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• Solaris 11

  - by user9154181

  Oracle has a strict policy about not discussing product features until they appear in shipping product. Now that Solaris 11 is publically available, it is time to catch up. I will be shortly posting articles on a variety of new developments in the Solaris linkers and related bits: 64-bit Archives After 40+ years of Unix, the archive file format has run out of room. The ar and link-editor (ld) commands have been enhanced to allow archives to grow past their previous 32-bit limits. Guidance The link-editor is now willing and able to tell you how to alter your link lines in order to build better objects. Stub Objects This is one of the bigger projects I've undertaken since joining the Solaris group. Stub objects are shared objects, built entirely from mapfiles, that supply the same linking interface as the real object, while containing no code or data. You can link to them, but cannot use them at runtime. It was pretty simple to add this ability to the link-editor, but the changes to the OSnet in order to apply them to building Solaris were massive. I discuss how we came to invent stub objects, how we apply them to build the OSnet in a more parallel and scalable manner, and about the follow on opportunities that have emerged from the new stub proto area we created to hold them. The elffile Utility A new standard Solaris utility, elffile is a variant of the file utility, focused exclusively on linker related files. elffile is of particular value for examining archives, as it allows you to find out what is inside them without having to first extract the archive members into temporary files. This release has been a long time coming. I joined the Solaris group in late 2005, and this will be my first FCS. From a user perspective, Solaris 11 is probably the biggest change to Solaris since Solaris 2.0. Solaris 11 polishes the ground breaking features from Solaris 10 (DTrace, FMA, ZFS, Zones), and uses them to add a powerful new packaging system, numerous other enhacements and features, along with a huge modernization effort. I'm excited to see it go out into the world. I hope you enjoy using it as much as we did creating it. Software is never done. On to the next one...

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• How to Add a Business Card Image to a Signature in Outlook 2013 Without the vCard (.vcf) File

  - by Lori Kaufman

  When you add a business card to a signature, an image of the business card is inserted into the signature and the vCard (.vcf) file is attached. If you don’t want to attach the vCard file, you can insert the image only into your signature. To insert only the image of your business card without the .vcf file, click People on the Navigation Bar at the bottom of the Outlook window. To get a business card image we can use, we must view the contacts in any form other than People, so we can open the full contact editing window. To do this, click on a different view in the Current View section of the Home tab. We chose to view our contacts in the Business Card format. Double-click on your contact in the current view. The full contact editing window displays with an image of the business card on the right. Right-click on the business card image and select Copy Image from the popup menu. To close the contact editing window, click the File tab and click Close in the menu list on the left. NOTE: You can also click the X in the upper, right corner of the contact editing window to close it. To open the signature editor, click the File tab. Click Options in the menu list on the left side of the Account Information screen. On the Outlook Options dialog box, click Mail in the list of options on the left side of the dialog box. On the Mail screen, click Signatures in the Compose messages section. NOTE: You can also access the Signatures and Stationery dialog box from the Message window for new emails and drafts. Click New Email on the Home tab or double-click an email in the Drafts folder to access the Message window. For more information, see our article about assigning a default signature. In the signature editor, right-click and select Paste from the popup menu. The image is inserted into the signature. You can also use this method to copy a business card image for use in other documents and programs. It’s also possible to insert the vCard (.vcf) file into a signature without the image. We’ll cover that topic tomorrow.     

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• 5.1 surround sound

  - by rocker9455

  Ok, So i've always had trouble with enabling 5.1 in ubuntu. Running 'alsamixer': I have: Master, Heaphones, PCM, Front, Front Mi, Front Mi, Surround, Center All are at 100% Card:HDA Intel Chip:Realtek ALC888 (This is my onboard sound, Its a dell studio, with 7.1 integrated sound) Running "speaker-test -c6 -twav" I only get the front 2 speakers (Right/Left) making any noise. The others make no noise at all. I have no other sound card to use as all my PCI slots are used up. Daemon.conf: ; daemonize = no ; fail = yes ; allow-module-loading = yes ; allow-exit = yes ; use-pid-file = yes ; system-instance = no ; enable-shm = yes ; shm-size-bytes = 0 # setting this 0 will use the system-default, usually 64 MiB ; lock-memory = no ; cpu-limit = no ; high-priority = yes ; nice-level = -11 ; realtime-scheduling = yes ; realtime-priority = 5 ; exit-idle-time = 20 ; scache-idle-time = 20 ; dl-search-path = (depends on architecture) ; load-default-script-file = yes ; default-script-file = ; log-target = auto ; log-level = notice ; log-meta = no ; log-time = no ; log-backtrace = 0 resample-method = speex-float-1 ; enable-remixing = yes ; enable-lfe-remixing = no flat-volumes = no ; rlimit-fsize = -1 ; rlimit-data = -1 ; rlimit-stack = -1 ; rlimit-core = -1 ; rlimit-as = -1 ; rlimit-rss = -1 ; rlimit-nproc = -1 ; rlimit-nofile = 256 ; rlimit-memlock = -1 ; rlimit-locks = -1 ; rlimit-sigpending = -1 ; rlimit-msgqueue = -1 ; rlimit-nice = 31 ; rlimit-rtprio = 9 ; rlimit-rttime = 1000000 ; default-sample-format = s16le ; default-sample-rate = 44100 ; default-sample-channels = 6 ; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right default-fragments = 8 default-fragment-size-msec = 10

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• problems programmatically creating UIView on iPad App

  - by user3871

  I have been struggling with this problem for a few days. My iPad app is designed to be a portrait game. To satisfy Apple's expection, I also support landscape mode. When it goes into landscape mode, the game goes into a letterbox format with back borders on the sides. My problem is I am creating the UIWindow and UIView programmatically. For some unkown reason, the touch controls are "locked" in to think I'm always in landscape mode. And even though visually in portrait mode everything looks correct, the top and bottom of the screen does not respond to touch. To summarize how I am setting this up, let me provide the skeletal framework of what I'm doing: in main.cpp: int retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, @"derbyPoker_ipadAppDelegate"); In the delegate, I am doing this: - (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions { CGRect screenBounds = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]; CGFloat scale = [[ UIScreen mainScreen] scale ]; m_device_width = screenBounds.size.width; m_device_height = screenBounds.size.height; m_device_scale = scale; // Everything is built assuming 640x960 window = [[ UIWindow alloc ] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]]; viewController = [ glView new ]; [self doStateChange:[blitz class]]; return YES; } The last bit of code sets up the UIView... - (void) doStateChange: (Class) state{ viewController.view = [[state alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, m_device_width, m_device_height) andManager:self]; viewController.view.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit; viewController.view.autoresizesSubviews = YES; [window addSubview:viewController.view]; [window makeKeyAndVisible]; } The problem seems to related to the line viewController.view.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit; If I remove that line, touch works correctly in portrait mode. But the negative is when I'm landscape mode, the game stretches incorrectly. So That's not a option. The frustrating thing is, when I originally had this set up with a NIB file, it worked fine. I have read through the docs about UIWindow, UIViewController and UIView and have tried about everything to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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• Partial Shader Signatures HLSL D3D11 C++

  - by ThePhD

  I had been debugging a problem I was having in a single shader file with 2 functions in it. I'm using DirectX 11, vs_5_0 and ps_5_0. I have stripped it down to its basic components to understand what was going wrong with the shaders, because the different named components of the Pixel and Vertex shaders were swapping the data being input: void QuadVertex ( inout float4 position : SV_Position, inout float4 color : COLOR0, inout float2 tex : TEXCOORD0 ) { // ViewProject is a 4x4 matrix, // just included here to show the simple passthrough of the data position = mul(position, ViewProjection); } And a Pixel Shader: float4 QuadPixel ( float4 color : COLOR0, float2 tex : TEXCOORD0 ) : SV_Target0 { // Color is filled with position data and tex is // filled with color values from the Vertex Shader return color; } The ID3D11InputLayout and associated C++ code correctly compiles the shaders and sets them up with some simple primitive data: data[0].Position.x = 0.0f * 210; data[0].Position.y = 1.0f * 160; data[0].Position.z = 0.0f; data[1].Position.x = 0.0f * 210; data[1].Position.y = 0.0f * 160; data[1].Position.z = 0.0f; data[2].Position.x = 1.0f * 210; data[2].Position.y = 1.0f * 160; data[2].Position.z = 0.0f; data[0].Colour = Colors::Red; data[1].Colour = Colors::Red; data[2].Colour = Colors::Red; data[0].Texture = Vector2::Zero; data[1].Texture = Vector2::Zero; data[2].Texture = Vector2::Zero; When used with the shader, the float4 color always ended up with the position data, and the float2 tex always ended up with the color data. After a moment, I figured out that the shader's input and output signatures needed to be in the correct order and the correct format and be laid out in the exact order of the output from the Vertex Shader, regardless of the semantics: float4 QuadPixel ( float4 pos : SV_Position, float4 color : COLOR0, float2 tex : TEXCOORD0 ) : SV_Target0 { return color; } After finding this out, My question is: Why don't the semantics map the appropriate components when going from Vertex Shader to Pixel Shader? Is there any way that I can make it so certain semantics are always mapped to other semantics, or do I always have to follow the rigid Shader Signature (in this case, Position, Color, and Texture) ? As a side note for why I'm asking: I know that when using XNA, my shader signatures for functions could differ in position and even drop items from Vertex Shader to Pixel Shader function parameters, having only the COLOR0 and TEXCOORD0 components being used (and it would still match up correctly). However, I also know that XNA relied on DX9 (and maybe a little DX10) implementation, and that maybe this kind of flexibility no longer exists in DX11?

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• Ray Picking Problems

  - by A Name I Haven't Decided On

  I've read so many answers on here about how to do Ray Picking, that I thought I had the idea of it down. But when I try to implement it in my game, I get garbage. I'm working with LWJGL. Here's the code: public static Ray getPick(int mouseX, int mouseY){ glPushMatrix(); //Setting up the Mouse Clip Vector4f mouseClip = new Vector4f((float)mouseX * 2 / 960f - 1, 1 - (float)mouseY * 2 / 640f ,0 ,1); //Loading Matrices FloatBuffer modMatrix = BufferUtils.createFloatBuffer(16); FloatBuffer projMatrix = BufferUtils.createFloatBuffer(16); glGetFloat(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, modMatrix); glGetFloat(GL_PROJECTION_MATRIX, projMatrix); //Assigning Matrices Matrix4f proj = new Matrix4f(); Matrix4f model = new Matrix4f(); model.load(modMatrix); proj.load(projMatrix); //Multiplying the Projection Matrix by the Model View Matrix Matrix4f tempView = new Matrix4f(); Matrix4f.mul(proj, model, tempView); tempView.invert(); //Getting the Camera Position in World Space. The 4th Column of the Model View Matrix. model.invert(); Point cameraPos = new Point(model.m30, model.m31, model.m32); //Theoretically getting the vector the Picking Ray goes Vector4f rayVector = new Vector4f(); Matrix4f.transform(tempView, mouseClip, rayVector); rayVector.translate((float)-cameraPos.getX(),(float) -cameraPos.getY(),(float) -cameraPos.getZ(), 0f); rayVector.normalise(); glPopMatrix(); //This Basically Spits out a value that changes as the Camera moves. //When the Mouse moves, the values change around 0.001 points from screen edge to edge. System.out.format("Vector: %f %f %f%n", rayVector.x, rayVector.y, rayVector.z); //return new Ray(cameraPos, rayVector); return null; } I don't really know why this isn't working. I was hoping some more experienced eyes might be able to help me out. I can get the camera position like a champ, it's the vector the rays going in that I can't seem to get right. Thanks.

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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• Clouds, Clouds, Clouds Everywhere, Not a Drop of Rain!

  - by sxkumar

  At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious interest in all things cloud.  Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However, when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations.  Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during 1:1 interactions. While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which is what the enterprise cloud is all about.  Even a handful of those who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service isn’t something that they see an immediate need for.  This is in quite contrast to the picture being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud.  On the face of it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what exactly is the reality? Well, the reality is that there is undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented, and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning.  Consequently, most  enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and value of enterprise private cloud.  Even among those who have chosen to move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually need.  Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends.  So what is the way forward?  I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing. To take a step back, the fundamental premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of  strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served, etc.  But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption within enterprises and private cloud is no exception.   Such a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. In my next blog,  I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of  enterprise cloud. I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page. Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud"  and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.

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• Multi-Part Map Troubleshooting

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Scenario I came across a nice little one with multi-part maps the other day. I had an orchestration where I needed to combine 4 input messages into one output message like in the below table:   Input Messages Output Messages Company Details Member Details Event Message Member Search Member Import   I thought my orchestration was working fine but for some reason when I was trying to send my message it had no content under the root node like below <ns0:ImportMemberChange xmlns:ns0="http://---------------/"></ns0:ImportMemberChange>   My map is displayed in the below picture. I knew that the member search message may not have any elements under it but its root element would always exist. The rest of the messages were expected to be fully populated. I tried a number of different things and testing my map outside of the orchestration it always worked fine. The Eureka Moment The eureka moment came when I was looking at the xslt produced by the map. Even though I'd tried swapping the order of the messages in the input of the map you can see in the below picture that the first part of the processing of the message (with the red circle around it) is doing a for-each over the GetCompanyDetailsResult element within the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message. This is because the processing is driven by the output message format and the first element to output is the OrganisationID which comes from the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message. At this point I could focus my attention on this message as the xslt shows that if this xpath statement doesn’t return the an element from the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message then the whole body of the output message will not be produced and the output from the map would look like the message I was getting. <ns0:ImportMemberChange xmlns:ns0="http://---------------/"></ns0:ImportMemberChange> I was quickly able to prove this in my map test which proved this was a likely candidate for the problem. I revisited the orchestration focusing on the creation of the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message and there was actually a bug in the orchestration which resulted in the message being incorrectly created, once this was fixed everything worked as expected. Conclusion Originally I thought it was a problem with the map itself, and looking online there wasn’t really much in the way of content around troubleshooting for multi-part map problems so I thought I'd write this up. I guess technically it isn't a multi-part map problem, but I spend a good couple of hours the other day thinking it was.

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• LINQ to Twitter v2.1.09 Released

  - by Joe Mayo

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/10/15/linq-to-twitter-v2.1.09-released.aspxToday, I released LINQ to Twitter v2.1.09. Here are important new changes. Bug Fixes This is primarily a bug fix release. Most notably, there were authentication problems in WinRT apps. This is now fixed. New Features One new feature is the addition of ApplicationOnlyAuthentication for WinRT. It is fully async.  Here’s how it works: var auth = new WinRtApplicationOnlyAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" } }; if (auth == null || !auth.IsAuthorized) { await auth.AuthorizeAsync(); } var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); (from search in twitterCtx.Search where search.Type == SearchType.Search && search.Query == SearchTextBox.Text select search) .MaterializedAsyncCallback( async response => await Dispatcher.RunAsync( CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, async () => { Search searchResponse = response.State.Single(); string message = string.Format( "Search returned {0} statuses", searchResponse.Statuses.Count); await new MessageDialog(message, "Search Complete").ShowAsync(); })); It’s called the WinRtApplicationOnlyAuthorizer. You only need two tokens, ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret, which come from your Twitter API application settings page. Note: You need a Twitter Application, which you can create at https://dev.twitter.com/. The MaterializedAsyncCallback materializes your query and handles the response. I put everything together in a lambda for demonstration purposes, but you can always replace the callback with a handler of type Action<TwitterAsyncResponse<IEnumerable<T>>>, where T is Search for this example. On the Horizon The next version of LINQ to Twitter is in development. I discussed it at LINQ to Twitter Async. This isn’t complete, but you can download the source code at the LINQ to Twitter site on CodePlex. I’ve competed all the spikes for what I thought would be the hard parts and now have prototypes of queries and commands working. This would be a good time to provide feedback if there are features in the current version that you think could be improved. The current driving forces for the next version will be async and PCL.   @JoeMayo

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• Our own Daily WTF

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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• core.* files eating up server space (~50MB)

  - by skytreader

  I'm renting server space from someone and, upon logging in my control panel after quite sometime, noticed an abnormal spike (~50MB) in the disk usage. Upon investigating, I found a lot of core.* files scattered around my public_html directory. Each one is more than 5MB in size but no more than 6MB. The * part is all numbers (in programming regex, that should be core\.\d+). I downloaded one and checked the contents. There was a lot of balderdash characters (NUL mostly, but also a scattering of ETB, ETX, STX) but there's this block of readable text which says: This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software. If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created with the data reset to initial values. Pretty self-explanatory. A few blocks above the text are some more readable messages that look like logs but is sandwiched in between non printable characters. I've extracted some below. Scan not valid for mh mailboxes Bogus character 0x%x in news state Can't rewrite news state %.80s Error closing backup news state %.80s No state for newsgroup %.80s found Now, a few concerns: Am I under attack? The messages seem to be about my webmail but I don't use my personal webmail that much---only for a vanity email address and an inbox for an outdated comments system. However, lately, I seem to notice a spike in the spam for my vanity mail. (Note: the comments system is covered by a captcha but every now and then some get through. My vanity email has a spam filter but it isn't as good as I'd like). Next, if this is a feature, can I turn it off? Is it advisable to? I've only 150MB so you see why I'm fretting over a 50MB spike. Some final details: my only server-side scripts are in PHP. The directory which accumulated the most number of these core files is the one containing the Wordpress-managed subdomain of my site. I manage my server through CPanel. Lastly, I decided to delete this files and after some checking nothing seems amiss in my websites nor in my mail. They are indeed the ones responsible for the ~50MB spike as my disk space usage is back to expected.

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• Interaction of a GUI-based App and Windows Service

  - by psubsee2003

  I am working on personal project that will be designed to help manage my media library, specifically recordings created by Windows Media Center. So I am going to have the following parts to this application: A Windows Service that monitors the recording folder. Once a new recording is completed that meets specific criteria, it will call several 3rd party CLI Applications to remove the commercials and re-encode the video into a more hard-drive friendly format. A controller GUI to be able to modify settings of the service, specifically add new shows to watch for, and to modify parameters for the CLI Applications A standalone (GUI-based) desktop application that can perform many of the same functions as the windows service, expect manually on specific files instead of automatically based on specific criteria. (It should be mentioned that I have limited experience with an application of this complexity, and I have absolutely zero experience with Windows Services) Since the 1st and 3rd bullet share similar functionality, my design plan is to pull the common functionality into a separate library shared by both parts applications, but these 2 components do not need to interact otherwise. The 2nd and 3rd bullets seem to share some common functionality, both will have a GUI, both will have to help define similar parameters (one to send to the service and the other to send directly to the CLI applications), so I can see some advantage to combining them into the same application. On the other hand, the standalone application (bullet #3) really does not need to interact with the service at all, except for possibly sharing a few common default parameters that can easily be put into an XML in a common location, so it seems to make more sense to just keep everything separate. The controller GUI (2nd bullet) is where I am stuck at the moment. Do I just roll this functionality (allow for user interaction with the service to update settings and criteria) into the standalone application? Or would it be a better design decision to keep them separate? Specifically, I'm worried about adding the complexity of communicating with the Windows Service to the standalone application when it doesn't need it. Is WCF the right approach to allow the controller GUI to interact with the Windows Service? Or is there a better alternative? At the moment, I don't envision a need for a significant amount of interaction, maybe just adding a new task once in a while and occasionally tweaking a parameter, but when something is changed, I do expect the windows service to immediately use the new settings.

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• The Connected Company: WebCenter Portal Activity Streams

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post by Mitchell Palski, Oracle Staff Sales Consultant 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Social media is sure to have made its way into your company or government organization. Whether its discussion threads, blog posts, Facebook-style profile-pages, or just a simple Instant Messenger application; in one way or another, your employees are connected. What are the objectives of leveraging social media in your organization? Facilitating knowledge transfer More effectively organizing team events Generating inter-community discussions to solve problems Improving resource management Increasing organizational awareness Creating an environment of accountability Do any of the business objectives above stand out to you as needs? If so, consider leveraging the WebCenter Portal Activity Stream as part of your solution. In WebCenter Portal, the Activity Stream feature provides a streaming view of the activities of your connections, actions taken in portals, and business activities that looks a lot like a combined Facebook and Twitter newsfeed. Activity Stream can note when a user: Posts feedback (comments) Uploads a document Creates a new blog, page, event, or announcement Starts a new discussion Streams messages and attachments entered through WebCenter Publisher (similar to Twitter) Through Activity Stream Preferences, you can select which of these activities to show or hide from your personal Activity Stream. Here’s what you get: Real-time stream of activities with in a Portal or sub-Portal increases awareness across your organization or within a working group Complete list of user actions reduces the time-to-find for users that need to interact with the latest activities in your portal Users can publish to their groups when tasks are finished for complete group traceability and accountability, as well as improved resource management. Project discussions and shared documents that require the expertise of someone outside of a working group now get increased visibility across your organization. There’s a reason that commercial Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter have been so successful – they spread information in an aesthetically appealing and easy to read format.  Strategically placing an Activity Feed within your Portal is analogous to sending your employees a daily newsletter, events calendar, recent documents report, and list of announcements – BUT ALL IN ONE! 

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• What is the recommended way to output values to FBO targets? (OpenGL 3.3 + GLSL 330)

  - by datSilencer

  I'll begin by apologizing for any dumb assumptions you might find in the code below since I'm still pretty much green when it comes to OpenGL programming. I'm currently trying to implement deferred shading by using FBO's and their associated targets (textures in my case). I have a simple (I think :P) geometry+fragment shader program and I'd like to write its Fragment Shader stage output to three different render targets (previously bound by a call to glDrawBuffers()), like so: #version 330 in vec3 WorldPos0; in vec2 TexCoord0; in vec3 Normal0; in vec3 Tangent0; layout(location = 0) out vec3 WorldPos; layout(location = 1) out vec3 Diffuse; layout(location = 2) out vec3 Normal; uniform sampler2D gColorMap; uniform sampler2D gNormalMap; vec3 CalcBumpedNormal() { vec3 Normal = normalize(Normal0); vec3 Tangent = normalize(Tangent0); Tangent = normalize(Tangent - dot(Tangent, Normal) * Normal); vec3 Bitangent = cross(Tangent, Normal); vec3 BumpMapNormal = texture(gNormalMap, TexCoord0).xyz; BumpMapNormal = 2 * BumpMapNormal - vec3(1.0, 1.0, -1.0); vec3 NewNormal; mat3 TBN = mat3(Tangent, Bitangent, Normal); NewNormal = TBN * BumpMapNormal; NewNormal = normalize(NewNormal); return NewNormal; } void main() { WorldPos = WorldPos0; Diffuse = texture(gColorMap, TexCoord0).xyz; Normal = CalcBumpedNormal(); } If my render target textures are configured as: RT1:(GL_RGB32F, GL_RGB, GL_FLOAT, GL_TEXTURE0, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0) RT2:(GL_RGB32F, GL_RGB, GL_FLOAT, GL_TEXTURE1, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1) RT3:(GL_RGB32F, GL_RGB, GL_FLOAT, GL_TEXTURE2, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT2) And assuming that each texture has an internal format capable of contaning the incoming data, will the fragment shader write the corresponding values to the expected texture targets? On a related note, do the textures need to be bound to the OpenGL context when they are Multiple Render Targets? From some Googling, I think there are two other ways to output to MRTs: 1: Output each component to gl_FragData[n]. Some forum posts say this method is deprecated. However, looking at the latest OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 specifications at opengl.org, the core profiles still mention this approach. 2: Use a typed output array variable for the expected type. In this case, I think it would be something like this: out vec3 [3] output; void main() { output[0] = WorldPos0; output[1] = texture(gColorMap, TexCoord0).xyz; output[2] = CalcBumpedNormal(); } So which is then the recommended approach? Is there a recommended approach at all if I plan to code on top of OpenGL 3.3? Thanks for your time and help!

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• List of common pages to have in the footer [closed]

  - by user359650

  I would like to post this question as a reference for webmasters wondering what pages they should include in the footer. I will use answers to complete my initial list: About us / About MyCompany / MyCompany About / About us: description about the company, its mission, and its vision. History: summary of milestones achieved by the company. The team / Management / Board of directors: depending on size of the company there may be one of more pages describing the people involved in the company, depending on their position. Awards: list of awards received by the company if any. In the press / They're talking about us: list of links to external websites, usually highly regarded news websites, which mentioned the company in one of their articles. Media Wallpapers: wallpapers with company logo in different colors and formats that fans can set as desktop image for their computer. logos: company logo in different colors and formats that websites/blogs posting about the website can use for illustration purposes. Media kits: documents, usually in PDF format summarizing the key company figures and facts that journalists can download and read to get a quick overview of the company. Misc Contact / Contact us: contact details the company is prepared to disclose if any (address, email, phone) or contact form. Careers / Jobs / Join us: list of open vacancies with contact form to apply. Investors / Partners / Publishers: information and contact forms for companies willing to become Investors/Partners/Publishers or login page to access portal restricted to those who already are. FAQ: list of common questions and answers to guide users and reduce number of support requests. Follow us / Community Facebook / Twitter / Google+: links to the company's pages/accounts on various social networks. Legal Terms / Terms of use / Terms & Conditions: rules users must follow when browsing the website. Privacy / Privacy Statement: explanations as to how the company deals with users' personal data and what users can do about it (request information to be deleted...). cookies: page that starts appearing on more and more websites due to new regulation (notably EU) imposing more transparency and control for users about cookies (e.g. BBC cookie page). Any input is welcome PS: if someone with enough rep could add the footer tag that would be great (min. 300 required).

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• How do I create weapon attachments?

  - by Tron86

  My question is; I am developing a game for XNA and I am trying to create a weapon attachment for my player model. My player model loads the .md3 format and reads tags for attachment points. I am able to get the tag of my model's hand. And I am also able to get the tag of my weapon's handle. Each tag I am able to get the rotation and position of and this is how I am calculating it: Model.worldMatrix = Matrix.CreateScale(Model.scale) * Matrix.CreateRotationX(-MathHelper.PiOver2) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(MathHelper.PiOver2); Pretty simple, the player model has a scale and its orientation(it loads on its side so I just use a 90 degree X axis rotation, and a Y axis rotation to face away from the camera). I then calculate the torso tag on the lower body, which gives me a local coordinate at the waist. Then I take that matrix and calculate the tag_weapon in the upper body. This gives me the hand position in local space. I also get the rotation matrix from that tag that I store for later use. All this seems to work fine. Now I move onto my weapon: Matrix weaponWorld = Matrix.CreateScale(CurrentWeapon.scale) * Matrix.CreateRotationX(-MathHelper.PiOver2) * TagRotationMatrix * Matrix.CreateTranslation(HandTag.Position) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(PlayerRotation) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(CollisionBody.Position) * You may notice the weapon matrix gets rotated by 90 degress on the X axis as well. This is because they load in on their sides. Once again this seems pretty simple and follows the SRT order I keep reading about. My TagRotation matrix is the hand's rotation. HandTag.Position is its position in local space. CreateRotationY(PlayerRotation) is the player's rotation in world space, and the CollisionBody.Position is the player's world location. Everything seems to be in order, and almost works in game. However when the gun spawns and follows the player's hand it seems to be flipped on an axis every couple frames. Almost like the X or Y axis is being inversed then put right back. Its hard to explain and I am totally stumped. Even removing all my X axis fixes does nothing to solve the problem. Hopefully I explained everything enough as I am a bit new to this! Thanks!

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• Validation and Error Generation when using the Data Mapper Pattern

  - by AndyPerlitch

  I am working on saving state of an object to a database using the data mapper pattern, but I am looking for suggestions/guidance on the validation and error message generation step (step 4 below). Here are the general steps as I see them for doing this: (1) The data mapper is used to get current info (assoc array) about the object in db: +=====================================================+ | person_id | name | favorite_color | age | +=====================================================+ | 1 | Andy | Green | 24 | +-----------------------------------------------------+ mapper returns associative array, eg. Person_Mapper::getPersonById($id) : $person_row = array( 'person_id' => 1, 'name' => 'Andy', 'favorite_color' => 'Green', 'age' => '24', ); (2) the Person object constructor takes this array as an argument, populating its fields. class Person { protected $person_id; protected $name; protected $favorite_color; protected $age; function __construct(array $person_row) { $this->person_id = $person_row['person_id']; $this->name = $person_row['name']; $this->favorite_color = $person_row['favorite_color']; $this->age = $person_row['age']; } // getters and setters... public function toArray() { return array( 'person_id' => $this->person_id, 'name' => $this->name, 'favorite_color' => $this->favorite_color, 'age' => $this->age, ); } } (3a) (GET request) Inputs of an HTML form that is used to change info about the person is populated using Person::getters <form> <input type="text" name="name" value="<?=$person->getName()?>" /> <input type="text" name="favorite_color" value="<?=$person->getFavColor()?>" /> <input type="text" name="age" value="<?=$person->getAge()?>" /> </form> (3b) (POST request) Person object is altered with the POST data using Person::setters $person->setName($_POST['name']); $person->setFavColor($_POST['favorite_color']); $person->setAge($_POST['age']); *(4) Validation and error message generation on a per-field basis - Should this take place in the person object or the person mapper object? - Should data be validated BEFORE being placed into fields of the person object? (5) Data mapper saves the person object (updates row in the database): $person_mapper->savePerson($person); // the savePerson method uses $person->toArray() // to get data in a more digestible format for the // db gateway used by person_mapper Any guidance, suggestions, criticism, or name-calling would be greatly appreciated.

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• IsNumeric() Broken? Only up to a point.

  - by Phil Factor

  In SQL Server, probably the best-known 'broken' function is poor ISNUMERIC() . The documentation says 'ISNUMERIC returns 1 when the input expression evaluates to a valid numeric data type; otherwise it returns 0. ISNUMERIC returns 1 for some characters that are not numbers, such as plus (+), minus (-), and valid currency symbols such as the dollar sign ($).'Although it will take numeric data types (No, I don't understand why either), its main use is supposed to be to test strings to make sure that you can convert them to whatever numeric datatype you are using (int, numeric, bigint, money, smallint, smallmoney, tinyint, float, decimal, or real). It wouldn't actually be of much use anyway, since each datatype has different rules. You actually need a RegEx to do a reasonably safe check. The other snag is that the IsNumeric() function  is a bit broken. SELECT ISNUMERIC(',')This cheerfully returns 1, since it believes that a comma is a currency symbol (not a thousands-separator) and you meant to say 0, in this strange currency.  However, SELECT ISNUMERIC(N'£')isn't recognized as currency.  '+' and  '-' is seen to be numeric, which is stretching it a bit. You'll see that what it allows isn't really broken except that it doesn't recognize Unicode currency symbols: It just tells you that one numeric type is likely to accept the string if you do an explicit conversion to it using the string. Both these work fine, so poor IsNumeric has to follow suit. SELECT  CAST('0E0' AS FLOAT)SELECT  CAST (',' AS MONEY) but it is harder to predict which data type will accept a '+' sign. SELECT  CAST ('+' AS money) --0.00SELECT  CAST ('+' AS INT)   --0SELECT  CAST ('+' AS numeric)/* Msg 8115, Level 16, State 6, Line 4 Arithmetic overflow error converting varchar to data type numeric.*/SELECT  CAST ('+' AS FLOAT)/*Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 5Error converting data type varchar to float.*/> So we can begin to say that the maybe IsNumeric isn't really broken, but is answering a silly question 'Is there some numeric datatype to which i can convert this string? Almost, but not quite. The bug is that it doesn't understand Unicode currency characters such as the euro or franc which are actually valid when used in the CAST function. (perhaps they're delaying fixing the euro bug just in case it isn't necessary).SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'?23.67') --0SELECT  CAST (N'?23.67' AS money) --23.67SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'£100.20') --1SELECT  CAST (N'£100.20' AS money) --100.20 Also the CAST function itself is quirky in that it cannot convert perfectly reasonable string-representations of integers into integersSELECT ISNUMERIC('200,000')       --1SELECT  CAST ('200,000' AS INT)   --0/*Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 2Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '200,000' to data type int.*/  A more sensible question is 'Is this an integer or decimal number'. This cuts out a lot of the apparent quirkiness. We do this by the '+E0' trick. If we want to include floats in the check, we'll need to make it a bit more complicated. Here is a small test-rig. SELECT  PossibleNumber,         ISNUMERIC(CAST(PossibleNumber AS NVARCHAR(20)) + 'E+00') AS Hack,        ISNUMERIC (PossibleNumber + CASE WHEN PossibleNumber LIKE '%E%'                                          THEN '' ELSE 'E+00' END) AS Hackier,        ISNUMERIC(PossibleNumber) AS RawIsNumericFROM    (SELECT CAST(',' AS NVARCHAR(10)) AS PossibleNumber          UNION SELECT '£' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION SELECT '56' UNION SELECT '456.67890'         UNION SELECT '0E0' UNION SELECT '-'         UNION SELECT '-' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'¢'        UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'?34.56'         UNION SELECT '-345' UNION SELECT '3.332228E+09') AS examples Which gives the result ... PossibleNumber Hack Hackier RawIsNumeric-------------- ----------- ----------- ------------? 0 0 0- 0 0 1, 0 0 1. 0 0 1¢ 0 0 1£ 0 0 1? 0 0 0?34.56 0 0 00E0 0 1 13.332228E+09 0 1 1-345 1 1 1456.67890 1 1 156 1 1 1 I suspect that this is as far as you'll get before you abandon IsNumeric in favour of a regex. You can only get part of the way with the LIKE wildcards, because you cannot specify quantifiers. You'll need full-blown Regex strings like these ..[-+]?\b[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?\b #INT or REAL[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,3}\b #TINYINT[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,5}\b #SMALLINT.. but you'll get even these to fail to catch numbers out of range.So is IsNumeric() an out and out rogue function? Not really, I'd say, but then it would need a damned good lawyer.

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• Best Practice Method for Including Images in a DataGrid using MVVM

  - by Killercam

  All, I have a WPF DataGrid. This DataGrid shows files ready for compilation and should also show the progress of my compiler as it compiles the files. The format of the DataGrid is Image|File Path|State -----|---------|----- * |C:\AA\BB |Compiled & |F:PP\QQ |Failed > |G:HH\LL |Processing .... The problem is the image column (the *, &, and are for representation only). I have a ResourceDictionary that contains hundreds of vector images as Canvas objects: <ResourceDictionary xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"> <Canvas x:Key="appbar_acorn" Width="48" Height="48" Clip="F1 M 0,0L 48,0L 48,48L 0,48L 0,0"> <Path Width="22.3248" Height="25.8518" Canvas.Left="13.6757" Canvas.Top="11.4012" Stretch="Fill" Fill="{DynamicResource BlackBrush}" Data="F1 M 16.6309,18.6563C 17.1309,8.15625 29.8809,14.1563 29.8809,14.1563C 30.8809,11.1563 34.1308,11.4063 34.1308,11.4063C 33.5,12 34.6309,13.1563 34.6309,13.1563C 32.1309,13.1562 31.1309,14.9062 31.1309,14.9062C 41.1309,23.9062 32.6309,27.9063 32.6309,27.9062C 24.6309,24.9063 21.1309,22.1562 16.6309,18.6563 Z M 16.6309,19.9063C 21.6309,24.1563 25.1309,26.1562 31.6309,28.6562C 31.6309,28.6562 26.3809,39.1562 18.3809,36.1563C 18.3809,36.1563 18,38 16.3809,36.9063C 15,36 16.3809,34.9063 16.3809,34.9063C 16.3809,34.9063 10.1309,30.9062 16.6309,19.9063 Z "/> </Canvas> </ResourceDictionary> Now, I want to be able to include these in my image column and change them at run-time. I was going to attempt to do this by setting up a property in my View Model that was of type Image and binding this to my View via: <DataGrid.Columns> <DataGridTemplateColumn Header="" Width="SizeToCells" IsReadOnly="True"> <DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Image Source="{Binding Canvas}"/> </DataTemplate> </DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> </DataGridTemplateColumn> </DataGrid.Columns> Where in the View Model I have the appropriate property. Now, I was told this is not 'pure' MVVM. I don't fully accept this, but I want to know if there is a better way of doing this. Say, binding to an enum and using a converter to get the image? Any advice would be appreciated.

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• Let&rsquo;s keep informed with &ldquo;Data Explorer&rdquo;

  - by Luca Zavarella

  At Pass Summit 2011 a new project was announced. It’s a Microsoft SQL Azure Lab and its codename is Microsoft “Data Explorer”. According to the official blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dataexplorer/), this new tool provides an innovative way to acquire new knowledge from the data that interest you. In a nutshell, Data Explorer allows you to combine data from multiple sources, to publish and share the result. In addition, you can generate data streams in the RESTful open format (Open Data Protocol), and they can then be used by other applications. Nonetheless we can still use Excel or PowerPivot to analyze the results. Sources can be varied: Excel spreadsheets, text files, databases, Windows Azure Marketplace, etc.. For those who are not familiar with this resource, I strongly suggest you to keep an eye on the data services available to the Marketplace: https://datamarket.azure.com/browse/Data To tell the truth, as I read the above blog post, I was tempted to think of the Data Explorer as a "SSIS on Azure" addressed to the Power User. In fact, reading the response from Tim Mallalieu (Group Program Manager of Data Explorer) to the comment made to his post, I had a positive response to my first impression: “…we originally thinking of ourselves as Self-Service ETL. As we talked to more folks and started partnering with other teams we realized that would be an area that we can add value but that there were more opportunities emerging.” The typical operations of the ETL phase ( processing and organization of data in different formats) can be obtained thanks to Data Explorer Mashup. This is an image of the tool: The flexibility in the manipulation of information is given by Data Explorer Formula Language. This is a formula-based Excel-style specific language: Anyone wishing to know more can check the project page in addition to aforementioned blog: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/labs/dataexplorer.aspx In light of this new project, there is no doubt about the intention of Microsoft to get closer and closer to the Power User, providing him flexible and very easy to use tools for data analysis. The prime example of this is PowerPivot. The question that remains is always the same: having in a company more Power User will implicitly mean having different data models representing the same reality. But this would inevitably lead to anarchical data management... What do you think about that?

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• [EF + Oracle] Inserting Data (Sequences) (2/2)

  - by JTorrecilla

  Prologue In the previous chapter we have see how to create DB records with EF, now we are going to Some Questions about Oracle.   ORACLE One characteristic from SQL Server that differs from Oracle is “Identity”. To all that has not worked with SQL Server, this property, that applies to Integer Columns, lets indicate that there is auto increment columns, by that way it will be filled automatically, without writing it on the insert statement. In EF with SQL Server, the properties whose match with Identity columns, will be filled after invoking SaveChanges method. In Oracle DB, there is no Identity Property, but there is something similar. Sequences Sequences are DB objects, that allow to create auto increment, but there are not related directly to a Table. The syntax is as follows: name, min value, max value and begin value. 1: CREATE SEQUENCE nombre_secuencia 2: INCREMENT BY numero_incremento 3: START WITH numero_por_el_que_empezara 4: MAXVALUE valor_maximo | NOMAXVALUE 5: MINVALUE valor_minimo | NOMINVALUE 6: CYCLE | NOCYCLE 7: ORDER | NOORDER 8:    How to get sequence value? To obtain the next val from the sequence: 1: SELECT nb_secuencia.Nextval 2: From Dual Due to there is no direct way to indicate that a column is related to a sequence, there is several ways to imitate the behavior: Use a Trigger (DB), Use Stored Procedures or Functions(…) or my particularly option. EF model, only, imports Table Objects, Stored Procedures or Functions, but not sequences. By that, I decide to create my own extension Method to invoke Next Val from a sequence: 1: public static class EFSequence 2: { 3: public static int GetNextValue(this ObjectContext contexto, string SequenceName) 4: { 5: string Connection = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["JTorrecillaEntities2"].ConnectionString; 6: Connection=Connection.Substring(Connection.IndexOf(@"connection string=")+19); 7: Connection = Connection.Remove(Connection.Length - 1, 1); 8: using (IDbConnection con = new Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection(Connection)) 9: { 10: using (IDbCommand cmd = con.CreateCommand()) 11: { 12: con.Open(); 13: cmd.CommandText = String.Format("Select {0}.nextval from DUAL", SequenceName); 14: return Convert.ToInt32(cmd.ExecuteScalar()); 15: } 16: } 17:  18: } 19: } This Object Context’s extension method are going to invoke a query with the Sequence indicated by parameter. It takes the connection strings from the App settings, removing the meta data, that was created by VS when generated the EF model. And then, returns the next value from the Sequence. The next value of a Sequence is unique, by that, when some concurrent users are going to create records in the DB using the sequence will not get duplicates. This is my own implementation, I know that it could be several ways to do and better ways. If I find any other way, I promise to post it. To use the example is needed to add a reference to the Oracle (ODP.NET) dll.

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• Ad-hoc reporting similar to Microstrategy/Pentaho - is OLAP really the only choice (is OLAP even sufficient)?

  - by TheBeefMightBeTough

  So I'm getting ready to develop an API in Java that will provide all dimensions, metrics, hierarchies, etc to a user such that they can pick and choose what they want (say, e.g., dimensions of Location (a store) and Weekly, and the metric Product Sales $), provide their choices to the api, and have it spit out an object that contains the answer to their question (the object would probably be a set of cells). I don't even believe there will be much drill up/down. The data warehouse the APIwill interface with is in a standard form (FACT tables, dimensions, star schema format). My question is, is an OLAP framework such as Mondrian the only way to achieve something akin to ad-hoc reporting? I can envisage a really large Cube (or VirtualCube) that contains most of the dimensions and metrics the user could ever want, which would give the illusion of ad-hoc reporting. The problem is that there is a ton of setup to do (so much XML) to get the framework to work with the data. Further it requires specific knowledge, such as MDX, and even moreso learning the framework peculiars (Mondrian API). Finally, I am not positive it will scale much better than simply making queries against a SQL database. OLAP to me feels like very old technology. Is performance really an issue anymore? The alternative I can think of would be dynamic SQL. If the existing tables in the data warehouse conform to a naming scheme (FACT_, DIM_, etc), or if a very simple config file/ database table containing config information existed that stored which tables are fact tables, which are dimensions, and what metrics are available, then couldn't the api read from that and assembly the appropriate sql query? Would this necessarily be harder than learning MDX, Mondrian (or another OLAP framework), and creating all the cubes? In general, I feel that OLAP is at the same time too powerful (supports drill up/down, complex functions) and outdated and am reluctant to base my architecture on it. However, I am unsure if the alternative(s), such as rolling my own ad-hoc reporting framework using dynamic SQL would remove any complexity while still fulfilling requirements, both functional and non-functional (e.g., scalability; some FACT tables have many millions of rows). I also wonder about other techniques (e.g., hive). Has anyone here tried to do ad-hoc reporting? Any advice? I expect this project to take a pretty long time (3 months min, but probably longer), so I just do not want to commit to an architecture without being absolutely sure of its pros and cons. Thanks so much.

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• Misused mke2fs and cannot boot into system

  - by surlogics

  I installed Ubuntu with WUBI in Windows 7 64bit, and I had installed Mandriva 2011 with a disk. I tried to learn Linux with Ubuntu and misused mke2fs; after I reboot my computer, Windows 7 and Ubuntu has crashed. As I have Mandriva, I boot into Mandriva and found # df -h /dev/sda7 12G 9.8G 1.5G 88% / /dev/sda2 15G 165M 14G 2% /media/logical /dev/sda6 119G 88G 32G 74% /media/2C9E85319E84F51C /dev/sda5 118G 59G 60G 50% /media/D25A6DDE5A6DBFB9 /dev/sda9 100G 188M 100G 1% /media/ae69134a-a65e-488f-ae7f-150d1b5e36a6 /dev/sda1 100M 122K 100M 1% /media/DELLUTILITY /dev/sda3 98G 81G 17G 83% /media/OS # fdisk /dev/sda Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xd24f801e Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 206847 102400 6 FAT16 /dev/sda2 * 206848 30926847 15360000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 30926848 235726847 102400000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 235728864 976771071 370521104 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 235728896 481488895 122880000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 727252992 976771071 124759040 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda7 481500243 506674034 12586896 83 Linux /dev/sda8 506674098 514851119 4088511 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda9 514851183 727246484 106197651 83 Linux Partition table entries are not in disk order I think I may used the following command mke2fs -j -L "logical"/dev/sda2 but I had forgotten what kind of partition it was before I transfered it into ext3. perhaps ntfs Data was not lost, and I can view my files as I could in Windows. In Mandriva, there are following disks: 117.2 GB hard disk, files in it is the same as my Windows D:, and Ubuntu was installed in it; 119.0 GB hard disk is my G:, with my personal files in it; 12.0 GB is the same with Mandriva / (with means root), 101.3 GB hard disk with nothing but lost+found; DELLUTILITY should be Dell computer utilities pre-installed in my computer; logical is the disk which I had spoiled, I can view nothing but lost+found; and OS is the C: in my Windows. After I boot, grub lets me choose Mandriva or Windows. I chose Windows and it tells me: FILE system type unknown, partition type 0x7 Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format I doubt something wrong with windows MBR or something # cat /boot/grub/menu.lst timeout 5 color black/cyan yellow/cyan gfxmenu (hd0,6)/boot/gfxmenu default 0 title linux kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=199581b7-ac7e-4c5f-9888-24c4f213cad8 nokmsboot logo.nologo quiet resume=UUID=34c546e4-9c42-4526-aa64-bbdc0e9d64fd splash=silent vga=788 initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img title linux-nonfb kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux-nonfb root=UUID=199581b7-ac7e-4c5f-9888-24c4f213cad8 nokmsboot resume=UUID=34c546e4-9c42-4526-aa64-bbdc0e9d64fd initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img title failsafe kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=UUID=199581b7-ac7e-4c5f-9888-24c4f213cad8 nokmsboot failsafe initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img title windows root (hd0,1) makeactive chainloader +1 I can boot into Linux, but not Ubuntu, it boot into Mandriva. I don't have a boot disk. Help me find a way to make it work again.

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• openGL textures in bitmap mode

  - by evenex_code

  For reasons detailed here I need to texture a quad using a bitmap (as in, 1 bit per pixel, not an 8-bit pixmap). Right now I have a bitmap stored in an on-device buffer, and am mounting it like so: glBindBuffer(GL_PIXEL_UNPACK_BUFFER, BFR.G[(T+1)%2]); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGB, W, H, 0, GL_COLOR_INDEX, GL_BITMAP, 0); The OpenGL spec has this to say about glTexImage2D: "If type is GL_BITMAP, the data is considered as a string of unsigned bytes (and format must be GL_COLOR_INDEX). Each data byte is treated as eight 1-bit elements..." Judging by the spec, each bit in my buffer should correspond to a single pixel. However, the following experiments show that, for whatever reason, it doesn't work as advertised: 1) When I build my texture, I write to the buffer in 32-bit chunks. From the wording of the spec, it is reasonable to assume that writing 0x00000001 for each value would result in a texture with 1-px-wide vertical bars with 31-wide spaces between them. However, it appears blank. 2) Next, I write with 0x000000FF. By my apparently flawed understanding of the bitmap mode, I would expect that this should produce 8-wide bars with 24-wide spaces between them. Instead, it produces a white 1-px-wide bar. 3) 0x55555555 = 1010101010101010101010101010101, therefore writing this value ought to create 1-wide vertical stripes with 1 pixel spacing. However, it creates a solid gray color. 4) Using my original 8-bit pixmap in GL_BITMAP mode produces the correct animation. I have reached the conclusion that, even in GL_BITMAP mode, the texturer is still interpreting 8-bits as 1 element, despite what the spec seems to suggest. The fact that I can generate a gray color (while I was expecting that I was working in two-tone), as well as the fact that my original 8-bit pixmap generates the correct picture, support this conclusion. Questions: 1) Am I missing some kind of prerequisite call (perhaps for setting a stride length or pack alignment or something) that will signal to the texturer to treat each byte as 8-elements, as it suggests in the spec? 2) Or does it simply not work because modern hardware does not support it? (I have read that GL_BITMAP mode was deprecated in 3.3, I am however forcing a 3.0 context.) 3) Am I better off unpacking the bitmap into a pixmap using a shader? This is a far more roundabout solution than I was hoping for but I suppose there is no such thing as a free lunch.

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