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• The Softer Side of Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  It’s election season in the U.S., and you know what that means. It means I stop by the recycling bin in my garage before entering the house with the contents of my mailbox. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my usual direct mail purge when I came across a piece from The Container Store®. This piece would have gone straight to the recycling bin, but the title stopped me: Learn what WE STAND FOR! Under full disclaimer, I’m probably a “frequent flier” at The Container Store. One can never be too organized! Now, back to the direct mail piece. I opened it to discover that The Container Store has taken their customer experience beyond “a shopping experience that makes you smile” to giving customers more insight and transparency into how they feel about their employees, the vendors they partner with, and the communities they live in. The direct mail piece included several employees showcasing a skill, hobby or talent with their photo and a personal note that used one word to describe what these employees believe The Container Store stands for. I do not recall the last time I read through an entire piece of direct mail. But this time, I pored over all the comments and photos.  Summer, a salesperson, believes that one word is PASSION. Thomas in distribution center inventory systems chooses the word ACTION. The list goes on to include MATCHLESS, FUN, FAMILY, LOVE, and EMPOWERMENT. The Container Store is running a contest asking you to tell them what nonprofit organization you stand for. Anyone can submit their favorite nonprofit to win cash, products and services from The Container Store. Don’t forget about the softer side of customer experience. With many organizations working feverishly to transform their business into being more customer-centric, it’s easy to get caught up in processes and technology. Focusing on people and social responsibility often falls behind and becomes a lower priority. Keeping people and social responsibility at the forefront is crucial. Your customers will use your processes and technology, but they will see or hear your people and feel their passion. The latter is what they will remember most about your brand. I’m sure there are many other great examples of the softer side of customer experience. Please share your examples in the comments section.

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• need some concrete examples on user stories, tasks and how they relate to functional and technical specifications

  - by gideon

  Little heads up, Im the only lonely dev building/planning/mocking my project as I go. Ive come up with a preview release that does only the core aspects of the system, with good business value and I've coded most of the UI as dirty throw-able mockups over nicely abstracted and very minimal base code. In the end I know quite well what my clients want on the whole. I can't take agile-ish cowboying anymore because Im completely dis-organized and have no paper plan and since my clients are happy, things are getting more complex with more features and ideas. So I started using and learning Agile & Scrum Here are my problems: I know what a functional spec is.(sample): Do all user stories and/or scenarios become part of the functional spec? I know what user stories and tasks are. Are these kinda user stories? I dont see any Business Value reason added to them. I made a mind map using freemind, I had problems like this: Actor : Finance Manager Can Add a Financial Plan into the system because well thats the point of it? What Business Value reason do I add for things like this? Example : A user needs to be able to add a blog article (in the blogger app) because..?? Its the point of a blogger app, it centers around that feature? How do I go into the finer details and system definitions: Actor: Finance Manager Action: Adds a finance plan. This adding is a complicated process with lots of steps. What User Story will describe what a finance plan in the system is ?? I can add it into the functional spec under definitions explaining what a finance plan is and how one needs to add it into the system, but how do I get to the backlog planning from there? Example: A Blog Article is mostly a textual document that can be written in rich text in the system. To add a blog article one must...... But how do you create backlog list/features out of this? Where are the user stories for what a blog article is and how one adds/removes it? Finally, I'm a little confused about the relations between functional specs and user stories. Will my spec contain user stories in them with UI mockups? Now will these user stories then branch out tasks which will make up something like a technical specification? Example : EditorUser Can add a blog article. Use XML to store blog article. Add a form to add blog. Add Windows Live Writer Support. That would be agile tasks but would that also be part of/or form the technical specs? Some concrete examples/answers of my questions would be nice!!

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• How to explain bad software to non-technical people?

  - by mtutty

  In discussing software development with non-technical people (customers, business owners, project sponsors, etc.), I often resort to analogies and metaphors. It's relatively easy and effective to use a "house" or other metaphor for describing the size and complexity of new development. However, we often inherit someone else's code or data, and this approach doesn't seem to hold up as well when trying to explain why we're gutting something that already seems to work. Of course we can point to cycle time and cost to be saved in the future but this generally means nothing to business folks. I know doctors can say "just take this pill," but I'm not sure that software devs have the same authority. Ideas? EDIT: Let me add a bit to the discussion. The specific project I'm talking about has customers that don't realize (or care) about specific aspects of the system we're retiring (i.e., they think it was just fine): The system would save a NEW RECORD every time someone updated a field The system contained tables for reference data. These tables had new records added every day, even though they were duplicates of previous records. And there was no way to tie the reference data used for a particular case at the time it was closed. This is like 99% of the data in the old system. The field NAMES also have spaces, apostrophes and other inappropriate characters in them, making everything harder to work with. In addition to the incredible amount of duplicate data, they have around 1000 XLS files with data they want added to the system. Previously, they would do a spreadsheet for each case in the database, IN ADDITION TO what they typed into the database. Getting rid of this old, unneeded information and piping in the XLS data comprises about 80% of the total project effort, and was not something we could accurately predict. I'm trying to find a concrete way to describe how bad this thing was, mostly so that the customer will understand why the migration process has been so time-consuming. The actual coding was done pretty quickly and the new system works fine, but without the old data they won't be happy. Sorry to get into the weeds, but most of the answers I've seen so far are pretty basic scope/schedule/cost things. I've been doing this for 15 years, so this really is more of a reflective, philosophical question - but without some of the details it can be difficult to really appreciate the awful beauty of this problem.

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• How to apply effects that occur (or change) over time to characters in a game?

  - by Joshua Harris

  So assume that I have a system that applies Effects to Characters like so: public class Character { private Collection<Effect> _effects; public void AddEffect (Effect e) { e.ApplyTo(this); _effects.Add(e); } public void RemoveEffect (Effect e) { e.RemoveFrom(this); _effects.Remove(e); } } public interface Effect { public void ApplyTo (Character character); public void RemoveFrom (Character character); } Example Effect: Armor Buff for 5 seconds. void someFunction() { // Do Stuff ... Timer armorTimer = new Timer(5 seconds); ArmorBuff armorbuff = new ArmorBuff(); character.AddEffect(armorBuff); armorTimer.Start(); // Do more stuff ... } // Some where else in code public void ArmorTimer_Complete() { character.RemoveEffect(armorBuff); } public class ArmorBuff implements Effect { public void applyTo(Character character) { character.changeArmor(20); } public void removeFrom(Character character) { character.changeArmor(-20); } } Ok, so this example would buff the Characters armor for 5 seconds. Easy to get working. But what about effects that change over the duration of the effect being applied. Two examples come to mind: Damage Over Time: 200 damage every second for 3 seconds. I could mimic this by applying an Effect that lasts for 1 second and has a counter set to 3, then when it is removed it could deal 200 damage, clone itself, decrement the counter of the clone, and apply the clone to the character. If it repeats this until the counter is 0, then you got a damage over time ability. I'm not a huge fan of this approach, but it does describe the behavior exactly. Degenerating Speed Boost: Gain a speed boost that degrades over 3 seconds until you return to your normal speed. This is a bit harder. I can basically do the same thing as above except having timers set to some portion of a second, such that they occur fast enough to give the appearance of degenerating smoothly over time (even though they are really just stepping down incrementally). I feel like you could get away with only 12 steps over a second (maybe less, I would have to test it and see), but this doesn't seem very elegant to me. The only other way to implement this effect would be to change the system so that the Character checks the _effects collection for effects that alter any of the properties any time that they are being used. I could handle this in functions like getCurrentSpeed() and getCurrentArmor(), but you can imagine how much of a hassle it would be to have that kind of overhead every time you want to do a calculation with movement speed (which would be every time you move your character). Is there a better way to deal with these kinds of effects or events?

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• "ODM" - One of the Support team's most valued acronyms

  - by graham.mckendry(at)oracle.com

  If you submit technical service requests (SRs) through the My Oracle Support portal, you may often see the term "ODM" used in updates from our Support team. ODM is an acronym for "Oracle Diagnostic Methodology", which defines a standard problem solving approach that all of Oracle Support uses for every technical SR. ODM provides a number of benefits to the SRs - both for the Support organization and for the customer - including a consistent approach, higher quality, justified solutions, and ultimately faster resolution. Screenshot: Example of an ODM "Issue Clarification" activity in a service request The Oracle Diagnostic Methodology applies to both categories of technical SRs: Consultative (question-answer topics) and Problem-Solution. There are a few KM Notes that describe the steps of ODM, however to keep things simple (and since those KM Notes appear to be a bit outdated), I'll summarize the ODM stages here as follows: Consultative ODM - Three mandatory stages: ODM Question: Clarification of the customer's exact question. ODM Answer: Thorough answer to the customer's question. ODM Knowledge Content: Reference to new or existing knowledge base content, or explanation why the particular SR does not necessarily require knowledge content. Problem-Solution ODM - Eight mandatory stages: ODM Issue Clarification: Clarification of the reported issue, including the symptoms, the steps to reproduce, and an outline of the business impact ODM Issue Verification: Confirmation of the issue being verified based on proof provided by the customer, such as screenshots, log files, or reproducing the issue during an Oracle Web Conference. ODM Cause Determination: Succinct outline of the root cause of the issue. ODM Cause Justification: Explanation as to why the root cause applies to this particular situation. ODM Proposed Solution(s): Succinct outline of the potential solution(s) to resolve the issue. ODM Proposed Solution(s) Justification: Explanation of why the proposed solution(s) will in fact resolve the issue. ODM Solution Action Plan: Detailed numbered instructions on how to execute the proposed solutions. ODM Knowledge Content: Reference to new or existing knowledge base content, or explanation why the particular SR does not necessarily require knowledge content. During these stages, you may see other optional ODM-related activities such as "ODM Data Collection", "ODM Action Plan", "ODM Research", and "ODM Test Case". Again, these structured tags help ensure a uniform methodology across your SRs. With this knowledge you should be able to develop better predictability of what's coming next in your SRs, as well as what you can do to help expedite the resolution process.

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• Top down space game control problem

  - by Phil

  As the title suggests I'm developing a top down space game. I'm not looking to use newtonian physics with the player controlled ship. I'm trying to achieve a control scheme somewhat similar to that of FlatSpace 2 (awesome game). I can't figure out how to achieve this feeling with keyboard controls as opposed to mouse controls though. Any suggestions? I'm using Unity3d and C# or javaScript (unityScript or whatever is the correct term) works fine if you want to drop some code examples. Edit: Of course I should describe FlatSpace 2's control scheme, sorry. You hold the mouse button down and move the mouse in the direction you want the ship to move in. But it's not the controls I don't know how to do but rather the feeling of a mix of driving a car and flying an aircraft. It's really well made. Youtube link: FlatSpace2 on iPhone I'm not developing an iPhone game but the video shows the principle of the movement style. Edit 2 As there seems to be a slight interest, I'll post the version of the code I've used to continue. It works good enough. Sometimes good enough is sufficient! using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class ShipMovement : MonoBehaviour { public float directionModifier; float shipRotationAngle; public float shipRotationSpeed = 0; public double thrustModifier; public double accelerationModifier; public double shipBaseAcceleration = 0; public Vector2 directionVector; public Vector2 accelerationVector = new Vector2(0,0); public Vector2 frictionVector = new Vector2(0,0); public int shipFriction = 0; public Vector2 shipSpeedVector; public Vector2 shipPositionVector; public Vector2 speedCap = new Vector2(0,0); void Update() { directionModifier = -Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"); shipRotationAngle += ( shipRotationSpeed * directionModifier ) * Time.deltaTime; thrustModifier = Input.GetAxis("Vertical"); accelerationModifier = ( ( shipBaseAcceleration * thrustModifier ) ) * Time.deltaTime; directionVector = new Vector2( Mathf.Cos(shipRotationAngle ), Mathf.Sin(shipRotationAngle) ); //accelerationVector = Vector2(directionVector.x * System.Convert.ToDouble(accelerationModifier), directionVector.y * System.Convert.ToDouble(accelerationModifier)); accelerationVector.x = directionVector.x * (float)accelerationModifier; accelerationVector.y = directionVector.y * (float)accelerationModifier; // Set friction based on how "floaty" controls you want shipSpeedVector.x *= 0.9f; //Use a variable here shipSpeedVector.y *= 0.9f; //<-- as well shipSpeedVector += accelerationVector; shipPositionVector += shipSpeedVector; gameObject.transform.position = new Vector3(shipPositionVector.x, 0, shipPositionVector.y); } }

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• Cone of Uncertainty in classic and agile projects

  - by DigiMortal

  David Starr from Scrum.org made interesting session in TechEd Europe 2012 - Implementing Scrum Using Team Foundation Server 2012. One of interesting things for me was how Cone of Uncertainty looks like in agile projects (or how agile methodologies distort the cone we know from waterfall projects). This posting illustrates two cones – one for waterfall and one for agile world. Cone of Uncertainty Cone of Uncertainty was introduced to software development community by Steve McConnell and it visualizes how accurate are our estimates over project timeline. Here is the Cone of Uncertainty when we deal with waterfall and Big Design Up-Front (BDUF). Cone of Uncertainty. Taken from MSDN Library page Estimating. The closer we are to project end the more accurate are our estimates. When project ends we know exactly how much every task took time. As we can see then cone is wide when we usually have to give our estimates – it happens somewhere between Initial Project Concept and Requirements Complete. Don’t ask me why Initial Project Concept is the stage where some companies give their best estimates – they just do it every time and doesn’t learn a thing later. This cone is inevitable for software development and agile methodologies that try to make software world better are also able to change the cone. Cone of Uncertainty in agile projects Agile methodologies usually try to avoid BDUF, waterfalls and other things that make all our mistakes highly expensive. Of course, we are not the only ones who make mistakes – don’t also forget our dear customers. Agile methodologies take development as creational work and focus on making it better. One main trick is to focus on small and short iterations. What it means? We are estimating functionalities that are easier for us to understand and implement. Therefore our estimates are more accurate. As we move from few big iterations to many small iterations we also distort and slice Cone of Uncertainty. This is how cone looks when agile methodologies are used. Cone of Uncertainty in agile projects. We have more cones to live with but they are way smaller. I don’t have any numbers to put here because I found any but still this “chart” should give you the point: more smaller iterations cause more but way smaller cones of uncertainty. We can handle these small uncertainties because steps we take to complete small tasks are more predictable and doesn’t grow very often above our heads. One more note. Consider that both of charts given in this posting describe exactly the same phase of same project – just uncertainties are different.

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• Simple thruster like behaviour when rotating sprite

  - by ensamgud

  I'm prototyping some 2D game concepts with XNA and have added some basic keyboard inputs to control a triangle sprite. When I press key up the sprite accelerates in it's current facing direction, when I release the key it brakes down. For rotation, when I press left/right keys I rotate the sprite. Currently the sprite immedately changes direction when I rotate it. What I want is for it to keep moving in the same direction when I rotate, until I hit key up, adding thrust in whatever direction the sprite is pointing at. This would simulate thrusters on a classic space shooter like Asteroids. I'm adding an image to describe the behaviour I'm after and some code samples of how I'm doing things at the moment. This is my player struct, holding information of the sprite. public struct PlayerData { public Vector2 Position; // where to draw the sprite public Vector2 Direction; // travel direction of sprite public float Angle; // rotation of sprite public float Velocity; public float Acceleration; public float Decelleration; public float RotationAcceleration; public float RotationDecceleration; public float TopSpeed; public float Scale; } This is how I'm currently handling thrusting / braking (when pressing/releasing key up) (simplified, removed some bounds checking etc): player.Velocity += player.Acceleration * 0.1f; player.Velocity -= player.Acceleration * 0.1f; And when I rotate the sprite left and right: player.Angle -= player.RotationAcceleration * 0.1f; player.Angle += player.RotationAcceleration * 0.1f; This runs in the update loop, keeps the direction updated and updates the position: Vector2 up = new Vector2(0f, -1f); Matrix rotMatrix = Matrix.CreateRotationZ(player.Angle); player.Direction = Vector2.Transform(up, rotMatrix); player.Direction *= player.Velocity; player.Position += player.Direction; I am following along various beginner tutorials and haven't found any describing this, but I have tried some on my own without success. Do I need to change my velocity and acceleration fields to Vectors instead of floats to accomplish this type of movement? I realise my Angle and the Direction vector is currently tied together and I need to disconnect these somehow to be able to rotate freely without changing the direction of the movement, but I can't quite figure out how to do this while keeping the acceleration/decceleration functional. Would appreciate an explanation rather than pure code samples. Thanks,

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• How to avoid oscillation by async event based systems?

  - by inf3rno

  Imagine a system where there are data sources which need to be kept in sync. A simple example is model - view data binding by MVC. Now I intend to describe these kind of systems with data sources and hubs. Data sources are publishing and subscribing for events and hubs are relaying events to data sources. By handling an event a data source will change it state described in the event. By publishing an event the data source puts its current state to the event, so other data sources can use that information to change their state accordingly. The only problem with this system, that events can be reflected from the hub or from the other data sources, and that can put the system into an infinite oscillation (by async or infinite loop by sync). For example A -- data source B -- data source H -- hub A -> H -> A -- reflection from the hub A -> H -> B -> H -> A -- reflection from another data source By sync it is relatively easy to solve this issue. You can compare the current state with the event, and if they are equal, you don't change the state and raise the same event again. By async I could not find a solution yet. The state comparison does not work by async event handling because there is eventual consistency, and new events can be published in an inconsistent state causing the same oscillation. For example: A(*->x) -> H -> B(y->x) -- can go parallel with B(*->y) -> H -> A(x->y) -- so first A changes to x state while B changes to y state -- then B changes to x state while A changes to y state -- and so on for eternity... What do you think is there an algorithm to solve this problem? If there is a solution, is it possible to extend it to prevent oscillation caused by multiple hubs, multiple different events, etc... ? update: I don't think I can make this work without a lot of effort. I think this problem is just the same as we have by syncing multiple databases in a distributed system. So I think what I really need is constraints if I want to prevent this problem in an automatic way. What constraints do you suggest?

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• How to implement a multi-part snake with smooth movement? [closed]

  - by Jamie

  Sorry that i couldnt answer on my previous post but it got closed. I couldnt answer because i had to prepair for my finals. As there were problems with understanding of what im trying to achieve, im going to describe a little bit more in depth. Im creating a game in which you steer a snake. I assume everybody knows how that works. But in my case the snake isnt just propagating in an array element by element. Imagine a 2Dgrid on which the snake moves. Its 10x10 tiles. Lets say one tile is 4x4 meters. The snakes head spawns in the middle of the (3,2) tile (beginning with (0,0)), so its position is (4*3+2,4*2+2)(the 2's are so that the snake is in the middle of the 4x4 tile). And heres where the fun begins. when the snake moves, it doesnt jump to next tile. Instead it moves a fraction of the way there. So lets say the snake is heading to tile (4,2). After it moved once, its position is (4*3+2+0.1,4*2+2), where 0.1 is the fraction of the way it moved. This is done to achieve smooth movement. So now im adding the rest of the body. The rest is supposed to move along the exact same path as the head did. I implemented it so that each part of the body has its own position and direction. Then i apply this algorithm: 1.Move each part in its direction. 2.If a part is in the middle of the tile(which implies all of them are), change each parts direction to the direction of the part proceeding it. As i said before i could make this work, but i cant stop thinking that im overlooking a much easier and cleaner solution. So this is my question. Is there any easier/better/faster way to do this?

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• Development Approach: User Interface In or Domain Model Out?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  While I've never delivered anything using Smalltalk, my brief time playing with it has definitely left its mark. The only way to describe the experience is MVC the way it was meant to be. Essentially, all the heavy lifting for your application is done in the business objects (or domain model if you are so inclined). The standard controls are bound to the business objects in some way. For example, a text box is mapped to an object's field (the field itself is an object so it's easy to do). A button would mapped to a method. This is all done with a very simple and natural API. We don't have to think about binding objects, etc. It just works. Yet, in many newer languages and APIs you are forced to think from the outside in. First with C++ and MFC, and now with C# and WPF, Microsoft has gotten it's developer world hooked on GUI builders where you build your application by implementing event handlers. Java Swing development isn't so different, only you are writing the code to instantiate the controls on the form yourself. For some projects, there may never even be a domain model--just event handlers. I've been in and around this model for most of my carreer. Each way forces you to think differently. With the Smalltalk approach, your domain is smart while your GUI is dumb. With the default VisualStudio approach, your GUI is smart while your domain model (if it exists) is rather anemic. Many developers that I work with see value in the Smalltalk approach, and try to shoehorn that approach into the VisualStudio environment. WPF has some dynamic binding features that makes it possible; but there are limitations. Inevitably some code that belongs in the domain model ends up in the GUI classes. So, which way do you design/develop your code? Why? GUI first. User interaction is paramount. Domain first. I need to make sure the system is correct before we put a UI on it. There's pros and cons for either approach. Domain model fits in there with crystal cathedrals and pie in the sky. GUI fits in there with quick and dirty (sometimes really dirty). And for an added bonus: How do you make sure the code is maintainable?

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• How to temporarily save the result of the query, to use in another?

  - by Truth

  I have this problem I think you may help me with. P.S. I'm not sure how to call this, so if anyone finds a more appropriate title, please do edit. Background I'm making this application for searching bus transit lines. Bus lines are a 3 digit number, and is unique and will never change. The requirement is to be able to search for lines from stop A to stop B. The user interface is already successful in hinting the user to only use valid stop names. The requirement is to be able to display if a route has a direct line, and if not, display a 2-line and even 3-line combination. Example: I need to get from point A to point D. The program should show: If there's a direct line A-D. If not, display alternative, 2 line combos, such as A-C, C-D. If there aren't any 2-line combos, search for 3-line combos: A-B, B-C, C-D. Of course, the app should display bus line numbers, as well as when to switch buses. What I have: My database is structured as follows (simplified, actual database includes locations and times and whatnot): +-----------+ | bus_stops | +----+------+ | id | name | +----+------+ +-------------------------------+ | lines_stops_relationship | +-------------+---------+-------+ | bus_line | stop_id | order | +-------------+---------+-------+ Where lines_stops_relationship describe a many-to-many relationship between the bus lines and the stops. Order, signifies the order in which stops appear in a single line. Not all lines go back and forth, and order has meaning (point A with order 2 comes after point B with order 1). The Problem We find out if a line can pass through the route easily enough. Just search for a single line which passes through both points in the correct order. How can I find if there's a 2/3 line combo? I was thinking to search for a line which matches the source stop, and one for the destination stop, and see if I can get a common stop between them, where the user can switch buses. How do I remember that stop? 3 line combo is even trickier, I find a line for the source, and a line for the destination, and then what? Search for a line which has 2 stops I guess, but again, How do I remember the stops? tl;dr How do I remember results from a query to be able to use it again? I'm hoping to achieve this in a single query (for each, a query for 1-line routes, a query for 2, and a query for 3-line combos). Note: I don't mind if someone suggests a completely different approach than what I have, I'm open to any solutions. Will award any assistance with a cookie and an upvote. Thanks in advance!

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• Unexplained CPU and Disk activity spikes in SQL Server 2005

  - by Philip Goh

  Before I pose my question, please allow me to describe the situation. I have a database server, with a number of tables. Two of the biggest tables contain over 800k rows each. The majority of rows are less than 10k in size, though roughly 1 in 100 rows will be 1 MB but <4 MB. So out of the 1.6 million rows, about 16000 of them will be these large rows. The reason they are this big is because we're storing zip files binary blobs in the database, but I'm digressing. We have a service that runs constantly in the background, trimming 10 rows from each of these 2 tables. In the performance monitor graph above, these are the little bumps (red for CPU, green for disk queue). Once ever minute we get a large spike of CPU activity together with a jump in disk activity, indicated by the red arrow in the screenshot. I've run the SQL Server profiler, and there is nothing that jumps out as a candidate that would explain this spike. My suspicion is that this spike occurs when one of the large rows gets deleted. I've fed the results of the profiler into the tuning wizard, and I get no optimisation recommendations (i.e. I assume this means my database is indexed correctly for my current workload). I'm not overly worried as the server is coping fine in all circumstances, even under peak load. However, I would like to know if there is anything else I can do to find out what is causing this spike? Update: After investigating this some more, the CPU and disk usage spike was down to SQL server's automatic checkpoint. The database uses the simple recovery model, and this truncates the log file at each checkpoint. We can see this demonstrated in the following graph. As described on MSDN, the checkpoints will occur when the transaction log becomes 70% full and we are using the simple recovery model. This has been enlightening and I've definitely learned something!

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• How to scope access to a service to set of users, using OpenLDAP, and only OUs

  - by JDS

  Okay, here goes. Solving this will solve several problems for me (as I can reapply this knowledge to several extant, similar problems), but luckily I have a very specific, concise problem to describe. Enough preamble. Our hosting partner is setting up VPN access for us and is connecting it to our LDAP server. They are using Cisco VPN, the docs on setting this up are here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6120/products_configuration_example09186a00808c3c45.shtml#maintask1 Specifically, note the screenshot in (5), under "ASDM" Now, I do NOT want to provide access to all of our users. I only want to provide access to our IT group. But I do not see a configuration option for LDAP groups on that web reference for the Cisco VPN. We are using: OpenLDAP 2.4 Static groups (i.e. "Group has the following members...") Single user OU, "ou=users,dc=mycompany,dc=com" Is it possible to provide an alias of some kind in OpenLDAP that creates another OU, "itusers", say, and lets me alias the members of that OU somehow? Something like: "cn=Jeff Silverman,ou=itusers,dc=mycompany,dc=com" is an alias for "cn=Jeff Silverman,ou=users,dc=mycompany,dc=com" And is NOT a separate, unique user account. Alternatively, should I just create a separate OU and manage it separately? It is a pain, but only 12-15 users will have to be managed that way, with two separate user accounts. But I hate this option - messy, unmanageable, unscalable. You know what I mean. I am open to any options. I've searched and read all over but I can't quite find an directly analagous example. I can't possibly be the only one who's had this problem! Thanks!

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• How to replicate Lynda.com transitions in my own presentations (Keynote preferred, Powerpoint possib

  - by jdmuys

  I recently noticed that lynda.com uses in their training videos a very interesting transition that I would like to replicate in my own presentations. They are somewhat similar to the computer screen animations in the "Minority Report" movie: they zoom out to a huge sheet, pan, and zoom back in to a new location. It's very good for navigating deep hierarchies. For example when you are at level 1, you can see level 3, but it's tiny and unreadable. You then transition by zooming in to a deeper level that suddenly becomes legible. I can imagine also to use it using a large "mind map" as a common Ariane thread, to dive into details (and back out) while still taking advantage of the visual memory of the audience. It a bit difficult to describe, I hope I managed to convey the idea. You can see them in action for example there (iPhone programming training): http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=48369 Then click on "What you should know" in the introduction chapter. See for example in that movie between 22s and 24s, then between 27s and 28s. How do they do that? How could I replicate that effect? TIA

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• SpamAssassin 2010 Bug still active on my mailserver despite the offending rule being fixed - where t

  - by Ibrahim

  The SpamAssassin 2010 bug was supposed to be fixed not long after the bug became widely known, and indeed the offending rule in my /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf has been updated. However, incoming messages are still being tagged by this eg: X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.188 tagged_above=-999 required=6.31 tests=[BAYES_50=0.001, FH_DATE_PAST_20XX=3.188, SPF_PASS=-0.001] Here is the relevant rule: ##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006] describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX The date is grossly in the future. ##} FH_DATE_PAST_20XX I'm on spamassassin/3.2.5-2+lenny1.1~volatile1 on Debian Lenny, completely up to date. Any pointers on where to look to figure out what's going on? I don't know anything about SpamAssassin; someone else usually manages this but I'm free right now and am trying to figure out what the problem is because it's been annoying us for a while and we only just realized this bug was still affecting us. Update: I've lowered the score for the FH_DATE_PAST20XX rule to 0.1, both in /etc/spamassassin/local.cf and /usr/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf and it's still giving 3.188 points for this rule. Any idea what's going on? This really has me stumped. Update 2: It seems that after restarting amavisd, it's been fixed. What's the difference between amavisd and spamd? It seems like both should not be running, or something.

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• SpamAssassin 2010 Bug still active on my mailserver despite the offending rule being fixed - where t

  - by Ibrahim

  The SpamAssassin 2010 bug was supposed to be fixed not long after the bug became widely known, and indeed the offending rule in my /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf has been updated. However, incoming messages are still being tagged by this eg: X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.188 tagged_above=-999 required=6.31 tests=[BAYES_50=0.001, FH_DATE_PAST_20XX=3.188, SPF_PASS=-0.001] Here is the relevant rule: ##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006] describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX The date is grossly in the future. ##} FH_DATE_PAST_20XX I'm on spamassassin/3.2.5-2+lenny1.1~volatile1 on Debian Lenny, completely up to date. Any pointers on where to look to figure out what's going on? I don't know anything about SpamAssassin; someone else usually manages this but I'm free right now and am trying to figure out what the problem is because it's been annoying us for a while and we only just realized this bug was still affecting us. Update: I've lowered the score for the FH_DATE_PAST20XX rule to 0.1, both in /etc/spamassassin/local.cf and /usr/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf and it's still giving 3.188 points for this rule. Any idea what's going on? This really has me stumped. Update 2: It seems that after restarting amavisd, it's been fixed. What's the difference between amavisd and spamd? It seems like both should not be running, or something.

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• Unable to get defined path in 'source' type on AIX node

  - by haris

  hi all, I am trying to create a set of users on my AIX node and trying to get their authorized_keys which are already hosted on my server with name like, 'myuser_id_dsa.pub'. Currently i am managing 2 nodes (1. SLES 2. AIX). I defined the 'source' file paths in 2 separate contexts in fileserver.conf; [AIX] path myfiles/users/ssh/ allow *.another.mydomain.com [SLES] path myfiles/users/keys/ssh/ allow *.mydomain.com but when I run puppet then it ended successfully on my SLES node but encountered failure on AIX; with following err; /* Could not describe /AIX/myuser_id_rsa.pub: Fileserver module 'AIX' not mounted*/ in my code i have defined the 'source' with $filserver variable as: case $operatingsystem { "AIX": { $fileserver = "AIX" } default: { $fileserver = "SLES" } } file { "${home}/${username}/.ssh/authorized_keys": source = "puppet:///$fileserver/${username}_is_dsa.pub", ... ... } why AIX is not able to get the source path from my fileserver.conf while SLES is running absolutely fine? and how can I do it? I have to run similar configuration across different servers so I can only deal it with case statement. looking forward for your help Thanks

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• Attempting to update Amazon Route53 using a script, but domain is not being updated

  - by ks78

  I have several Amazon EC2 instances, running Ubuntu 10.04, with which I'd like to use Amazon's Route53. I setup a script as described in Shlomo Swidler's article, but I'm still missing something. When the script runs, it doesn't return any output, which I initially assumed meant it ran correctly. However, when I check the DNS records using MyR53DNS, there are no entries for my instances. Here's my script: #!/bin/tcsh -f set root=`dirname $0` setenv EC2_HOME /usr/lib/ec2-api-tools setenv EC2_CERT /etc/cron.route53/ec2_x509_cert.pem setenv EC2_PRIVATE_KEY /etc/cron.route53/ec2_x509_private.pem setenv AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID myaccesskeyid setenv AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY mysecretaccesskey /user/bin/ec2-describe-instances | \ perl -ne '/^INSTANCE\s+(i-\S+).*?(\S+\.amazonaws\.com)/ \ and do { $dns = $2; print "$1 $dns\n" }; /^TAG.+\sShortName\s+(\S+)/ \ and print "$1 $dns\n"' | \ perl -ane 'print "$F[0] CNAME $F[1] --replace\n"' | \ xargs -n 4 $/etc/cron.route53/cli53/cli53.py \ rrcreate -x 60 mydomain.com Does anyone see a problem with this script? If its not the script, what else could be preventing my Route53 domain from being updated? I am using the Security Groups to IP-restrict the instances. I've tried opening port 53, but that didn't seem to have an effect. Is there another port that Route53 uses? I'd appreciate any help or guidance the ServerFault community can offer. Let me know if you need any further info.

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• Our application is responding different on client server

  - by WtFudgE

  I have an application running on our local server and it works perfect. However when I deploy my application to our client's server there are problems. If i copy all the sources to another local from their server, it works fine again.... I am talking about an ASP.NET application talking with windows server 2008. The server specs of our client are: intel Xeon 2.13 GHz 6 GB RAM 300 GB HDD windows server 2008 R2 Although I think it's not that important I will describe the problems I am talking about to give u a better idea: It is related to upating and deleting fields in the sql server. Whenever there is more than one user running the application, and updates or deletes (not even the same record!0, there seems to be fields updating/deleting wrongly. But as I said before, if we copy the source to another server it is not the case. So I assumed it is more configuration related. Do you guys have any idea what the issue could be? Thanks a lot EDIT: my client old me he disabled the sql related accounts Could this be related?

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• Problems sending email using .Net's SmtpClient

  - by Jason Haley

  I've been looking through questions on Stackoverflow and Serverfault but haven't found the same problem mentioned - though that may be because I just don't know enough about how email works to understand that some of the questions are really the same as mine ... here's my situation: I have a web application that uses .Net's SmtpClient to send email. The configuration of the SmtpClient uses a smtp server, username and password. The SmtpClient code executes on a server that has an ip address not in the domain the smtp server is in. In most cases the emails go without a problem - but not AOL (and maybe others - but that is one we know for sure right now). When I look at the headers in the message that was kicked back from AOL it has one less line than the successful messages hotmail gets: AOL Bad Message: Received: from WEBSVRNAME ([##.###.###.###]) by domainofsmtp.com with MailEnable ESMTP; Mon, 18 Jun 2012 09:48:24 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> ... Good Hotmail Message: Received: from mail.domainofsmtp.com ([###.###.###.###]) by subdomainsof.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.4900); Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:29:13 -0700 Received: from WEBSVRNAME ([##.###.###.###]) by domainofsmtp.com with MailEnable ESMTP; Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:29:03 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> ... Notice the hotmail message headers has an additional line. I'm confused as to why the Web server's name and ip address are even in the headers since I thought I was using the SmtpClient to go through the smtp server (hence the need for the username and password of a valid email box). I've read about SPFs, DKIM and SenderID's but at this point I'm not sure if I would need to do something with the web server (and its ip/domain) or the domain the smtp is coming from. Has anyone had to do anything similiar before? Am I using the smtp server as a relay? Any help on how to describe what I'm doing would also help.

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• Does water damage a fiber optic / cat5 cable

  - by chris

  One of the buildings I support recently had an adventure with a broken fire sprinkler. Lots of water everywhere. One of the "drains" the water used was the vertical risers between network closets. The cable plant in this building has bundles of cat5e as well as conduit with bundles of multimode fiber optic cables. The fiber is standard multi strand plenum rated stuff that terminates in boxes that have the patches to the switches. As far as I can tell, no water got near the ends of the cables (fiber or copper) but the conduit was saturated, and is likely still saturated because there isn't any air flow to dry the cables out. My gut reaction is that while it didn't do the cables any favors, it likely also isn't going to cause any problems. A little more reading / googling around leads me to believe that the water may cause problems down the road. Some pretty pictures so everyone knows what I'm talking about: Fiber conduit: Vertical riser, going down: Vertical riser, going up: Does anyone have any experience with this sort of damage and how to deal with it? Should we just ask the insurance adjuster to add "pull new structured cable" to the list of things to be replaced? And, if the opinion is "replace it because it'll start failing randomly over time" please include links that describe the specific failure modes, so I've got some ammo to use with the adjuster.

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• time sync with ntpd

  - by guthrie

  I run Debian on several systems, and their times do not seem to stay in sync. I can run ntpdate manually, but I thought that I should have an ntpd running that would automate that. I did check with apt and apt-cache but don't find any ntpd (or associated ntpq), not any such names in my system (locate...), but ntp-doc does still describe them. Looking around I see that there is an ntpdate-debian command, and it uses /etc/default/ntpdate for servers (instead of the standard /etc/ntp.conf), but even thought that file is there and has "yes" indicated to use ntp.conf, it fails with "no servers can be used", although ntpdate works fine. Is this just a layer over ntpdate, any reason to use it instead? So, why are they missing, do I need them, how do I automate time updates? Associated, two of my machines are virtualized on a MSoft VM, how is it that their clocks drift, and both to different values? (The underlying Windows machine clock seems stable). I see a few old notes about time & ntp problems on VMware, didn't find anything either current or relating to MSoft VMs. Anything I did see says just to use ntpd, but as above, ...?!

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• Officially announced RAM support size doesn't apply to one of twin rigs with just one difference

  - by Deniz

  It'll take a little long to describe my situation but here goes the story : In January 2009 we bought (the OEM parts) two similar systems with just one difference. One of them had a Phenom X4 cpu and the other one (mine) a Phenom X3 cpu. At the beginning we had problems with both systems to power them on whilst having all of their ram slots being full. We decided to install the systems with just 2 slots populated and later try to install the rest of ram sticks. Both systems did succeed to support 3 sticks. We tried many different procedures to make the systems work with their fourth ram slots being populated. We waited for new bios updates and flashed the boards when they were available, we tried different ram sticks with different frequencies etc. One day while we were trying to install the fourth stick, the X4 machine did accept it. The other one did not. The most mind boggling thing was that after one of my trials the X3 system begun to not operate with the third slot populated. Our boards did have AMD 770 chipsets and we even tried to change the board of the X3 machine with another 770 chipset board. Now my questions are : Should we change the cpu ? What is causing the X3 system to not accept the fourth (or now the third) ram stick ? The manufacturers sites do claim that this boards do accept 4 ram sticks (but they only tested them with certain ram brands and models). What are the limitations for maximum ram configurations on motherboards ? Are there some "rules of thumb" except frequency, voltage, chip type considerations for which we did check our parts ? Our boards are : Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 Sapphire PC-AM2RX780 - PURE CrossFireX 770

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• Nginx's speed, and how to replicate it [migrated]

  - by Mediocre Gopher

  I'm interested in this from more than an academic standpoint rather than a practical standpoint; I don't plan on creating a production webserver to compete with nginx. What I'm wondering is how exactly nginx is so fast. The top google response for this is this thread, but it merely links to a cryptic slideshow and a general covering of different io strategies. All other results seem to simply describe how fast nginx is, rather then the reason. I tried building a simple erlang server to try to compete with nginx, but to no avail; nginx won out. All my server does is spawn a new process for each request, uses that process to read the file to a socket, then closes the file and kills the thread. It's not complicated, but given erlang's lightweight processes and underlying aio structure I thought it would compete, but nginx still wins out by a consistent 300 ms average under a heavy stress test. What is nginx doing that my simple server isn't? My first thought would be keeping files in main memory instead of tossing them between requests, but the filesystem cache does this already so I didn't think it would make that great of difference. Am I wrong? Or is there something else that I'm missing?

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