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• Where would a spam bot be located?

  - by Tim

  I have a hosted website using a free hosting service, I received an email this afternoon saying that I have been suspended because my account has been compromised. Basically, someone is using my email account to mass send spam. I've changed all the passwords and everything but when my Gmail pulls the emails from the host it's still downloading loads of spam messages that show like this: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host 198.91.80.251 [198.91.80.251]: 554 5.6.0 id=23634-03 - Rejected by MTA on relaying, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10030): 554 Error: This email address has lost rights to send email from the system ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ Return-path: <[email protected]> Received: from keenesystems.com ([66.135.33.211]:2370 helo=server211) by absolut.x10hosting.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id 1TGwSW-002hHe-Lc for [email protected]; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:44 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:43 -0500 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 3.9.9 (8.5.3-6) Subject: New staff members wanted at Auction It Online From: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] To: "Nadia Monti" <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <OUTLOOK-IDM-9aed7054-6a3e-e1a4-1d5c-3e73377652a6@server211> Date : 26 September 2012=0ATime : 13:35=0ASender : Dennise Halcomb Head = Office Manager of RJ Auction Drop-Off Int.=0A=0ANice to meet you Nadia M= onti=0A=0ARJ ADO Ltd., a USA based company, offers a significant amount = of goods worldwide for our customers on eBay and other auction venues. = Our company's main target is to provide a suitable and cost-effective se= rvice for any person, company or fundraising company. The main purpose o= f the administrative assistant / sales support representative is to cont= ribute to the sales force and add convenience to our cost-effective serv= ice dedicated to individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. O= ur HR department obtained your resume from one of the various job-orient= ed websites just to offer you this post.=0A=0AWorking Schedule: This is = a part time and home-based offer. You won't need to spend more than 3 ho= urs each day. Your =0Aschedule will be flexible.=0A=0ASalary: At the end= of the trial period (it lasts for 1 month) you will be paid 1,800 EUR. = With the average volume of clients your overall income will raise up to = 3,000 EUR per month. After the trial period is over your base salary wil= l grow up to 2,500 EUR per month, so you will earn 5% commission from th= e transactions completed.=0A=0AWhere?: Italy Wide. As it is a stay at ho= me position all the communication will be carried out via email and via = phone.=0A=0ARequirements: Access to the internet during the workday and = basic microsoft office skills are needed. Basic knowledge of English is = required (most of the contacts will be in English).=0A=0ACosts and Fees:= There are NO costs at any time for our employees. All fees related to t= his position are covered by the RJ ADO Co. Ltd..=0A=0AFurther Hiring Pro= cess: If you are interested in position we offer, please reply to this e= mail and send us the copy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AAfter re= viewing all of the received applications we will reply to successful app= licants only. Then we'll offer to these successful applicants a position= within our firm on a trial period basis for one month beginning from th= e date you sign a trial agreement. During this trial period you will rec= eive full guidance and support. Employees on a one monthly trial period = are evaluated at least one week prior to the end of their trial. During = the trial, your supervisor can recommend termination. At the end of the = trial period, the supervisor can offer continued employment, extension o= f trial period, or termination. After the trial period you may ask for m= ore hours or continue full-time.=0A=0AIf you are interested in this posi= tion, just reply to this email and send any questions you have and the c= opy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AThank You,=0AHR-Manager of RJ = ADO Co. Ltd.=0A=0APermission Settings=0AYou have been referred to RJ Auc= tion Drop-Off If you feel you received this email in error or do not wis= h to receive future messages, please reply to this message with "remove"= in the subject field. We will immediately update our database according= ly. =0AWe apologize for any inconvenience caused.=0A=0ARJ Auction Drop-O= ff Co. Ltd. I'm not aware of how this has happened. I'm not sure how anyone could have got hold of my password. It's a simple wordpress install, at some point recently my host went down and there was a fresh install of wordpress with default admin accounts, I have a feeling it could be something to do with this. My question is, even though I've changed all my passwords it's all still happening, is there annywhere in paticular this script would be stored on my host. I really can't deal with having my hosting account suspended and my email account sending all this spam.

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• Webcor Builders Coordinates Construction Schedules and Mitigates Potential Delays More Efficiently with Integrated Project Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} With more than 40 years of commercial construction experience, Webcor Builders is a leading builder of distinguished, high-profile projects, including high-rise condominiums and hotels, laboratories, healthcare centers, and public works projects. Webcor is also known for its award-winning concrete, interior construction, historic restoration, and seismic renovation work. The company has completed more than 50 million square feet of projects to date. Considering the variety and complexity of the construction projects Webcor undertakes, an integrated project management solution is critical to ensuring optimal efficiency and completing client projects on time and on budget. The company previously used a number of scheduling systems for its various building projects. These packages provided different levels of schedule detail and required schedulers, engineers, and other employees to learn multiple systems. From an IT cost and complexity perspective, the company had to manage multiple scheduling systems and pay for multiple sets of licenses. The company looked to standardize on an enterprise project management system, and selected Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. Webcor uses the solution’s advanced capabilities to schedule complex projects, analyze delays, model and propose multiple scenarios to demonstrate and mitigate delays and cost overruns, and process that information efficiently to deliver the scheduling precision that public and private projects require. In fact, the solution was instrumental in helping the company’s expansion into public sector projects during the recent economic downturn, and with Primavera P6 in place, it can deliver the precise schedule reporting required for large public projects. With Primavera P6 in place, the company could deliver the precise scheduling and milestone reporting capabilities required for large public projects. The solution is in managing the high-profile University of California – Berkeley Memorial Stadium project. Webcor was hired as construction manager and general contractor for the stadium renovation project, which is a fast-paced project located near the seismically active Hayward Fault Zone. Due to the University of California’s football schedule, meeting the Universities deadline for the coming season placed Webcor in a situation where risk awareness and early warnings of issues would be paramount. Webcor and the extended project team needed a solution that could instantly analyze alternate scenarios to mitigate potential delays; Primavera would deliver those answers.The team would also need to enable multiple stakeholders to use an internet-based platform to access the schedule from various locations, and model complicated sequencing requirements where swift decisions would be made to keep the project on track. The schedule is an integral part of Webcor’s construction management process for the stadium project. Rather than providing the client with the industry-standard monthly update, Webcor updates the critical path method (CPM) schedule on a weekly basis. The project team also reviews the schedule and updates weekly to confirm that progress and forecasted performance are accurate. Hired by the University for their ability to deliver in high risk environments The Webcor team was hit recently with a design supplement that could have added up to 70 days to the project. Using Oracle Primavera P6 the team sprung into action analyzing multiple “what if” scenarios to review mitigation means and methods.  Determined to make sure the Bears could take the field in the coming season the project team nearly eliminated the impact with their creative analysis in working the schedule. The total time from the issuance of the final design supplement to an agreed mitigation response was less than one week; leveraging the Oracle Primavera solution Webcor was able to deliver superior customer value With the ability to efficiently manage projects and schedules, Webcor can ensure it completes its projects on time and on budget, as well as inform clients about what changes to plans will mean in terms of delays and additional costs. Read the complete customer case study at :  http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/customersearch/webcor-builders-1-primavera-ss-1639886.html

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• Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

  - by charlie.mott

  I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined.  But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose?  Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type.  Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance.  Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works.  Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged.  But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there?  What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• Examine your readiness for managing Enterprise Private Cloud

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Cloud computing promises to deliver greater agility to meet demanding  business needs, operational efficiencies, and lower cost. However these promises cannot be realized and enterprises may not be able to get the best value out of their enterprise private cloud computing infrastructure without a comprehensive cloud management solution . Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Take this new self-assessment quiz that measures the readiness of your enterprise private cloud. It scores your readiness in the following areas and discover where and how you can improve to gain total cloud control over your enterprise private cloud. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Complete Cloud Lifecycle Solution Check if you are ready to manage all phases of the building, managing, and consuming an enterprise cloud. You will learn how Oracle can help build and manage a rich catalog of cloud services – whether it is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Database-as-a-Service, or Platform-as-a-Service, all from a single product. Integrated Cloud Stack Management Integrated management of the entire cloud stack – all the way from application to disk, is very important to eliminate the integration pains and costs that customers would have to otherwise incur by trying to create a cloud environment by integrating multiple point solutions. Business-Driven Clouds It is critical that an enterprise Cloud platform is not only able to run applications but also has deep business insight and visibility. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c enables creation of application-aware and business-driven clouds that has deep insight into applications, business services and transactions. As the leading providers of business applications and the middleware, we are able to offer you a cloud solution that is optimized for business services. Proactive Management Integration of the enterprise cloud infrastructure with support can allow cloud administrators to benefit from Automatic Service Requests (ASR), proactive patch recommendations, health checks and end-of-life advisory for all of the technology deployed within cloud. Learn more about solution for Enterprise Cloud and Cloud management by attending various sessions , demos and hand-on labs at Oracle Open World 2012 . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• LINQ and ArcObjects

  - by Marko Apfel

  Motivation LINQ (language integrated query) is a component of the Microsoft. NET Framework since version 3.5. It allows a SQL-like query to various data sources such as SQL, XML etc. Like SQL also LINQ to SQL provides a declarative notation of problem solving – i.e. you don’t need describe in detail how a task could be solved, you describe what to be solved at all. This frees the developer from error-prone iterator constructs. Ideally, of course, would be to access features with this way. Then this construct is conceivable: var largeFeatures = from feature in features where (feature.GetValue("SHAPE_Area").ToDouble() > 3000) select feature; or its equivalent as a lambda expression: var largeFeatures = features.Where(feature => (feature.GetValue("SHAPE_Area").ToDouble() > 3000)); This requires an appropriate provider, which manages the corresponding iterator logic. This is easier than you might think at first sight - you have to deliver only the desired entities as IEnumerable<IFeature>. LINQ automatically establishes a state machine in the background, whose execution is delayed (deferred execution) - when you are really request entities (foreach, Count (), ToList (), ..) an instantiation processing takes place, although it was already created at a completely different place. Especially in multiple iteration through entities in the first debuggings you are rubbing your eyes when the execution pointer jumps magically back in the iterator logic. Realization A very concise logic for constructing IEnumerable<IFeature> can be achieved by running through a IFeatureCursor. You return each feature via yield. For an easier usage I have put the logic in an extension method Getfeatures() for IFeatureClass: public static IEnumerable<IFeature> GetFeatures(this IFeatureClass featureClass, IQueryFilter queryFilter, RecyclingPolicy policy) { IFeatureCursor featureCursor = featureClass.Search(queryFilter, RecyclingPolicy.Recycle == policy); IFeature feature; while (null != (feature = featureCursor.NextFeature())) { yield return feature; } //this is skipped in unit tests with cursor-mock if (Marshal.IsComObject(featureCursor)) { Marshal.ReleaseComObject(featureCursor); } } So you can now easily generate the IEnumerable<IFeature>: IEnumerable<IFeature> features = _featureClass.GetFeatures(RecyclingPolicy.DoNotRecycle); You have to be careful with the recycling cursor. After a delayed execution in the same context it is not a good idea to re-iterated on the features. In this case only the content of the last (recycled) features is provided and all the features are the same in the second set. Therefore, this expression would be critical: largeFeatures.ToList(). ForEach(feature => Debug.WriteLine(feature.OID)); because ToList() iterates once through the list and so the the cursor was once moved through the features. So the extension method ForEach() always delivers the same feature. In such situations, you must not use a recycling cursor. Repeated executions of ForEach() is not a problem, because for every time the state machine is re-instantiated and thus the cursor runs again - that's the magic already mentioned above. Perspective Now you can also go one step further and realize your own implementation for the interface IEnumerable<IFeature>. This requires that only the method and property to access the enumerator have to be programmed. In the enumerator himself in the Reset() method you organize the re-executing of the search. This could be archived with an appropriate delegate in the constructor: new FeatureEnumerator<IFeatureclass>(_featureClass, featureClass => featureClass.Search(_filter, isRecyclingCursor)); which is called in Reset(): public void Reset() { _featureCursor = _resetCursor(_t); } In this manner, enumerators for completely different scenarios could be implemented, which are used on the client side completely identical like described above. Thus cursors, selection sets, etc. merge into a single matter and the reusability of code is increasing immensely. On top of that in automated unit tests an IEnumerable could be mocked very easily - a major step towards better software quality. Conclusion Nevertheless, caution should be exercised with these constructs in performance-relevant queries. Because of managing a state machine in the background, a lot of overhead is created. The processing costs additional time - about 20 to 100 percent. In addition, working without a recycling cursor is fast a performance gap. However declarative LINQ code is much more elegant, flawless and easy to maintain than manually iterating, compare and establish a list of results. The code size is reduced according to experience an average of 75 to 90 percent! So I like to wait a few milliseconds longer. As so often it has to be balanced between maintainability and performance - which for me is gaining in priority maintainability. In times of multi-core processors, the processing time of most business processes is anyway not dominated by code execution but by waiting for user input. Demo source code The source code for this prototype with several unit tests, you can download here: https://github.com/esride-apf/Linq2ArcObjects. .

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• Tech Talk: Managing Cloud Integration

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Cloud computing solutions are widely hailed as a way to reduce capital expenditures yet organizations are realizing they need to also consider all of the nuances of integrating cloud applications with existing information systems.Cloud integration, after all, has a direct impact on your costs, maintenance and upgrade efforts. Catch this conversation on Tech Talk with Oracle Vice President, Amit Zavery, to understand how Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a simple and consistent method to maintaining integration interfaces across disparate systems across cloud and on-premise applications. Simplify your IT infrastructure and seamlessly manage data and application integration across your applications with Oracle solutions. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} For other Fusion Middleware talks, subscribe to Fusion Middleware Radio today and visit us on oracle.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Photo courtesy: www.cloudtweaks.com

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• Using XA Transactions in Coherence-based Applications

  - by jpurdy

  While the costs of XA transactions are well known (e.g. increased data contention, higher latency, significant disk I/O for logging, availability challenges, etc.), in many cases they are the most attractive option for coordinating logical transactions across multiple resources. There are a few common approaches when integrating Coherence into applications via the use of an application server's transaction manager: Use of Coherence as a read-only cache, applying transactions to the underlying database (or any system of record) instead of the cache. Use of TransactionMap interface via the included resource adapter. Use of the new ACID transaction framework, introduced in Coherence 3.6.   Each of these may have significant drawbacks for certain workloads. Using Coherence as a read-only cache is the simplest option. In this approach, the application is responsible for managing both the database and the cache (either within the business logic or via application server hooks). This approach also tends to provide limited benefit for many workloads, particularly those workloads that either have queries (given the complexity of maintaining a fully cached data set in Coherence) or are not read-heavy (where the cost of managing the cache may outweigh the benefits of reading from it). All updates are made synchronously to the database, leaving it as both a source of latency as well as a potential bottleneck. This approach also prevents addressing "hot data" problems (when certain objects are updated by many concurrent transactions) since most database servers offer no facilities for explicitly controlling concurrent updates. Finally, this option tends to be a better fit for key-based access (rather than filter-based access such as queries) since this makes it easier to aggressively invalidate cache entries without worrying about when they will be reloaded. The advantage of this approach is that it allows strong data consistency as long as optimistic concurrency control is used to ensure that database updates are applied correctly regardless of whether the cache contains stale (or even dirty) data. Another benefit of this approach is that it avoids the limitations of Coherence's write-through caching implementation. TransactionMap is generally used when Coherence acts as system of record. TransactionMap is not generally compatible with write-through caching, so it will usually be either used to manage a standalone cache or when the cache is backed by a database via write-behind caching. TransactionMap has some restrictions that may limit its utility, the most significant being: The lock-based concurrency model is relatively inefficient and may introduce significant latency and contention. As an example, in a typical configuration, a transaction that updates 20 cache entries will require roughly 40ms just for lock management (assuming all locks are granted immediately, and excluding validation and writing which will require a similar amount of time). This may be partially mitigated by denormalizing (e.g. combining a parent object and its set of child objects into a single cache entry), at the cost of increasing false contention (e.g. transactions will conflict even when updating different child objects). If the client (application server JVM) fails during the commit phase, locks will be released immediately, and the transaction may be partially committed. In practice, this is usually not as bad as it may sound since the commit phase is usually very short (all locks having been previously acquired). Note that this vulnerability does not exist when a single NamedCache is used and all updates are confined to a single partition (generally implying the use of partition affinity). The unconventional TransactionMap API is cumbersome but manageable. Only a few methods are transactional, primarily get(), put() and remove(). The ACID transactions framework (accessed via the Connection class) provides atomicity guarantees by implementing the NamedCache interface, maintaining its own cache data and transaction logs inside a set of private partitioned caches. This feature may be used as either a local transactional resource or as logging XA resource. However, a lack of database integration precludes the use of this functionality for most applications. A side effect of this is that this feature has not seen significant adoption, meaning that any use of this is subject to the usual headaches associated with being an early adopter (greater chance of bugs and greater risk of hitting an unoptimized code path). As a result, for the moment, we generally recommend against using this feature. In summary, it is possible to use Coherence in XA-oriented applications, and several customers are doing this successfully, but it is not a core usage model for the product, so care should be taken before committing to this path. For most applications, the most robust solution is normally to use Coherence as a read-only cache of the underlying data resources, even if this prevents taking advantage of certain product features.

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• ASP.NET: Including JavaScript libraries conditionally from CDN

  - by DigiMortal

  When developing cloud applications it is still useful to build them so they can run also on local machine without network connection. One thing you use from CDN when in cloud and from app folder when not connected are common JavaScript libraries. In this posting I will show you how to add support for local and CDN script stores to your ASP.NET MVC web application. Our solution is simple. We will add new configuration setting to our web.config file (including cloud transform file of it) and new property to our web application. In master page where scripts are included we will include scripts from CDN conditionally. There is nothing complex, all changes we make are simple ones. 1. Adding new property to web application Although I am using ASP.NET MVC web application these modifications work also very well with ASP.NET Forms. Open Global.asax and add new static property to your application class. public static bool UseCdn {     get     {         var valueString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["useCdn"];         bool useCdn;           bool.TryParse(valueString, out useCdn);         return useCdn;     } } If you want less round-trips to configuration data you can keep some nullable boolean in your application class scope and load CDN setting first time it is asked. 2. Adding new configuration setting to web.config By default my application uses local scripts. Although my application runs on cloud I can do a lot of stuff without staging environment in cloud. So by default I don’t have costs on traffic when including scripts from application folders. <appSettings>   <add key="UseCdn" value="false" /> </appSettings> You can also set UseCdn value to true and change it to false when you are not connected to network. 3. Modifying web.config cloud transform I have special configuration for my solution that I use when deploying my web application to cloud. This configuration is called Cloud and transform for this configuration is located in web.cloud.config. To make application using CDN when deployed to cloud we need the following transform. <appSettings>   <add key="UseCdn"        value="true"        xdt:Transform="SetAttributes"        xdt:Locator="Match(key)" /> </appSettings> Now when you publish your application to cloud it uses CDN by default. 4. Including scripts in master pages The last thing we need to change is our master page. My solution is simple. I check if I have to include scripts from CDN and if it is true then I include scripts from there. Otherwise my scripts will be included from application folder. @if (MyWeb.MvcApplication.UseCdn) {     <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> } else {     <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> } Although here is only one script shown you can add all your scripts that are also available in some CDN in this if-else block. You are free to include scripts from different CDN services if you need. Conclusion As we saw it was very easy to modify our application to make it use CDN for JavaScript libraries in cloud and local scripts when run on local machine. We made only small changes to our application code, configuration and master pages to get different script sources supported. Our application is now more independent from external sources when we are working on it.

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• PriorityQueue update problems

  - by Bharat

  After going through a bunch of questions here on SO, I still have no idea what exactly is going wrong with my code and would appreciate some help. I'm trying to implement a priority queue based on f-costs for an A* algorithm, and while the algorithm works fine for short pathfinding distances, it seems to go wrong when there's an obstacle or when the distance between start and goal points is greater than about 30 squares (although sometimes it screws up for less too). while(!m_qOpenList.isEmpty()) { m_xCurrent=m_qOpenList.poll(); m_xCurrent.setBackground(Color.red); m_qClosedList.add(m_xCurrent); if(m_xCurrent.getStatus()==2) { System.out.println("Target Reached"); solved=true; break; } iX=m_xCurrent.getXCo(); iY=m_xCurrent.getYCo(); for(i=iX-1;i<=iX+1;i++) for(j=iY-1;j<=iY+1;j++) { if(i<0||j<0||i>m_iMazeX||j>m_iMazeX||(i==iX&&j==iY) || m_xNode[i][j].getStatus()==4|| m_qClosedList.contains(m_xNode[i][j])) continue; m_xNode[i][j].score(m_xCurrent,m_xGoal); m_qOpenList.add(m_xNode[i][j]); } } It's quite rudimentary as I'm just trying to get it to work for now. m_qOpenList is the PriorityQueue. The problem is that when I debug the program, at some point (near an obstacle), a Node with a fcost of say 84 has higher priority than a node with an fcost of 70. I am not attempting to modify the values once they're on the priority queue. You'll notice that I add at the end of the while loop (I read somewhere that the priorityqueue reorders itself when stuff is added to it), and poll right after that at the beginning. Status of 2 means the Node is the goal, and a status of 4 means that it is unwalkable. public int compareTo(Node o) { if(m_iF<o.m_iF) return -1; if(m_iF>o.m_iF) return 1; return 0; } And that's the compareTo function. Can you see a problem? =(

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• Zend Framework - Ruby on Rails has a screencast showing how to code a blog in 15 minutes. Does ZF ha

  - by Sootah

  Ruby on Rails has a screencast presentation they use to promote their framework that shows how to code a basic weblog system in 15 minutes with RoR. Does the Zend PHP Framework have a similar screencast/presentation/whatever demonstrating something similar? It doesn't have to be a blog specifically, but I would definitely like to find a presentation that shows some rapid application development using ZF. Where I'm coming from: I have been programming on and off for years now. I started out with QBASIC waaaaay back in the day making little programs (text adventure games, screensavers, simple little things). I then moved to C++ but never really did anything too impressive with it. Since then (probably 5 years or so now) I have started to use C# for my desktop development and PHP for my web development. I've made some pretty cool tools here and there, but am certainly not a professional programmer by any stretch of the term as it has always simply been a hobby of mine. Right now I have two major web applications that I will start work on shortly. (Like tomorrow, or later tonight ideally.. :) ) Both will be database-driven apps that will require user registration, the ability to manipulate data that is specific to their account (their posts, listings, user account details, etc), amongst other things. Currently I am evaluating different frameworks to help me develop these web apps more quickly. I've been looking at, and have heard good things about Ruby on Rails. Hulu and YellowPages.com using it is an obvious endorsement - Of course, I have heard about the scalability issues that it potentially has; but that shouldn't be an issue with what I am working on. I don't expect millions of users per day for either project. I am also seriously looking at the Zend Framework for my needs because I already have some experience with PHP. Ideally I would like to find a ZF screencast that shows an app being written quickly so that I have a roughly equal comparison between the two options I am exploring and can see first-hand how things get done in both. That said - I am not opposed to considering frameworks other than RoR or ZF. The only research I've done on the subject has been over the past couple of days so I am quite certain that there are other excellent options out there that I've not even looked at - or heard of. Of course, it'd be awesome if there is a rapid app dev presentation that I can watch for whatever else is suggested. So - Suggestions? Links to good screencasts that show rapid application development in other frameworks? Are there other PHP frameworks that I should be considering? (Ones that are easy to deploy would be ideal, so I don't have to purchase a dedicated server that I have full control over. I'd like to keep my hosting costs down assuming that it's reasonable) Thanks in advance! -Sootah

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• How to modularize a JSF/Facelets/Spring application with OSGi?

  - by lexicore

  I'm working with very large JSF/Facelets applications which use Spring for DI/bean management. My applications have modular structure and I'm currently looking for approaches to standardize the modularization. My goal is to compose a web application from a number of modules (possibly depending on each other). Each module may contain the following: Classes; Static resources (images, CSS, scripts); Facelet templates; Managed beans - Spring application contexts, with request, session and application-scoped beans (alternative is JSF managed beans); Servlet API stuff - servlets, filters, listeners (this is optional). What I'd like to avoid (almost at all costs) is the need to copy or extract module resources (like Facelets templates) to the WAR or to extend the web.xml for module's servlets, filters, etc. It must be enough to add the module (JAR, bundle, artifact, ...) to the web application (WEB-INF/lib, bundles, plugins, ...) to extend the web application with this module. Currently I solve this task with a custom modularization solution which is heavily based on using classpath resources: Special resources servlet serves static resources from classpath resources (JARs). Special Facelets resource resolver allows loading Facelet templates from classpath resources. Spring loads application contexts via the pattern classpath*:com/acme/foo/module/applicationContext.xml - this loads application contexts defined in module JARs. Finally, a pair of delegating servlets and filters delegate request processing to the servlets and filters configured in Spring application contexts from modules. Last days I read a lot about OSGi and I was considering, how (and if) I could use OSGi as a standardized modularization approach. I was thinking about how individual tasks could be solved with OSGi: Static resources - OSGi bundles which want to export static resources register a ResourceLoader instances with the bundle context. A central ResourceServlet uses these resource loaders to load resources from bundles. Facelet templates - similar to above, a central ResourceResolver uses services registered by bundles. Managed beans - I have no idea how to use an expression like #{myBean.property} if myBean is defined in one of the bundles. Servlet API stuff - use something like WebExtender/Pax Web to register servlets, filters and so on. My questions are: Am I inventing a bicycle here? Are there standard solutions for that? I've found a mentioning of Spring Slices but could not find much documentation about it. Do you think OSGi is the right technology for the described task? Is my sketch of OSGI application more or less correct? How should managed beans (especially request/session scope) be handled? I'd be generally graefult for your comments.

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• Swing: Scroll to bottom of JScrollPane, conditionally on current viewport location

  - by I82Much

  Hi all, I am attempting to mimic the functionality of Adium and most other chat clients I've seen, wherein the scrollbars advance to the bottom when new messages come in, but only if you're already there. In other words, if you've scrolled a few lines up and are reading, when a new message comes in it won't jump your position to the bottom of the screen; that would be annoying. But if you're scrolled to the bottom, the program rightly assumes that you want to see the most recent messages at all times, and so auto-scrolls accordingly. I have had a bear of a time trying to mimic this; the platform seems to fight this behavior at all costs. The best I can do is as follows: In constructor: JTextArea chatArea = new JTextArea(); JScrollPane chatAreaScrollPane = new JScrollPane(chatArea); // We will manually handle advancing chat window DefaultCaret caret = (DefaultCaret) chatArea.getCaret(); caret.setUpdatePolicy(DefaultCaret.NEVER_UPDATE); In method that handles new text coming in: boolean atBottom = isViewAtBottom(); // Append the text using styles etc to the chatArea if (atBottom) { scrollViewportToBottom(); } public boolean isAtBottom() { // Is the last line of text the last line of text visible? Adjustable sb = chatAreaScrollPane.getVerticalScrollBar(); int val = sb.getValue(); int lowest = val + sb.getVisibleAmount(); int maxVal = sb.getMaximum(); boolean atBottom = maxVal == lowest; return atBottom; } private void scrollToBottom() { chatArea.setCaretPosition(chatArea.getDocument().getLength()); } Now, this works, but it's janky and not ideal for two reasons. By setting the caret position, whatever selection the user may have in the chat area is erased. I can imagine this would be very irritating if he's attempting to copy/paste. Since the advancement of the scroll pane occurs after the text is inserted, there is a split second where the scrollbar is in the wrong position, and then it visually jumps towards the end. This is not ideal. Before you ask, yes I've read this blog post on Text Area Scrolling, but the default scroll to bottom behavior is not what I want. Other related (but to my mind, not completely helpful in this regard) questions: Setting scroll bar on a jscrollpane Making a JScrollPane automatically scroll all the way down. Any help in this regard would be very much appreciated.

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• Swing: Scroll to bottom of JScrollPane, conditional on current viewport location

  - by I82Much

  Hi all, I am attempting to mimic the functionality of Adium and most other chat clients I've seen, wherein the scrollbars advance to the bottom when new messages come in, but only if you're already there. In other words, if you've scrolled a few lines up and are reading, when a new message comes in it won't jump your position to the bottom of the screen; that would be annoying. But if you're scrolled to the bottom, the program rightly assumes that you want to see the most recent messages at all times, and so auto-scrolls accordingly. I have had a bear of a time trying to mimic this; the platform seems to fight this behavior at all costs. The best I can do is as follows: In constructor: JTextArea chatArea = new JTextArea(); JScrollPane chatAreaScrollPane = new JScrollPane(chatArea); // We will manually handle advancing chat window DefaultCaret caret = (DefaultCaret) chatArea.getCaret(); caret.setUpdatePolicy(DefaultCaret.NEVER_UPDATE); In method that handles new text coming in: boolean atBottom = isViewAtBottom(); // Append the text using styles etc to the chatArea if (atBottom) { scrollViewportToBottom(); } public boolean isAtBottom() { // Is the last line of text the last line of text visible? Adjustable sb = chatAreaScrollPane.getVerticalScrollBar(); int val = sb.getValue(); int lowest = val + sb.getVisibleAmount(); int maxVal = sb.getMaximum(); boolean atBottom = maxVal == lowest; return atBottom; } private void scrollToBottom() { chatArea.setCaretPosition(chatArea.getDocument().getLength()); } Now, this works, but it's janky and not ideal for two reasons. By setting the caret position, whatever selection the user may have in the chat area is erased. I can imagine this would be very irritating if he's attempting to copy/paste. Since the advancement of the scroll pane occurs after the text is inserted, there is a split second where the scrollbar is in the wrong position, and then it visually jumps towards the end. This is not ideal. Before you ask, yes I've read this blog post on Text Area Scrolling, but the default scroll to bottom behavior is not what I want. Other related (but to my mind, not completely helpful in this regard) questions: Setting scroll bar on a jscrollpane Making a JScrollPane automatically scroll all the way down. Any help in this regard would be very much appreciated.

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• What are the benefits of using ORM over XML Serialization/Deserialization?

  - by Tequila Jinx

  I've been reading about NHibernate and Microsoft's Entity Framework to perform Object Relational Mapping against my data access layer. I'm interested in the benefits of having an established framework to perform ORM, but I'm curious as to the performance costs of using it against standard XML Serialization and Deserialization. Right now, I develop stored procedures in Oracle and SQL Server that use XML Types for either input or output parameters and return or shred XML depending on need. I use a custom database command object that uses generics to deserialize the XML results into a specified serializable class. By using a combination of generics, xml (de)serialization and Microsoft's DAAB, I've got a process that's fairly simple to develop against regardless of the data source. Moreover, since I exclusively use Stored Procedures to perform database operations, I'm mostly protected from changes in the data structure. Here's an over-simplified example of what I've been doing. static void main() { testXmlClass test = new test(1); test.Name = "Foo"; test.Save(); } // Example Serializable Class ------------------------------------------------ [XmlRootAttribute("test")] class testXmlClass() { [XmlElement(Name="id")] public int ID {set; get;} [XmlElement(Name="name")] public string Name {set; get;} //create an instance of the class loaded with data. public testXmlClass(int id) { GenericDBProvider db = new GenericDBProvider(); this = db.ExecuteSerializable("myGetByIDProcedure"); } //save the class to the database... public Save() { GenericDBProvider db = new GenericDBProvider(); db.AddInParameter("myInputParameter", DbType.XML, this); db.ExecuteSerializableNonQuery("mySaveProcedure"); } } // Database Handler ---------------------------------------------------------- class GenericDBProvider { public T ExecuteSerializable<T>(string commandText) where T : class { XmlSerializer xml = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)); // connection and command code is assumed for the purposes of this example. // the final results basically just come down to... return xml.Deserialize(commandResults) as T; } public void ExecuteSerializableNonQuery(string commandText) { // once again, connection and command code is assumed... // basically, just execute the command along with the specified // parameters which have been serialized. } public void AddInParameter(string name, DbType type, object value) { StringWriter w = new StringWriter(); XmlSerializer x = new XmlSerializer(value.GetType()); //handle serialization for serializable classes. if (type == DbType.Xml && (value.GetType() != typeof(System.String))) { x.Serialize(w, value); w.Close(); // store serialized object in a DbParameterCollection accessible // to my other methods. } else { //handle all other parameter types } } } I'm starting a new project which will rely heavily on database operations. I'm very curious to know whether my current practices will be sustainable in a high-traffic situation and whether or not I should consider switching to NHibernate or Microsoft's Entity Framework to perform what essentially seems to boil down to the same thing I'm currently doing. I appreciate any advice you may have.

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• How to force VS 2010 to skip "builds" of projects which haven't changed?

  - by Ladislav Mrnka

  Our product's solution has more than 100+ projects (500+ksloc of production code). Most of them are C# projects but we also have few using C++/CLI to bridge communication with native code. Rebuilding the whole solution takes several minutes. That's fine. If I want to rebuilt the solution I expect that it will really take some time. What is not fine is time needed to build solution after full rebuild. Imagine I used full rebuild and know without doing any changes to to the solution I press Build (F6 or Ctrl+Shift+B). Why it takes 35s if there was no change? In output I see that it started "building" of each project - it doesn't perform real build but it does something which consumes significant amount of time. That 35s delay is pain in the ass. Yes I can improve the time by not using build solution but only build project (Shift+F6). If I run build project on particular test project I'm currently working on it will take "only" 8+s. It requires me to run project build on correct project (the test project to ensure dependent tested code is build as well). At least ReSharper test runner correctly recognizes that only this single project must be build and rerunning test usually contains only 8+s compilation. My current coding Kata is: don't touch Ctrl+Shift+B. The test project build will take 8s even if I don't do any changes. The reason why it takes 8s is because it also "builds" dependencies = in my case it "builds" more than 20 projects but I made changes only to unit test or single dependency! I don't want it to touch other projects. Is there a way to simply tell VS to build only projects where some changes were done and projects which are dependent on changed ones (preferably this part as another build option)? I worry you will tell me that it is exactly what VS is doing but in MS way ... I want to improve my TDD experience and reduce the time of compilation (in TDD the compilation can happen twice per minute). To make this even more frustrated I'm working in a team where most of developers used to work on Java projects prior to joining this one. So you can imagine how they are pissed off when they must use VS in contrast to full incremental compilation in Java. I don't require incremental compilation of classes. I expect working incremental compilation of solutions. Especially in product like VS 2010 Ultimate which costs several thousands dollars. I really don't want to get answers like: Make a separate solution Unload projects you don't need etc. I can read those answers here. Those are not acceptable solutions. We're not paying for VS to do such compromises.

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• gcc/g++: error when compiling large file

  - by Alexander

  Hi, I have a auto-generated C++ source file, around 40 MB in size. It largely consists of push_back commands for some vectors and string constants that shall be pushed. When I try to compile this file, g++ exits and says that it couldn't reserve enough virtual memory (around 3 GB). Googling this problem, I found that using the command line switches --param ggc-min-expand=0 --param ggc-min-heapsize=4096 may solve the problem. They, however, only seem to work when optimization is turned on. 1) Is this really the solution that I am looking for? 2) Or is there a faster, better (compiling takes ages with these options acitvated) way to do this? Best wishes, Alexander Update: Thanks for all the good ideas. I tried most of them. Using an array instead of several push_back() operations reduced memory usage, but as the file that I was trying to compile was so big, it still crashed, only later. In a way, this behaviour is really interesting, as there is not much to optimize in such a setting -- what does the GCC do behind the scenes that costs so much memory? (I compiled with deactivating all optimizations as well and got the same results) The solution that I switched to now is reading in the original data from a binary object file that I created from the original file using objcopy. This is what I originally did not want to do, because creating the data structures in a higher-level language (in this case Perl) was more convenient than having to do this in C++. However, getting this running under Win32 was more complicated than expected. objcopy seems to generate files in the ELF format, and it seems that some of the problems I had disappeared when I manually set the output format to pe-i386. The symbols in the object file are by standard named after the file name, e.g. converting the file inbuilt_training_data.bin would result in these two symbols: binary_inbuilt_training_data_bin_start and binary_inbuilt_training_data_bin_end. I found some tutorials on the web which claim that these symbols should be declared as extern char _binary_inbuilt_training_data_bin_start;, but this does not seem to be right -- only extern char binary_inbuilt_training_data_bin_start; worked for me.

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• Should we denormalize database to improve performance?

  - by Groo

  We have a requirement to store 500 measurements per second, coming from several devices. Each measurement consists of a timestamp, a quantity type, and several vector values. Right now there is 8 vector values per measurement, and we may consider this number to be constant for needs of our prototype project. We are using HNibernate. Tests are done in SQLite (disk file db, not in-memory), but production will probably be MsSQL. Our Measurement entity class is the one that holds a single measurement, and looks like this: public class Measurement { public virtual Guid Id { get; private set; } public virtual Device Device { get; private set; } public virtual Timestamp Timestamp { get; private set; } public virtual IList<VectorValue> Vectors { get; private set; } } Vector values are stored in a separate table, so that each of them references its parent measurement through a foreign key. We have done a couple of things to ensure that generated SQL is (reasonably) efficient: we are using Guid.Comb for generating IDs, we are flushing around 500 items in a single transaction, ADO.Net batch size is set to 100 (I think SQLIte does not support batch updates? But it might be useful later). The problem Right now we can insert 150-200 measurements per second (which is not fast enough, although this is SQLite we are talking about). Looking at the generated SQL, we can see that in a single transaction we insert (as expected): 1 timestamp 1 measurement 8 vector values which means that we are actually doing 10x more single table inserts: 1500-2000 per second. If we placed everything (all 8 vector values and the timestamp) into the measurement table (adding 9 dedicated columns), it seems that we could increase our insert speed up to 10 times. Switching to SQL server will improve performance, but we would like to know if there might be a way to avoid unnecessary performance costs related to the way database is organized right now. [Edit] With in-memory SQLite I get around 350 items/sec (3500 single table inserts), which I believe is about as good as it gets with NHibernate (taking this post for reference: http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/08/22/nhibernate-perf-tricks.aspx). But I might as well switch to SQL server and stop assuming things, right? I will update my post as soon as I test it.

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• Optimising movement on hex grid

  - by Mloren

  I am making a turn based hex-grid game. The player selects units and moves them across the hex grid. Each tile in the grid is of a particular terrain type (eg desert, hills, mountains, etc) and each unit type has different abilities when it comes to moving over the terrain (e.g. some can move over mountains easily, some with difficulty and some not at all). Each unit has a movement value and each tile takes a certain amount of movement based on its terrain type and the unit type. E.g it costs a tank 1 to move over desert, 4 over swamp and cant move at all over mountains. Where as a flying unit moves over everything at a cost of 1. The issue I have is that when a unit is selected, I want to highlight an area around it showing where it can move, this means working out all the possible paths through the surrounding hexes, how much movement each path will take and lighting up the tiles based on that information. I got this working with a recursive function and found it took too long to calculate, I moved the function into a thread so that it didn't block the game but still it takes around 2 seconds for the thread to calculate the moveable area for a unit with a move of 8. Its over a million recursions which obviously is problematic. I'm wondering if anyone has an clever ideas on how I can optimize this problem. Here's the recursive function I'm currently using (its C# btw): private void CalcMoveGridRecursive(int nCenterIndex, int nMoveRemaining) { //List of the 6 tiles adjacent to the center tile int[] anAdjacentTiles = m_ThreadData.m_aHexData[nCenterIndex].m_anAdjacentTiles; foreach(int tileIndex in anAdjacentTiles) { //make sure this adjacent tile exists if(tileIndex == -1) continue; //How much would it cost the unit to move onto this adjacent tile int nMoveCost = m_ThreadData.m_anTerrainMoveCost[(int)m_ThreadData.m_aHexData[tileIndex].m_eTileType]; if(nMoveCost != -1 && nMoveCost <= nMoveRemaining) { //Make sure the adjacent tile isnt already in our list. if(!m_ThreadData.m_lPassableTiles.Contains(tileIndex)) m_ThreadData.m_lPassableTiles.Add(tileIndex); //Now check the 6 tiles surrounding the adjacent tile we just checked (it becomes the new center). CalcMoveGridRecursive(tileIndex, nMoveRemaining - nMoveCost); } } } At the end of the recursion, m_lPassableTiles contains a list of the indexes of all the tiles that the unit can possibly reach and they are made to glow. This all works, it just takes too long. Does anyone know a better approach to this?

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• iPhone Image Resources, ICO vs PNG, app bundle filesize

  - by Jasarien

  My application has a collection of around 1940 icons that are used throughout. They're currently in ICO and new images provided to me come in ICO format too. I have noticed that they contain a 16x16 and 32x32 representation of each icon in one file. Each file is roughly 4KB in filesize (as reported by finder, but ls reports that they vary from being ~1000 bytes to 5000 bytes) A very small number of these icons only contain the 32x32 representation, and as a result are only around 700 bytes in size. Currently I am bundling these icons with my application and they are inflating the size of the app a bit more than I would like. Altogether, the images total just about 25.5MB. Xcode must do some kind of compression because the resulting app bundle is about 12.4MB. Compressing this further into a ZIP (as it would be when submitted to the App Store), results in a final file of 5.8MB. I'm aware that the maximum limit for over the air App Store downloads has been raised to 20MB since the introduction of the iPad (I'm not sure if that extends to iPhone apps as well as iPad apps though, if not the limit would be 10MB). My worry is that new icons are going to be added (sometimes up to 10 icons per week), and will continue to inflate the app bundle over time. What is the best way to distribute these icons with my app? Things I've tried and not had much success with: Converting the icons from ICO to PNG: I tried this in the hopes that the pngcrush utility would help out with the filesize. But it appears that it doesn't make much of a difference between a normal PNG and a crushed png (I believe it just optimises the image for display on the iPhone's GPU rather than compress it's size). Also in going from ICO to PNG actually increased the size of the icon file... Zipping the images, and then uncompressing them on first run. While this did reduce the overall image sizes, I found that the effort needed to unzip them, copy them to the documents folder and ensure that duplication doesn't happen on upgrades was too much hassle to be worth the benefit. Also, on original and 3G iPhones unzipping and copying around 25MB of images takes too long and creates a bad experience... Things I've considered but not yet tried: Instead of distributing the icons within the app bundle, host them online, and download each icon on demand (it depends on the user's data as to which icons will actually be displayed and when). Issues with this is that bandwidth costs money, and image downloads will be bandwidth intensive. However, my app currently has a small userbase of around 5,500 users (of which I estimate around 1500 to be active based on Flurry stats), and I have a huge unused bandwidth allowance with my current hosting package. So I'm open to thoughts on how to solve this tricky issue.

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• Problem on a Floyd-Warshall implementation using c++

  - by Henrique

  I've got a assignment for my college, already implemented Dijkstra and Bellman-Ford sucessfully, but i'm on trouble on this one. Everything looks fine, but it's not giving me the correct answer. Here's the code: void FloydWarshall() { //Also assume that n is the number of vertices and edgeCost(i,i) = 0 int path[500][500]; /* A 2-dimensional matrix. At each step in the algorithm, path[i][j] is the shortest path from i to j using intermediate vertices (1..k-1). Each path[i][j] is initialized to edgeCost(i,j) or infinity if there is no edge between i and j. */ for(int i = 0 ; i <= nvertices ; i++) for(int j = 0 ; j <= nvertices ; j++) path[i][j] = INFINITY; for(int j = 0 ; j < narestas ; j++) //narestas = number of edges { path[arestas[j]->v1][arestas[j]->v2] = arestas[j]->peso; //peso = weight of the edge (aresta = edge) path[arestas[j]->v2][arestas[j]->v1] = arestas[j]->peso; } for(int i = 0 ; i <= nvertices ; i++) //path(i, i) = 0 path[i][i] = 0; //test print, it's working fine //printf("\n\n\nResultado FloydWarshall:\n"); //for(int i = 1 ; i <= nvertices ; i++) // printf("distancia ao vertice %d: %d\n", i, path[1][i]); //heres the problem, it messes up, and even a edge who costs 4, and the minimum is 4, it prints 2. //for k = 1 to n for(int k = 1 ; k <= nvertices ; k++) //for i = 1 to n for(int i = 1 ; i <= nvertices ; i++) //for j := 1 to n for(int j = 1 ; j <= nvertices ; j++) if(path[i][j] > path[i][k] + path[k][j]) path[i][j] = path[i][k] + path[k][j]; printf("\n\n\nResultado FloydWarshall:\n"); for(int i = 1 ; i <= nvertices ; i++) printf("distancia ao vertice %d: %d\n", i, path[1][i]); } im using this graph example i've made: 6 7 1 2 4 1 5 1 2 3 1 2 5 2 5 6 3 6 4 6 3 4 2 means we have 6 vertices (1 to 6), and 7 edges (1,2) with weight 4... etc.. If anyone need more info, i'm up to giving it, just tired of looking at this code and not finding an error.

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• Pointers to class fields

  - by newbie_cpp

  My task is as follows : Using pointers to class fields, create menu allowing selection of ice, that Person can buy in Ice shop. Buyer will be charged with waffel and ice costs. Selection of ice and charging buyers account must be shown in program. Here's my Person class : #include <iostream> using namespace std; class Iceshop { const double waffel_price = 1; public: } class Person { static int NUMBER; char* name; int age; const int number; double plus, minus; public: class Account { int number; double resources; public: Account(int number, double resources) : number(number), resources(resources) {} } Person(const char* n, int age) : name(strcpy(new char[strlen(n)+1],n)), number(++NUMBER), plus(0), minus(0), age(age) {} Person::~Person(){ cout << "Destroying resources" << endl; delete [] name; } friend void show(Person &p); int* take_age(){ return &age; } char* take_name(){ return name; } void init(char* n, int a) { name = n; age = a; } Person& remittance(double d) { plus += d; return *this; } Person& paycheck(double d) { minus += d; return *this; } Account* getAccount(); }; int Person:: Person::Account* Person::getAccount() { return new Account(number, plus - minus); } void Person::Account::remittance(double d){ resources = resources + d; } void Person::Account::paycheck(double d){ resources = resources - d; } void show(Person *p){ cout << "Name: " << p->take_name() << "," << "age: " << p->take_age() << endl; } int main(void) { Person *p = new Person; p->init("Mary", 25); show(p); p->remittance(100); system("PAUSE"); return 0; } How to start this task ? Where and in what form should I store menu options ?

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• Unlimited SMS API/Gateway (Sending and Receiving)

  - by Naif

  I am creating a chat application which requires that users be able to send and receive sms messages through a web interface. It would be somewhat similar to the text messaging service available in yahoo mail or in aol instant messenger. The situation is this: Given the high quantity of messages that would be sent and received, paying on a per message basis is not economically feasible. How is it that sites such as yahoo, aim, and twitter can send and receive unlimited sms messages? Essentially, I am looking for a way to send and receive unlimited sms from my computer. Below is a list of some approaches I've come up with but have run into problems with as well. If just one of the approaches can be utilized effectively, then I am fine. As a note on the nature of my application: I will only be sending messages to users that explicitly sign up for the service and permit the receiving of messages. They can unsubscribe at any time. This is to prevent spam. I am aware of software such as Kannel which allows one to connect to a providers smsc gateway. However, this adds the risk of not being approved by the provider which would be unacceptable. Is there any way to significantly mitigate this risk? Utilizing a gateway provider eliminates this risk, but adds the issue of per message pricing. I am also aware of email to sms. However, I have done some testing with that and it appears that this method results in many messages being undelivered or delivered VERY late. If it weren't for that, this approach would have been ideal. Is there any way to negotiate with carriers to remove me from their filters (considering the nature of my service as stated before)? I could use a gsm modem, but even with an "unilimited" plan on a sim card, there are still limits (around 100,000 messages or so). Furthermore, from my understanding, gsm modems are capable of only sending out around a dozen messages per minute. I need to be able to send out as much as several hundred messages per second. During the first 2 months, around 10 messages per second would suffice. There are ways to send out ads with messages to cover the per message costs. However, this is a deal-breaker since it has a high chance of tarnishing the quality of service. Furthermore, I know it is possible to do it without such ads since yahoo, aim, and twitter do not send ads with their messages.

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• Recommended ASP.NET Shared Hosting

  - by coffeeaddict

  Ok, I have to admit I'm getting fed up with www.discountasp.net's pricing model and this annoyance has built up over the past 8 years or so. I've been with them for years and absolutely love them on the technical side, however it's getting ridiculously expensive for so little that you get. I mean here's my scenario: 1) I am running 2 SQL Server databases which costs me $10/ea per month so that's $20/month for 2 and I only get 500 mb disk space which is horrible 2) I am paying $10/mo just for the hosting itself which I only get 1 gig of disk space! I mean common! 3) I am simply running 2 small apps (Screwturn Wiki & Subtext Blog)...so I don't really care if it's up 99% or not, it's not worth paying a total of $300 just to keep these 2 apps running over discountasp.net Anyone else feel the same? Yes, I know they have great support, probably have great servers running behind this but in the end I really don't care as long as my site is up 95% or better. Yes, the hosting toolset rocks. But you know I bet you I can find a similar set somewhere else. I like how I can totally control IIS 7 at discountasp and I can control my own app pool etc. That's very powerful and essential. But anyone have any good alternatives to discountasp that gives me close to the same at a much more reasonable cost point? I mean http://www.m6.net/prices.aspx gives you 10 SQL Databases for $7 and 200 gigs disk space! I don't know about their tools or support but just looking at those numbers and some other hosts I've seen, I feel that discountasp.net is way out of line. They don't even offer any purchasing discounts such as it would be nice if my 2nd SQL Server is only $5/month not $10...stuff like this, to make it much more realistic and fair. Opinions (people who do have discountasp.net, people who have left them, or people who have another host they like)??? But geez $300 just to host a couple DBs and lightweight open source apps? Not worth the price they are charging. I'm almost at a price point that enables me to get a decent dedicated server! I really don't care about beta support. Not a big deal to me.

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