 2. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you hurriedly had to look up ‘Modula 2′ on Wikipedia. Based largely on Pascal, it was a specialist language for embedded systems, but I’ve never ever come across it in a commercial business application. Nevertheless, it was an excellent teaching language since it taught modules, scope control, multiprogramming and the advantages of encapsulating a set of related subprograms and data structures. As long as the course also taught how to transfer these skills to other, more useful languages, it was not necessarily a problem. I said as much, but they gleefully retorted that the biggest local employer, a defense contractor specializing in Radar and military technology, used nothing but Modula 2. “Why teach any other programming language when they will be using Modula 2 for all their working lives?” said a complacent lecturer. On hearing this, I made my excuses and left. There could be no meeting of minds. They were providing training in a specific computer language, not an education in IT. Twenty years later, I once more worked nearby and regularly passed the long-deserted ‘brownfield’ site of the erstwhile largest local employer; the end of the cold war had led to lean times for defense contractors. A digger was about to clear the rubble of the long demolished factory along with the accompanying growth of buddleia and thistles, in order to lay the infrastructure for ‘affordable housing’. Modula 2 was a distant memory. Either those employees had short working lives or they’d retrained in other languages. The University, by contrast, was thriving, but I wondered if their erstwhile graduates had ever cursed the narrow specialization of their training in IT, as they struggled with the unexpected variety of their subsequent careers.

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• Synchronous Actions

  - by Dan Krasinski-Oracle

  Since the introduction of SMF, svcadm(1M) has had the ability to enable or disable a service instance and wait for that service instance to reach a final state.  With Oracle Solaris 11.2, we’ve expanded the set of administrative actions which can be invoked synchronously. Now all subcommands of svcadm(1M) have synchronous behavior. Let’s take a look at the new usage: Usage: svcadm [-v] [cmd [args ... ]] svcadm enable [-rt] [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... enable and online service(s) svcadm disable [-t] [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... disable and offline service(s) svcadm restart [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... restart specified service(s) svcadm refresh [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... re-read service configuration svcadm mark [-It] [-s [-T timeout]] <state> <service> ... set maintenance state svcadm clear [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... clear maintenance state svcadm milestone [-d] [-s [-T timeout]] <milestone> advance to a service milestone svcadm delegate [-s] <restarter> <svc> ... delegate service to a restarter As you can see, each subcommand now has a ‘-s’ flag. That flag tells svcadm(1M) to wait for the subcommand to complete before returning. For enables, that means waiting until the instance is either ‘online’ or in the ‘maintenance’ state. For disable, the instance must reach the ‘disabled’ state. Other subcommands complete when: restart A restart is considered complete once the instance has gone offline after running the ‘stop’ method, and then has either returned to the ‘online’ state or has entered the ‘maintenance’ state. refresh If an instance is in the ‘online’ state, a refresh is considered complete once the ‘refresh’ method for the instance has finished. mark maintenance Marking an instance for maintenance completes when the instance has reached the ‘maintenance’ state. mark degraded Marking an instance as degraded completes when the instance has reached the ‘degraded’ state from the ‘online’ state. milestone A milestone transition can occur in one of two directions. Either the transition moves from a lower milestone to a higher one, or from a higher one to a lower one. When moving to a higher milestone, the transition is considered complete when the instance representing that milestone reaches the ‘online’ state. The transition to a lower milestone, on the other hand, completes only when all instances which are part of higher milestones have reached the ‘disabled’ state. That’s not the whole story. svcadm(1M) will also try to determine if the actions initiated by a particular subcommand cannot complete. Trying to enable an instance which does not have its dependencies satisfied, for example, will cause svcadm(1M) to terminate before that instance reaches the ‘online’ state. You’ll also notice the optional ‘-T’ flag which can be used in conjunction with the ‘-s’ flag. This flag sets a timeout, in seconds, after which svcadm gives up on waiting for the subcommand to complete and terminates. This is useful in many cases, but in particular when the start method for an instance has an infinite timeout but might get stuck waiting for some resource that may never become available. For the C-oriented, each of these administrative actions has a corresponding function in libscf(3SCF), with names like smf_enable_instance_synchronous(3SCF) and smf_restart_instance_synchronous(3SCF).  Take a look at smf_enable_instance_synchronous(3SCF) for details.

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• Give a session on C++ AMP – here is how

  - by Daniel Moth

  Ever since presenting on C++ AMP at the AMD Fusion conference in June, then the Gamefest conference in August, and the BUILD conference in September, I've had numerous requests about my material from folks that want to re-deliver the same session. The C++ AMP session I put together has evolved over the 3 presentations to its final form that I used at BUILD, so that is the one I recommend you base yours on. Please get the slides and the recording from channel9 (I'll refer to slide numbers below). This is how I've been presenting the C++ AMP session: Context (slide 3, 04:18-08:18) Start with a demo, on my dual-GPU machine. I've been using the N-Body sample (for VS 11 Developer Preview). (slide 4) Use an nvidia slide that has additional examples of performance improvements that customers enjoy with heterogeneous computing. (slide 5) Talk a bit about the differences today between CPU and GPU hardware, leading to the fact that these will continue to co-exist and that GPUs are great for data parallel algorithms, but not much else today. One is a jack of all trades and the other is a number cruncher. (slide 6) Use the APU example from amd, as one indication that the hardware space is still in motion, emphasizing that the C++ AMP solution is a data parallel API, not a GPU API. It has a future proof design for hardware we have yet to see. (slide 7) Provide more meta-data, as blogged about when I first introduced C++ AMP. Code (slide 9-11) Introduce C++ AMP coding with a simplistic array-addition algorithm – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 12-13) index<N>, extent<N>, and grid<N>. (Slide 14-16) array<T,N>, array_view<T,N> and comparison between them. (Slide 17) parallel_for_each. (slide 18, 21) restrict. (slide 19-20) actual restrictions of restrict(direct3d) – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 22) bring it altogether with a matrix multiplication example. (slide 23-24) accelerator, and accelerator_view. (slide 26-29) Introduce tiling incl. tiled matrix multiplication [tiling probably deserves a whole session instead of 6 minutes!]. IDE (slide 34,37) Briefly touch on the concurrency visualizer. It supports GPU profiling, but enhancements specific to C++ AMP we hope will come at the Beta timeframe, which is when I'll be spending more time talking about it. (slide 35-36, 51:54-59:16) Demonstrate the GPU debugging experience in VS 11. Summary (slide 39) Re-iterate some of the points of slide 7, and add the point that the C++ AMP spec will be open for other compiler vendors to implement, even on other platforms (in fact, Microsoft is actively working on that). (slide 40) Links to content – see slide – including where all your questions should go: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/threads.   "But I don't have time for a full blown session, I only need 2 (or just 1, or 3) C++ AMP slides to use in my session on related topic X" If all you want is a small number of slides, you can take some from the session above and customize them. But because I am so nice, I have created some slides for you, including talking points in the notes section. Download them here. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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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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• Oracle GoldenGate Active-Active Part 1

  - by Nick_W

  My name is Nick Wagner, and I'm a recent addition to the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) product management team.  I've spent the last 15+ years working on database replication products, and I've spent the last 10 years working on the Oracle GoldenGate product.  So most of my posting will probably be focused on OGG.  One question that comes up all the time is around active-active replication with Oracle GoldenGate.  How do I know if my application is a good fit for active-active replication with GoldenGate?   To answer that, it really comes down to how you plan on handling conflict resolution.  I will delve into topology and deployment in a later blog, but here is a simple architecture: The two most common resolution routines are host based resolution and timestamp based resolution. Host based resolution is used less often, but works with the fewest application changes.  Think of it like this: any transactions from SystemA always take precedence over any transactions from SystemB.  If there is a conflict on SystemB, then the record from SystemA will overwrite it.  If there is a conflict on SystemA, then it will be ignored.  It is quite a bit less restrictive, and in most cases, as long as all the tables have primary keys, host based resolution will work just fine.  Timestamp based resolution, on the other hand, is a little trickier. In this case, you can decide which record is overwritten based on timestamps. For example, does the older record get overwritten with the newer record?  Or vice-versa?  This method not only requires primary keys on every table, but it also requires every table to have a timestamp/date column that is updated each time a record is inserted or updated on the table.  Most homegrown applications can always be customized to include these requirements, but it's a little more difficult with 3rd party applications, and might even be impossible for large ERP type applications.  If your database has these features - whether it’s primary keys for host based resolution, or primary keys and timestamp columns for timestamp based resolution - then your application could be a great candidate for active-active replication.  But table structure is not the only requirement.  The other consideration applies when there is a conflict; i.e., do I need to perform any notification or track down the user that had their data overwritten?  In most cases, I don't think it's necessary, but if it is required, OGG can always create an exceptions table that contains all of the overwritten transactions so that people can be notified. It's a bit of extra work to implement this type of option, but if the business requires it, then it can be done. Unless someone is constantly monitoring this exception table or has an automated process in dealing with exceptions, there will be a delay in getting a response back to the end user. Ideally, when setting up active-active resolution we can include some simple procedural steps or configuration options that can reduce, or in some cases eliminate the potential for conflicts.  This makes the whole implementation that much easier and foolproof.  And I'll cover these in my next blog. 

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• Incorrect lighting results with deferred rendering

  - by Lasse

  I am trying to render a light-pass to a texture which I will later apply on the scene. But I seem to calculate the light position wrong. I am working on view-space. In the image above, I am outputting the attenuation of a point light which is currently covering the whole screen. The light is at 0,10,0 position, and I transform it to view-space first: Vector4 pos; Vector4 tmp = new Vector4 (light.Position, 1); // Transform light position for shader Vector4.Transform (ref tmp, ref Camera.ViewMatrix, out pos); shader.SendUniform ("LightViewPosition", ref pos); Now to me that does not look as it should. What I think it should look like is that the white area should be on the center of the scene. The camera is at the corner of the scene, and it seems as if the light would move along with the camera. Here's the fragment shader code: void main(){ // default black color vec3 color = vec3(0); // Pixel coordinates on screen without depth vec2 PixelCoordinates = gl_FragCoord.xy / ScreenSize; // Get pixel position using depth from texture vec4 depthtexel = texture( DepthTexture, PixelCoordinates ); float depthSample = unpack_depth(depthtexel); // Get pixel coordinates on camera-space by multiplying the // coordinate on screen-space by inverse projection matrix vec4 world = (ImP * RemapMatrix * vec4(PixelCoordinates, depthSample, 1.0)); // Undo the perspective calculations vec3 pixelPosition = (world.xyz / world.w) * 3; // How far the light should reach from it's point of origin float lightReach = LightColor.a / 2; // Vector in between light and pixel vec3 lightDir = (LightViewPosition.xyz - pixelPosition); float lightDistance = length(lightDir); vec3 lightDirN = normalize(lightDir); // Discard pixels too far from light source //if(lightReach < lightDistance) discard; // Get normal from texture vec3 normal = normalize((texture( NormalTexture, PixelCoordinates ).xyz * 2) - 1); // Half vector between the light direction and eye, used for specular component vec3 halfVector = normalize(lightDirN + normalize(-pixelPosition)); // Dot product of normal and light direction float NdotL = dot(normal, lightDirN); float attenuation = pow(lightReach / lightDistance, LightFalloff); // If pixel is lit by the light if(NdotL > 0) { // I have moved stuff from here to above so I can debug them. // Diffuse light color color += LightColor.rgb * NdotL * attenuation; // Specular light color color += LightColor.xyz * pow(max(dot(halfVector, normal), 0.0), 4.0) * attenuation; } RT0 = vec4(color, 1); //RT0 = vec4(pixelPosition, 1); //RT0 = vec4(depthSample, depthSample, depthSample, 1); //RT0 = vec4(NdotL, NdotL, NdotL, 1); RT0 = vec4(attenuation, attenuation, attenuation, 1); //RT0 = vec4(lightReach, lightReach, lightReach, 1); //RT0 = depthtexel; //RT0 = 100 / vec4(lightDistance, lightDistance, lightDistance, 1); //RT0 = vec4(lightDirN, 1); //RT0 = vec4(halfVector, 1); //RT0 = vec4(LightColor.xyz,1); //RT0 = vec4(LightViewPosition.xyz/100, 1); //RT0 = vec4(LightPosition.xyz, 1); //RT0 = vec4(normal,1); } What am I doing wrong here?

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• How to get faster graphics in KVM? VNC is painfully slow with Haiku OS guest, Spice won't install and SDL doesn't work

  - by Don Quixote

  I've been coming up to speed on the Haiku operating system, an Open Source clone of BeOS 5 Pro. I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro as my development machine. Apple's BootCamp BIOS does not support more than four partitions on the internal hard drive. While I can set up extended and logical partitions, doing so will prevent any of the installed operating systems from booting. To run Haiku directly on the iron, I boot it off a USB stick. Using external storage is also helpful because I am perpetually out of filesystem space. While VirtualBox is documented to allow access to physical drives, I could not actually get it to work. Also VirtualBox can only use one of the host CPU's cores. While VB guests can be configured for more than one CPU, they are only emulated. A full build of the Haiku OS takes 4.5 under VB. I had the hope of reducing build times by using KVM instead, but it's not working nearly as well as VirtualBox did. The Linux Kernel Virtual Machine is broken in all manner of fundamental ways as seen from Haiku. But I'm a coder; maybe I could contribute to fixing some of those problems. The first problem I've got is that Haiku's video in virt-manager is quite painfully slow. When I drag Haiku windows around the desktop, they lag quite far behind where my mouse is. It's quite difficult to move a window to a precise position on the screen. Just imagine that the mouse was connected to the window title bar with a really stretchy spring. Also Haiku's mouse lags quite far behind where I have moved it. I found lots of Personal Package Archives that enable Spice from QEMU / KVM at the Ubuntu Personal Package Arhives. I tried a few of the PPAs but none of them worked; with one of them, the command "add-apt-repository" crashed with a traceback. There is a Wiki page about Spice, but it says that it only works on 64-bit. My Early 2006 MacBook Pro is 32-bit. Its Apple Model Identifier is MacBookPro1,1; these use Core Duos NOT Core 2 Duos. I don't mind building a source deb for 32-bit if I can expect it to work. Is there some reason that Spice should be 64-bit only? Does it need features of the x86_64 Instruction Set Architecture that x86 does not have? When I try using SDL from virt-manager, the configuration for Local SDL Window says "Xauth: /home/mike/.Xauthority". When I try to start my guest, virt-manager emits an error. When I Googled the error message, the usual solution was to make ~/.Xauthority readible. However, .Xauthorty does not exist in my home directory. Instead I have a $XAUTHORITY environment variable. There is no way to configure SDL in virt-manager to use $XAUTHORITY instead of ~/.Xauthority. Neither does it work to copy the value of $XAUTHORITY into the file. I am ready to scream, because I've been five fscking days trying to make KVM work for Haiku development. There is a whole lot more that is broken than the slow video. All I really want to do for now is speed up my full builds of Haiku by using "jam -j2" to use both cores in my CPU. I may try Xen next, but the last time I monkeyed with Xen it was far, far more broken than I am finding KVM to be. Just for now, I would be satisfied if there were some way to use my USB stick as a drive in VirtualBox. VB does allow me to configure /dev/sdb as a drive, but it always causes a fatal error when I try to launch the guest. Thank You For Any Advice You Can Give Me. -

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• PASS Summit 2013 Review

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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• Build 2012, the first post

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Yes, I was one of the lucky few who made it to Build. Build, formerly known as the Professional Developers Conference (or PDC) is the place to be if you are a developer on the Microsoft platform. Since I take my job seriously I took out some time on my busy schedule, sighed at the thought of not seeing my family for another week and signed up for it. Now, before I talk about the amazing Surface devices (yes, this posting is written on one of them), the great Lumia 920 we all got, the long deserved love for touch, NUI and other things I have been talking about for years, I need to do some ranting. So if you are anxious to read about the technical goodies you’ll have to wait until the next post. Still here? Good. When I signed up for the Build conference during my holidays this summer it was pretty obvious that demand would be high. Therefor I made sure I was on time. But even though I registered only 7 minutes after the initial opening time the Early Bird discount for the first 500 attendees was already sold out. I later learned that registration actually started 5 minutes before the scheduled time but even though it is still impressive how fast things went. The whole event sold out in 57 minutes Or so they say… A lot of people got put on the waiting list. There was room for about 1500 attendees and I heard that at least 1000 people were on that waiting list, including a lot of people I know. Strangely, all of them got tickets assigned after 2 weeks. Here at the conference I heard from a guy from Nokia that they had shipped 2500 Lumia 920 phones. That number matches the rumors that the organization added 1000 extra tickets. This, of course is no problem. I am not an elitist and I think large crowds have a special atmosphere that I quite like. But…. The Microsoft Campus is not equipped for that sheer volume of visitors. That was painfully obvious during on-site registration where people had to stand in line for over 2 hours. The conference is spread out over 2 buildings, divided by a 15 minute busride (yes, the campus is that big). I have seen queues of over 200 people waiting for the bus and when that arrived it had a capacity of 16. I can assure you: that doesn’t fit. This of course means that travelling from one site to the other might take about 30 minutes. So you arrive at the session room just in time, only to find out it’s full. Since you can’ get into that session you try to find another one but now you’re even more late so you have no chance at all of entering. The doors are closed and you’re told: “Well, you can watch the live stream online”. Mmmm… So I spend thousands of dollars, a week away from home, family and work to be told I can also watch the sessions online? Are you fricking kidding me? I could go on but I won’t. You get the idea. It’s jus badly organized, something I am not really used to in my 20 years of experience at Microsoft events. Yes, I am disappointed. I hope a lot of people here in Redmond will also fill in the evals and that the organization next year will do a better job. Really, Build deserves better. </rantmode>

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• MPI Cluster Debugger launch integration in VS2010

  Let's assume that you have all the HPC bits installed and that you have existing MPI code (or you created a "Hello World" project using the MPI project template). Of course, you create a single MPI application and at runtime it will correspond to multiple processes (of the same app) launched on multiple nodes (i.e. machines) on the cluster. So how do you debug such a situation by simply hitting the familiar "F5" keystroke (i.e. Debug - Start Debugging)?WATCH IT INSTEAD OF READING ABOUT ITIf you can't bear to read through all the details below, just watch this 19-minute screencast explaining this VS2010 feature. Alternatively, or even additionally, keep on reading.REQUIREMENTWhen you debug an MPI application, you would want the copying of resources from your client machine (where Visual Studio is installed) to each compute node (where Windows HPC Server is installed) to take place automatically for you. 'Resources' in the previous sentence includes your application binary, plus any binary or data dependencies it may have, plus PDBs if needed, plus the debug CRT of the correct bitness, plus msvsmon for remote debugging to work. You would also want, after copying is complete, to have your app and msvsmon launched and attached so that you can hit breakpoints back in Visual Studio on your client machine. All these thing that you would want are delivered in VS2010.STEPS TO F51. In your MPI project where you have placed a breakpoint go to Project Properties - Configuration Properties - Debugging. Ensure the "Debugger to launch" combo box value is set to MPI Cluster Debugger.2. There are a whole bunch of properties here and typically you can ignore all of them except one: Run Environment. By default it is set to run 1 process on your local machine and if you change the number after that to, for example, 4 it will launch 4 processes of your app on your local machine.You want this to run on your cluster though, so go to the dropdown arrow at the end of the Run Environment cell and open it to expose the "Edit Hpc node" menu which opens the Node Selector dialog:In this dialog you can enter (or pick from a list) the cluster head node name and then the number of processes you want to execute on the cluster and then hit OK and… you are done.3. Press F5 and watch your breakpoint get hit (after giving it some time for copying, remote execution, attachment and symbol resolution to take place).GOING DEEPERIn the MPI Cluster Debugger project properties above, you can see many additional properties to the Run Environment. They are all optional, but you may want to understand them in order to fine tune your cluster debugging. Read all about each one of these on the MSDN page Configuration Properties for the MPI Cluster Debugger.In the Node Selector dialog above you can see more options than just the Head Node name and Number of Process to run. They should be self-explanatory but I also cover them in depth in my screencast showing you an example of why you would choose to schedule processes per core versus per node. You can also read about these options on MSDN as part of the page How to: Configure and Launch the MPI Cluster Debugger.To read through an example that touches on MPI project creation, project properties, node selector, and also usage of MPI with OpenMP plus MPI with PPL, read the MSDN page Walkthrough: Launching the MPI Cluster Debugger in Visual Studio 2010.Happy MPI debugging! Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Getting the number of fragments which passed the depth test

  - by Etan

  In "modern" environments, the "NV Occlusion Query" extension provides a method to get the number of fragments which passed the depth test. However, on the iPad / iPhone using OpenGL ES, the extension is not available. What is the most performant approach to implement a similar behaviour in the fragment shader? Some of my ideas: Render the object completely in white, then count all the colors together using a two-pass shader where first a vertical line is rendered and for each fragment the shader computes the sum over the whole row. Then, a single vertex is rendered whose fragment sums all the partial sums of the first pass. Doesn't seem to be very efficient. Render the object completely in white over a black background. Downsample recursively, abusing the hardware linear interpolation between textures until being at a reasonably small resolution. This leads to fragments which have a greyscale level depending on the number of white pixels where in their corresponding region. Is this even accurate enough? Use mipmaps and simply read the pixel on the 1x1 level. Again the question of accuracy and if it is even possible using non-power-of-two textures. The problem wit these approaches is, that the pipeline gets stalled which results in major performance issues. Therefore, I'm looking for a more performant way to accomplish my goal. Using the EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN extension Apple introduced EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN in iOS 5.0 for iPad 2. "4.1.6 Occlusion Queries Occlusion queries use query objects to track the number of fragments or samples that pass the depth test. An occlusion query can be started and finished by calling BeginQueryEXT and EndQueryEXT, respectively, with a target of ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT or ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT. When an occlusion query is started with the target ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT, the samples-boolean state maintained by the GL is set to FALSE. While that occlusion query is active, the samples-boolean state is set to TRUE if any fragment or sample passes the depth test. When the occlusion query finishes, the samples-boolean state of FALSE or TRUE is written to the corresponding query object as the query result value, and the query result for that object is marked as available. If the target of the query is ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT, an implementation may choose to use a less precise version of the test which can additionally set the samples-boolean state to TRUE in some other implementation dependent cases." The first sentence hints on a behavior which is exactly what I'm looking for: getting the number of pixels which passed the depth test in an asynchronous manner without much performance loss. However, the rest of the document describes only how to get boolean results. Is it possible to exploit this extension to get the pixel count? Does the hardware support it so that there may be hidden API to get access to the pixel count? Other extensions which could be exploitable would be debugging features like the number of times the fragment shader was invoked (PSInvocations in DirectX - not sure if something simila is available in OpenGL ES). However, this would also result in a pipeline stall.

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