Search Results

Search found 11972 results on 479 pages for 'writing'.

Page 428/479 | < Previous Page | 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435  | Next Page >

• Advice on learning programming languages and math.

  - by Joris Ooms

  I feel like I'm getting stuck lately when it comes to learning about programming-related things; I thought I'd ask a question here and write it all down in the hope to get some pointers/advice from people. Perhaps writing it down helps me put things in perspective for myself aswell. I study Interactive Multimedia Design. This course is based on two things: graphic design on one hand, and web development on the other hand. I have quite a decent knowledge of web-related languages (the usual HTML/JS/PHP) and I'll be getting a course on ASP.NET next year. In my free time, I have learnt how to work with CodeIgniter, aswell as some diving into Ruby (and Rails) and basic iOS programming. In my first year of college I also did a class on Java (19/20 on the end result). This grade doesn't really mean anything though; I have the basics of OOP down but Java-wise, we learnt next to nothing. Considering the time I have been programming in, for example, PHP.. I can't say I'm bad at it. I'm definitely not good or great at it, but I'm decent. My teachers tell me I have the programming thing down. They just tell me I should keep on learning. So that's what I do, and I try to take in as much as possible; however, sometimes I'm unsure where to start and I have this tendency to always doubt myself. Now, for the 'question'. I want to get into iOS programming. I know iOS programming boils down to programming in Cocoa Touch and Objective-C. I also know Obj-C is a superset of C. I have done a class on C a couple of years ago, but I failed miserably. I got stuck at pointers and never really understood them.. Until like a month ago. I suddenly 'got' it. I have been working through a book on Objective-C for a week or so now, and I understand the basics (I'm at like.. chapter 6 or so). However, I keep running into similar problems as the ones I had when I did the C class: I suck at math. No, really. I come from a Latin-Modern Languages background in high school and I had nearly no math classes back then. I wanted to study Computer Science, but I failed there because of the miserable state of my mathematics knowledge. I can't explain why I'm suddenly talking about math here though, because it isn't directly related to programming.. yet it is. For example, the examples in the book I'm reading now are about programming a fraction-calculator. All good, I can do the programming when I get the formulas down.. but it takes me a full day or more to actually get to that point. I also find it hard to come up with ideas for myself. I made one small iOS app the other day and it's just a button / label kind of thing. When I press the button, it generates a random number. That's really all I could come up with. Can you 'learn' that? It probably comes down to creativity, but evidently, I'm not too great at being creative. Are there any sites or resources out there that provide something like a basic list of things you can program when you're just starting out? Maybe I'm focusing on too many things at once. I want to keep my HTML/CSS at a decent level, while learning PHP and CodeIgniter, while diving into Ruby on Rails and learning Objective-C and the iOS SDK at the same time. I just want to be good at something, I guess. The problem is that I can't seem to be happy with my PHP stuff. I want more, something 'harder'; that's why I decided to pick up the iOS thing. Like I said, I have the basics down of a lot of different languages. I can program something simple in Java, in C, in Objective-C as of this week.. but it ends there. Mostly because I can't come up with ideas for more complex applications, and also because I just doubt myself: 'Oh, that's too complex, I can never do that'. And then it ends there. To conclude my rant, let me basically rephrase my questions into a 'tl;dr' part. A. I want to get into iOS programming and I have basic knowledge of C/Objective-C. However, I struggle to come up with ideas of my own and implement them and I also suck at math which is something that isn't directly related to, yet often needed while programming. What can I do? B. I have an interest in a lot of different programming languages and I can't stop reading/learning. However, I don't feel like I'm good in anything. Should I perhaps focus on just one language for a year or longer, or keep taking it all in at the same time and hope I'll finally get them all down? C. Are there any resources out there that provide basic ideas of things I can program? I'm thinking about 'simple' command-line applications here to help me while studying C/Obj-C away from the whole iPhone SDK. Like I said, the examples in my book are mainly math-based (fraction calculator) and it's kinda hard. :( Thanks a lot for reading my post. I didn't plan it to be this long but oh well. Thanks in advance for any answers.

  Read the article

• FairScheduling Conventions in Hadoop

  - by dan.mcclary

  While scheduling and resource allocation control has been present in Hadoop since 0.20, a lot of people haven't discovered or utilized it in their initial investigations of the Hadoop ecosystem. We could chalk this up to many things: Organizations are still determining what their dataflow and analysis workloads will comprise Small deployments under tests aren't likely to show the signs of strains that would send someone looking for resource allocation options The default scheduling options -- the FairScheduler and the CapacityScheduler -- are not placed in the most prominent position within the Hadoop documentation. However, for production deployments, it's wise to start with at least the foundations of scheduling in place so that you can tune the cluster as workloads emerge. To do that, we have to ask ourselves something about what the off-the-rack scheduling options are. We have some choices: The FairScheduler, which will work to ensure resource allocations are enforced on a per-job basis. The CapacityScheduler, which will ensure resource allocations are enforced on a per-queue basis. Writing your own implementation of the abstract class org.apache.hadoop.mapred.job.TaskScheduler is an option, but usually overkill. If you're going to have several concurrent users and leverage the more interactive aspects of the Hadoop environment (e.g. Pig and Hive scripting), the FairScheduler is definitely the way to go. In particular, we can do user-specific pools so that default users get their fair share, and specific users are given the resources their workloads require. To enable fair scheduling, we're going to need to do a couple of things. First, we need to tell the JobTracker that we want to use scheduling and where we're going to be defining our allocations. We do this by adding the following to the mapred-site.xml file in HADOOP_HOME/conf: <property> <name>mapred.jobtracker.taskScheduler</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.mapred.FairScheduler</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.fairscheduler.allocation.file</name> <value>/path/to/allocations.xml</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.fairscheduler.poolnameproperty</name> <value>pool.name</value> </property> <property> <name>pool.name</name> <value>${user.name}</name> </property> What we've done here is simply tell the JobTracker that we'd like to task scheduling to use the FairScheduler class rather than a single FIFO queue. Moreover, we're going to be defining our resource pools and allocations in a file called allocations.xml For reference, the allocation file is read every 15s or so, which allows for tuning allocations without having to take down the JobTracker. Our allocation file is now going to look a little like this <?xml version="1.0"?> <allocations> <pool name="dan"> <minMaps>5</minMaps> <minReduces>5</minReduces> <maxMaps>25</maxMaps> <maxReduces>25</maxReduces> <minSharePreemptionTimeout>300</minSharePreemptionTimeout> </pool> <mapreduce.job.user.name="dan"> <maxRunningJobs>6</maxRunningJobs> </user> <userMaxJobsDefault>3</userMaxJobsDefault> <fairSharePreemptionTimeout>600</fairSharePreemptionTimeout> </allocations> In this case, I've explicitly set my username to have upper and lower bounds on the maps and reduces, and allotted myself double the number of running jobs. Now, if I run hive or pig jobs from either the console or via the Hue web interface, I'll be treated "fairly" by the JobTracker. There's a lot more tweaking that can be done to the allocations file, so it's best to dig down into the description and start trying out allocations that might fit your workload.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – TechEd India 2012 – Content, Speakers and a Lots of Fun

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd is one event which every developers and IT professionals are looking forward to attend. It is opportunity of life time and no matter how many time one gets chance to engage with it, it is never enough. I still remember every single moment of every TechEd I have attended so far. We are less than 100 hours away from TechEd India 2012 event.This event is the one must attend event for every Technology Enthusiast. Fourth time in the row I am going to attend this event and I am equally excited as the first time of the event. There are going to be two very solid SQL Server track this time and I will be attending end of the end both the tracks. Here is my view on each of the 10 sessions. Each session is carefully crafted and leading exeprts from industry will present it. Day 1, March 21, 2012 T-SQL Rediscovered with SQL Server 2012 – This session is going to bring some of the lesser known enhancements that were brought with SQL Server 2012. When I learned that Jacob Sebastian is going to do this session my reaction to this is DEMO, DEMO and DEMO! Jacob spends hours and hours of his time preparing his session and this will be one of those session that I am confident will be delivered over and over through out the next many events. Catapult your data with SQL Server 2012 Integration Services – Praveen is expert story teller and one of the wizard when it is about SQL Server and business intelligence. He is surely going to mesmerize you with some interesting insights on SSIS performance too. Processing Big Data with SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop – There are three sessions on Big Data at TechEd India 2012. Stephen is going to deliver one of the session. Watching Stephen present is always joy and quite entertaining. He shares knowledge with his typical humor which captures ones attention. I wrote about what is BIG DATA in a blog post. SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolutions – I will be presenting this Session along with Vinod Kumar. READ MORE HERE. Securing with ContainedDB in SQL Server 2012 – Pranab is expert when it is about SQL Server and Security. I have seen him presenting and he is indeed very pleasant to watch. A dry subject like security, he makes it much lively. A Contained Database is a database which contains all the necessary settings and metadata, making database easily portable to another server. This database will contain all the necessary details and will not have to depend on any server where it is installed for anything. You can take this database and move it to another server without having any worries. Day 3, March 23, 2012 Peeling SQL Server like an Onion: Internals Demystified – Vinod Kumar has been writing about this extensively on his other blog post. In recent conversation he suggested that he will be creating very exclusive content for this presentation. I know Vinod for long time and have worked with him along many community activities. I am going to pay special attention to the details. I know Vinod has few give-away planned now for attending the session now only if he shares with us. Speed Up – Parallel Processes and unparalleled Performance – Performance tuning is my favorite subject. I will be discussing effect of parallelism on performance in this session. Here me out, there will be lots of quiz questions during this session and if you get the answers correct – you can win some really cool goodies – I Promise! READ MORE HERE. Keep your database available – AlwaysOn – Balmukund is like an army man. He is always ready to show and prove that he has coolest toys in terms of SQL Server and he knows how to keep them running AlwaysON. Availability groups, Listener, Clustering, Failover, Read-Only replica etc all will be demo’ed in this session. This is really heavy but very interesting content not to be missed. Lesser known facts about SQL Server Backup and Restore – Amit Banerjee – this name is known internationally for solving SQL Server problems in 140 characters. He has already blogged about this and this topic is going to be interesting. A successful restore strategy for applications is as good as their last good known backup. I have few difficult questions to ask to Amit and I am very sure that his unique style will entertain people. By the way, his one of the slide may give few in audience a funny heart attack. Top 5 reasons why you want SQL Server 2012 BI – Praveen plans to take a tour of some of the BI enhancements introduced in the new version. Business Insights with SQL Server is a critical building block and this version of SQL Server is no exception. For the matter of the fact, when I saw the demos he was going to show during this session, I felt like that I wish I can set up all of this on my machine. If you miss this session – you will miss one of the most informative session of the day. Also TechEd India 2012 has a Live streaming of some content and this can be watched here. The TechEd Team is planning to have some really good exclusive content in this channel as well. If you spot me, just do not hesitate to come by me and introduce yourself, I want to remember you! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

  Read the article

• ASP.NET WebAPI Security 2: Identity Architecture

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Pedro has beaten me to the punch with a detailed post (and diagram) about the WebAPI hosting architecture. So go read his post first, then come back so we can have a closer look at what that means for security. The first important takeaway is that WebAPI is hosting independent-  currently it ships with two host integration implementations – one for ASP.NET (aka web host) and WCF (aka self host). Pedro nicely shows the integration into the web host. Self hosting is not done yet so we will mainly focus on the web hosting case and I will point out security related differences when they exist. The interesting part for security (amongst other things of course) is the HttpControllerHandler (see Pedro’s diagram) – this is where the host specific representation of an HTTP request gets converted to the WebAPI abstraction (called HttpRequestMessage). The ConvertRequest method does the following: Create a new HttpRequestMessage. Copy URI, method and headers from the HttpContext. Copies HttpContext.User to the Properties<string, object> dictionary on the HttpRequestMessage. The key used for that can be found on HttpPropertyKeys.UserPrincipalKey (which resolves to “MS_UserPrincipal”). So the consequence is that WebAPI receives whatever IPrincipal has been set by the ASP.NET pipeline (in the web hosting case). Common questions are: Are there situations where is property does not get set? Not in ASP.NET – the DefaultAuthenticationModule in the HTTP pipeline makes sure HttpContext.User (and Thread.CurrentPrincipal – more on that later) are always set. Either to some authenticated user – or to an anonymous principal. This may be different in other hosting environments (again more on that later). Why so generic? Keep in mind that WebAPI is hosting independent and may run on a host that materializes identity completely different compared to ASP.NET (or .NET in general). This gives them a way to evolve the system in the future. How does WebAPI code retrieve the current client identity? HttpRequestMessage has an extension method called GetUserPrincipal() which returns the property as an IPrincipal. A quick look at self hosting shows that the moral equivalent of HttpControllerHandler.ConvertRequest() is HttpSelfHostServer.ProcessRequestContext(). Here the principal property gets only set when the host is configured for Windows authentication (inconsisteny). Do I like that? Well – yes and no. Here are my thoughts: I like that it is very straightforward to let WebAPI inherit the client identity context of the host. This might not always be what you want – think of an ASP.NET app that consists of UI and APIs – the UI might use Forms authentication, the APIs token based authentication. So it would be good if the two parts would live in a separate security world. It makes total sense to have this generic hand off point for identity between the host and WebAPI. It also makes total sense for WebAPI plumbing code (especially handlers) to use the WebAPI specific identity abstraction. But – c’mon we are running on .NET. And the way .NET represents identity is via IPrincipal/IIdentity. That’s what every .NET developer on this planet is used to. So I would like to see a User property of type IPrincipal on ApiController. I don’t like the fact that Thread.CurrentPrincipal is not populated. T.CP is a well established pattern as a one stop shop to retrieve client identity on .NET.  That makes a lot of sense – even if the name is misleading at best. There might be existing library code you want to call from WebAPI that makes use of T.CP (e.g. PrincipalPermission, or a simple .Name or .IsInRole()). Having the client identity as an ambient property is useful for code that does not have access to the current HTTP request (for calling GetUserPrincipal()). I don’t like the fact that that the client identity conversion from host to WebAPI is inconsistent. This makes writing security plumbing code harder. I think the logic should always be: If the host has a client identity representation, copy it. If not, set an anonymous principal on the request message. Btw – please don’t annoy me with the “but T.CP is static, and static is bad for testing” chant. T.CP is a getter/setter and, in fact I find it beneficial to be able to set different security contexts in unit tests before calling in some logic. And, in case you have wondered – T.CP is indeed thread static (and the name comes from a time where a logical operation was bound to a thread – which is not true anymore). But all thread creation APIs in .NET actually copy T.CP to the new thread they create. This is the case since .NET 2.0 and is certainly an improvement compared to how Win32 does things. So to sum it up: The host plumbing copies the host client identity to WebAPI (this is not perfect yet, but will surely be improved). or in other words: The current WebAPI bits don’t ship with any authentication plumbing, but solely use whatever authentication (and thus client identity) is set up by the host. WebAPI developers can retrieve the client identity from the HttpRequestMessage. Hopefully my proposed changes around T.CP and the User property on ApiController will be added. In the next post, I will detail how to add WebAPI specific authentication support, e.g. for Basic Authentication and tokens. This includes integrating the notion of claims based identity. After that we will look at the built-in authorization bits and how to improve them as well. Stay tuned.

  Read the article

• Converting Creole to HTML, PDF, DOCX, ..

  - by Marko Apfel

  Challenge We documented a project on Github with the Wiki there. For most articles we used Creole as markup language. Now we have to deliver a lot of the content to our client in an usual format like PDF or DOCX. So we need a automatism to extract all relevant content, merge it together and convert the stuff to a new format. Problem One of the most popular toolsets to convert between several formats is Pandoc. But unfortunally Pandoc does not support Creole (see the converting matrix). Approach So we need an intermediate step: Converting from Creole to a supported Pandoc format. Creolo/c is a Creole to Html converter and does exactly what we need. After converting our Creole content to Html we could use Pandoc for all the subsequent tasks. Solution Getting the Creole stuff First at all we need the Creole content on our locale machines. This is easy. Because the Github Wiki themselves is a Git repository we could clone it to our machine. In the working copy we see now all the files and the suffix gives us the hint for the markup language. Converting and Merging Creole content to Html Because we would like all content from several Creole files in one HTML file, we have to convert and merge all the input files to one output file. Creole/c has an option (-b) to generate only the Html-stuff below a Html <Body>-tag. And this is hook for us to start. We have to create manually the additional preluding Html-tags (<html>, <head>, ..), then we merge all needed Creole content to our output file and last we add the closing tags. This could be done straightforward with a little bit old DOS magic: REM === Generate the intro tags === ECHO ^<html^> > %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<meta name="generator" content="creole/c"^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<body^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Mix in all interesting Creole stuff with creole/c === .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+overview.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdCaptureMode.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdDamageReducingActivity.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+lookup+IncidentDamageCodes.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+Attachments.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+TrafficLights.creole >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Generate the outro tags === ECHO ^</body^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</html^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Convert the Html file to Docx with Pandoc === .\Pandoc\bin\pandoc.exe -o .\Database-Schema.docx %TMP%\output.html Some explanation for this The first ECHO call creates the file. Therefore the beginning <html> tag is send via > to a temporary working file. All following calls add content to the existing file via >>. The tag-characters < and > must be escaped. This is done by the caret sign (^). We use a file in the default temporary folder (%TMP%) to avoid writing in our current folders. (better for continuous integration) Both toolsets (Creole/c and Pandoc) are copied to a versioned tools folder in the Wiki. This is committable and no problem after pushing – Github does not do anything with it. In this folder is also the batch (Export-Docx.bat) for all the steps. Pandoc recognizes the conversion by the suffixes of the file names. So it is enough to specify only the input and output files.

  Read the article

• Towards an F# .NET Reflector add-in

  - by CliveT

  When I had the opportunity to spent some time during Red Gate's recent "down tools" week on a project of my choice, the obvious project was an F# add-in for Reflector . To be honest, this was a bit of a misnomer as the amount of time in the designated week for coding was really less than three days, so it was always unlikely that very much progress would be made in such a small amount of time (and that certainly proved to be the case), but I did learn some things from the experiment. Like lots of problems, one useful technique is to take examples, get them to work, and then generalise to get something that works across the board. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to do the last stage. The obvious first step is to take a few function definitions, starting with the obvious hello world, moving on to a non-recursive function and finishing with the ubiquitous recursive Fibonacci function. let rec printMessage message  =     printfn  message let foo x  =    (x + 1) let rec fib x  =     if (x >= 2) then (fib (x - 1) + fib (x - 2)) else 1 The major problem in decompiling these simple functions is that Reflector has an in-memory object model that is designed to support object-oriented languages. In particular it has a return statement that allows function bodies to finish early. I used some of the in-built functionality to take the IL and produce an in-memory object model for the language, but then needed to write a transformer to push the return statements to the top of the tree to make it easy to render the code into a functional language. This tree transform works in some scenarios, but not in others where we simply regenerate code that looks more like CPS style. The next thing to get working was library level bindings of values where these values are calculated at runtime. let x = [1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4] let y = List.map  (fun x -> foo x) x The way that this is translated into a set of classes for the underlying platform means that the code needs to follow references around, from the property exposing the calculated value to the class in which the code for generating the value is embedded. One of the strongest selling points of functional languages is the algebraic datatypes, which allow definitions via standard mathematical-style inductive definitions across the union cases. type Foo =     | Something of int     | Nothing type 'a Foo2 =     | Something2 of 'a     | Nothing2 Such a definition is compiled into a number of classes for the cases of the union, which all inherit from a class representing the type itself. It wasn't too hard to get such a de-compilation happening in the cases I tried. What did I learn from this? Firstly, that there are various bits of functionality inside Reflector that it would be useful for us to allow add-in writers to access. In particular, there are various implementations of the Visitor pattern which implement algorithms such as calculating the number of references for particular variables, and which perform various substitutions which could be more generally useful to add-in writers. I hope to do something about this at some point in the future. Secondly, when you transform a functional language into something that runs on top of an object-based platform, you lose some fidelity in the representation. The F# compiler leaves attributes in place so that tools can tell which classes represent classes from the source program and which are there for purposes of the implementation, allowing the decompiler to regenerate these constructs again. However, decompilation technology is a long way from being able to take unannotated IL and transform it into a program in a different language. For a simple function definition, like Fibonacci, I could write a simple static function and have it come out in F# as the same function, but it would be practically impossible to take a mass of class definitions and have a decompiler translate it automatically into an F# algebraic data type. What have we got out of this? Some data on the feasibility of implementing an F# decompiler inside Reflector, though it's hard at the moment to say how long this would take to do. The work we did is included the 6.5 EAP for Reflector that you can get from the EAP forum. All things considered though, it was a useful way to gain more familiarity with the process of writing an add-in and understand difficulties other add-in authors might experience. If you'd like to check out a video of Down Tools Week, click here.

  Read the article

• Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Sometimes it can be difficult to center a picture in a document just by dragging it dragging it around. Today we show you how to center pictures, images, and other objects perfectly in Word and PowerPoint. Note: For this tutorial we’re using Office 2010, but the steps are nearly identical in 2007. Centering a Picture in Word First let’s insert a picture into our document.  Click the Insert tab, and then click Picture. Once you select the picture you want, it will be added to your document.  Usually, pictures are added wherever your curser was in the document, so in a blank document it will be added at the top left. Also notice Picture Tools show up in the Ribbon after inserting an image. Note: The following menu items are available in Picture Tools Format tab which is displayed when you select the object or image you’re working with. How do we align the picture just like we want?  Click Position to get some quick placement options, including centered in the middle of the document or on the top.    However, for more advanced placement, we can use the Align tool.  If Word isn’t maximized, you may only see the icon without the “Align” label. Notice the tools were grayed out in the menu by default.  To be able to change the Alignment, we need to first change the text wrap settings. Click the Wrap Text button, and any option other than “In Line with Text”.  Your choice will depend on the document you’re writing, just choose the option that works best in the document.   Now, select the Align tools again.  You can now position your image precisely with these options. Align Center will position your picture in the center of the page widthwise. Align Middle will put the picture in the middle of the page height-wise. This works the same with textboxes.  Simply click the Align button in the Format tab, and you can center it in the page. And if you’d like to align several objects together, simply select them all, click Group, and then select Group from the menu.   Now, in the align tools, you can center the whole group on your page for a heading, or whatever you want to use the pictures for. These steps also work the same with Office 2007. Center objects in PowerPoint This works similar in PowerPoint, except that pictures are automatically set for square wrapping automatically, so you don’t have to change anything.  Simply insert the picture or other object of your choice, click Align, and choose the option you want. Additionally, if one object is already aligned like you want, drag another object near it and you will see a Smart Guide to help you align or center the second object with the first.  This only works with shapes in PowerPoint 2010 beta, but will work with pictures, textboxes, and media in the final release this summer. Conclusion These are good methods for centering images and objects in Word and PowerPoint.  From designing perfect headers to emphasizing your message in a PowerPoint presentation, this is something we’ve found useful and hope you will too. Since we’re talking about Office here, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft has announced the Technology Guarantee Program for Office 2010. Essentially what this means is, if you purchase a version of Office 2007 between March 5th and September 30th of this year, when Office 2010 is released you’ll be able to upgrade to it for free! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteAdd More Functions To Office 2007 By Installing Add-InsCustomize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaEasily Rotate Pictures In Word 2007Add Effects To Your Pictures in Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox)

  Read the article

• Maintaining packages with code - Adding a property expression programmatically

  Every now and then I've come across scenarios where I need to update a lot of packages all in the same way. The usual scenario revolves around a group of packages all having been built off the same package template, and something needs to updated to keep up with new requirements, a new logging standard for example.You'd probably start by updating your template package, but then you need to address all your existing packages. Often this can run into the hundreds of packages and clearly that's not a job anyone wants to do by hand. I normally solve the problem by writing a simple console application that looks for files and patches any package it finds, and it is an example of this I'd thought I'd tidy up a bit and publish here. This sample will look at the package and find any top level Execute SQL Tasks, and change the SQL Statement property to use an expression. It is very simplistic working on top level tasks only, so nothing inside a Sequence Container or Loop will be checked but obviously the code could be extended for this if required. The code that actually sets the expression is shown below, the rest is just wrapper code to find the package and to find the task. /// <summary> /// The CreationName of the Tasks to target, e.g. Execute SQL Task /// </summary> private const string TargetTaskCreationName = "Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.ExecuteSQLTask.ExecuteSQLTask, Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; /// <summary> /// The name of the task property to target. /// </summary> private const string TargetPropertyName = "SqlStatementSource"; /// <summary> /// The property expression to set. /// </summary> private const string ExpressionToSet = "@[User::SQLQueryVariable]"; .... // Check if the task matches our target task type if (taskHost.CreationName == TargetTaskCreationName) { // Check for the target property if (taskHost.Properties.Contains(TargetPropertyName)) { // Get the property, check for an expression and set expression if not found DtsProperty property = taskHost.Properties[TargetPropertyName]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(property.GetExpression(taskHost))) { property.SetExpression(taskHost, ExpressionToSet); changeCount++; } } } This is a console application, so to specify which packages you want to target you have three options: Find all packages in the current folder, the default behaviour if no arguments are specified TaskExpressionPatcher.exe .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find all packages in a specified folder, pass the folder as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\ .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find a specific package, pass the file path as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\Package.dtsx The code was written against SQL Server 2005, but just change the reference to Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS to be the SQL Server 2008 version and it will work fine. If you get an error Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DtsRuntimeException: The package failed to load due to error 0xC0011008… then check that the package is from the correct version of SSIS compared to the referenced assemblies, 2005 vs 2008 in other words. Download Sample Project TaskExpressionPatcher.zip (6 KB)

  Read the article

• Allowing Access to HttpContext in WCF REST Services

  - by Rick Strahl

  If you’re building WCF REST Services you may find that WCF’s OperationContext, which provides some amount of access to Http headers on inbound and outbound messages, is pretty limited in that it doesn’t provide access to everything and sometimes in a not so convenient manner. For example accessing query string parameters explicitly is pretty painful: [OperationContract] [WebGet] public string HelloWorld() { var properties = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageProperties; var property = properties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name] as HttpRequestMessageProperty; string queryString = property.QueryString; var name = StringUtils.GetUrlEncodedKey(queryString,"Name"); return "Hello World " + name; } And that doesn’t account for the logic in GetUrlEncodedKey to retrieve the querystring value. It’s a heck of a lot easier to just do this: [OperationContract] [WebGet] public string HelloWorld() { var name = HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString["Name"] ?? string.Empty; return "Hello World " + name; } Ok, so if you follow the REST guidelines for WCF REST you shouldn’t have to rely on reading query string parameters manually but instead rely on routing logic, but you know what: WCF REST is a PITA anyway and anything to make things a little easier is welcome. To enable the second scenario there are a couple of steps that you have to take on your service implementation and the configuration file. Add aspNetCompatibiltyEnabled in web.config Fist you need to configure the hosting environment to support ASP.NET when running WCF Service requests. This ensures that the ASP.NET pipeline is fired up and configured for every incoming request. <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> Markup your Service Implementation with AspNetCompatibilityRequirements Attribute Next you have to mark up the Service Implementation – not the contract if you’re using a separate interface!!! – with the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "RateTestService")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class RestRateTestProxyService Typically you’ll want to use Allowed as the preferred option. The other options are NotAllowed and Required. Allowed will let the service run if the web.config attribute is not set. Required has to have it set. All these settings determine whether an ASP.NET host AppDomain is used for requests. Once Allowed or Required has been set on the implemented class you can make use of the ASP.NET HttpContext object. When I allow for ASP.NET compatibility in my WCF services I typically add a property that exposes the Context and Request objects a little more conveniently: public HttpContext Context { get { return HttpContext.Current; } } public HttpRequest Request { get { return HttpContext.Current.Request; } } While you can also access the Response object and write raw data to it and manipulate headers THAT is probably not such a good idea as both your code and WCF will end up writing into the output stream. However it might be useful in some situations where you need to take over output generation completely and return something completely custom. Remember though that WCF REST DOES actually support that as well with Stream responses that essentially allow you to return any kind of data to the client so using Response should really never be necessary. Should you or shouldn’t you? WCF purists will tell you never to muck with the platform specific features or the underlying protocol, and if you can avoid it you definitely should avoid it. Querystring management in particular can be handled largely with Url Routing, but there are exceptions of course. Try to use what WCF natively provides – if possible as it makes the code more portable. For example, if you do enable ASP.NET Compatibility you won’t be able to self host a WCF REST service. At the same time realize that especially in WCF REST there are number of big holes or access to some features are a royal pain and so it’s not unreasonable to access the HttpContext directly especially if it’s only for read-only access. Since everything in REST works of URLS and the HTTP protocol more control and easier access to HTTP features is a key requirement to building flexible services. It looks like vNext of the WCF REST stuff will feature many improvements along these lines with much deeper native HTTP support that is often so useful in REST applications along with much more extensibility that allows for customization of the inputs and outputs as data goes through the request pipeline. I’m looking forward to this stuff as WCF REST as it exists today still is a royal pain (in fact I’m struggling with a mysterious version conflict/crashing error on my machine that I have not been able to resolve – grrrr…).© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  AJAX  WCF  

  Read the article

• Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

  - by Davide Mauri

  In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

  Read the article

• Talend Enterprise Data Integration overperforms on Oracle SPARC T4

  - by Amir Javanshir

  The SPARC T microprocessor, released in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, and now continued at Oracle, has a good track record in parallel execution and multi-threaded performance. However it was less suited for pure single-threaded workloads. The new SPARC T4 processor is now filling that gap by offering a 5x better single-thread performance over previous generations. Following our long-term relationship with Talend, a fast growing ISV positioned by Gartner in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools”, we decided to test some of their integration components with the T4 chip, more precisely on a T4-1 system, in order to verify first hand if this new processor stands up to its promises. Several tests were performed, mainly focused on: Single-thread performance of the new SPARC T4 processor compared to an older SPARC T2+ processor Overall throughput of the SPARC T4-1 server using multiple threads The tests consisted in reading large amounts of data --ten's of gigabytes--, processing and writing them back to a file or an Oracle 11gR2 database table. They are CPU, memory and IO bound tests. Given the main focus of this project --CPU performance--, bottlenecks were removed as much as possible on the memory and IO sub-systems. When possible, the data to process was put into the ZFS filesystem cache, for instance. Also, two external storage devices were directly attached to the servers under test, each one divided in two ZFS pools for read and write operations. Multi-thread: Testing throughput on the Oracle T4-1 The tests were performed with different number of simultaneous threads (1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, 48 and 64) and using different storage devices: Flash, Fibre Channel storage, two stripped internal disks and one single internal disk. All storage devices used ZFS as filesystem and volume management. Each thread read a dedicated 1GB-large file containing 12.5M lines with the following structure: customerID;FirstName;LastName;StreetAddress;City;State;Zip;Cust_Status;Since_DT;Status_DT 1;Ronald;Reagan;South Highway;Santa Fe;Montana;98756;A;04-06-2006;09-08-2008 2;Theodore;Roosevelt;Timberlane Drive;Columbus;Louisiana;75677;A;10-05-2009;27-05-2008 3;Andrew;Madison;S Rustle St;Santa Fe;Arkansas;75677;A;29-04-2005;09-02-2008 4;Dwight;Adams;South Roosevelt Drive;Baton Rouge;Vermont;75677;A;15-02-2004;26-01-2007 […] The following graphs present the results of our tests: Unsurprisingly up to 16 threads, all files fit in the ZFS cache a.k.a L2ARC : once the cache is hot there is no performance difference depending on the underlying storage. From 16 threads upwards however, it is clear that IO becomes a bottleneck, having a good IO subsystem is thus key. Single-disk performance collapses whereas the Sun F5100 and ST6180 arrays allow the T4-1 to scale quite seamlessly. From 32 to 64 threads, the performance is almost constant with just a slow decline. For the database load tests, only the best IO configuration --using external storage devices-- were used, hosting the Oracle table spaces and redo log files. Using the Sun Storage F5100 array allows the T4-1 server to scale up to 48 parallel JVM processes before saturating the CPU. The final result is a staggering 646K lines per second insertion in an Oracle table using 48 parallel threads. Single-thread: Testing the single thread performance Seven different tests were performed on both servers. Given the fact that only one thread, thus one file was read, no IO bottleneck was involved, all data being served from the ZFS cache. Read File ? Filter ? Write File: Read file, filter data, write the filtered data in a new file. The filter is set on the “Status” column: only lines with status set to “A” are selected. This limits each output file to about 500 MB. Read File ? Load Database Table: Read file, insert into a single Oracle table. Average: Read file, compute the average of a numeric column, write the result in a new file. Division & Square Root: Read file, perform a division and square root on a numeric column, write the result data in a new file. Oracle DB Dump: Dump the content of an Oracle table (12.5M rows) into a CSV file. Transform: Read file, transform, write the result data in a new file. The transformations applied are: set the address column to upper case and add an extra column at the end, which is the concatenation of two columns. Sort: Read file, sort a numeric and alpha numeric column, write the result data in a new file. The following table and graph present the final results of the tests: Throughput unit is thousand lines per second processed (K lines/second). Improvement is the % of improvement between the T5140 and T4-1. Test T4-1 (Time s.) T5140 (Time s.) Improvement T4-1 (Throughput) T5140 (Throughput) Read/Filter/Write 125 806 645% 100 16 Read/Load Database 195 1111 570% 64 11 Average 96 557 580% 130 22 Division & Square Root 161 1054 655% 78 12 Oracle DB Dump 164 945 576% 76 13 Transform 159 1124 707% 79 11 Sort 251 1336 532% 50 9 The improvement of single-thread performance is quite dramatic: depending on the tests, the T4 is between 5.4 to 7 times faster than the T2+. It seems clear that the SPARC T4 processor has gone a long way filling the gap in single-thread performance, without sacrifying the multi-threaded capability as it still shows a very impressive scaling on heavy-duty multi-threaded jobs. Finally, as always at Oracle ISV Engineering, we are happy to help our ISV partners test their own applications on our platforms, so don't hesitate to contact us and let's see what the SPARC T4-based systems can do for your application! "As describe in this benchmark, Talend Enterprise Data Integration has overperformed on T4. I was generally happy to see that the T4 gave scaling opportunities for many scenarios like complex aggregations. Row by row insertion in Oracle DB is faster with more than 650,000 rows per seconds without using any bulk Oracle capabilities !" Cedric Carbone, Talend CTO.

  Read the article

• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

  Read the article

• Helping install mrcwa and solve problems with f2py in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  - by user288160

  I am sorry if this is the wrong section but I am starting to get desperate, please someone help me... I need to install the program mrcwa-20080820 (sourceforge.net/projects/mrcwa/) because a summer project that I am involved. I need to use it together with anaconda (store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/), I already installed Anaconda and apparently it is working. When I type: conda --version I got the expected answer. conda 3.5.2 If I tried to import numpy or scipy with python or simple type f2py there are no errors. So far so good. But when I tried to install this program sudo python setup.py install I got these errors: running install running build sh: 1: f2py: not found cp: cannot stat ‘mrcwaf.so’: No such file or directory running build_py running install_lib running install_egg_info Removing /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mrcwa-20080820.egg-info Writing /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mrcwa-20080820.egg-info Obs: I am trying to use intel fortran 64-bits and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. So I was checking f2py and tried to execute the program hello world f2py -c -m hello hello.f from here: cens.ioc.ee/projects/f2py2e/index.html#usage and I had some problems too: running build running config_cc unifing config_cc, config, build_clib, build_ext, build commands --compiler options running config_fc unifing config_fc, config, build_clib, build_ext, build commands --fcompiler options running build_src build_src building extension "hello" sources f2py options: [] f2py:> /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.c creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 Reading fortran codes... Reading file 'hello.f' (format:fix,strict) Post-processing... Block: hello Block: foo Post-processing (stage 2)... Building modules... Building module "hello"... Constructing wrapper function "foo"... foo(a) Wrote C/API module "hello" to file "/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 /hellomodule.c" adding '/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.c' to sources. adding '/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7' to include_dirs. copying /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/f2py/src/fortranobject.c -> /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 copying /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/f2py/src/fortranobject.h -> /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 build_src: building npy-pkg config files running build_ext customize UnixCCompiler customize UnixCCompiler using build_ext customize Gnu95FCompiler Could not locate executable gfortran Could not locate executable f95 customize IntelFCompiler Found executable /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort customize LaheyFCompiler Could not locate executable lf95 customize PGroupFCompiler Could not locate executable pgfortran customize AbsoftFCompiler Could not locate executable f90 Could not locate executable f77 customize NAGFCompiler customize VastFCompiler customize CompaqFCompiler Could not locate executable fort customize IntelItaniumFCompiler customize IntelEM64TFCompiler customize IntelEM64TFCompiler customize IntelEM64TFCompiler using build_ext building 'hello' extension compiling C sources C compiler: gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -g -O2 -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3 creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 compile options: '-I/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 -I/home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/home/felipe/anaconda/include/python2.7 -c' gcc: /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.c In file included from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarraytypes.h:1761:0, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarrayobject.h:17, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/arrayobject.h:4, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.h:13, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.c:17: /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/npy_1_7_deprecated_api.h:15:2: warning: #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " "#defining NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API NPY_1_7_API_VERSION" [-Wcpp] #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " \ ^ gcc: /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.c In file included from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarraytypes.h:1761:0, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarrayobject.h:17, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/arrayobject.h:4, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.h:13, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.c:2: /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/npy_1_7_deprecated_api.h:15:2: warning: #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " "#defining NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API NPY_1_7_API_VERSION" [-Wcpp] #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " \ ^ compiling Fortran sources Fortran f77 compiler: /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -FI -fPIC -xhost -openmp -fp-model strict Fortran f90 compiler: /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -FR -fPIC -xhost -openmp -fp-model strict Fortran fix compiler: /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -FI -fPIC -xhost -openmp -fp-model strict compile options: '-I/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 -I/home/felipe/.local /lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/home/felipe/anaconda/include/python2.7 -c' ifort:f77: hello.f /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -shared -shared -nofor_main /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.o /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3 /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.o /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/hello.o -L/home/felipe /anaconda/lib -lpython2.7 -o ./hello.so Removing build directory /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3 Please help me I am new in ubuntu and python. I really need this program, my advisor is waiting an answer. Thank you very much, Felipe Oliveira.

  Read the article

• Scripting out Contained Database Users

  - by Argenis

    Today’s blog post comes from a Twitter thread on which @SQLSoldier, @sqlstudent144 and @SQLTaiob were discussing the internals of contained database users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the concept of contained users within a SQL Server database (hit the link if you have not). In this article I’d like to show you that you can, indeed, script out contained database users and recreate them on another database, as either contained users or as good old fashioned logins/server principals as well. Why would this be useful? Well, because you would not need to know the password for the user in order to recreate it on another instance. I know there is a limited number of scenarios where this would be necessary, but nonetheless I figured I’d throw this blog post to show how it can be done. A more obscure use case: with the password hash (which I’m about to show you how to obtain) you could also crack the password using a utility like hashcat, as highlighted on this SQLServerCentral article. The Investigation SQL Server uses System Base Tables to save the password hashes of logins and contained database users. For logins it uses sys.sysxlgns, whereas for contained database users it leverages sys.sysowners. I’ll show you what I do to figure this stuff out: I create a login/contained user, and then I immediately browse the transaction log with, for example, fn_dblog. It’s pretty obvious that only two base tables touched by the operation are sys.sysxlgns, and also sys.sysprivs – the latter is used to track permissions. If I connect to the DAC on my instance, I can query for the password hash of this login I’ve just created. A few interesting things about this hash. This was taken on my laptop, and I happen to be running SQL Server 2014 RTM CU2, which is the latest public build of SQL Server 2014 as of time of writing. In 2008 R2 and prior versions (back to 2000), the password hashes would start with 0x0100. The reason why this changed is because starting with SQL Server 2012 password hashes are kept using a SHA512 algorithm, as opposed to SHA-1 (used since 2000) or Snefru (used in 6.5 and 7.0). SHA-1 is nowadays deemed unsafe and is very easy to crack. For regular SQL logins, this information is exposed through the sys.sql_logins catalog view, so there is really no need to connect to the DAC to grab an SID/password hash pair. For contained database users, there is (currently) no method of obtaining SID or password hashes without connecting to the DAC. If we create a contained database user, this is what we get from the transaction log: Note that the System Base Table used in this case is sys.sysowners. sys.sysprivs is used as well, and again this is to track permissions. To query sys.sysowners, you would have to connect to the DAC, as I mentioned previously. And this is what you would get: There are other ways to figure out what SQL Server uses under the hood to store contained database user password hashes, like looking at the execution plan for a query to sys.dm_db_uncontained_entities (Thanks, Robert Davis!) SIDs, Logins, Contained Users, and Why You Care…Or Not. One of the reasons behind the existence of Contained Users was the concept of portability of databases: it is really painful to maintain Server Principals (Logins) synced across most shared-nothing SQL Server HA/DR technologies (Mirroring, Availability Groups, and Log Shipping). Often times you would need the Security Identifier (SID) of these logins to match across instances, and that meant that you had to fetch whatever SID was assigned to the login on the principal instance so you could recreate it on a secondary. With contained users you normally wouldn’t care about SIDs, as the users are always available (and synced, as long as synchronization takes place) across instances. Now you might be presented some particular requirement that might specify that SIDs synced between logins on certain instances and contained database users on other databases. How would you go about creating a contained database user with a specific SID? The answer is that you can’t do it directly, but there’s a little trick that would allow you to do it. Create a login with a specified SID and password hash, create a user for that server principal on a partially contained database, then migrate that user to contained using the system stored procedure sp_user_migrate_to_contained, then drop the login. CREATE LOGIN <login_name> WITH PASSWORD = <password_hash> HASHED, SID = <sid> ; GO USE <partially_contained_db>; GO CREATE USER <user_name> FROM LOGIN <login_name>; GO EXEC sp_migrate_user_to_contained @username = <user_name>, @rename = N’keep_name’, @disablelogin = N‘disable_login’; GO DROP LOGIN <login_name>; GO Here’s how this skeleton would look like in action: And now I have a contained user with a specified SID and password hash. In my example above, I renamed the user after migrated it to contained so that it is, hopefully, easier to understand. Enjoy!

  Read the article

• Performing a clean database creation using msbuild

  - by Robert May

  So I’m taking a break from writing about other Agile stuff for a post. :)  I’m still going to get back to the other subjects, but this is fun too. Something I’ve done quite a bit of is MSBuild and CI work.  I’m experimenting with ways to improve what I’ve done in the past, particularly around database CI. Today, I developed a mechanism for starting from scratch with your database.  By scratch, I mean blowing away the existing database and creating it again from a single command line call.  I’m a firm believer that developers should be able to get to a known clean state at the database level with a single command and that they should be operating off of their own isolated database to improve productivity.  These scripts will help that. Here’s how I did it.  First, we have to disconnect users.  I did so using the help of a script from sql server central.  Note that I’m using sqlcmd variable replacement. -- kills all the users in a particular database -- dlhatheway/3M, 11-Jun-2000 declare @arg_dbname sysname declare @a_spid smallint declare @msg varchar(255) declare @a_dbid int set @arg_dbname = '$(DatabaseName)' select @a_dbid = sdb.dbid from master..sysdatabases sdb where sdb.name = @arg_dbname declare db_users insensitive cursor for select sp.spid from master..sysprocesses sp where sp.dbid = @a_dbid open db_users fetch next from db_users into @a_spid while @@fetch_status = 0 begin select @msg = 'kill '+convert(char(5),@a_spid) print @msg execute (@msg) fetch next from db_users into @a_spid end close db_users deallocate db_users GO Once all users are booted from the database, we can commence with recreating the database.  I generated the script that is used to create a database from SQL Server management studio, so I’m only going to show the bits that weren’t generated that are important.  There are a bunch of Alter Database statements that aren’t shown. First, I had to find the default location of the database files in the install, since they can be in many different locations.  I used Method 1 from a technet blog and then modified it a bit to do what I needed to do.  I ended up using dynamic SQL because for the life of me, I couldn’t get the “Filename” property to not return an error when I used anything besides a string.  I’m dropping the database first, if it exists.  Here’s the code:   IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM [master].[sys].[databases] WHERE [name] = N'$(DatabaseName)') BEGIN drop database $(DatabaseName) END; go IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM [master].[sys].[databases] WHERE [name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath') BEGIN DROP DATABASE zzTempDBForDefaultPath END; -- Create temp database. Because no options are given, the default data and --- log path locations are used CREATE DATABASE zzTempDBForDefaultPath; DECLARE @Default_Data_Path VARCHAR(512), @Default_Log_Path VARCHAR(512); --Get the default data path SELECT @Default_Data_Path = ( SELECT LEFT(physical_name,LEN(physical_name)-CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(physical_name))+1) FROM sys.master_files mf INNER JOIN sys.[databases] d ON mf.[database_id] = d.[database_id] WHERE d.[name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath' AND type = 0); --Get the default Log path SELECT @Default_Log_Path = ( SELECT LEFT(physical_name,LEN(physical_name)-CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(physical_name))+1) FROM sys.master_files mf INNER JOIN sys.[databases] d ON mf.[database_id] = d.[database_id] WHERE d.[name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath' AND type = 1); --Clean up. IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM [master].[sys].[databases] WHERE [name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath') BEGIN DROP DATABASE zzTempDBForDefaultPath END; DECLARE @SQL nvarchar(max) SET @SQL= 'CREATE DATABASE $(DatabaseName) ON PRIMARY ( NAME = N''$(DatabaseName)'', FILENAME = N''' + @Default_Data_Path + N'$(DatabaseName)' + '.mdf' + ''', SIZE = 2048KB , FILEGROWTH = 1024KB ) LOG ON ( NAME = N''$(DatabaseName)Log'', FILENAME = N''' + @Default_Log_Path + N'$(DatabaseName)' + '.ldf' + ''', SIZE = 1024KB , FILEGROWTH = 10%) ' exec (@SQL) GO And with that, your database is created.  You can run these scripts on any server and on any database name.  To do that, I created an MSBuild script that looks like this: <Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="4.0"> <PropertyGroup> <DatabaseName>MyDatabase</DatabaseName> <Server>localhost</Server> <SqlCmd>sqlcmd -v DatabaseName=$(DatabaseName) -S $(Server) -i </SqlCmd> <ScriptDirectory>.\Scripts</ScriptDirectory> </PropertyGroup> <Target Name ="Rebuild"> <ItemGroup> <ScriptFiles Include="$(ScriptDirectory)\*.sql"/> </ItemGroup> <Exec Command="$(SqlCmd) &quot;%(ScriptFiles.Identity)&quot;" ContinueOnError="false"/> </Target> </Project> Note that the Scripts directory is underneath the directory where I’m running the msbuild command and is relative to that directory.  Note also that the target is using batching to run each script in the scripts subdirectory, one after the other.  Each script is passed to the sqlcmd command line execution using the .Identity property on the itemgroup that is created.  This target file is saved in the file “Database.target”. To make this work, you’ll need msbuild in your path, and then run the following command: msbuild database.target /target:Rebuild Once you’ve got your virgin database setup, you’d then need to use a tool like dbdeploy.net to determine that it was a virgin database, build a change script based on the change scripts, and then you’d want another sqlcmd call to update the database with the appropriate scripts.  I’m doing that next, so I’ll post a blog update when I’ve got it working. Technorati Tags: MSBuild,Agile,CI,Database

  Read the article

• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

  Read the article

• Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

  And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014   Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

  Read the article

• Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

  Read the article

• Trace File Source Adapter

  The Trace File Source adapter is a useful addition to your SSIS toolbox.  It allows you to read 2005 and 2008 profiler traces stored as .trc files and read them into the Data Flow.  From there you can perform filtering and analysis using the power of SSIS. There is no need for a SQL Server connection this just uses the trace file. Example Usages Cache warming for SQL Server Analysis Services Reading the flight recorder Find out the longest running queries on a server Analyze statements for CPU, memory by user or some other criteria you choose Properties The Trace File Source adapter has two properties, both of which combine to control the source trace file that is read at runtime. SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 trace files are supported for both the Database Engine (SQL Server) and Analysis Services. The properties are managed by the Editor form or can be set directly from the Properties Grid in Visual Studio. Property Type Description AccessMode Enumeration This property determines how the Filename property is interpreted. The values available are: DirectInput Variable Filename String This property holds the path for trace file to load (*.trc). The value is either a full path, or the name of a variable which contains the full path to the trace file, depending on the AccessMode property. Trace Column Definition Hopefully the majority of you can skip this section entirely, but if you encounter some problems processing a trace file this may explain it and allow you to fix the problem. The component is built upon the trace management API provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately API methods that expose the schema of a trace file have known issues and are unreliable, put simply the data often differs from what was specified. To overcome these limitations the component uses  some simple XML files. These files enable the trace column data types and sizing attributes to be overridden. For example SQL Server Profiler or TMO generated structures define EventClass as an integer, but the real value is a string. TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml  - SQL Server Database Engine Trace Columns TraceDataColumnsAS.xml    - SQL Server Analysis Services Trace Columns The files can be found in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents folder, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml" If at runtime the component encounters a type conversion or sizing error it is most likely due to a discrepancy between the column definition as reported by the API and the actual value encountered. Whilst most common issues have already been fixed through these files we have implemented specific exception traps to direct you to the files to enable you to fix any further issues due to different usage or data scenarios that we have not tested. An example error that you can fix through these files is shown below. Buffer exception writing value to column 'Column Name'. The string value is 999 characters in length, the column is only 111. Columns can be overridden by the TraceDataColumns XML files in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml". Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trace File Source transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Please note that the Microsoft Trace classes used in the component are not supported on 64-bit platforms. To use the Trace File Source on a 64-bit host you need to ensure you have the 32-bit (x86) tools available, and the way you execute your package is setup to use them, please see the help topic 64-bit Considerations for Integration Services for more details. Downloads Trace Sources for SQL Server 2005 -- Trace Sources for SQL Server 2008 Version History SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.382 - SQL Sever 2008 public release. (9 Apr 2009) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.0.321 - SQL Server 2005 public release. (18 Nov 2008) -- Screenshots

  Read the article

• How to install iodbc in Ubuntu 12.10

  - by Hanynowsky

  I need to install the library iodbc (depends on libodbc2) in my Quantal machine. Yet there is creepy dependency problem. This was replaced somehow by unixodbc which I don't have, installed. Here is what I get when I try to install : sudo apt-get install libiodbc2-dev Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libiodbc2-dev : Depends: libiodbc2 (= 3.52.7-2build2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: iodbc (= 3.52.7-2build2) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I can tell that iodbc conflicts with odbcinst. Yet, I cannot remove it due to the following: sudo apt-get remove odbcinst Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: akonadi-backend-mysql calligra-l10n-engb kde-l10n-engb kdevelop-l10n kdevelop-php-docs-l10n kdevelop-php-l10n libakonadi-kabc4 libakonadi-notes4 libakonadiprotocolinternals1 libboost-thread1.49.0 libdmtx0a libgpgme++2 libkcalcore4 libkdgantt2 libkholidays4 libkimap4 libkldap4 libkmbox4 libkmime4 libkolabxml0 libkpgp4 libkresources4 libksieve4 libprison0 libqgpgme1 libqrencode3 libxerces-c3.1 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: akonadi-server k3b k3b-i18n katepart kde-runtime kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-plugins kdepim-runtime kdepim-strigi-plugins kdepimlibs-kio-plugins kdoctools kget kmag kmail kmix kmousetool ksystemlog kubuntu-debug-installer language-pack-kde-ar language-pack-kde-en libakonadi-calendar4 libakonadi-contact4 libakonadi-kcal4 libakonadi-kde4 libakonadi-kmime4 libcalendarsupport4 libincidenceeditorsng4 libk3b6 libkabc4 libkactivities-bin libkactivities6 libkalarmcal2 libkatepartinterfaces4 libkcal4 libkcalutils4 libkcddb4 libkde3support4 libkdepim4 libkdepimdbusinterfaces4 libkdewebkit5 libkemoticons4 libkfile4 libkgapi0 libkhtml5 libkio5 libkleo4 libkmanagesieve4 libkmediaplayer4 libknewstuff3-4 libknotifyconfig4 libkolab0 libkonq-common libkonq5abi1 libkontactinterface4 libkparts4 libkpimidentities4 libkpimtextedit4 libkpimutils4 libkprintutils4 libksieveui4 libktexteditor4 libktnef4 libktorrent4 libkworkspace4abi2 libkxmlrpcclient4 libmailcommon4 libmailimporter4 libmailtransport4 libmessagecomposer4 libmessagecore4 libmessagelist4 libmessageviewer4 libmicroblog4 libnepomuk4 libnepomukcore4abi1 libnepomukquery4a libnepomuksync4 libnepomukutils4 libplasma3 libsoprano4 libtemplateparser4 libvirtodbc0 nepomuk-core odbcinst odbcinst1debian2 plasma-scriptengine-javascript qapt-batch soprano-daemon virtuoso-minimal 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 89 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 126 MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Other info: Why do the "iodbc" and "libmyodbc" packages conflict with each other? The root problem is that I need to use a new feature introduced in the latest MySQL Workbench builds (DB Migration) which uses odbc for that matter. Here is what Mysql doc says about it : Linux The Migration Wizard uses iODBC as a driver manager for all of its ODBC connections in Linux. This may give you some troubles because most Linux distributions provide ODBC drivers compiled against unixODBC. This is another driver manager not supported by MySQL Workbench so you won’t be able to use those drivers unless you compile them against iODBC. Here’s what you should do. Make sure that you have iODBC installed. If you are using Debian, Ubuntu or another Debian based distro, type this command in your terminal: $ sudo apt-get install iodbc libiodbc2-dev libpq-dev libssl-dev For RPM based distros (RedHat, Fedora, etc.) type this command instead of the previous one: $ sudo yum install iodbc iodbc-dev libpqxx-devel openssl-devel Now we need to install the PostgreSQL ODBC drivers. Download the psqlODBC source tarball from here. Use the latest version available for download. As of this writing the latest version corresponds to the file psqlodbc-09.01.0200.tar.gz. Extract this tarball to a directory in your hard drive and open a terminal and cd into that directory. Type this in the terminal window: $ ./configure --with-iodbc --enable-pthreads $ make $ sudo make install Verify that you have the file psqlodbcw.so in the /usr/local/lib directory. This package seems to pose the problem probably: dpkg -s odbcinst1debian2 Package: odbcinst1debian2 Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: libs Installed-Size: 241 Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]> Architecture: amd64 Multi-Arch: same Source: unixodbc Version: 2.2.14p2-5ubuntu4 Replaces: unixodbc (<< 2.1.1-2) Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libltdl7 (>= 2.4.2), odbcinst Pre-Depends: multiarch-support Breaks: libiodbc2, libmyodbc (<< 5.1.6-2), odbc-postgresql (<< 1:09.00.0310-1.1), tdsodbc (<< 0.82-8) Conflicts: odbcinst1, odbcinst1debian1 Description: Support library for accessing odbc ini files This package contains the libodbcinst library from unixodbc, a library used by ODBC drivers for reading their configuration settings from /etc/odbc.ini and ~/.odbc.ini. . Also contained in this package are the driver setup plugins, which describe the features supported by individual ODBC drivers. Homepage: http://www.unixodbc.org/ Original-Maintainer: Steve Langasek <[email protected]> I have no broken packages:

  Read the article

• Basic shadow mapping fails on NVIDIA card?

  - by James

  Recently I switched from an AMD Radeon HD 6870 card to an (MSI) NVIDIA GTX 670 for performance reasons. I found however that my implementation of shadow mapping in all my applications failed. In a very simple shadow POC project the problem appears to be that the scene being drawn never results in a draw to the depth map and as a result the entire depth map is just infinity, 1.0 (Reading directly from the depth component after draw (glReadPixels) shows every pixel is infinity (1.0), replacing the depth comparison in the shader with a comparison of the depth from the shadow map with 1.0 shadows the entire scene, and writing random values to the depth map and then not calling glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT) results in a random noisy pattern on the scene elements - from which we can infer that the uploading of the depth texture and comparison within the shader are functioning perfectly.) Since the problem appears almost certainly to be in the depth render, this is the code for that: const int s_res = 1024; GLuint shadowMap_tex; GLuint shadowMap_prog; GLint sm_attr_coord3d; GLint sm_uniform_mvp; GLuint fbo_handle; GLuint renderBuffer; bool isMappingShad = false; //The scene consists of a plane with box above it GLfloat scene[] = { -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 1.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, -10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.5, 0.5, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, ... }; //Initialize the stuff used by the shadow map generator int initShadowMap() { //Initialize the shadowMap shader program if (create_program("shadow.v.glsl", "shadow.f.glsl", shadowMap_prog) != 1) return -1; const char* attribute_name = "coord3d"; sm_attr_coord3d = glGetAttribLocation(shadowMap_prog, attribute_name); if (sm_attr_coord3d == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind attribute %s\n", attribute_name); return 0; } const char* uniform_name = "mvp"; sm_uniform_mvp = glGetUniformLocation(shadowMap_prog, uniform_name); if (sm_uniform_mvp == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind uniform %s\n", uniform_name); return 0; } //Create a framebuffer glGenFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); //Create render buffer glGenRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); //Setup the shadow texture glGenTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, s_res, s_res, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, NULL); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); return 0; } //Delete stuff void dnitShadowMap() { //Delete everything glDeleteFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glDeleteRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glDeleteTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glDeleteProgram(shadowMap_prog); } int loadSMap() { //Bind MVP stuff glm::mat4 view = glm::lookAt(glm::vec3(10.0, 10.0, 5.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 1.0, 0.0)); glm::mat4 projection = glm::ortho<float>(-10,10,-8,8,-10,40); glm::mat4 mvp = projection * view; glm::mat4 biasMatrix( 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0 ); glm::mat4 lsMVP = biasMatrix * mvp; //Upload light source matrix to the main shader programs glUniformMatrix4fv(uniform_ls_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(lsMVP)); glUseProgram(shadowMap_prog); glUniformMatrix4fv(sm_uniform_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(mvp)); //Draw to the framebuffer (with depth buffer only draw) glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex, 0); glDrawBuffer(GL_NONE); glReadBuffer(GL_NONE); GLenum result = glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER); if (GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE != result) { printf("ERROR: Framebuffer is not complete.\n"); return -1; } //Draw shadow scene printf("Creating shadow buffers..\n"); int ticks = SDL_GetTicks(); glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); //Wipe the depth buffer glViewport(0, 0, s_res, s_res); isMappingShad = true; //DRAW glEnableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); glVertexAttribPointer(sm_attr_coord3d, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 5*4, scene); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 14*3); glDisableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); isMappingShad = false; glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); printf("Render Sbuf in %dms (GLerr: %d)\n", SDL_GetTicks() - ticks, glGetError()); return 0; } This is the full code for the POC shadow mapping project (C++) (Requires SDL 1.2, SDL-image 1.2, GLEW (1.5) and GLM development headers.) initShadowMap is called, followed by loadSMap, the scene is drawn from the camera POV and then dnitShadowMap is called. I followed this tutorial originally (Along with another more comprehensive tutorial which has disappeared as this guy re-configured his site but used to be here (404).) I've ensured that the scene is visible (as can be seen within the full project) to the light source (which uses an orthogonal projection matrix.) Shader utilities function fine in non-shadow-mapped projects. I should also note that at no point is the GL error state set. What am I doing wrong here and why did this not cause problems on my AMD card? (System: Ubuntu 12.04, Linux 3.2.0-49-generic, 64 bit, with the nvidia-experimental-310 driver package. All other games are functioning fine so it's most likely not a card/driver issue.)

  Read the article

• Justifiable Perks.

  - by Phil Factor

      I was once the director of a start-up IT Company, and had the task of recruiting a proportion of the management team. As my background was in IT management, I was rather more familiar with recruiting Geeks for technology jobs, but here, one of my early tasks was interviewing a Marketing Director.  The small group of financiers had suggested a rather strange Irishman called  Halleran.  From my background in City of London dealing-rooms, I was slightly unprepared for the experience of interviewing anyone wearing a pink suit. Many of my older City colleagues would have required resuscitation after seeing his white leather shoes. However, nobody will accuse me of prejudging an interviewee. After all, many Linux experts who I’ve come to rely on have appeared for interview dressed as hobbits. In fact, the interview went well, and we had even settled his salary.  I was somewhat unprepared for the coda.    ‘And I will need to be provided with a Ferrari  by the company.’    ‘Hmm. That seems reasonable.’    Initially, he looked startled, and then a slow smile of victory spread across his face.    ‘What colour would you like?’ I asked genially.    ‘It has to be red.’ He looked very earnest on this point.    ‘Fine. I have to go past Hamleys on the way home this evening, so I’ll pick one up then for you.’    ‘Er.. Hamley’s is a toyshop, not a Ferrari Dealership.’    I stared at him in bafflement for a few seconds. ‘You’re not seriously asking for a real Ferrari are you?’     ‘Well, yes. Not for my own sake, you understand. I’d much prefer a simple run-about, but my position demands it. How could I maintain the necessary status in the office without one? How could I do my job in marketing when my grey Datsun was all too visible in the car Park? It is a tool of the job.’    ‘Excuse me a moment, but I must confer with the MD’    I popped out to see Chris, the MD. ‘Chris, I’m interviewing a lunatic in a pink suit who is trying to demand that a Ferrari is a precondition of his employment. I tried the ‘misunderstanding trick’ but it didn’t faze him.’     ‘Sorry, Phil, but we’ve got to hire him. The VCs insist on it. You’ve got to think of something that doesn’t involve committing to the purchase of a Ferrari. Current funding barely covers the rent for the building.’    ‘OK boss. Leave it to me.’    On return, I slapped O’Halleran’s file on the table with a genial, paternalistic smile. ‘Of course you should have a Ferrari. The only trouble is that it will require a justification document that can be presented to the board. I’m sure you’ll have no problem in preparing this document in the required format.’ The initial look of despair was quickly followed by a bland look of acquiescence. He had, earlier in the interview, argued with great eloquence his skill in preparing the tiresome documents that underpin the essential corporate and government deals that were vital to the success of this new enterprise. The justification of a Ferrari should be a doddle.     After the interview, Chris nervously asked how I’d fared.     ‘I think it is all solved.’    ‘… without promising a Ferrari, I hope.’    ‘Well, I did actually; on condition he justified it in writing.’    Chris issued a stream of invective. The strain of juggling the resources in an underfunded startup was beginning to show.    ‘Don’t worry. In the unlikely event of him coming back with the required document, I’ll give him mine.’    ‘Yours?’ He strode over to the window to stare down at the car park.    He needn’t have worried: I knew that his breed of marketing man could more easily lay an ostrich egg than to prepare a decent justification document. My Ferrari is still there at the back of my garage. Few know of the Ferrari cultivator, a simple inexpensive motorized device designed for the subsistence farmers of southern Italy. It is the very devil to start, but it creates a perfect tilth for the seedbed.

  Read the article

• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

  Read the article

• Monitoring Events in your BPEL Runtime - RSS Feeds?

  - by Ramkumar Menon

  @10g - It had been a while since I'd tried something different. so here's what I did this week!Whenever our Developers deployed processes to the BPEL runtime, or perhaps when a process gets turned off due to connectivity issues, or maybe someone retired a process, I needed to know. So here's what I did. Step 1: Downloaded Quartz libraries and went through the documentation to understand what it takes to schedule a recurring job. Step 2: Cranked out two components using Oracle JDeveloper. [Within a new Web Project] a) A simple Java Class named FeedUpdater that extends org.quartz.Job. All this class does is to connect to your BPEL Runtime [via opmn:ormi] and fetch all events that occured in the last "n" minutes. events? - If it doesn't ring a bell - its right there on the BPEL Console. If you click on "Administration > Process Log" - what you see are events.The API to retrieve the events is //get the locator reference for the domain you are interested in.Locator l = .... //Predicate to retrieve events for last "n" minutesWhereCondition wc = new WhereCondition(...) //get all those events you needed.BPELProcessEvent[] events = l.listProcessEvents(wc); After you get all these events, write out these into an RSS Feed XML structure and stream it into a file that resides either in your Apache htdocs, or wherever it can be accessed via HTTP.You can read all about RSS 2.0 here. At a high level, here is how it looks like. <?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?><rss version="2.0">  <channel>    <title>Live Updates from the Development Environment</title>    <link>http://soadev.myserver.com/feeds/</link>    <description>Live Updates from the Development Environment</description>    <lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:03:00 PST</lastBuildDate>    <language>en-us</language>    <ttl>1</ttl>    <item>      <guid>1290213724692</guid>      <title>Process compiled</title>      <link>http://soadev.myserver.com/BPELConsole/mdm_product/administration.jsp?mode=processLog&amp;processName=&amp;dn=all&amp;eventType=all&amp;eventDate=600&amp;Filter=++Filter++</link>      <pubDate>Fri Nov 19 00:00:37 PST 2010</pubDate>      <description>SendPurchaseOrderRequestService: 3.0 Time : Fri Nov 19 00:00:37                   PST 2010</description>    </item>   ...... </channel> </rss> For writing ut XML content, read through Oracle XML Parser APIs - [search around for oracle.xml.parser.v2] b) Now that my "Job" was done, my job was half done. Next, I wrote up a simple Scheduler Servlet that schedules the above "Job" class to be executed ever "n" minutes. It is very straight forward. Here is the primary section of the code.           try {        Scheduler sched = StdSchedulerFactory.getDefaultScheduler();         //get n and make a trigger that executes every "n" seconds        Trigger trigger = TriggerUtils.makeSecondlyTrigger(n);        trigger.setName("feedTrigger" + System.currentTimeMillis());        trigger.setGroup("feedGroup");                JobDetail job = new JobDetail("SOA_Feed" + System.currentTimeMillis(), "feedGroup", FeedUpdater.class);        sched.scheduleJob(job,trigger);         }catch(Exception ex) {            ex.printStackTrace();            throw new ServletException(ex.getMessage());        } Look up the Quartz API and documentation. It will make this look much simpler.   Now that both components were ready, I packaged the Application into a war file and deployed it onto my Application Server. When the servlet initialized, the "n" second schedule was set/initialized. From then on, the servlet kept populating the RSS Feed file. I just ensured that my "Job" code keeps only 30 latest events within it, so that the feed file is small and under control. [a few kbs]   Next I opened up the feed xml on my browser - It requested a subscription - and Here I was - watching new deployments/life cycle events all popping up on my browser toolbar every 5 (actually n)  minutes!   Well, you could do it on a browser/reader of your choice - or perhaps read them like you read an email on your thunderbird!.      

  Read the article

• The clock hands of the buffer cache

  - by Tony Davis

  Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Generally, I remain immune to any twinge of interest in the bowels of SQL Server, reasoning that there are certain things that I don't and shouldn't need to know about SQL Server in order to use it successfully. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'. Back at the office, I succumbed to a moment of weakness and opened up Google. He wasn't lying. SQL Server maintains various memory buffers, or caches. For example, the plan cache stores recently-used execution plans. The data cache in the buffer pool stores frequently-used pages, ensuring that they may be read from memory rather than via expensive physical disk reads. These memory stores are classic LRU (Least Recently Updated) buffers, meaning that, for example, the least frequently used pages in the data cache become candidates for eviction (after first writing the page to disk if it has changed since being read into the cache). SQL Server clearly needs some mechanism to track which pages are candidates for being cleared out of a given cache, when it is getting too large, and it is this mechanism that is somewhat more labyrinthine than I previously imagined. Each page that is loaded into the cache has a counter, a miniature "wristwatch", which records how recently it was last used. This wristwatch gets reset to "present time", each time a page gets updated and then as the page 'ages' it clicks down towards zero, at which point the page can be removed from the cache. But what is SQL Server is suffering memory pressure and urgently needs to free up more space than is represented by zero-counter pages (or plans etc.)? This is where our 'clock hands' come in. Each cache has associated with it a "memory clock". Like most conventional clocks, it has two hands; one "external" clock hand, and one "internal". Slava Oks is very particular in stressing that these names have "nothing to do with the equivalent types of memory pressure". He's right, but the names do, in that peculiar Microsoft tradition, seem designed to confuse. The hands do relate to memory pressure; the cache "eviction policy" is determined by both global and local memory pressures on SQL Server. The "external" clock hand responds to global memory pressure, in other words pressure on SQL Server to reduce the size of its memory caches as a whole. Global memory pressure – which just to confuse things further seems sometimes to be referred to as physical memory pressure – can be either external (from the OS) or internal (from the process itself, e.g. due to limited virtual address space). The internal clock hand responds to local memory pressure, in other words the need to reduce the size of a single, specific cache. So, for example, if a particular cache, such as the plan cache, reaches a defined "pressure limit" the internal clock hand will start to turn and a memory sweep will be performed on that cache in order to remove plans from the memory store. During each sweep of the hands, the usage counter on the cache entry is reduced in value, effectively moving its "last used" time to further in the past (in effect, setting back the wrist watch on the page a couple of hours) and increasing the likelihood that it can be aged out of the cache. There is even a special Dynamic Management View, sys.dm_os_memory_cache_clock_hands, which allows you to interrogate the passage of the clock hands. Frequently turning hands equates to excessive memory pressure, which will lead to performance problems. Two hours later, I emerged from this rather frightening journey into the heart of SQL Server memory management, fascinated but still unsure if I'd learned anything that I'd put to any practical use. However, I certainly began to agree that there is something almost Tolkeinian in the language of the deep recesses of SQL Server. Cheers, Tony.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435  | Next Page >