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• Why Are Minimized Programs Often Slow to Open Again?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  It seems particularly counterintuitive: you minimize an application because you plan on returning to it later and wish to skip shutting the application down and restarting it later, but sometimes maximizing it takes even longer than launching it fresh. What gives? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Bart wants to know why he’s not saving any time with application minimization: I’m working in Photoshop CS6 and multiple browsers a lot. I’m not using them all at once, so sometimes some applications are minimized to taskbar for hours or days. The problem is, when I try to maximize them from the taskbar – it sometimes takes longer than starting them! Especially Photoshop feels really weird for many seconds after finally showing up, it’s slow, unresponsive and even sometimes totally freezes for minute or two. It’s not a hardware problem as it’s been like that since always on all on my PCs. Would I also notice it after upgrading my HDD to SDD and adding RAM (my main PC holds 4 GB currently)? Could guys with powerful pcs / macs tell me – does it also happen to you? I guess OSes somehow “focus” on active software and move all the resources away from the ones that run, but are not used. Is it possible to somehow set RAM / CPU / HDD priorities or something, for let’s say, Photoshop, so it won’t slow down after long period of inactivity? So what is the deal? Why does he find himself waiting to maximize a minimized app? The Answer SuperUser contributor Allquixotic explains why: Summary The immediate problem is that the programs that you have minimized are being paged out to the “page file” on your hard disk. This symptom can be improved by installing a Solid State Disk (SSD), adding more RAM to your system, reducing the number of programs you have open, or upgrading to a newer system architecture (for instance, Ivy Bridge or Haswell). Out of these options, adding more RAM is generally the most effective solution. Explanation The default behavior of Windows is to give active applications priority over inactive applications for having a spot in RAM. When there’s significant memory pressure (meaning the system doesn’t have a lot of free RAM if it were to let every program have all the RAM it wants), it starts putting minimized programs into the page file, which means it writes out their contents from RAM to disk, and then makes that area of RAM free. That free RAM helps programs you’re actively using — say, your web browser — run faster, because if they need to claim a new segment of RAM (like when you open a new tab), they can do so. This “free” RAM is also used as page cache, which means that when active programs attempt to read data on your hard disk, that data might be cached in RAM, which prevents your hard disk from being accessed to get that data. By using the majority of your RAM for page cache, and swapping out unused programs to disk, Windows is trying to improve responsiveness of the program(s) you are actively using, by making RAM available to them, and caching the files they access in RAM instead of the hard disk. The downside of this behavior is that minimized programs can take a while to have their contents copied from the page file, on disk, back into RAM. The time increases the larger the program’s footprint in memory. This is why you experience that delay when maximizing Photoshop. RAM is many times faster than a hard disk (depending on the specific hardware, it can be up to several orders of magnitude). An SSD is considerably faster than a hard disk, but it is still slower than RAM by orders of magnitude. Having your page file on an SSD will help, but it will also wear out the SSD more quickly than usual if your page file is heavily utilized due to RAM pressure. Remedies Here is an explanation of the available remedies, and their general effectiveness: Installing more RAM: This is the recommended path. If your system does not support more RAM than you already have installed, you will need to upgrade more of your system: possibly your motherboard, CPU, chassis, power supply, etc. depending on how old it is. If it’s a laptop, chances are you’ll have to buy an entire new laptop that supports more installed RAM. When you install more RAM, you reduce memory pressure, which reduces use of the page file, which is a good thing all around. You also make available more RAM for page cache, which will make all programs that access the hard disk run faster. As of Q4 2013, my personal recommendation is that you have at least 8 GB of RAM for a desktop or laptop whose purpose is anything more complex than web browsing and email. That means photo editing, video editing/viewing, playing computer games, audio editing or recording, programming / development, etc. all should have at least 8 GB of RAM, if not more. Run fewer programs at a time: This will only work if the programs you are running do not use a lot of memory on their own. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite products such as Photoshop CS6 are known for using an enormous amount of memory. This also limits your multitasking ability. It’s a temporary, free remedy, but it can be an inconvenience to close down your web browser or Word every time you start Photoshop, for instance. This also wouldn’t stop Photoshop from being swapped when minimizing it, so it really isn’t a very effective solution. It only helps in some specific situations. Install an SSD: If your page file is on an SSD, the SSD’s improved speed compared to a hard disk will result in generally improved performance when the page file has to be read from or written to. Be aware that SSDs are not designed to withstand a very frequent and constant random stream of writes; they can only be written over a limited number of times before they start to break down. Heavy use of a page file is not a particularly good workload for an SSD. You should install an SSD in combination with a large amount of RAM if you want maximum performance while preserving the longevity of the SSD. Use a newer system architecture: Depending on the age of your system, you may be using an out of date system architecture. The “system architecture” is generally defined as the “generation” (think generations like children, parents, grandparents, etc.) of the motherboard and CPU. Newer generations generally support faster I/O (input/output), better memory bandwidth, lower latency, and less contention over shared resources, instead providing dedicated links between components. For example, starting with the “Nehalem” generation (around 2009), the Front-Side Bus (FSB) was eliminated, which removed a common bottleneck, because almost all system components had to share the same FSB for transmitting data. This was replaced with a “point to point” architecture, meaning that each component gets its own dedicated “lane” to the CPU, which continues to be improved every few years with new generations. You will generally see a more significant improvement in overall system performance depending on the “gap” between your computer’s architecture and the latest one available. For example, a Pentium 4 architecture from 2004 is going to see a much more significant improvement upgrading to “Haswell” (the latest as of Q4 2013) than a “Sandy Bridge” architecture from ~2010. Links Related questions: How to reduce disk thrashing (paging)? Windows Swap (Page File): Enable or Disable? Also, just in case you’re considering it, you really shouldn’t disable the page file, as this will only make matters worse; see here. And, in case you needed extra convincing to leave the Windows Page File alone, see here and here. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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• Parallel Classloading Revisited: Fully Concurrent Loading

  - by davidholmes

  Java 7 introduced support for parallel classloading. A description of that project and its goals can be found here: http://openjdk.java.net/groups/core-libs/ClassLoaderProposal.html The solution for parallel classloading was to add to each class loader a ConcurrentHashMap, referenced through a new field, parallelLockMap. This contains a mapping from class names to Objects to use as a classloading lock for that class name. This was then used in the following way: protected Class loadClass(String name, boolean resolve) throws ClassNotFoundException { synchronized (getClassLoadingLock(name)) { // First, check if the class has already been loaded Class c = findLoadedClass(name); if (c == null) { long t0 = System.nanoTime(); try { if (parent != null) { c = parent.loadClass(name, false); } else { c = findBootstrapClassOrNull(name); } } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) { // ClassNotFoundException thrown if class not found // from the non-null parent class loader } if (c == null) { // If still not found, then invoke findClass in order // to find the class. long t1 = System.nanoTime(); c = findClass(name); // this is the defining class loader; record the stats sun.misc.PerfCounter.getParentDelegationTime().addTime(t1 - t0); sun.misc.PerfCounter.getFindClassTime().addElapsedTimeFrom(t1); sun.misc.PerfCounter.getFindClasses().increment(); } } if (resolve) { resolveClass(c); } return c; } } Where getClassLoadingLock simply does: protected Object getClassLoadingLock(String className) { Object lock = this; if (parallelLockMap != null) { Object newLock = new Object(); lock = parallelLockMap.putIfAbsent(className, newLock); if (lock == null) { lock = newLock; } } return lock; } This approach is very inefficient in terms of the space used per map and the number of maps. First, there is a map per-classloader. As per the code above under normal delegation the current classloader creates and acquires a lock for the given class, checks if it is already loaded, then asks its parent to load it; the parent in turn creates another lock in its own map, checks if the class is already loaded and then delegates to its parent and so on till the boot loader is invoked for which there is no map and no lock. So even in the simplest of applications, you will have two maps (in the system and extensions loaders) for every class that has to be loaded transitively from the application's main class. If you knew before hand which loader would actually load the class the locking would only need to be performed in that loader. As it stands the locking is completely unnecessary for all classes loaded by the boot loader. Secondly, once loading has completed and findClass will return the class, the lock and the map entry is completely unnecessary. But as it stands, the lock objects and their associated entries are never removed from the map. It is worth understanding exactly what the locking is intended to achieve, as this will help us understand potential remedies to the above inefficiencies. Given this is the support for parallel classloading, the class loader itself is unlikely to need to guard against concurrent load attempts - and if that were not the case it is likely that the classloader would need a different means to protect itself rather than a lock per class. Ultimately when a class file is located and the class has to be loaded, defineClass is called which calls into the VM - the VM does not require any locking at the Java level and uses its own mutexes for guarding its internal data structures (such as the system dictionary). The classloader locking is primarily needed to address the following situation: if two threads attempt to load the same class, one will initiate the request through the appropriate loader and eventually cause defineClass to be invoked. Meanwhile the second attempt will block trying to acquire the lock. Once the class is loaded the first thread will release the lock, allowing the second to acquire it. The second thread then sees that the class has now been loaded and will return that class. Neither thread can tell which did the loading and they both continue successfully. Consider if no lock was acquired in the classloader. Both threads will eventually locate the file for the class, read in the bytecodes and call defineClass to actually load the class. In this case the first to call defineClass will succeed, while the second will encounter an exception due to an attempted redefinition of an existing class. It is solely for this error condition that the lock has to be used. (Note that parallel capable classloaders should not need to be doing old deadlock-avoidance tricks like doing a wait() on the lock object\!). There are a number of obvious things we can try to solve this problem and they basically take three forms: Remove the need for locking. This might be achieved by having a new version of defineClass which acts like defineClassIfNotPresent - simply returning an existing Class rather than triggering an exception. Increase the coarseness of locking to reduce the number of lock objects and/or maps. For example, using a single shared lockMap instead of a per-loader lockMap. Reduce the lifetime of lock objects so that entries are removed from the map when no longer needed (eg remove after loading, use weak references to the lock objects and cleanup the map periodically). There are pros and cons to each of these approaches. Unfortunately a significant "con" is that the API introduced in Java 7 to support parallel classloading has essentially mandated that these locks do in fact exist, and they are accessible to the application code (indirectly through the classloader if it exposes them - which a custom loader might do - and regardless they are accessible to custom classloaders). So while we can reason that we could do parallel classloading with no locking, we can not implement this without breaking the specification for parallel classloading that was put in place for Java 7. Similarly we might reason that we can remove a mapping (and the lock object) because the class is already loaded, but this would again violate the specification because it can be reasoned that the following assertion should hold true: Object lock1 = loader.getClassLoadingLock(name); loader.loadClass(name); Object lock2 = loader.getClassLoadingLock(name); assert lock1 == lock2; Without modifying the specification, or at least doing some creative wordsmithing on it, options 1 and 3 are precluded. Even then there are caveats, for example if findLoadedClass is not atomic with respect to defineClass, then you can have concurrent calls to findLoadedClass from different threads and that could be expensive (this is also an argument against moving findLoadedClass outside the locked region - it may speed up the common case where the class is already loaded, but the cost of re-executing after acquiring the lock could be prohibitive. Even option 2 might need some wordsmithing on the specification because the specification for getClassLoadingLock states "returns a dedicated object associated with the specified class name". The question is, what does "dedicated" mean here? Does it mean unique in the sense that the returned object is only associated with the given class in the current loader? Or can the object actually guard loading of multiple classes, possibly across different class loaders? So it seems that changing the specification will be inevitable if we wish to do something here. In which case lets go for something that more cleanly defines what we want to be doing: fully concurrent class-loading. Note: defineClassIfNotPresent is already implemented in the VM as find_or_define_class. It is only used if the AllowParallelDefineClass flag is set. This gives us an easy hook into existing VM mechanics. Proposal: Fully Concurrent ClassLoaders The proposal is that we expand on the notion of a parallel capable class loader and define a "fully concurrent parallel capable class loader" or fully concurrent loader, for short. A fully concurrent loader uses no synchronization in loadClass and the VM uses the "parallel define class" mechanism. For a fully concurrent loader getClassLoadingLock() can return null (or perhaps not - it doesn't matter as we won't use the result anyway). At present we have not made any changes to this method. All the parallel capable JDK classloaders become fully concurrent loaders. This doesn't require any code re-design as none of the mechanisms implemented rely on the per-name locking provided by the parallelLockMap. This seems to give us a path to remove all locking at the Java level during classloading, while retaining full compatibility with Java 7 parallel capable loaders. Fully concurrent loaders will still encounter the performance penalty associated with concurrent attempts to find and prepare a class's bytecode for definition by the VM. What this penalty is depends on the number of concurrent load attempts possible (a function of the number of threads and the application logic, and dependent on the number of processors), and the costs associated with finding and preparing the bytecodes. This obviously has to be measured across a range of applications. Preliminary webrevs: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~dholmes/concurrent-loaders/webrev.hotspot/ http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~dholmes/concurrent-loaders/webrev.jdk/ Please direct all comments to the mailing list [email protected].

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• EPM Planning 11.1.2 - MassGridStatistics

  - by Keith Rosenthal

  A utility is available for Oracle Hyperion Planning that determines web form load times.  This utility, MassGridStatistics, opens all web forms within the Planning application.  After the forms are opened, an html page will appear showing the form options, suppression, number of row column and page members, and load times.  Any form having a load time longer than one second could potentially have scalability issues in a multi-user environment and should be considered for re-design.  Adding suppression (especially block suppression) and reducing the number of rows and columns are potential fixes that will reduce load times. The MassGridStatistics utility is located in a .7z file called MassGridStatistics.7z.  Extract the file using 7-Zip.  A readme file is provided listing the installation instructions and the steps to run the utility. MassGridStatistics is included with the 11.1.2.1.101 patch set and will also be in all future releases starting with 11.1.2.2.  For earlier Planning releases, an SR will be necessary to have Support provide the utility.

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• Searching integer sequences

  - by David Gibson

  I have a fairly complex search problem that I've managed to reduce to the following description. I've been googling but haven't been able to find an algorithm that seems to fit my problem cleanly. In particular the need to skip arbitrary integers. Maybe someone here can point me to something? Take a sequence of integers A, for example (1 2 3 4) Take various sequences of integers and test if any of them match A such that. A contains all of the integers in the tested sequence The ordering of the integers in the tested sequence are the same in A We don't care about any integers in A that are not in the test sequence We want all matching test sequences, not just the first. An example A = (1 2 3 4) B = (1 3) C = (1 3 4) D = (3 1) E = (1 2 5) B matches A C matches A D does not match A as the ordering is different E does not match A as it contains an integer not in A I hope that this explanation is clear enough. The best I've managed to do is to contruct a tree of the test sequences and iterate over A. The need to be able to skip integers leads to a lot of unsuccessful search paths. Thanks Reading some suggestions I feel that I have to clarify a couple of points that I left too vague. Repeated numbers are allowed, in fact this is quite important as it allows a single test sequence to match A is multiple ways A = (1234356), B = (236), matches could be either -23---6 or -2--3-6 I expect there to be a very large number of test sequences, in the thousands at least and sequence A will tend to have a max length of maybe 20. Thus simply trying to match each test sequence one by one by iterating becomes extremely inefficient. Sorry if this wasn't clear.

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• Can't get lines around table borders/cells [migrated]

  - by Ira Baxter

  I have several web pages containing tables, for which I'd like to have line-borders around the tables and the cells. In fact, some of these pages existed for several years already, and rendered acceptly in IE6, IE7. We switched about 6 months ago to a completely different set of style sheets to change our site look and feel. We also switched to "modern" browsers such as IE8 (and because I couldn't stop Vista) to IE9. Now the borders don't render at all. I spent a day fighting with this about a month ago, and failed to fix it. It seemed that I could reduce the page down to just the barest table and IE8 would still not render the border. I think I decided IE8 was just buggy, but I'm not an HTML expert so it is more likely that I'm buggy. (I'm just getting back to this; I'll go see if I can find that reduced page). Here is one such page: http://www.semdesigns.com/products/DMS/DMSComparison.html The tables should be obvious; you can tell them by their absence of lines :-{ The URI validates using the W3C service as HTML 4.01 Transitional. Any suggestions?

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• Missing X-Spam-Status header

  - by Walt Stoneburner

  I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (trusty) and have followed the directions in https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/mail-filtering.html and am sending and receiving mail just fine. While I do see X-Virus-Scanned headers in my messages, which suggests mail is indeed being processed, I do not see any X-Spam-Level or X-Spam-Score headers being added to messages. This makes downstream procmailrc and client-side filtering ...more difficult. While having $final_spam_destiny = D_DISCARD in /etc/amavis/conf.d/20-debian_defaults does greatly reduce spam to my inbox, I had concerns of false-positives prior to tuning and didn't know were there going, so have set it to D_PASS for the time being. This exposed the problem. I'm not sure where to look to start diagnosing the problem (otherwise I'd post a suspect configuration file). /etc/amavis/conf.d/15-content_filter_mode has the lines uncommented to enable virus and spam checks, and virus checking appears to be working according to the headers. Spam Assassin certainly seems to be starting just fine, too. SpamAssassin debug facilities: info SA info: zoom: able to use 360/360 'body_0' compiled rules (100%) SpamAssassin loaded plugins: AskDNS, AutoLearnThreshold, Bayes, BodyEval, Check, DKIM, DNSEval, FreeMail, HTMLEval, HTTPSMismatch, Hashcash, HeaderEval, ImageInfo, MIMEEval, MIMEHeader, Pyzor, Razor2, RelayEval, ReplaceTags, Rule2XSBody, SPF, SpamCop, URIDNSBL, URIDetail, URIEval, VBounce, WLBLEval, WhiteListSubject SpamControl: init_pre_fork on SpamAssassin done I've also set $log_level = 2; in /etc/amavis/conf.d/50-user and don't see any obvious errors rolling by in the logs. Q: Any recommendations of what to try next? UPDATE (it appears that I have the right setting already): /etc/amavis/conf.d$ grep sa_tag_level_deflt * 20-debian_defaults:# $sa_tag_level_deflt = 2.0; # add spam info headers if at, or above that level 20-debian_defaults:$sa_tag_level_deflt = -999; # add spam info headers if at, or above that level

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• Multiple sites with the same codebase in Python

  - by Jimmy

  I am trying to run a large amount of sites which share about 90% of their code. They are simply designed to query an API and return the results. They will have a common userbase / database but will be configured slightly different and will have different CSS (perhaps even different templating). My initial idea was to run them as separate applications with a common library but I have read about the sites framework which would allow them to run from a single instance of Django which may help to reduce memory usage. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/sites/ Is the site framework the right approach to a problem like this, and does it have real benefits over running separate applications? Initially I thought it was, but now I think otherwise. I have heard the following: Your SITE_ID is set in settings.py, so in order to have multiple sites, you need multiple settings.py configurations, which means multiple distinct processes/instances. You can of course share the code base between them, but each site will need a dedicated worker / WSGIDaemon to serve the site. This effectively removes any benefit of running multiple sites under one hood, if each site needs a UWSGI instance running. Alternative ideas of systems: https://github.com/iivvoo/django_layers https://github.com/shestera/django-multisite I don't know what route to be taking with this.

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• Vector with Constant-Time Remove - still a Vector?

  - by Darrel Hoffman

  One of the drawbacks of most common implementations of the Vector class (or ArrayList, etc. Basically any array-backed expandable list class) is that their remove() operation generally operates in linear time - if you remove an element, you must shift all elements after it one space back to keep the data contiguous. But what if you're using a Vector just to be a list-of-things, where the order of the things is irrelevant? In this case removal can be accomplished in a few simple steps: Swap element to be removed with the last element in the array Reduce size field by 1. (No need to re-allocate the array, as the deleted item is now beyond the size field and thus not "in" the list any more. The next add() will just overwrite it.) (optional) Delete last element to free up its memory. (Not needed in garbage-collected languages.) This is clearly now a constant-time operation, since only performs a single swap regardless of size. The downside is of course that it changes the order of the data, but if you don't care about the order, that's not a problem. Could this still be called a Vector? Or is it something different? It has some things in common with "Set" classes in that the order is irrelevant, but unlike a Set it can store duplicate values. (Also most Set classes I know of are backed by a tree or hash map rather than an array.) It also bears some similarity to Heap classes, although without the log(N) percolate steps since we don't care about the order.

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• Considering Embedding a Database? Choose MySQL!

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  The M of the LAMP stack and the #1 database for Web-based applications, MySQL is also an extremely popular choice as embedded database. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Access our Resource Kit to discover the top reasons why:   3,000 ISVs and OEMs rely on MySQL as their embedded database 8 of the top 10 software vendors and hundreds of startups selected MySQL to power their cloud, on-premise and appliance-based offerings Leading mobile and SaaS providers ensure continuous service availability and scalability with lower cost and risk using MySQL Cluster. Learn how you can reduce costs and accelerate time to market while increasing performance and reliability. Access white papers, webinars, case studies and other resources in our Resource Kit.  

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• One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?

  - by Arkaaito

  At my company (3-yr-old web industry startup), we have frequent problems with the product team saying "aaaah this is a crisis patch it now!" (doesn't everybody?) This has an impact on the productivity (and morale) of engineering staff, self included. Management has spent some time thinking about how to reduce the frequency of these same-day requests and has come up with the solution that we are going to have a release every week. (Previously we'd been doing one every two weeks, which usually slipped by a couple of days or so.) There are 13 developers and 6 local / 9 offshore testers; the theory is that only 4 developers (and all testers) will work on even-numbered releases, unless a piece of work comes up that really requires some specific expertise from one of the other devs. Each cycle will contain two days of dev work and two days of QA work (plus 1 day of scoping / triage / ...). My questions are: (a) Does anyone have experience with this length of release cycle? (b) Has anyone heard of this length of release cycle even being attempted? (c) If (a) or (b), how on Earth do you make it work? (Any pitfalls to avoid, etc., are also appreciated.) (d) How can we minimize the damage if this effort fails?

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• A new mission statement for my school's algorithms class

  - by Eric Fode

  The teacher at Eastern Washington University that is now teaching the algorithms course is new to eastern and as a result the course has changed drastically mostly in the right direction. That being said I feel that the class could use a more specific, and industry oriented (since that is where most students will go, though suggestions for an academia oriented class are also welcome) direction, having only worked in industry for 2 years I would like the community's (a wider and much more collectively experienced and in the end plausibly more credible) opinion on the quality of this as a statement for the purpose an algorithms class, and if I am completely off target your suggestion for the purpose of a required Jr. level Algorithms class that is standalone (so no other classes focusing specifically on algorithms are required). The statement is as follows: The purpose of the algorithms class is to do three things: Primarily, to teach how to learn, do basic analysis, and implement a given algorithm found outside of the class. Secondly, to teach the student how to model a problem in their mind so that they can find a an existing algorithm or have a direction to start the development of a new algorithm. Third, to overview a variety of algorithms that exist and to deeply understand and analyze one algorithm in each of the basic algorithmic design strategies: Divide and Conquer, Reduce and Conquer, Transform and Conquer, Greedy, Brute Force, Iterative Improvement and Dynamic Programming. The Question in short is: do you agree with this statement of the purpose of an algorithms course, so that it would be useful in the real world, if not what would you suggest?

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• Modded Portal Gun Levitates a Companion Cube [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This cleverly designed Portal gun prop levitates a model Companion Cube; the whole setup just begs to be paired with a Halloween costume. Courtesy of Caleb over at Hack A Day: I was out to lunch with a couple friends, brainstorming ideas for fun projects when one of them says “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a working gravity gun?”. We all immediately concurred that while it would in fact be cool, it is also a silly proposition. However, only a few seconds later, I realized we could do a display piece that emulated this concept very easily. Floating magnetic globes have been around for quite some time. I determined I would tear the guts out of a stock floating globe and mount it on a portal gun, since they’re easier to find than a gravity gun. I would also build a custom companion cube to be the correct size and weight necessary. Watch the video above and then check out the link below for more information on the build. HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

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• Do we have enough time to build an electric car future?

  - by julien.groues

  A recent article from Greenbang has posed the question 'Do we have enough time to build an electric car future?'. The writer discusses that, although the future of transport might lie with electric cars, there is concern regarding whether we'll be able to build the market and infrastructure required to support them, before carbon and oil constraints create difficulties in powering the vehicles. Of course, the increasing use of Electric vehicles (EVs) is going to put excessive pressure on energy grids, as large volumes of electricity will need to be directed to charging points, which in turn must handle fluctuating demand at peak times. EVs are increasing in popularity as a sustainable method of transport to reduce carbon consumption, and electric utilities will have the opportunity, and the challenge, to quickly determine the best methods to fuel these vehicles and accommodate the associated increases in demand for energy. Critically, efficient software is required to provide diagnostic and predictive capabilities related to EV refuelling - for example, anticipated electricity flow will need to be addressed as the number of EVs on the road increases, and electricity will need to be directed to specific areas on-demand as vehicles attempt to recharge en-mass. But a smart grid infrastructure can meet these demands, intelligently. The implementation of a smart grid is not in the distant future, it is an achievable reality for utilities via simple installation of new software and technologies, which can be done incrementally for those facing existing legacy systems or concerned with upfront costs. The smart grid is integral to the monitoring and control of energy use as well as the future-proofing of the energy grid. A smart grid will be critical to meeting the electricity requirements of new EVs and will ensure their successful deployment by providing a reliable foundation for the data handling required to record and manage electricity distribution - from recording and assessing energy usage, to analysing data and sharing information with consumers via green billing. http://www.greenbang.com/do-we-have-enough-time-to-build-an-electric-car-future_14248.html

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• Help me select a "Simpler" target to create a new language: .NET, LLVM, Go, Own VM

  - by mamcx

  Lets define "Simple". This is my first language. I have no previous experience I will not dedicate +4 years to learn it properly. I'm a professional software [developer], but as an amateur in this area, I want instant gratification. If the idea shows a future, I could rewrite it. I don't want to do everything from scratch. In fact, if there exists a way to get GO (for example), change its syntax, add some sugar, give some extra functions and leave intact everything else, that would be perfect! From the example of coffescript/scala I think is better to build on top of some rich runtime like .NET/GO so I don't need to rewrite everything. HOWEVER, if is better other way, no problem for the first try! I want it in a week. I need it in a week so it will really take a month. Then it truly takes 3 months. But I don't want to put more that 3 months on this. I could reduce the scope of my language, but I hope the tools will help me a lot... I want to build a new language. Similar to python, but typed. I wonder what to build it on top of. I like the idea of building on top of GO. To get their sane (IMHO) OO paradigm (I plan to do the same, using interfaces, not inheritance), get goroutines and some other stuff. In my naive thinking I imagine that spit another language could help me to debug it more easily. However, look like everyone is building on top of something like .NET (don't like Java), LLVM or make it own VM. I read http://createyourproglang.com/ (great!) and the part of the VM look "easy" to me. So, what I need is the proper criteria and question I need to know in advance to have a fair shot at make this.

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• Oracle SOA Governance EMEA Workshop for Partners & System Integrators: Nov 5-7th | Madrid, Spain

  - by Lionel Dubreuil

  The EMEA Fusion Middleware Product Management team is delighted to announce an exciting and a much-awaited workshop on our market-leading SOA Governance offering. Oracle SOA Governance solution is Oracle Fusion Middleware's strategic approach to governing SOA. Whether just embarking on an SOA program, or expanding from project or pilot to broader deployment, the Oracle SOA Governance solution closes the loop on measuring SOA success from project inception through to realization, and providing the proof of ROI on SOA. Would your prospects and customers like to: Align their SOA Vision and Execution Improve Decision Making Effectively Manage Business and Technology Change Enable Control Foster Enterprise-wide Collaboration Reduce Development Costs Track their SOA Investments and Returns Demonstrate business value and ROI of SOA This FREE hands-on workshop is dedicated to EMEA Partners & System Integrators (SIs). It'll be delivered by Oracle HQ Product Management and will primarily focus on : SOA Governance as a Strategy and Methodology Hands-on with Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and Oracle Service Registry (OSR) When, how and whom to position our SOA Governance offerings Our SOA Governance Rapid Start Service Hands-on sessions for the most popular customer use cases Seats are limited, book now - you cannot afford to miss this training! If you're interested please contact Yogesh Sontakke (yogesh.sontakke-AT-oracle-DOT-com)

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• Oracle SOA Governance EMEA Workshop for Partners & System Integrators: Nov 5-7th | Madrid, Spain

  - by Lionel Dubreuil

  The EMEA Fusion Middleware Product Management team is delighted to announce an exciting and a much-awaited workshop on our market-leading SOA Governance offering. Oracle SOA Governance solution is Oracle Fusion Middleware's strategic approach to governing SOA. Whether just embarking on an SOA program, or expanding from project or pilot to broader deployment, the Oracle SOA Governance solution closes the loop on measuring SOA success from project inception through to realization, and providing the proof of ROI on SOA. Would your prospects and customers like to: Align their SOA Vision and Execution Improve Decision Making Effectively Manage Business and Technology Change Enable Control Foster Enterprise-wide Collaboration Reduce Development Costs Track their SOA Investments and Returns Demonstrate business value and ROI of SOA This FREE hands-on workshop is dedicated to EMEA Partners & System Integrators (SIs). It'll be delivered by Oracle HQ Product Management and will primarily focus on : SOA Governance as a Strategy and Methodology Hands-on with Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and Oracle Service Registry (OSR) When, how and whom to position our SOA Governance offerings Our SOA Governance Rapid Start Service Hands-on sessions for the most popular customer use cases Seats are limited, book now - you cannot afford to miss this training! If you're interested please contact Yogesh Sontakke: [email protected].

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• Which language is more suitable heavy file tasks?

  - by All

  I need to write a script (based on basic functions) to process /image/audio/video files. The process is mainly filesystem tasks and converts. The database of files has been stored by mysql. The script is simple but cause heavy tasks on the system; for example renaming/converting/copying thousands of file in a run. The script does not read the content of files into memory, it just manage the commands for sub-processes. The main weight is on the communication with filesystem. The script will be used regularly for new files. My concern is about performance. I am thinking of Shell script a complied language like C Please advise which programming language is more suitable for this purpose and why? UPDATE: An example is to scan a folder for images, convert them with ImageMagick, move files to destination folder, get file info, then update the database. As you can see, the process has no room for optimization, and most of languages have similar APIs for popular programs like ImageMagick, MySQL, etc. Thus, it can be written in any language. I just wish to reduce resource usage by speeding up the long loop. NOTE: I know that questions about comparing languages are not favorable, but I really had problem to choose, because the problems can appear in action.

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• Character creation using spritesheets

  - by Patrick Developer

  I am currently creating a 2D fighting game and have implemented a system where upon starting a new game, the player is presented with the option to create a custom character. I have a set of string arrays set with values that correspond to hair, headgear, chest, lower body and shoes. When done selecting a variety of items from the lists, a code is generated based off the index of each item (i.e 01123), which is then used to assign the correct Spritesheet to the player character. This has already presented a lot of work as I have had to create quite a few spreadsheets based of possible combinations, but I am now looking at a massive amount of work to implement each variation. I have started to look into setting layers for each item to reduce workload, but I am also looking at having different stances for the character - Depending on the currently equipped weapon - so this may present a lot of work either way. My question is, do I have any alternatives or am I stuck creating masses of Spritesheets to cover all combinations? As a side note, how much impact will assigning layered items have on overall performance?

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• Dealing with institutionalized programmers.

  - by Singleton

  Some times programmers who work in a project for long time tend to get institutionalized. It is difficult to convince them with reasoning. Even if we manage to convince them they will be adamant to take suggestion on board. How do we handle the situation without developing friction in team? Institutionalized in terms of practices. I recently joined in a project where build &release process was made so complicated with unnecessary roadblocks. My suggestion was we can get rid of some of the development overheads(like filling few spreadsheets) just by integrating defect management and version controlling tools (both are IBM-Rational tools integration can be very easy and one-off effort). Also by using tools like Maven & Ant (project involves java and some COTS products) build & release can be simplified and reduce manual errors& intervention. I managed to convince and ready to put efforts for developing proof of concept. But the ‘Senior’ developer is not willing to take it on board. One reason could be the current process makes him valuable in team.

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• Sudden drop in Total Indexed pages and increase in 'Not Selected' number.

  - by Pravin

  My blog is around 1 year old and have PR2. The average daily pageviews upto last 1 week were 1800. The total number of posts are 180. Though I have only 180 total posts, the total number of Indexed URL was increasing and it was as high as 510. But in the month of Sept2012, the total number of Indexed pages dropped from 510 to 214. The drop was sudden and it is now increasing very slowly. Also, the other main concern is huge increase in 'Not Selected' number. It is currently 814. I have never posted any post again and never copied any idea from any other blog. But I do use internal linking to some older post those are related to the new posts. The questions are:; Why there is sudden drop in the 'Total Indexed' pages. Why there was increase in total indexed pages to 500 even though the total posts were only 180. As the drop in 'Total Indexed' was in the month of sept2012, I was getting same organic traffic and it was steadily increasing till last week and then there was a 50 drop in the total pageviews. Why. Now, again the traffic is becoming to normal but still there is a problem. Is increase in the 'Not selected' number is a cause of drop in 'Total Indexed'? How to prevent or reduce the number of 'Not Selected' even though I do not have any duplicate post withing blog. Is the 'internal linking' to older post creating 'Not selected' problem? Should I edit my 'Robot.txt' to avoid crawling of labes that may be creating duplicate posts or something like that, if so, what is correct robot.txt. I have uploaded the screenshot of the graph of Webmaster Tools. Please take a look and give suggestions. Please help. Thank you in advance.

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• Oracle SOA Governance EMEA Workshop for Partners & System Integrators: Nov 5-7th | Madrid, Spain

  - by Lionel Dubreuil

  The EMEA Fusion Middleware Product Management team is delighted to announce an exciting and a much-awaited workshop on our market-leading SOA Governance offering. Oracle SOA Governance solution is Oracle Fusion Middleware's strategic approach to governing SOA. Whether just embarking on an SOA program, or expanding from project or pilot to broader deployment, the Oracle SOA Governance solution closes the loop on measuring SOA success from project inception through to realization, and providing the proof of ROI on SOA. Would your prospects and customers like to: Align their SOA Vision and Execution Improve Decision Making Effectively Manage Business and Technology Change Enable Control Foster Enterprise-wide Collaboration Reduce Development Costs Track their SOA Investments and Returns Demonstrate business value and ROI of SOA This FREE hands-on workshop is dedicated to EMEA Partners & System Integrators (SIs). It'll be delivered by Oracle HQ Product Management and will primarily focus on : SOA Governance as a Strategy and Methodology Hands-on with Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and Oracle Service Registry (OSR) When, how and whom to position our SOA Governance offerings Our SOA Governance Rapid Start Service Hands-on sessions for the most popular customer use cases Seats are limited, book now - you cannot afford to miss this training! If you're interested please contact Yogesh Sontakke: [email protected].

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• Becoming a Certified Information Professional

  - by Lance Shaw

  Yesterday, we participated with AIIM in a webinar about the Certified Information Professional (CIP) program that they are now offering.  The interest level is very high in the program, as evidenced by the high turnout at the event. You might be asking yourself, what does the Oracle WebCenter team care about an AIIM certification program? Well, we sponsored this program because we consistently find that the more educated our customers and prospects are, the more value they are going to get out of the technology we provide.  As an ECM vendor, we provide plenty of WebCenter product training and certifications to help you make the most of WebCenter technology. While these are essential and valuable, technologists that also have an operational command of the business and the various impacts that the flow of information can have are even more valuable to an organization. Thinking about the management of content and information and its effect on business process can have wide-ranging benefits, not only to your company but to your personal bottom line.  And let's be honest, a customer who is looking holistically at how content is managed is going to see more opportunities to leverage that content and in many cases, this will motivate the purchase of additional product licenses.   Now if you are regretting the fact that you missed the webinar yesterday, never fear!  It is now available for playback and you can view it at your convenience by visiting the AIIM website. We hope you find it informative and that you can personally profit from being able to showcase your certification as an Information Professional. Additionally, we hope it will help you identify additional opportunities to leverage Oracle WebCenter in order to further reduce your operational costs and drive your business forward.

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• Cleaning your BizTalk Build Server

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Just a little note for myself this one.At one of my customers where it is still BizTalk 2006 one of the build servers is intermittently getting issues so I wanted to run a script periodically to clean things up a little.  The below script is an example of how you can stop cruise control and all of the biztalk services, then clean the biztalk databases and reset the backup process and then click everything off again.This should keep the server a little cleaner and reduce the number of builds that occasionally fail for adhoc environmental issues.REM Server Clean ScriptREM =================== REM This script is ran to move the build server back to a clean state echo Stop Cruise Controlnet stop CCService echo Stop IISiisreset /stop echo Stop BizTalk Servicesnet stop BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Stop SSOnet stop ENTSSO echo Stop SQL Job Agentnet stop SQLSERVERAGENT echo Clean Message Boxsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_CleanupMsgbox"sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_PurgeSubscriptions"  echo Clean Tracking Databasesqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Exec dtasp_CleanHMData" echo Reset TDDS Stream Statussqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Update TDDS_StreamStatus Set lastSeqNum = 0" echo Force Full Backupsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMgmtDB -Q "Exec sp_ForceFullBackup" echo Clean Backup Directorydel E:\BtsBackups\*.* /q  echo Start SSOnet start ENTSSO echo Start SQL Job Agentnet start SQLSERVERAGENT echo Start BizTalk Servicesnet start BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Start IISiisreset /start echo Start Cruise Controlnet start CCService

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• Loading main javascript on every page? Or breaking it up to relevant pages?

  - by Kyle

  I have a 700kb decompressed JS file which is loaded on every page. Before I had 12 javascript files on each page but to reduce http requests I compressed them all into 1 file. This file is ~130kb gzipped and is served over gzip. However on the local computer it is still unpacked and loaded on every page. Is this a performance issue? I've profiled the javascript with firebug profiler but did not see any issues. The problem/illusion I am facing is there are jquery libraries compressed in that file that are sometimes not used on the current page. For example jquery datatables is 200kb compressed and that is only loaded on 2 of my website pages. Another is jqplot and that is another 200kb. I now have 400kb of excess code that isn't executed on 80% of the pages. Should I leave everything in 1 file? Should I take out the jquery libraries and load only relevant JS on the current page?

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