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• SQL SERVER – DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  Have you ever faced situation where something does not work and when you try to go and fix it – you like fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this is exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story of yesterday I want to state it candidly that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. One of the my DBA friend who always used my performance tuning script yesterday sent me email asking following question - “Every time I want to retrieve OS related information in SQL Server – I used DMV sys.dm_os_sys_info. I just upgraded my SQL Server edition from 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 RC0 and it suddenly stopped working. Well, this is not the production server so the issue is not big yet but eventually I need to resolve this error. Any suggestion?” The funny thing was original email was very long but it did not talk about what is the exact error beside the query is not working. I think this is the disadvantage of being too friendly on email sometime. Well, never the less, I quickly looked at the DMV on my SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 RC0 version. To my surprise I found out that there were few columns which are renamed in SQL Server 2012 RC0. Usually when people see breaking changes they do not like it but when I see these changes I was happy as new names were meaningful and additionally their new conversion is much more practical and useful. Here are the columns previous names - Previous Column Name New Column Name physical_memory_in_bytes physical_memory_kb bpool_commit_target committed_target_kb bpool_visible visible_target_kb virtual_memory_in_bytes virtual_memory_kb bpool_commited committed_kb If you read it carefully you will notice that new columns now display few results in the KB whereas earlier result was in bytes. When I see the results in bytes I always get confused as I could not guess what exactly it will convert to. I like to see results in kb and I am glad that new columns are now displaying the results in the kb. I sent the details of the new columns to my friend and ask him to check the columns used in application. From my comment he quickly realized why he was facing error and fixed it immediately. Overall – all was well at the end and I learned something new. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• ScrollyFox Provides Automated Page Scrolling in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you read a high amount of content each day on the web but get tired of manually scrolling through everything? Now you can set up relaxed pace auto-scrolling in Firefox with the ScrollyFox extension. Note: You may occasionally encounter a website where the extension will not work. This may be due to the particular website’s coding. Using ScrollyFox Once you have the extension installed you may want to have a quick look at the preferences. The default scroll speed is set at “50” and the reverse scrolling setting is enabled. You can easily adjust the settings for speed to suit your needs. Note: For our examples we left the reverse scrolling setting enabled. By default the extension is disabled at first and the status bar button will have a faded coloration. You can see what the button looks like once activated…notice the small arrow type buttons on the right side. In our first example you can see the webpage auto-scrolling in a downward direction. Having reached the bottom it automatically started scrolling back towards the top. Visiting the How-To Geek website you can see that the extension was already working as the page was finishing loading. Going up! Conclusion While this extension may not be for everyone, it can be useful for those who have heavy reading and/or very long articles to read. Links Download the ScrollyFox extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing Firefox Scrolling Problems with Dell Synaptics TouchpadQuick Hits: 11 Firefox Tab How-TosDisable That Irritating AutoScroll Feature in FirefoxEnjoy Customizable Smooth Scrolling in Firefox with SmoothWheelQuick Tip: Disable Firefox Tab Scrolling 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox

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• PeopleSoft HCM @ OHUG 11: Enter the Matrix

  - by Jay Zuckert

  The PeopleSoft HCM team is back from a very busy and exciting OHUG conference in Orlando. The packed, standing-room only PeopleSoft HCM Roadmap keynote was the highlight of the conference for many attendees and the reviews are in : PeopleSoft rocked the house ! Great demonstration of products in the keynote. Best keynote in a long time, and fun. Engaging and entertaining, great demonstration of capabilities. Message received loud and clear, PeopleSoft applications are here to stay.  PeopleSoft has a real vision moving forward. Real-time polls using mobile texting were cutting edge.                          Tracy Martin (as Trinity) and other members of the PeopleSoft HCM team presented a ‘must-see’ Matrix-themed session while dressed as movie characters. The keynote highlighted planned HCM capabilities for Matrix administration and future organization visualization enhancements. The team also previewed the planned Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary.                           Following the keynote, some of the cast posed for photo opportunities at the OHUG booth in the exhibition hall. As you can imagine, they received some interesting looks walking by the other vendor booths. The PeopleSoft HCM team also presented numerous other OHUG sessions covering PeopleSoft Talent Management, Compensation, HR HelpDesk, Payroll, Global HCM Practices, Time & Labor, Absence Management, and Benefits. All of those presentations are available from the OHUG site at www.ohug.org. When not in one of the well-attended PeopleSoft HCM sessions, conference attendees filled the Oracle booth in the exhibition hall to see live product demonstrations. True to their PeopleSoft roots, some of the PeopleSoft HCM team played as hard as they worked in Orlando and enjoyed the OHUG Appreciation event along with customers at the Hard Rock. We are already busy planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2011 and prepping sessions our PeopleSoft HCM customers are sure to like. We hope to see you there in San Francisco from Oct. 2-6. To learn more about OpenWorld or to register, click here.

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• SQL SERVER – Identify Numbers of Non Clustered Index on Tables for Entire Database

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the script which will give you numbers of non clustered indexes on any table in entire database. SELECT COUNT(i.TYPE) NoOfIndex, [schema_name] = s.name, table_name = o.name FROM sys.indexes i INNER JOIN sys.objects o ON i.[object_id] = o.[object_id] INNER JOIN sys.schemas s ON o.[schema_id] = s.[schema_id] WHERE o.TYPE IN ('U') AND i.TYPE = 2 GROUP BY s.name, o.name ORDER BY schema_name, table_name Here is the small story behind why this script was needed. I recently went to meet my friend in his office and he introduced me to his colleague in office as someone who is an expert in SQL Server Indexing. I politely said I am yet learning about Indexing and have a long way to go. My friend’s colleague right away said – he had a suggestion for me with related to Index. According to him he was looking for a script which will count all the non clustered on all the tables in the database and he was not able to find that on SQLAuthority.com. I was a bit surprised as I really do not remember all the details about what I have written so far. I quickly pull up my phone and tried to look for the script on my custom search engine and he was correct. I never wrote a script which will count all the non clustered indexes on tables in the whole database. Excessive indexing is not recommended in general. If you have too many indexes it will definitely negatively affect your performance. The above query will quickly give you details of numbers of indexes on tables on your entire database. You can quickly glance and use the numbers as reference. Please note that the number of the index is not a indication of bad indexes. There is a lot of wisdom I can write here but that is not the scope of this blog post. There are many different rules with Indexes and many different scenarios. For example – a table which is heap (no clustered index) is often not recommended on OLTP workload (here is the blog post to identify them), drop unused indexes with careful observation (here is the script for it), identify missing indexes and after careful testing add them (here is the script for it). Even though I have given few links here it is just the tip of the iceberg. If you follow only above four advices your ship may still sink. Those who wants to learn the subject in depth can watch the videos here after logging in. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• You do not need a separate SQL Server license for a Standby or Passive server - this Microsoft White Paper explains all

  - by tonyrogerson

  If you were in any doubt at all that you need to license Standby / Passive Failover servers then the White Paper “Do Not Pay Too Much for Your Database Licensing” will settle those doubts. I’ve had debate before people thinking you can only have a single instance as a standby machine, that’s just wrong; it would mean you could have a scenario where you had a 2 node active/passive cluster with database mirroring and log shipping (a total of 4 SQL Server instances) – in that set up you only need to buy one physical license so long as the standby nodes have the same or less physical processors (cores are irrelevant). So next time your supplier suggests you need a license for your standby box tell them you don’t and educate them by pointing them to the white paper. For clarity I’ve copied the extract below from the White Paper. Extract from “Do Not Pay Too Much for Your Database Licensing” Standby Server Customers often implement standby server to make sure the application continues to function in case primary server fails. Standby server continuously receives updates from the primary server and will take over the role of primary server in case of failure in the primary server. Following are comparisons of how each vendor supports standby server licensing. SQL Server Customers does not need to license standby (or passive) server provided that the number of processors in the standby server is equal or less than those in the active server. Oracle DB Oracle requires customer to fully license both active and standby servers even though the standby server is essentially idle most of the time. IBM DB2 IBM licensing on standby server is quite complicated and is different for every editions of DB2. For Enterprise Edition, a minimum of 100 PVUs or 25 Authorized User is needed to license standby server.   The following graph compares prices based on a database application with two processors (dual-core) and 25 users with one standby server. [chart snipped]  Note   All prices are based on newest Intel Xeon Nehalem processor database pricing for purchases within the United States and are in United States dollars. Pricing is based on information available on vendor Web sites for Enterprise Edition. Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 25 users (CALs) x $164 / CAL + $8,592 / Server = $12,692 (no need to license standby server) Oracle Enterprise Edition (base license without options) Named User Plus minimum (25 Named Users Plus per Core) = 25 x 2 = 50 Named Users Plus x $950 / Named Users Plus x 2 servers = $95,000 IBM DB2 Enterprise Edition (base license without feature pack) Need to purchase 125 Authorized User (400 PVUs/100 PVUs = 4 X 25 = 100 Authorized User + 25 Authorized Users for standby server) = 125 Authorized Users x $1,040 / Authorized Users = $130,000  

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• What micro web-framework has the lowest overhead but includes templating

  - by Simon Martin

  I want to rewrite a simple small (10 page) website and besides a contact form it could be written in pure html. It is currently built with classic asp and Dreamweaver templates. The reason I'm not simply writing 10 html pages is that I want to keep the layout all in 1 place so would need either includes or a masterpage. I don't want to use Dreamweaver templates, or batch processing (like org-mode) because I want to be able to edit using notepad (or Visual Studio) because occasionally I might need to edit a file on the server (Go Daddy's IIS admin interface will let me edit text). I don't want to use ASP.NET MVC or WebForms (which I use in my day job) because I don't need all the overhead they bring with them when essentially I'm serving up 9 static files, 1 contact form and 1 list of clubs (that I aim to use jQuery to filter). The shared hosting package I have on Go Daddy seems to take a long time to spin up when serving aspx files. Currently the clubs page is driven from an MS SQL database that I try to keep up to date by manually checking the dojo locator on the main HQ pages and editing the entries myself, this is again way over the top. I aim to get a text file with the club details (probably in JSON or xml format) and use that as the source for the clubs page. There will need to be a bit of programming for this as the HQ site is unable to provide an extract / feed so something will have to scrape the site periodically to update my clubs persistence file. I'd like that to be automated - but I'm happy to have that triggered on a visit to the clubs page so I don't need to worry about scheduling a job. I would probably have a separate process that updates the persistence that has nothing to do with the rest of the site. Ideally I'd like to use Mercurial (or git) to publish, I know Bitbucket (and github) both serve static page sites so they wouldn't work in this scenario (dynamic pages and a contact form) but that's the model I'd like to use if there is such a thing. My requirements are: Simple templating system, 1 place to define header, footers, menu etc., that can be edited using just notepad. Very minimal / lightweight framework. I don't need a monster for 10 pages Must run either on IIS7 (shared Go Daddy Windows hosting) or other free host

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• Isometric screen to 3D world coordinates efficiently

  - by Justin

  Been having a difficult time transforming 2D screen coordinates to 3D isometric space. This is the situation where I am working in 3D but I have an orthographic camera. Then my camera is positioned at (100, 200, 100), Where the xz plane is flat and y is up and down. I've been able to get a sort of working solution, but I feel like there must be a better way. Here's what I'm doing: With my camera at (0, 1, 0) I can translate my screen coordinates directly to 3D coordinates by doing: mouse2D.z = (( event.clientX / window.innerWidth ) * 2 - 1) * -(window.innerWidth /2); mouse2D.x = (( event.clientY / window.innerHeight) * 2 + 1) * -(window.innerHeight); mouse2D.y = 0; Everything okay so far. Now when I change my camera back to (100, 200, 100) my 3D space has been rotated 45 degrees around the y axis and then rotated about 54 degrees around a vector Q that runs along the xz plane at a 45 degree angle between the positive z axis and the negative x axis. So what I do to find the point is first rotate my point by 45 degrees using a matrix around the y axis. Now I'm close. So then I rotate my point around the vector Q. But my point is closer to the origin than it should be, since the Y value is not 0 anymore. What I want is that after the rotation my Y value is 0. So now I exchange my X and Z coordinates of my rotated vector with the X and Z coordinates of my non-rotated vector. So basically I have my old vector but it's y value is at an appropriate rotated amount. Now I use another matrix to rotate my point around the vector Q in the opposite direction, and I end up with the point where I clicked. Is there a better way? I feel like I must be missing something. Also my method isn't completely accurate. I feel like it's within 5-10 coordinates of where I click, maybe because of rounding from many calculations. Sorry for such a long question.

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• Scrum and Team Consolidation

  - by John K. Hines

  I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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• Why does my MySQL remote-connection fail (VLAN)?

  - by Johannes Nielsen

  ubuntu-community! Again I have a problem with my special friend MySQL :D I have got two servers - a database-server and a web-server - who are connected via VLAN. Now I want the web-server to have remote access to the database-server's MySQL. So I created the user user in mysql.user. user's Host is xxx.yyy.zzz.9 which is the internal IP-address of the web-server. xxx.yyy.zzz.0 is the network. I also created user with Host % . As long as I use MySQL on the database-server logging in as user, everything works fine. But trying to log in as user from xxx.yyy.zzz.9 using mysql -h xxx.yyy.zzz.8 -u user -p (where xxx.yyy.zzz.8 is the database-server's internal IP), I get ERROR 2003 (HY000): Can't connect to MySQL server on 'xxx.yyy.zzz.8' (110) So I tried to activate Bind-Address in the my.cnf file. Well, if I use xxx.yyy.zzz.8, nothing changes. But if I try xxx.yyy.zzz.9 and try to restart MySQL, I get mysql stop/waiting start: Job failed to start I checked the log files and found - nothing. The database-server's MySQL doesn't even register, that the web-server tries to connect remotely. My idea is, that maybe I didn't configure the VLAN properley, even though I asked someone who actually knows such stuff and he told me, I did everything right. What I wrote into /etc/networking/interfaces is: #The VLAN auto eth1 iface eth1 inet static address xxx.yyy.zzz..8 netmask 255.255.255.0 network xxx.yyy.zzz.0 broadcast xxx.yyy.zzz.255 mtu 1500 ifconfig returns eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr xxxxxxxxxxxxxx inet addr:xxx.yyy.zzz.8 Bcast:xxx.yyy.zzz.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:241146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:9765 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:17825995 (17.8 MB) TX bytes:566602 (566.6 KB) Memory:fb900000-fb920000 for the eth1, what is, what I configured. (This is for the database-server, the web-server looks similar). ethtool eth1 returns: Settings for eth1: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supported pause frame use: No Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised pause frame use: No Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 100Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on MDI-X: Unknown Supports Wake-on: d Wake-on: d Current message level: 0x00000003 (3) drv probe Link detected: yes (This is for the database-server, the web-server looks similar). Actually I think, everything is right, but it still doesn't work. Is there someone with an idea? EDIT: I commented ou Bind-Address in my.cnf after it didn't work.

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• Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Exaskeleton with Extreme Scale

  - by J Swaroop

  Re-posting Bruce Tierney's original post - albeit a day late: I reckon this is Oracle's most interesting launch this year. Enjoy! The World’s First Human Scale Body Surface (HSBS) Designed to Toughen Spineless Wimps April 1, 2012 Building on the success of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Exalytics, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Exaskeleton, toughening up spineless wimps across the globe through the introduction of extreme scalability over the human body leveraging a revolutionary new technology called Human Scale Body Surface (HSBS). First Customer Ship (FCS) was received by the little known and mostly unsuccessful superhero Awkwardman. After applying Oracle Exaskeleton with extreme scale, he has since rebranded himself as Aquaman. Said Aquaman, “I used to feel so helpless in my skin…now I feel like…well…a highly scaled Engineered System thanks to Oracle!” Thousand of meek and mild individuals eagerly lined up outside Oracle Corporation’s Redwood Shores office to purchase the new Oracle Exaskeleton, with the hope of finally gaining the spine they never had. Unfortunately for the individuals, a bully was spotted allegedly kicking the sand covering the beaches of Redwood Shores into the still spineless Exaskeleton hopefuls. Supporting Quotes “Industry analysts are inquiring if Oracle Exaskeleton is a radical departure from Oracle’s traditional enterprise focus into new markets”, said Oracle representative Sabrina Twich, “Oracle has extensive expertise in unified backbone solutions for application infrastructures…this is simply a new port to the human body combining our Business Intelligence (BI) and RDBC (Remote Direct Brain Cell) technologies.” “With this release of Oracle Exaskeleton, Oracle has redefined scalability. Software and hardware vendors had it all wrong” said the Director of Oracle Exaskeleton, “Scalability for hardware is like…um…you know…so scale-ful. No, wait…can I say that again? I didn’t get that right…Scalability is hardware-on-demand with public and private…hybrid clouds, no…<long pause>…Scalability for… nevermind, I don’t want to be in this stupid press release anyway” Releases An upcoming Oracle Exaskeleton service pack release will include a new datasheet with an extensive library of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as well as the introduction of more four-letter acronyms (FLAs) since technologies vendors have used up almost all of the 17,576 TLA permutations (TLAPs). About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. It would be an amazing coincidence if any of this is true in some secret Oracle lab, but I doubt it. Trademarks Really…you’re still reading this? Cool! Aquaman - First Customer Ship (FCS) - Oracle Exaskeleton

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• SQL SERVER – Introduction to CUME_DIST – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday post of Prox ‘n’ Funx. This is a very interesting subject. By the way Brad Schulz is my favorite guy when it is about blogging. I respect him as well learn a lot from him. Everybody is writing something new his subject, I decided to start SQL Server 2012 analytic functions series. SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function CUME_DIST(). This function provides cumulative distribution value. It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I will attempt small example to explain you this function. Instead of creating new table, I will be using AdventureWorks sample database as most of the developer uses that for experiment. Let us fun following query. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderQty, CUME_DIST() OVER(ORDER BY SalesOrderID) AS CDist FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY CDist DESC GO Above query will give us following result. Now let us understand what is the formula behind CUME_DIST and why the values in SalesOrderID = 43670 are 1. Let us take more example and be clear about why the values in SalesOrderID = 43667 are 0.5. Now let us enhence the same example and use PARTITION BY into the OVER clause and see the results. Run following query in SQL Server 2012. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderQty, ProductID, CUME_DIST() OVER(PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY ProductID ) AS CDist FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID DESC, CDist DESC GO Now let us see the result of this query. We are have changed the ORDER BY clause as well partitioning by SalesOrderID. You can see that CUME_DIST() function provides us different results. Additionally now we see value 1 multiple times. As we are using partitioning for each group of SalesOrderID we get the CUME_DIST() value. CUME_DIST() was long awaited Analytical function and I am glad to see it in SQL Server 2012. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Executable Resumes

  - by Liam McLennan

  Over the past twelve months I have been thinking a lot about executable specifications. Long considered the holy grail of agile software development, executable specifications means expressing a program’s functionality in a way that is both readable by the customer and computer verifiable in an automatic, repeatable way. With the current generation of BDD and ATDD tools executable specifications seem finally within the reach of a significant percentage of the development community. Lately, and partly as a result of my craftsmanship tour, I have decided that soon I am going to have to get a job (gasp!). As Dave Hoover describes in Apprenticeship Patters, “you … have mentors and kindred spirits that you meet with periodically, [but] when it comes to developing software, you work alone.” The time may have come where the only way for me to feel satisfied and enriched by my work is to seek out a work environment where I can work with people smarter and more knowledgeable than myself. Having been on both sides of the interview desk many times I know how difficult and unreliable the process can be. Therefore, I am proposing the idea of executable resumes. As a journeyman programmer looking for a fruitful work environment I plan to write an application that demonstrates my understanding of the state of the art. Potential employers can download, view and execute my executable resume and judge wether my aesthetic sensibility matches their own. The concept of the executable resume is based upon the following assertion: A line of code answers a thousand interview questions Asking people about their experiences and skills is not a direct way of assessing their value to your organisation. Often it simple assesses their ability to mislead an interviewer. An executable resume demonstrates: The highest quality code that the person is able to produce. That the person is sufficiently motivated to produce something of value in their own time. That the person loves their craft. The idea of publishing a program to demonstrate a developer’s skills comes from Rob Conery, who suggested that each developer should build their own blog engine since it is the public representation of their level of mastery. Rob said: Luke had to build his own lightsaber – geeks should have to build their own blogs. And that should be their resume. In honour of Rob’s inspiration I plan to build a blog engine as my executable resume. While it is true that the world does not need another blog engine it is as good a project as any, it is a well understood domain, and I have not found an existing blog engine that I like. Executable resumes fit well with the software craftsmanship metaphor. It is not difficult to imagine that under the guild system master craftsmen may have accepted journeymen based on the quality of the work they had produced in the past. We now understand that when it comes to the functionality of an application that code is the final arbiter. Why not apply the same rule to hiring?

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• Computer Visionaries 2014 Kinect Hackathon

  - by T

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tburger/archive/2014/08/08/computer-visionaries-2014-kinect-hackathon.aspxA big thank you to Computer Vision Dallas and Microsoft for putting together the Computer Visionaries 2014 Kinect Hackathon that took place July 18th and 19th 2014.  Our team had a great time and learned a lot from the Kinect MVP's and Microsoft team.  The Dallas Entrepreneur Center was a fantastic venue. In total, 114 people showed up to form 15 teams. Burger ITS & Friends team members with Ben Lower:  Shawn Weisfeld, Teresa Burger, Robert Burger, Harold Pulcher, Taylor Woolley, Cori Drew (not pictured), and Katlyn Drew (not pictured) We arrived Friday after a long day of work/driving.  Originally, our idea was to make a learning game for kids.  It was intended to be multi-simultaneous players dragging and dropping tiles into a canvas area for kids around 5 years old. We quickly learned that we were limited to two simultaneous players. After working on the game for the rest of the evening and into the next morning we decided that a fast multi-player game with hand gestures was not going to happen without going beyond what was provided with the API. If we were going to have something to show, it was time to switch gears. The next idea on the table was the Photo Anywhere Kiosk. The user can use voice and hand gestures to pick a place they would like to be.  After the user says a place (or anything they want) and then the word "search", the app uses Bing to display a bunch of images for him/her to choose from. With the use of hand gesture (grab and slide to move back and forth and push/pull to select an image) the user can get the perfect image to pose with. I couldn't get a snippet with the hand but when a the app is in use, a hand shows up to cue the user to use their hand to control it's movement. Once they chose an image, we use the Kinect background removal feature to super impose the user on that image. When they are in the perfect position, they say "save" to save the image. Currently, the image is saved in the images folder on the users account but there are many possibilities such as emailing it, posting to social media, etc.. The competition was great and we were honored to be recognized for third place. Other related posts: http://jasongfox.com/computer-visionaries-2014-incredible-success/ A couple of us are continuing to work on the kid's game and are going to make it a Windows 8 multi-player game without Kinect functionality. Stay tuned for more updates.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 11, 2010 -- #836

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Roboblob, Laurent Bugnion, Timmy Kokke, Michael Sync(-2-), Victor Gaudioso, and Bill Reiss. Brought to you from a tiny table in my no-tell-motelTM in 'Vegas AKA "cheaper than anywhere else" and the WiFi is free and smokin'... From SilverlightCream.com: Sync your Silverlight out-of-browser application data without service but with Dropbox Rénald Nollet is in good company (Walt Ritscher) because he's demo'ing synching OOB apps with dropbox. Unit Testable WCF Web Services in MVVM and Silverlight 4 Roboblob is discussing calling WCF Web Services from a Silverlight MVVM app... something he's been avoiding up to now. Good long code and text-filled article, with the project to download. Using commands with ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in Windows Phone 7 I almost missed this post by Laurent Bugnion, on how to get around the problem of not being able to attach commands to the ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in WP7. He gets around it with (gasp) code behind :) Introducing jLight – Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery. Oh boy... if you haven't been using jQuery yet, this should get it going for you... Timmy Kokke has produced jLight which brings jQuery into Silverlight for ease of DOM interaction... and it's on CodePlex! Test-Driven Development in Windows Phone7 – Part 1: Unit Testing with Silverlight for Phone7 Michael Sync's starting a series on TDD with Silverlight on WP7. Great tutorial and all the code is available. Tip: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” Error in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Michael Sync also has a tip up for the resolution of an error we've all seen in all sorts of development, but now in WP7, and the workaround is deceptively simple. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Create Gradients Victor Gaudioso has a new video tutorial up for creating gradients in Expression Blend... don't fumble around in Blend... learn from the master! Space Rocks game step 8: Hyperspace Bill Reiss is up to episode 8 in his Silverlight game series now... this latest is on Hyperspace ... don'cha wish you could just do that? My trip to 'Vegas would have been a lot faster :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• What does your Python development workbench look like?

  - by Fabian Fagerholm

  First, a scene-setter to this question: Several questions on this site have to do with selection and comparison of Python IDEs. (The top one currently is What IDE to use for Python). In the answers you can see that many Python programmers use simple text editors, many use sophisticated text editors, and many use a variety of what I would call "actual" integrated development environments – a single program in which all development is done: managing project files, interfacing with a version control system, writing code, refactoring code, making build configurations, writing and executing tests, "drawing" GUIs, and so on. Through its GUI, an IDE supports different kinds of workflows to accomplish different tasks during the journey of writing a program or making changes to an existing one. The exact features vary, but a good IDE has sensible workflows and automates things to let the programmer concentrate on the creative parts of writing software. The non-IDE way of writing large programs relies on a collection of tools that are typically single-purpose; they do "one thing well" as per the Unix philosophy. This "non-integrated development environment" can be thought of as a workbench, supported by the OS and generic interaction through a text or graphical shell. The programmer creates workflows in their mind (or in a wiki?), automates parts and builds a personal workbench, often gradually and as experience accumulates. The learning curve is often steeper than with an IDE, but those who have taken the time to do this can often claim deeper understanding of their tools. (Whether they are better programmers is not part of this question.) With advanced editor-platforms like Emacs, the pieces can be integrated into a whole, while with simpler editors like gedit or TextMate, the shell/terminal is typically the "command center" to drive the workbench. Sometimes people extend an existing IDE to suit their needs. What does your Python development workbench look like? What workflows have you developed and how do they work? For the first question, please give the main "driving" program – the one that you use to control the rest (Emacs, shell, etc.) the "small tools" -- the programs you reach for when doing different tasks For the second question, please describe what the goal of the workflow is (eg. "set up a new project" or "doing initial code design" or "adding a feature" or "executing tests") what steps are in the workflow and what commands you run for each step (eg. in the shell or in Emacs) Also, please describe the context of your work: do you write small one-off scripts, do you do web development (with what framework?), do you write data-munching applications (what kind of data and for what purpose), do you do scientific computing, desktop apps, or something else? Note: A good answer addresses the perspectives above – it doesn't just list a bunch of tools. It will typically be a long answer, not a short one, and will take some thinking to produce; maybe even observing yourself working.

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• ASP.Net or WPF(C#)?

  - by Rachel

  Our team is divided on this and I wanted to get some third-party opinions. We are building an application and cannot decide if we want to use .Net WPF Desktop Application with a WCF server, or ASP.Net web app using jQuery. I thought I'd ask the question here, with some specs, and see what the pros/cons of using either side would be. I have my own favorite and feel I am biased. Ideally we want to build the initial release of the software as fast as we can, then slow down and take time to build in the additional features/components we want later on. Above all we want the software to be fast. Users go through records all day long and delays in loading records or refreshing screens kills their productivity. Application Details: I'm estimating around 100 different screens for initial version, with plans for a lot of additional screens being added on later after the initial release. We are looking to use two-way communication for reminder and event systems Currently has to support around 100 users, although we've been told to allow for growth up to 500 users We have multiple locations Items to consider (maybe not initially in some cases but in future releases): Room for additional components to be added after initial release (there are a lot of of these... perhaps work here than the initial application) Keyboard navigation Performance is a must Production Speed to initial version Low maintenance overhead Future support Softphone/Scanner integration Our Developers: We have 1 programmer who has been learning WPF the past few months and was the one who suggested we use WPF for this. We have a 2nd programmer who is familiar with ASP.Net and who may help with the project in the future, although he will not be working on it much up until the initial release since his time is spent maintaining our current software. There is me, who has worked with both and am comfortable in either We have an outside company doing the project management, and they are an ASP.Net company. We plan on hiring 1-2 others, however we need to know what direction we are going in first Environment: General users are on Windows 2003 server with Terminal Services. They connect using WYSE thin-clients over an RDP connection. Admin staff has their own PCs with XP or higher. Users are allowed to specify their own resolution although they are limited to using IE as the web browser. Other locations connects to our network over a MPLS connection Based on that, what would you choose and why? I am asking here instead of SO because I am looking for opinions and not answers

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• AIIM, Oracle and Keste - Talking Social Business in LA

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great event today in Los Angeles - AIIM, Oracle and Keste presented on how organizations are making social business work. Atle Skjekkeland of AIIM presented How Social Business Is Driving Innovation. Atle talked about a number of fascinating points, such as how answers to questions come from unexpected sources. Atle cited the fact that 38% of organizations get half or more of answers from unexpected sources, which speaks to the wisdom of the crowds and how people are benefiting from open communications tools to get answers to their questions. He also had a number of hilarious examples of companies that don't get it. If Comcast were to go to YouTube and search Comcast, they would see the number one hit after their paid ad is a video of one of their technicians asleep on a customer's couch. Seems when he called the office for support he was put on hold so long he fell asleep. Dan O'Leary and Atle Skjekkeland After Atle's presentation I presented on Solving the Innovation Challenge with Oracle WebCenter. Atle had talked about McKinsey's research titled The Rise Of The Networked Enterprise: Web 2.0 Finds Its Payday. I brought in some new McKinsey research that built on that article. The new article is How Social Technologies Are Extending The Organization. A survey of 4,200 Global Executives brought three conclusions for the future: Boundaries among employees, vendors and customers will blur Employee teams will self-organize Data-driven decisions will rise These three items were themes that repeated through the day as we went through examples of what customers are doing today.  Next up was Vince Casarez of Keste. Vince was scheduled to profile one customer, but in an incredible 3 for 1 deal, Vince profiled Alcatel-Lucent, Qualcomm, and NetApp. Each of these implementations had content consolidation elements, as well as user engagement requirements that Keste was able to address with Oracle WebCenter. Vince Casarez of Keste And we had a couple of good tweets worth reprinting here. danieloleary Daniel O'Leary Learning about user engagement and social platforms from @bdirking #AIIM LA and @oracle event pic.twitter.com/1aNcLEUs danieloleary Daniel O'Leary Users want to be able to share data and activity streams, work at organizations that embrace social via @bdirking skjekkeland Atle Skjekkeland RT @danieloleary: Learning about user engagement and social platforms from @bdirking #AIIM LA and @oracle event pic.twitter.com/EWRYpvJa danieloleary Daniel O'Leary Thanks again to @bdirking for an amazing event in LA today, really impressed with the completeness of web center JimLundy Jim Lundy @ @danieloleary @bdirking yes, it is looking good - Web Center shadrachwhite Shadrach White @ @bdirking @heybenito I heard the #AIIM event in LA was a hit We had some great conversations through they day, many thanks to everyone who joined in. We look forward to continuing the conversation - thanks again to everyone who attended!

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• Step Away From That Computer! You’re Not Qualified to Use It!

  - by Michael Sorens

  Most things tend to come with warnings and careful instructions these days, but sadly not one of the most ubiquitous appliances of all, your computer. If a chainsaw is missing its instructions, you’re well advised not to use it, even though you probably know roughly how it’s supposed to work. I confess, there are days when I feel the same way about computers. Long ago, during the renaissance of the computer age, it was possible to know everything about computers. But today, it is challenging to be fully knowledgeable even in one small area, and most people aren’t as savvy as they like to think. And, if I may borrow from Edwin Abbott Abbott’s classic Flatland, that includes me. And you. Need an example of what I mean? Take a look at almost any recent month’s batch of Windows updates. Just two quick questions for you: Do you need all of those updates? Is it safe to install all of those updates? I do software design and development for a living on Windows and the .NET platform, but I will be quite candid: I often have little clue what the heck some of those updates are going to do or why they are needed. So, if you do not know why they are needed or what they do, how do you know if they are safe? Of course, one can sidestep both questions by accepting Microsoft’s recommended Windows Update setting of “install updates automatically”. That leads you to infer that you need all of them (which is not always the case) and, more significantly, that they are safe. Quite safe. Ah, lest reality intrude upon such a pretty picture! Sadly, there is no such thing as risk-free software installation, and payloads from Windows Update are no exception. Earlier this year, a Windows Secrets Patch Watch article touted this headline: Keep this troublesome kernel update on hold. It discusses KB 2862330, a security update originally published more than 4 months earlier, and yet the article still recommends not installing it! Most people simply do not have the time, resources, or interest, to go about figuring out which updates to install or postpone or skip for safety reasons. Windows Secrets Patch Watch is the best service I have encountered for getting advice, but it is still no panacea and using the service effectively requires a degree of computer literacy that I still think is beyond a good number of people. Which brings us full circle: Step Away From That Computer! You’re Not Qualified to Use It!

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• Ghost team foundation build controllers

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Quite often after an upgrade there are things left over. Most of the time they are easy to delete, but sometimes it takes a little effort. Even rarer are those times when something just will not go away no matter how much you try. We have had a ghost team build controller hanging around for a while now, and it had defeated my best efforts to get rid of it. The build controller was from our old TFS server from before our TFS 2010 beta 2 upgrade and was really starting to annoy me. Every time I try to delete it I get the message: Controller cannot be deleted because there are build in progress -Manage Build Controller dialog   Figure: Deleting a ghost controller does not always work. I ended up checking all of our 172 Team Projects for the build that was queued, but did not find anything. Jim Lamb pointed me to the “tbl_BuildQueue” table in the team Project Collection database and sure enough there was the nasty little beggar. Figure: The ghost build was easily spotted Adam Cogan asked me: “Why did you suspect this one?” Well, there are a number of things that led me to suspect it: QueueId is very low: Look at the other items, they are in the thousands not single digits ControllerId: I know there is only one legitimate controller, and I am assuming that 6 relates to “zzUnicorn” DefinitionId: This is a very low number and I looked it up in “tbl_BuildDefinition” and it did not exist QueueTime: As we did not upgrade to TFS 2010 until late 2009 a date of 2008 for a queued build is very suspect Status: A status of 2 means that it is still queued This build must have been queued long ago when we were using TFS 2008, probably a beta, and it never got cleaned up. As controllers are new in TFS 2010 it would have created the “zzUnicorn” controller to handle any build servers that already exist. I had previously deleted the Agent, but leaving the controller just looks untidy. Now that the ghost build has been identified there are two options: Delete the row I would not recommend ever deleting anything from the database to achieve something in TFS. It is really not supported. Set the Status to cancelled (Recommended) This is the best option as TFS will then clean it up itself So I set the Status of this build to 2 (cancelled) and sure enough it disappeared after a couple of minutes and I was then able to then delete the “zzUnicorn” controller. Figure: Almost completely clean Now all I have to do is get rid of that untidy “zzBunyip” agent, but that will require rewriting one of our build scripts which will have to wait for now.   Technorati Tags: ALM,TFBS,TFS 2010

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• Oracle and Eloqua Welcome Compendium’s Content Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Yesterday, Oracle announced its acquisition of Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing provider that helps companies plan, produce and deliver engaging content across multiple channels throughout their customers' lifecycle. Why? Because every part of the above paragraph speaks to where modern marketing is and where it’s headed. Customers have now been empowered, thanks to the Internet and particularly social, with access to almost limitless amounts of information about companies and products. This includes the especially influential voices of friends and objective acquaintances that have experience with the product or brand. With mobile, this info is available instantly in the palm of their hand. All of this research and influence mind you, is taking place long before a prospect will ever engage with the brand itself or one of its sales reps. So how does a brand effectively insert itself into these conversations and this flow of the customer journey? Now, more than ever, marketers must deliver relevant and engaging content across multiple channels and throughout the entire customer journey to be useful, helpful, and influential. Compendium has a data-driven content marketing platform that lines up relevant content with customer data and personas so brands can accelerate the conversion of prospects. Now think about combining that with the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud, part of Oracle's comprehensive CX solution. Marketers will be able to automate content delivery across channels by aligning persona-based content with customers' digital body language. Better customer engagement, improved sales lead quality, better return on marketing investment, and higher customer loyalty. Now we’re talking. Does data-driven content marketing have an impact? Compendium customer CVENT is a SaaS company specializing in meetings management tech. They wanted to increase leads & ad performance on their blog and dramatically increase their content. They also wanted to manage the creation, workflow, promotion and distribution of that content. With Compendium, CVENT created over 9,000 content elements, and sales-ready leads grew 325%. So Oracle Eloqua helps you target audiences, know buyers, and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns. Compendium lets you plan, publish, manage and measure content across content types and channels. Now kick it up yet another notch with Oracle’s Analytics, Big Data and Social solutions, and you’re using your marketing dollars to reach the right people in the right place at the right time with the right content. And as if that weren’t enough, your customers will love you for it. @mikestiles

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• Presentations & Training material OFM Summer Camps & Impressions & Feedback

  - by JuergenKress

  Thanks to all attendees who invested their time and utilized the opportunity to attend the Summer Camps! Due to high demand of our most of the trainings, we had a long waiting list with more numbers of partners who are keen to attend it. We would like to give our special thanks to all trainers, who delivered excellent workshops! Most of the presentations and course material have been posted on our SOA Community Workspace and WebLogic Community Workspace. You can access the content only if you are a registered community member. To register for the SOA Community please click here. You can register for the WebLogic Community here. To find out the first impressions of the event please visit our Facebook pages: www.facebook.com/WebLogicCommunity & www.facebook.com/soacommunity or Picasa Album Thanks for the excellent blog posts from AMIS Technology Blog & Middleware by Link Consulting. Let us know if you published a twitter blog on @soacommunity & @wlscommunity. We will be pleased to publish it in our Newsletters. WebLogic Course Quotes “Oracle trainings are the best” - Pedro Neto Novobas “Excellent training, well organized” - Pedro Antunh, Capgemini “This course dives you into Oracle WebLogic giving you a quick start on benefiting from Fusion Apps” - Leonardo Fernandes, Outsystems Additional Quotes “Thanks a lot again for organizing such a great and informative Summer Camp. Both training and networking were organized very professionally. I have gained tons of very useful Info, which will definitely help to increase quality of our future projects.” - Daniel Fasko fss-group.com “I didn’t get the chance yesterday to thank you for a most enjoyable and thoroughly educational time I had in Munich over the last few days.” - Jeroen Bakker Ordina “Just to congratulate you on a great event, not only today but also in the previous days of training. As we know, a very good organization and, as a native Portuguese that knows Lisbon very good, a nice choice of places to visit. Looking forward to come again next year.” Pedro Miguel Neto, Novobase. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: OFM Summer Camps,eduction,training,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Keep website and webservices warm with zero coding

  - by oazabir

  If you want to keep your websites or webservices warm and save user from seeing the long warm up time after an application pool recycle, or IIS restart or new code deployment or even windows restart, you can use the tinyget command line tool, that comes with IIS Resource Kit, to hit the site and services and keep them warm. Here’s how: First get tinyget from here. Download and install the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit on some PC. Then copy the tinyget.exe from “c:\program files…\IIS 6.0 ResourceKit\Tools'\tinyget” to the server where your IIS 6.0 or IIS 7 is running. Then create a batch file that will hit the pages and webservices. Something like this: SET TINYGET=C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Resources\TinyGet\tinyget.exe"%TINYGET%" -srv:dropthings.omaralzabir.com -uri:http://dropthings.omaralzabir.com/ -status:200"%TINYGET%" -srv:dropthings.omaralzabir.com -uri:http://dropthings.omaralzabir.com/WidgetService.asmx?WSDL - status:200 First I am hitting the homepage to keep the webpage warm. Then I am hitting the webservice URL with ?WSDL parameter, which allows ASP.NET to compile the service if not already compiled and walk through all the operations and reflect on them and thus loading all related DLLs into memory and reducing the warmup time when hit. Tinyget gets the servers name or IP in the –srv parameter and then the actual URI in the –uri. I have specified what’s the HTTP response code to expect in –status parameter. It ensures the site is alive and is returning http 200 code. Besides just warming up a site, you can do some load test on the site. Tinyget can run in multiple threads and run loops to hit some URL. You can literally blow up a site with commands like this: "%TINYGET%" -threads:30 -loop:100 -srv:google.com -uri:http://www.google.com/ -status:200 Tinyget is also pretty useful to run automated tests. You can record http posts in a text file and then use it to make http posts to some page. Then you can put matching clause to check for certain string in the output to ensure the correct response is given. Thus with some simple command line commands, you can warm up, do some transactions, validate the site is giving off correct response as well as run a load test to ensure the server performing well. Very cheap way to get a lot done.

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• Sqlite &amp; Entity Framework 4

  - by Dane Morgridge

  I have been working on a few client app projects in my spare time that need to persist small amounts of data and have been looking for an easy to use embedded database.  I really like db4o but I'm not wanting to open source this particular project so it was not an option.  Then I remembered that there was an ADO.NET provider for sqlite.  Being a fan of sqlite in general, I downloaded it and gave it an install.  The installer added tooling support for both Visual Studio 2008 & 2010 which is nice because I am working almost exclusively in 2010 at the moment.  I noticed that the provider also had support for Entity Framework, but not specifically v4.  I created a database using the tools that get installed with Visual Studio and all seemed to work fine.  I went on to create an Entity Framework context and selected the sqlite database and to my surprise it worked with out any problems.  The model showed up just like it would for any database and so I started to write a little code to test and then.. BAM!.. Exception. "Mixed mode assembly is built against version 'v2.0.50727' of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information." A quick bit of searching on Bing found the answer.  To get it working, you need to include the following code in your web.config file: 1: <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> 2: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" /> 3: </startup> And then everything magically works.  Entity Framework 4 features worked, like lazy loading and even the POCO templates worked.  The only thing that didn't work was the model first development.  The SQL generated was for SQL Server and of course wouldn't run on sqlite without some modifications. The only other oddity I found was that in order to have an auto incrementing id, you have to use the full integer data type for sqlite; a regular int won't do the trick.  This translates to an Int64, or a long when working with it in Entity Framework.  Not a big deal, but something you need to be aware of. All in all, I am quite impressed with the Entity Framework support I found with sqlite.  I wasn't really expecting much at all, and I was pleasantly surprised. I downloaded the ADO.NET sqlite provider from http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com/.  If you want to use an embedded database with Entity Framework, give it a look.  It will be well worth your time.

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• Interpolation using a sprite's previous frame and current frame

  - by user22241

  Overview I'm currently using a method which has been pointed out to me is extrapolation rather than interolation. As a result, I'm also now looking into the possibility of using another method which is based on a sprite's position at it's last (rendered) frame and it's current one. Assuming an interpolation value of 0.5 this is, (visually), how I understand it should affect my sprite's position.... This is how I'm obtaining an inerpolation value: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // Set/re-set loop back to 0 to start counting again loops=0; while(System.currentTimeMillis() > nextGameTick && loops < maxFrameskip) { SceneManager.getInstance().getCurrentScene().updateLogic(); nextGameTick += skipTicks; timeCorrection += (1000d / ticksPerSecond) % 1; nextGameTick += timeCorrection; timeCorrection %= 1; loops++; tics++; } interpolation = (float)(System.currentTimeMillis() + skipTicks - nextGameTick) / (float)skipTicks; render(interpolation); } I am then applying it like so (in my rendering call): render(float interpolation) { spriteScreenX = (spriteScreenX - spritePreviousX) * interpolation + spritePreviousX; spritePreviousX = spriteScreenX; // update and store this for next time } Results This unfortunately does nothing to smooth the movement of my sprite. It's pretty much the same as without the interpolation code. I can't get my head around how this is supposed to work and I honestly can't find any decent resources which explain this in any detail. My understanding of extrapolation is that when we arrive at the rendering call, we calculate the time between the last update call and the render call, and then adjust the sprite's position to reflect this time (moving the sprite forward) - And yet, this (Interpolation) is moving the sprite back, so how can this produce smooth results? Any advise on this would be very much appreciated. Edit I've implemented the code from OriginalDaemon's answer like so: @Override public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { newTime = System.currentTimeMillis()*0.001; frameTime = newTime - currentTime; if ( frameTime > (dt*25)) frameTime = (dt*25); currentTime = newTime; accumulator += frameTime; while ( accumulator >= dt ) { SceneManager.getInstance().getCurrentScene().updateLogic(); previousState = currentState; t += dt; accumulator -= dt; } interpolation = (float) (accumulator / dt); render(); } Interpolation values are now being produced between 0 and 1 as expected (similar to how they were in my original loop) - however, the results are the same as my original loop (my original loop allowed frames to skip if they took too long to draw which I think this loop is also doing). I appear to have made a mistake in my previous logging, it is logging as I would expect it to (interpolated position does appear to be inbetween the previous and current positions) - however, the sprites are most definitely choppy when the render() skipping happens.

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• Kickstarter "last minute cold feet"

  - by mm24

  today I scheduled the publication of a video on kickstarter requesting approximately 5.000 $ in order to complete the iPhone shooter game I started 1 year ago after quitting my job. I invested more than 20.000$ in the game so far (for artwork, music, legal and accountant expenses) and I am now getting cold feet about my decision of publishing the video. The game is "nearly finished", in other words: the game mechanics are working but I still have some bugs to fix. Once I will have finished this (I hope will take me 1 or 2 weeks) I plan to start working on the actual level balancing (e.g. deciding the order of appearence of enemies for each level and balancing the number of hitpoints and strenght of bullets that the enemies have). Reasons for not publishing the video are: fear that the concept can be copied easily: the game is a shooter game set in a different environment (its a pretty cool one, believe me :)) and I am worried that someone might copy* the idea (I know, its the usual "I am worried story.."). A shooter game is one of the easiest game to implement and hence there will be hundreds game developer able to copy it by just adapting their existing code and changing graphics (not as straightforward). It took me one year to develop this because I was inexperienced plus there are approximately 6/7 months of work from the illustrator and there are 8 unique music tracks composed. The soundtrack of the video is the soundtrack of the game wich is not yet published and has not been deposited to a music society. I did create legally valid timestamps for the tracks and I am considering uploading the album on iTunes before publishing the video so I can have a certain publication date. But overall I am a bit scared and worried because I have never done this before and even the simple act of publishing an album requires me to read a long contract from the "aggregator company") which, even if I do have contracts with the musicians do worry me as I am not a U.S. resident and I am not familiar with the U.S. law system Reasons for publishing the video are: I almost run out of money (but this is not a real reason as I should have enough for one more month of development time) ...I kind of need extra money as, even if I do have money for 1 month of development I do not have money for marketing and for other expenses (e.g. accountant) It will create a fan base I could get some useful feedback from a wider range of beta testers It might create some pre-release buzz in case some blogger or game magazine likes the concept Anyone has had similar experiences? Is there a real risk that someone will copy the concept and implement it in a couple of months? Will the Kickstarter campaing be a good pre-release exposure for the gmae? Any refrences of similar projects/situations? Is it realistic that someone like ROVIO will copy the idea straight away?

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