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• Top 5 Developer Enabling Nuggets in MySQL 5.6

  - by Rob Young

  MySQL 5.6 is truly a better MySQL and reflects Oracle's commitment to the evolution of the most popular and widelyused open source database on the planet.  The feature-complete 5.6 release candidate was announced at MySQL Connect in late September and the production-ready, generally available ("GA") product should be available in early 2013.  While the message around 5.6 has been focused mainly on mass appeal, advanced topics like performance/scale, high availability, and self-healing replication clusters, MySQL 5.6 also provides many developer-friendly nuggets that are designed to enable those who are building the next generation of web-based and embedded applications and services. Boiling down the 5.6 feature set into a smaller set, of simple, easy to use goodies designed with developer agility in mind, these things deserve a quick look:Subquery Optimizations Using semi-JOINs and late materialization, the MySQL 5.6 Optimizer delivers greatly improved subquery performance. Specifically, the optimizer is now more efficient in handling subqueries in the FROM clause; materialization of subqueries in the FROM clause is now postponed until their contents are needed during execution. Additionally, the optimizer may add an index to derived tables during execution to speed up row retrieval. Internal tests run using the DBT-3 benchmark Query #13, shown below, demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in execution times (from days to seconds) over previous versions. select c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalprice, sum(l_quantity)from customer, orders, lineitemwhere o_orderkey in (                select l_orderkey                from lineitem                group by l_orderkey                having sum(l_quantity) > 313  )  and c_custkey = o_custkey  and o_orderkey = l_orderkeygroup by c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalpriceorder by o_totalprice desc, o_orderdateLIMIT 100;What does this mean for developers?  For starters, simplified subqueries can now be coded instead of complex joins for cross table lookups: SELECT title FROM film WHERE film_id IN (SELECT film_id FROM film_actor GROUP BY film_id HAVING count(*) > 12); And even more importantly subqueries embedded in packaged applications no longer need to be re-written into joins.  This is good news for both ISVs and their customers who have access to the underlying queries and who have spent development cycles writing, testing and maintaining their own versions of re-written queries across updated versions of a packaged app.The details are in the MySQL 5.6 docs. Online DDL OperationsToday's web-based applications are designed to rapidly evolve and adapt to meet business and revenue-generationrequirements. As a result, development SLAs are now most often measured in minutes vs days or weeks. For example, when an application must quickly support new product lines or new products within existing product lines, the backend database schema must adapt in kind, and most commonly while the application remains available for normal business operations.  MySQL 5.6 supports this level of online schema flexibility and agility by providing the following new ALTER TABLE online DDL syntax additions:  CREATE INDEX DROP INDEX Change AUTO_INCREMENT value for a column ADD/DROP FOREIGN KEY Rename COLUMN Change ROW FORMAT, KEY_BLOCK_SIZE for a table Change COLUMN NULL, NOT_NULL Add, drop, reorder COLUMN Again, the details are in the MySQL 5.6 docs. Key-value access to InnoDB via Memcached APIMany of the next generation of web, cloud, social and mobile applications require fast operations against simple Key/Value pairs. At the same time, they must retain the ability to run complex queries against the same data, as well as ensure the data is protected with ACID guarantees. With the new NoSQL API for InnoDB, developers have allthe benefits of a transactional RDBMS, coupled with the performance capabilities of Key/Value store.MySQL 5.6 provides simple, key-value interaction with InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API.  Implemented via a new Memcached daemon plug-in to mysqld, the new Memcached protocol is mapped directly to the native InnoDB API and enables developers to use existing Memcached clients to bypass the expense of query parsing and go directly to InnoDB data for lookups and transactional compliant updates.  The API makes it possible to re-use standard Memcached libraries and clients, while extending Memcached functionality by integrating a persistent, crash-safe, transactional database back-end.  The implementation is shown here:So does this option provide a performance benefit over SQL?  Internal performance benchmarks using a customized Java application and test harness show some very promising results with a 9X improvement in overall throughput for SET/INSERT operations:You can follow the InnoDB team blog for the methodology, implementation and internal test cases that generated these results here. How to get started with Memcached API to InnoDB is here. New Instrumentation in Performance SchemaThe MySQL Performance Schema was introduced in MySQL 5.5 and is designed to provide point in time metrics for key performance indicators.  MySQL 5.6 improves the Performance Schema in answer to the most common DBA and Developer problems.  New instrumentations include: Statements/Stages What are my most resource intensive queries? Where do they spend time? Table/Index I/O, Table Locks Which application tables/indexes cause the most load or contention? Users/Hosts/Accounts Which application users, hosts, accounts are consuming the most resources? Network I/O What is the network load like? How long do sessions idle? Summaries Aggregated statistics grouped by statement, thread, user, host, account or object. The MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema is now enabled by default in the my.cnf file with optimized and auto-tune settings that minimize overhead (< 5%, but mileage will vary), so using the Performance Schema ona production server to monitor the most common application use cases is less of an issue.  In addition, new atomic levels of instrumentation enable the capture of granular levels of resource consumption by users, hosts, accounts, applications, etc. for billing and chargeback purposes in cloud computing environments.The MySQL docs are an excellent resource for all that is available and that can be done with the 5.6 Performance Schema. Better Condition Handling - GET DIAGNOSTICSMySQL 5.6 enables developers to easily check for error conditions and code for exceptions by introducing the new MySQL Diagnostics Area and corresponding GET DIAGNOSTICS interface command. The Diagnostic Area can be populated via multiple options and provides 2 kinds of information:Statement - which provides affected row count and number of conditions that occurredCondition - which provides error codes and messages for all conditions that were returned by a previous operation The addressable items for each are: The new GET DIAGNOSTICS command provides a standard interface into the Diagnostics Area and can be used via the CLI or from within application code to easily retrieve and handle the results of the most recent statement execution.  An example of how it is used might be:mysql> DROP TABLE test.no_such_table; ERROR 1051 (42S02): Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' mysql> GET DIAGNOSTICS CONDITION 1 -> @p1 = RETURNED_SQLSTATE, @p2 = MESSAGE_TEXT; mysql> SELECT @p1, @p2; +-------+------------------------------------+| @p1   | @p2                                | +-------+------------------------------------+| 42S02 | Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' | +-------+------------------------------------+ Options for leveraging the MySQL Diagnotics Area and GET DIAGNOSTICS are detailed in the MySQL Docs.While the above is a summary of some of the key developer enabling 5.6 features, it is by no means exhaustive. You can dig deeper into what MySQL 5.6 has to offer by reading this developer zone article or checking out "What's New in MySQL 5.6" in the MySQL docs.BONUS ALERT!  If you are developing on Windows or are considering MySQL as an alternative to SQL Server for your next project, application or shipping product, you should check out the MySQL Installer for Windows.  The installer includes the MySQL 5.6 RC database, all drivers, Visual Studio and Excel plugins, tray monitor and development tools all a single download and GUI installer.   So what are your next steps? Register for Dec. 13 "MySQL 5.6: Building the Next Generation of Web-Based Applications and Services" live web event.  Hurry!  Seats are limited. Download the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate (look under the Development Releases tab) Provide Feedback <link to http://bugs.mysql.com/> Join the Developer discussion on the MySQL Forums Explore all MySQL Products and Developer Tools As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL!

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• Performance Enhancement in Full-Text Search Query

  - by Calvin Sun

  Ever since its first release, we are continuing consolidating and developing InnoDB Full-Text Search feature. There is one recent improvement that worth blogging about. It is an effort with MySQL Optimizer team that simplifies some common queries’ Query Plans and dramatically shorted the query time. I will describe the issue, our solution and the end result by some performance numbers to demonstrate our efforts in continuing enhancement the Full-Text Search capability. The Issue: As we had discussed in previous Blogs, InnoDB implements Full-Text index as reversed auxiliary tables. The query once parsed will be reinterpreted into several queries into related auxiliary tables and then results are merged and consolidated to come up with the final result. So at the end of the query, we’ll have all matching records on hand, sorted by their ranking or by their Doc IDs. Unfortunately, MySQL’s optimizer and query processing had been initially designed for MyISAM Full-Text index, and sometimes did not fully utilize the complete result package from InnoDB. Here are a couple examples: Case 1: Query result ordered by Rank with only top N results: mysql> SELECT FTS_DOC_ID, MATCH (title, body) AGAINST ('database') AS SCORE FROM articles ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 1; In this query, user tries to retrieve a single record with highest ranking. It should have a quick answer once we have all the matching documents on hand, especially if there are ranked. However, before this change, MySQL would almost retrieve rankings for almost every row in the table, sort them and them come with the top rank result. This whole retrieve and sort is quite unnecessary given the InnoDB already have the answer. In a real life case, user could have millions of rows, so in the old scheme, it would retrieve millions of rows' ranking and sort them, even if our FTS already found there are two 3 matched rows. Apparently, the million ranking retrieve is done in vain. In above case, it should just ask for 3 matched rows' ranking, all other rows' ranking are 0. If it want the top ranking, then it can just get the first record from our already sorted result. Case 2: Select Count(*) on matching records: mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM articles WHERE MATCH (title,body) AGAINST ('database' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE); In this case, InnoDB search can find matching rows quickly and will have all matching rows. However, before our change, in the old scheme, every row in the table was requested by MySQL one by one, just to check whether its ranking is larger than 0, and later comes up a count. In fact, there is no need for MySQL to fetch all rows, instead InnoDB already had all the matching records. The only thing need is to call an InnoDB API to retrieve the count The difference can be huge. Following query output shows how big the difference can be: mysql> select count(*) from searchindex_inno where match(si_title, si_text) against ('people')  +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 666877 | +----------+ 1 row in set (16 min 17.37 sec) So the query took almost 16 minutes. Let’s see how long the InnoDB can come up the result. In InnoDB, you can obtain extra diagnostic printout by turning on “innodb_ft_enable_diag_print”, this will print out extra query info: Error log: keynr=2, 'people' NL search Total docs: 10954826 Total words: 0 UNION: Searching: 'people' Processing time: 2 secs: row(s) 666877: error: 10 ft_init() ft_init_ext() keynr=2, 'people' NL search Total docs: 10954826 Total words: 0 UNION: Searching: 'people' Processing time: 3 secs: row(s) 666877: error: 10 Output shows it only took InnoDB only 3 seconds to get the result, while the whole query took 16 minutes to finish. So large amount of time has been wasted on the un-needed row fetching. The Solution: The solution is obvious. MySQL can skip some of its steps, optimize its plan and obtain useful information directly from InnoDB. Some of savings from doing this include: 1) Avoid redundant sorting. Since InnoDB already sorted the result according to ranking. MySQL Query Processing layer does not need to sort to get top matching results. 2) Avoid row by row fetching to get the matching count. InnoDB provides all the matching records. All those not in the result list should all have ranking of 0, and no need to be retrieved. And InnoDB has a count of total matching records on hand. No need to recount. 3) Covered index scan. InnoDB results always contains the matching records' Document ID and their ranking. So if only the Document ID and ranking is needed, there is no need to go to user table to fetch the record itself. 4) Narrow the search result early, reduce the user table access. If the user wants to get top N matching records, we do not need to fetch all matching records from user table. We should be able to first select TOP N matching DOC IDs, and then only fetch corresponding records with these Doc IDs. Performance Results and comparison with MyISAM The result by this change is very obvious. I includes six testing result performed by Alexander Rubin just to demonstrate how fast the InnoDB query now becomes when comparing MyISAM Full-Text Search. These tests are base on the English Wikipedia data of 5.4 Million rows and approximately 16G table. The test was performed on a machine with 1 CPU Dual Core, SSD drive, 8G of RAM and InnoDB_buffer_pool is set to 8 GB. Table 1: SELECT with LIMIT CLAUSE mysql> SELECT si_title, match(si_title, si_text) against('family') as rel FROM si WHERE match(si_title, si_text) against('family') ORDER BY rel desc LIMIT 10; InnoDB MyISAM Times Faster Time for the query 1.63 sec 3 min 26.31 sec 127 You can see for this particular query (retrieve top 10 records), InnoDB Full-Text Search is now approximately 127 times faster than MyISAM. Table 2: SELECT COUNT QUERY mysql>select count(*) from si where match(si_title, si_text) against('family‘); +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 293955 | +----------+ InnoDB MyISAM Times Faster Time for the query 1.35 sec 28 min 59.59 sec 1289 In this particular case, where there are 293k matching results, InnoDB took only 1.35 second to get all of them, while take MyISAM almost half an hour, that is about 1289 times faster!. Table 3: SELECT ID with ORDER BY and LIMIT CLAUSE for selected terms mysql> SELECT <ID>, match(si_title, si_text) against(<TERM>) as rel FROM si_<TB> WHERE match(si_title, si_text) against (<TERM>) ORDER BY rel desc LIMIT 10; Term InnoDB (time to execute) MyISAM(time to execute) Times Faster family 0.5 sec 5.05 sec 10.1 family film 0.95 sec 25.39 sec 26.7 Pizza restaurant orange county California 0.93 sec 32.03 sec 34.4 President united states of America 2.5 sec 36.98 sec 14.8 Table 4: SELECT title and text with ORDER BY and LIMIT CLAUSE for selected terms mysql> SELECT <ID>, si_title, si_text, ... as rel FROM si_<TB> WHERE match(si_title, si_text) against (<TERM>) ORDER BY rel desc LIMIT 10; Term InnoDB (time to execute) MyISAM(time to execute) Times Faster family 0.61 sec 41.65 sec 68.3 family film 1.15 sec 47.17 sec 41.0 Pizza restaurant orange county california 1.03 sec 48.2 sec 46.8 President united states of america 2.49 sec 44.61 sec 17.9 Table 5: SELECT ID with ORDER BY and LIMIT CLAUSE for selected terms mysql> SELECT <ID>, match(si_title, si_text) against(<TERM>) as rel  FROM si_<TB> WHERE match(si_title, si_text) against (<TERM>) ORDER BY rel desc LIMIT 10; Term InnoDB (time to execute) MyISAM(time to execute) Times Faster family 0.5 sec 5.05 sec 10.1 family film 0.95 sec 25.39 sec 26.7 Pizza restaurant orange county califormia 0.93 sec 32.03 sec 34.4 President united states of america 2.5 sec 36.98 sec 14.8 Table 6: SELECT COUNT(*) mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM si_<TB> WHERE match(si_title, si_text) against (<TERM>) LIMIT 10; Term InnoDB (time to execute) MyISAM(time to execute) Times Faster family 0.47 sec 82 sec 174.5 family film 0.83 sec 131 sec 157.8 Pizza restaurant orange county califormia 0.74 sec 106 sec 143.2 President united states of america 1.96 sec 220 sec 112.2  Again, table 3 to table 6 all showing InnoDB consistently outperform MyISAM in these queries by a large margin. It becomes obvious the InnoDB has great advantage over MyISAM in handling large data search. Summary: These results demonstrate the great performance we could achieve by making MySQL optimizer and InnoDB Full-Text Search more tightly coupled. I think there are still many cases that InnoDB’s result info have not been fully taken advantage of, which means we still have great room to improve. And we will continuously explore the area, and get more dramatic results for InnoDB full-text searches. Jimmy Yang, September 29, 2012

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• Scaling Scrum within a group of 100s of programmers

  - by blunders

  Most Scrum teams lean toward 7-15 people **, though it's not clear how to scale Scrum among 100s of people, or how the effectiveness of a given team might be compared to another team within the group; meaning beyond just breaking the group into Scrum teams of 7-15 people, it's unclear how efforts between the teams are managed, compared, etc. Any suggestions related to either of these topics, or additional related topics that might be of more importance to account for in planning a large scale SCRUM grouping? ** In reviewing research related to the suggested size of software development teams, which appears to be the basis for the suggested Scrum team size, I found what appears to be an error in the research which oddly appears to show that bigger teams (15+ ppl), not smaller teams (7 ppl) are better. UPDATE, "Re: Scrum doesn't scale": Made huge amounts of progress on personally researching the topic, but thought I'd respond to the general belief of some that Scrum doesn't scale by citing a quote from Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn : Scrum Does Scale: You have to admire the intellectual honesty of the earliest agile authors. They were all very careful to say that agile methodolgies like Scrum were for small projects. This conservatism wasn’t because agile or Scrum turned out to be unsuited for large projects but because they hadn’t used these processes on large projects and so were reluctant to advise their readers to do so. But, in the years since the Agile Manifesto and the books that came shortly before and after it, we have learned that the principles and practices of agile development can be scaled up and applied on large projects, albeit it with a considerable amount of overhead. Fortunately, if large organizations use the techniques described regarding the role of the product owner, working with a shared product backlog, being mindful of dependencies, coordinating work among teams, and cultivating communities of practice, they can successfully scale a Scrum project. SOURCE: (ran across the book thanks to Ladislav Mrnka answer)

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• How can we make agile enjoyable for developers that like to personally, independently own large chunks from start to finish

  - by Kris

  We’re roughly midway through our transition from waterfall to agile using scrum; we’ve changed from large teams in technology/discipline silos to smaller cross-functional teams. As expected, the change to agile doesn’t suit everyone. There are a handful of developers that are having a difficult time adjusting to agile. I really want to keep them engaged and challenged, and ultimately enjoying coming to work each day. These are smart, happy, motivated people that I respect on both a personal and a professional level. The basic issue is this: Some developers are primarily motivated by the joy of taking a piece of difficult work, thinking through a design, thinking through potential issues, then solving the problem piece by piece, with only minimal interaction with others, over an extended period of time. They generally complete work to a high level of quality and in a timely way; their work is maintainable and fits with the overall architecture. Transitioning to a cross-functional team that values interaction and shared responsibility for work, and delivery of working functionality within shorter intervals, the teams evolve such that the entire team knocks that difficult problem over. Many people find this to be a positive change; someone that loves to take a problem and own it independently from start to finish loses the opportunity for work like that. This is not an issue with people being open to change. Certainly we’ve seen a few people that don’t like change, but in the cases I’m concerned about, the individuals are good performers, genuinely open to change, they make an effort, they see how the rest of the team is changing and they want to fit in. It’s not a case of someone being difficult or obstructionist, or wanting to hoard the juiciest work. They just don’t find joy in work like they used to. I’m sure we can’t be the only place that hasn’t bumped up on this. How have others approached this? If you’re a developer that is motivated by personally owning a big chunk of work from end to end, and you’ve adjusted to a different way of working, what did it for you?

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• Separation of development responsibilities in a new project

  - by dreza

  We have very recently started a new project (MVC 3.0) and some of our early discussion has been around how the work and development will be split amongst the team members to ensure we get the least amount of overlap of work and so help make it a bit easier for each developer to get on and do their work. The project is expected to take about 6 months - 1 year (although not all developers are likely to be on and might filter off towards the end), Our team is going to be small so this will help out a bit I believe. The team will essentially consist of: 3 x developers (All different levels i.e. more senior, intermediate and junior) 1 x project manager / product owner / tester An external company responsbile for doing our design work General project/development decisions so far have included: Develop in an Agile way using SCRUM techniques (We are still very much learning this approach as a company) Use MVVM archectecture Use Ninject and DI where possible Attempt to use as TDD as much as possible to drive development. Keep our controllers as skinny as possible Keep our views as simple as possible During our discussions two approaches have been broached as too how to seperate the workload given our objectives outlined above. OPTION 1: A framework seperation where each person is responsible for conceptual areas with overlap and discussion primarily in the integration areas. The integration areas would the responsibily of both developers as required. View prototypes (**Graphic designer**) | - Mockups | Views (Razor and view helpers etc) & Javascript (**Developer 1**) | - View models (Integration point) | Controllers and Application logic (**Developer 2**) | - Models (Integration point) | Domain model and persistence (**Developer 3**) OPTION 2: A more task orientated approach where each person is responsible for the completion of the entire task (story) from view - controller - model. QUESTION: For those who have worked in small teams developing MVC projects how have you managed the workload distribution in this situation. I can't imagine the junior would be responsible for building parts of the underlying architecture so would given them responsibility for the view make sense considering we are trying to keep it simple?

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• apply non-hierarchial transforms to hierarchial skeleton?

  - by user975135

  I use Blender3D, but the answer might not API-exclusive. I have some matrices I need to assign to PoseBones. The resulting pose looks fine when there is no bone hierarchy (parenting) and messed up when there is. I've uploaded an archive with sample blend of the rigged models, text animation importer and a test animation file here: http://www.2shared.com/file/5qUjmnIs/sample_files.html Import the animation by selecting an Armature and running the importer on "sba" file. Do this for both Armatures. This is how I assign the poses in the real (complex) importer: matrix_bases = ... # matrix from file animation_matrix = matrix_basis * pose.bones['mybone'].matrix.copy() pose.bones[bonename].matrix = animation_matrix If I go to edit mode, select all bones and press Alt+P to undo parenting, the Pose looks fine again. The API documentation says the PoseBone.matrix is in "object space", but it seems clear to me from these tests that they are relative to parent bones. Final 4x4 matrix after constraints and drivers are applied (object space) I tried doing something like this: matrix_basis = ... # matrix from file animation_matrix = matrix_basis * (pose.bones['mybone'].matrix.copy() * pose.bones[bonename].bone.parent.matrix_local.copy().inverted()) pose.bones[bonename].matrix = animation_matrix But it looks worse. Experimented with order of operations, no luck with all. For the record, in the old 2.4 API this worked like a charm: matrix_basis = ... # matrix from file animation_matrix = armature.bones['mybone'].matrix['ARMATURESPACE'].copy() * matrix_basis pose.bones[bonename].poseMatrix = animation_matrix pose.update() Link to Blender API ref: http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_63_17/bpy.types.BlendData.html#bpy.types.BlendData http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_63_17/bpy.types.PoseBone.html#bpy.types.PoseBone

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• New Enhancements for InnoDB Memcached

  - by Calvin Sun

  In MySQL 5.6, we continued our development on InnoDB Memcached and completed a few widely desirable features that make InnoDB Memcached a competitive feature in more scenario. Notablely, they are 1) Support multiple table mapping 2) Added background thread to auto-commit long running transactions 3) Enhancement in binlog performance  Let’s go over each of these features one by one. And in the last section, we will go over a couple of internally performed performance tests. Support multiple table mapping In our earlier release, all InnoDB Memcached operations are mapped to a single InnoDB table. In the real life, user might want to use this InnoDB Memcached features on different tables. Thus being able to support access to different table at run time, and having different mapping for different connections becomes a very desirable feature. And in this GA release, we allow user just be able to do both. We will discuss the key concepts and key steps in using this feature. 1) "mapping name" in the "get" and "set" command In order to allow InnoDB Memcached map to a new table, the user (DBA) would still require to "pre-register" table(s) in InnoDB Memcached “containers” table (there is security consideration for this requirement). If you would like to know about “containers” table, please refer to my earlier blogs in blogs.innodb.com. Once registered, the InnoDB Memcached will then be able to look for such table when they are referred. Each of such registered table will have a unique "registration name" (or mapping_name) corresponding to the “name” field in the “containers” table.. To access these tables, user will include such "registration name" in their get or set commands, in the form of "get @@new_mapping_name.key", prefix "@@" is required for signaling a mapped table change. The key and the "mapping name" are separated by a configurable delimiter, by default, it is ".". So the syntax is: get [@@mapping_name.]key_name set [@@mapping_name.]key_name  or  get @@mapping_name set @@mapping_name Here is an example: Let's set up three tables in the "containers" table: The first is a map to InnoDB table "test/demo_test" table with mapping name "setup_1" INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_1", "test", "demo_test", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "PRIMARY");  Similarly, we set up table mappings for table "test/new_demo" with name "setup_2" and that to table "mydatabase/my_demo" with name "setup_3": INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_2", "test", "new_demo", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "secondary_index_x"); INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_3", "my_database", "my_demo", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "idx"); To switch to table "my_database/my_demo", and get the value corresponding to “key_a”, user will do: get @@setup_3.key_a (this will also output the value that corresponding to key "key_a" or simply get @@setup_3 Once this is done, this connection will switch to "my_database/my_demo" table until another table mapping switch is requested. so it can continue issue regular command like: get key_b  set key_c 0 0 7 These DMLs will all be directed to "my_database/my_demo" table. And this also implies that different connections can have different bindings (to different table). 2) Delimiter: For the delimiter "." that separates the "mapping name" and key value, we also added a configure option in the "config_options" system table with name of "table_map_delimiter": INSERT INTO config_options VALUES("table_map_delimiter", "."); So if user wants to change to a different delimiter, they can change it in the config_option table. 3) Default mapping: Once we have multiple table mapping, there should be always a "default" map setting. For this, we decided if there exists a mapping name of "default", then this will be chosen as default mapping. Otherwise, the first row of the containers table will chosen as default setting. Please note, user tables can be repeated in the "containers" table (for example, user wants to access different columns of the table in different settings), as long as they are using different mapping/configure names in the first column, which is enforced by a unique index. 4) bind command In addition, we also extend the protocol and added a bind command, its usage is fairly straightforward. To switch to "setup_3" mapping above, you simply issue: bind setup_3 This will switch this connection's InnoDB table to "my_database/my_demo" In summary, with this feature, you now can direct access to difference tables with difference session. And even a single connection, you can query into difference tables. Background thread to auto-commit long running transactions This is a feature related to the “batch” concept we discussed in earlier blogs. This “batch” feature allows us batch the read and write operations, and commit them only after certain calls. The “batch” size is controlled by the configure parameter “daemon_memcached_w_batch_size” and “daemon_memcached_r_batch_size”. This could significantly boost performance. However, it also comes with some disadvantages, for example, you will not be able to view “uncommitted” operations from SQL end unless you set transaction isolation level to read_uncommitted, and in addition, this will held certain row locks for extend period of time that might reduce the concurrency. To deal with this, we introduce a background thread that “auto-commits” the transaction if they are idle for certain amount of time (default is 5 seconds). The background thread will wake up every second and loop through every “connections” opened by Memcached, and check for idle transactions. And if such transaction is idle longer than certain limit and not being used, it will commit such transactions. This limit is configurable by change “innodb_api_bk_commit_interval”. Its default value is 5 seconds, and minimum is 1 second, and maximum is 1073741824 seconds. With the help of such background thread, you will not need to worry about long running uncommitted transactions when set daemon_memcached_w_batch_size and daemon_memcached_r_batch_size to a large number. This also reduces the number of locks that could be held due to long running transactions, and thus further increase the concurrency. Enhancement in binlog performance As you might all know, binlog operation is not done by InnoDB storage engine, rather it is handled in the MySQL layer. In order to support binlog operation through InnoDB Memcached, we would have to artificially create some MySQL constructs in order to access binlog handler APIs. In previous lab release, for simplicity consideration, we open and destroy these MySQL constructs (such as THD) for each operations. This required us to set the “batch” size always to 1 when binlog is on, no matter what “daemon_memcached_w_batch_size” and “daemon_memcached_r_batch_size” are configured to. This put a big restriction on our capability to scale, and also there are quite a bit overhead in creating destroying such constructs that bogs the performance down. With this release, we made necessary change that would keep MySQL constructs as long as they are valid for a particular connection. So there will not be repeated and redundant open and close (table) calls. And now even with binlog option is enabled (with innodb_api_enable_binlog,), we still can batch the transactions with daemon_memcached_w_batch_size and daemon_memcached_r_batch_size, thus scale the write/read performance. Although there are still overheads that makes InnoDB Memcached cannot perform as fast as when binlog is turned off. It is much better off comparing to previous release. And we are continuing optimize the solution is this area to improve the performance as much as possible. Performance Study: Amerandra of our System QA team have conducted some performance studies on queries through our InnoDB Memcached connection and plain SQL end. And it shows some interesting results. The test is conducted on a “Linux 2.6.32-300.7.1.el6uek.x86_64 ix86 (64)” machine with 16 GB Memory, Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz CPU X86_64 2 CPUs- 4 Core Each, 2 RAID DISKS (1027 GB,733.9GB). Results are described in following tables: Table 1: Performance comparison on Set operations Connections 5.6.7-RC-Memcached-plugin ( TPS / Qps) with memcached-threads=8*** 5.6.7-RC* X faster Set (QPS) Set** 8 30,000 5,600 5.36 32 59,000 13,000 4.54 128 68,000 8,000 8.50 512 63,000 6.800 9.23 * mysql-5.6.7-rc-linux2.6-x86_64 ** The “set” operation when implemented in InnoDB Memcached involves a couple of DMLs: it first query the table to see whether the “key” exists, if it does not, the new key/value pair will be inserted. If it does exist, the “value” field of matching row (by key) will be updated. So when used in above query, it is a precompiled store procedure, and query will just execute such procedures. *** added “–daemon_memcached_option=-t8” (default is 4 threads) So we can see with this “set” query, InnoDB Memcached can run 4.5 to 9 time faster than MySQL server. Table 2: Performance comparison on Get operations Connections 5.6.7-RC-Memcached-plugin ( TPS / Qps) with memcached-threads=8 5.6.7-RC* X faster Get (QPS) Get 8 42,000 27,000 1.56 32 101,000 55.000 1.83 128 117,000 52,000 2.25 512 109,000 52,000 2.10 With the “get” query (or the select query), memcached performs 1.5 to 2 times faster than normal SQL. Summary: In summary, we added several much-desired features to InnoDB Memcached in this release, allowing user to operate on different tables with this Memcached interface. We also now provide a background commit thread to commit long running idle transactions, thus allow user to configure large batch write/read without worrying about large number of rows held or not being able to see (uncommit) data. We also greatly enhanced the performance when Binlog is enabled. We will continue making efforts in both performance enhancement and functionality areas to make InnoDB Memcached a good demo case for our InnoDB APIs. Jimmy Yang, September 29, 2012

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• How can we make agile enjoyable for developers that like to personally, independently own large chunks from start to finish

  - by Kris

  We’re roughly midway through our transition from waterfall to agile using scrum; we’ve changed from large teams in technology/discipline silos to smaller cross-functional teams. As expected, the change to agile doesn’t suit everyone. There are a handful of developers that are having a difficult time adjusting to agile. I really want to keep them engaged and challenged, and ultimately enjoying coming to work each day. These are smart, happy, motivated people that I respect on both a personal and a professional level. The basic issue is this: Some developers are primarily motivated by the joy of taking a piece of difficult work, thinking through a design, thinking through potential issues, then solving the problem piece by piece, with only minimal interaction with others, over an extended period of time. They generally complete work to a high level of quality and in a timely way; their work is maintainable and fits with the overall architecture. Transitioning to a cross-functional team that values interaction and shared responsibility for work, and delivery of working functionality within shorter intervals, the teams evolve such that the entire team knocks that difficult problem over. Many people find this to be a positive change; someone that loves to take a problem and own it independently from start to finish loses the opportunity for work like that. This is not an issue with people being open to change. Certainly we’ve seen a few people that don’t like change, but in the cases I’m concerned about, the individuals are good performers, genuinely open to change, they make an effort, they see how the rest of the team is changing and they want to fit in. It’s not a case of someone being difficult or obstructionist, or wanting to hoard the juiciest work. They just don’t find joy in work like they used to. I’m sure we can’t be the only place that hasn’t bumped up on this. How have others approached this? If you’re a developer that is motivated by personally owning a big chunk of work from end to end, and you’ve adjusted to a different way of working, what did it for you?

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• Change from Bullet/OgreAnim to Havok?

  - by Brett Powell

  I have been working on a game in Ogre for the last 6 months or so. It started as a learning project, and after a few rewrites it actually turned into a real game project. Physics scared me, and using Bullet with its lack of documentation was a nightmare, but I was able to atleast get some basics added and learned a lot. So as of now I am using Ogre with its default animation system (fairly basic) and Bullet Physics. I had always wanted to use Havok when I started out, but due to lack of integration information on the Ogre forums, and lack of tutorials on the net, I decided against it. Now that I am actually at the point where Bullet is just too much of a headache to proceed with (staring at forum threads praying someone answers) and the Ogre animation system is so basic, I am considering switching to Havok for Physics and Animation. The Physics system looks extremely polished and easy to use. The animation system looks incredible with the retargeting/blending/etc. The documentation is incredibly detailed as well (I guess when you come from Bullet, any documentation looks amazing) So my question is, as I am still somewhat of a 'newbie' to game development, should I just stick with what I am using now or should I make the switch over to Havok? The physics looks like I could get my project back to where it is now with minimal effort, and be able to expand much faster. The animation aspect looks extremely daunting as far as integrating it with Ogre.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, August 28, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, August 28, 2012Popular ReleasesImageServer: v1.1: This is the first version releasedChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke Project Templates V1.1 for VS2012: This release is specifically for Visual Studio 2012 Support, distributed through the Visual Studio Extensions gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ Check out the blog post for all of the details about this release. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/EntryId/3471/New-Visual-Studio-2012-Project-Templates-for-DotNetNuke.aspx If you need a project template for older versions of Visual Studio check out our previous releases.Home Access Plus+: v8.0: v8.0828.1800 RELEASE CHANGED TO BETA Any issues, please log them on http://www.edugeek.net/forums/home-access-plus/ This is full release, NO upgrade ZIP will be provided as most files require replacing. To upgrade from a previous version, delete everything but your AppData folder, extract all but the AppData folder and run your HAP+ install Documentation is supplied in the Web Zip The Quota Services require executing a script to register the service, this can be found in there install di...Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.2.0: Major linear algebra rework since v2.1, now available on Codeplex as well (previous versions were only available via NuGet). Also available as NuGet packages: PM> Install-Package MathNet.Numerics PM> Install-Package MathNet.Numerics.FSharp New: instead of the special Silverlight build we now provide a portable version supporting .Net 4, Silverlight 5 and .Net Core (WinRT) 4.5: PM> Install-Package MathNet.Numerics.PortablePhalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3391 (September 2012): New features: Extended ReflectionClass libxml error handling, constants TreatWarningsAsErrors MSBuild option OnlyPrecompiledCode configuration option; allows to use only compiled code Fixes: ArgsAware exception fix accessing .NET properties bug fix ASP.NET session handler fix for OutOfProc mode Phalanger Tools for Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2010 & 2012 New debugger engine, PHP-like debugging Lot of fixes of project files, formatting, smart indent, colorization etc. Improved ...WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®: CKEditor Provider 1.14.06: Whats New Added CKEditor 3.6.4 oEmbed Plugin can now handle short urls changes The Template File can now parsed from an xml file instead of js (More Info...) Style Sets can now parsed from an xml file instead of js (More Info...) Fixed Showing wrong Pages in Child Portal in the Link Dialog Fixed Urls in dnnpages Plugin Fixed Issue #6969 WordCount Plugin Fixed Issue #6973 File-Browser: Fixed Deleting of Files File-Browser: Improved loading time File-Browser: Improved the loa...MabiCommerce: MabiCommerce 1.0.1: What's NewSetup now creates shortcuts Fix spelling errors Minor enhancement to the Map window.ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5.2: This release has been built from the 2.5 branch. Version 2.5.2 is functionally identical to the 2.5.1 release but also includes the XML documentation comments file generated by Visual Studio. It is not 100% comprehensive but it will give you Visual Studio IntelliSense for a large part of the API. Just make sure the ScintillaNET.xml file is in the same folder as the ScintillaNET.dll reference you're using in your projects. (The XML file does not need to be distributed with your application)....WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.0: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.1: 2012.08.25 Ver5.7.1 (1)?????·?????LING?????????????? (2)SMTP???（????）????、?????\?????????????????????Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - Visual Studio 2012: Welcome to the Branching and Merging Guide Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording team All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs Spelling, grammar and content revisions are in progress. Hotfix will be published.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.62: Fix for issue #18525 - escaped characters in CSS identifiers get double-escaped if the character immediately after the backslash is not normally allowed in an identifier. fixed symbol problem with nuget package. 4.62 should have nuget symbols available again. Also want to highlight again the breaking change introduced in 4.61 regarding the renaming of the DLL from AjaxMin.dll to AjaxMinLibrary.dll to fix strong-name collisions between the DLL and the EXE. Please be aware of this change and...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.65: As some of you may know we were planning to release version 2.70 much later (the end of September). But today we have to release this intermediate version (2.65). It fixes a critical issue caused by a third-party assembly when running nopCommerce on a server with .NET 4.5 installed. No major features have been introduced with this release as our development efforts were focused on further enhancements and fixing bugs. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes p...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.2.9: . Fix: Some missing changes for fixing the window subclassing crash. · Fix: fixed bug when Run MyRouter at the first Time. · Fix: Log File · Fix: improve performance speed application · fix: solve some Exception.Private cloud DMS: Essential server-client full package: Requirements: - SQL server >= 2008 (minimal Express - for Essential recommended) - .NET 4.0 (Server) - .NET 4.0 Client profile (Client) This version allow: - full file system functionality Restrictions: - Maximum 2 parallel users - No share spaces - No hosted business groups - No digital sign functionality - No ActiveDirectory connector - No Performance cache - No workflow - No messagingJavaScript Prototype Extensions: Release 1.1.0.0: Release 1.1.0.0 Add prototype extension for object. Add prototype extension for array.Glyphx: Version 1.2: This release includes the SdlDotNet.dll dependency in the setup, which you will need.TFS Project Test Migrator: TestPlanMigration v1.0.0: Release 1.0.0 This first version do not create the test cases in the target project because the goal was to restore a Test Plan + Test Suite hierarchy after a manual user deletion without restoring all the Project Collection Database. As I discovered, deleting a Test Plan will do the following : - Delete all TestSuiteEntry (the link between a Test Suite node and a Test Case) - Delete all TestSuite (the nodes in the test hierarchy), including root TestSuite - Delete the TestPlan Test c...ERPStore eCommerce FrontOffice: ERPStore.Core V4.0.0.2 MVC4 RTM: ERPStore.Core V4.0.0.2 MVC4 RTM (Code Source)ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.8.0.0: sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved API, direct support for multiple barcode decoding, wrapper for barcode generating many other improvements and fixes encoder and decoder command line clients demo client for emguCV dev documentation startedNew ProjectsA Constraint Propogation Solver in F#: An experimental implementation of the Variable Consistency "Bucket Elimination" algorithm for constraint propogationAirline Pilot Academy: Taller de Sistemas de Información - UCB ArchiveManageSys: Something about archive managementCriteria Workflow Engine: A C++ Workflow Engine: Desing and execute business process.DnnDash Service: The DnnDash project enables administrators of DotNetNuke websites to view any installed DotNetNuke Dashboard components via other devices.Dynamics NAV UniWPF Addin: This project is Addin control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, allowing developers to put WPF controls directly to NAV page.Essai Salon de Chat: petit projet de communication basé sur une structure server / client(multi)High performance C# byte array to hex string to byte array: The performance key point for each to/from conversion is the (perpetual) repetition of the same if blocks and calculations...ImageCloudLock Backup Solution: ImageCloudLock 2012 is designed to backup your important items, like photos, financial documents, PDFs, excel documents and personal items to the Cloud service.Login with Facebook in ASP.Net MVC3 & Get data from Facebook User: This project is useful for ASP.Net MVC developer. For login with Facebook in ASP.Net MVC3 & Get data from user's facebook account.Lucy2D: Projet for developing 2D Games based on WPF and XNA. The point is to minimize effort for developers and fast prototyping.Main Street: Human Resources software for small business. Using C# and SQL Server Express.ManagedZFS: A managed implementation of the ZFS filesystem. Reliability, performance, and manageability. Also, *block-pointer rewrite* !!!Metro English Persian Dictionary: This is an English - Persian (Farsi) dictionary designed and developed for Windows 8 Metro User Interface which contains over 50000 words. My Personal Site: My Personal SiteNeverball Framework: Neverball FrameworkSample code: This project is simple a common location for me to store project skeletons and snippets for help bootstrapping other projects.Smart Card Fuzzer: SCFuzz is a smart card middleware fuzz testing tool (fuzzer). Using API hooking, SCFuzz modifies data returned by the card in order to find bugs in the host.Test Activation: Start looking into it.Vector, a .net generic collection to use instead of a List - in niche cases.: The Vector can be used as a replacement for a List if a large number of elements must be stored, and element inserts and deletes are frequent.WCF duplex Message: This is test project uses WCF to implement message broadcast.WCF! WTF?: Getting to know WCFZune to Lync Now Playing: Zune to Lync Now Playing is a simple application that let you display on your Lync Personal Note, the current song playing in Zune Player.

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• How to refactor while keeping accuracy and redundancy?

  - by jluzwick

  Before I ask this question I will preface it with our environment. My team consists of 3 programmers working on multiple different projects. Due to this, our use of testing is mostly limited to very general black box testing. Take the following assumptions also: Unit Tests will eventually be written but I'm under strict orders to refactor first Ignore common Test-Driven Development techniques when given this environment, my time is limited. I understand that if this were done correctly, our team would actually save money in the long-term by building Unit-Tests before hand. I'm about to refactor a fairly large portion of the code that is critical. While I believe my code will accurately work when done and after our black box testing, I realize that there will be new data that the new code might not be able to handle. What I wanted to know is how to keep old code that functions 98% of the time so that we can call those subroutines in case the new code doesn't work properly. Right now I'm thinking of separating the old code in a separate class file and adding a variable to our config that will tell the program which code to use. Is there a better way to handle this? NOTE: We do use revision control and we have archived builds so the client could always revert to a previous build, but I would like to see if there is a decent way of doing this besides reverting. I want this so they can use the other new functionality delivered in the new build. Edit: While I agree I will need to write Unit Tests for this, I don't believe I will capture everything with them. I'm looking for ways to easily be able to revert to the old, functional code should anything happen. While I know this is a poor practice, I'm planning on removing this code after our team can guarantee that the new code works to the same standards as the old.

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• C/C++: Who uses the logical operator macros from iso646.h and why?

  - by Jaime Soto

  There has been some debate at work about using the merits of using the alternative spellings for C/C++ logical operators in iso646.h: and && and_eq &= bitand & bitor | compl ~ not ! not_eq != or || or_eq |= xor ^ xor_eq ^= According to Wikipedia, these macros facilitate typing logical operators in international (non-US English?) and non-QWERTY keyboards. All of our development team is in the same office in Orlando, FL, USA and from what I have seen we all use the US English QWERTY keyboard layout; even Dvorak provides all the necessary characters. Supporters of using the iso646.h macros claim we should them because they are part of the C and C++ standards. I think this argument is moot since digraphs and trigraphs are also part of these standards and they are not even supported by default in many compilers. My rationale for opposing these macros in our team is that we do not need them since: Everybody on our team uses the US English QWERTY keyboard layout; C and C++ programming books from the US barely mention iso646.h, if at all; and new developers may not be familiar with iso646.h (this is expected if they are from the US). /rant Finally, to my set of questions: Does anyone in this site use the iso646.h logical operator macros? Why? What is your opinion about using the iso646.h logical operator macros in code written and maintained on US English QWERTY keyboards? Is my digraph and trigraph analogy a valid argument against using iso646.h with US English QWERTY keyboard layouts? EDIT: I missed two similar questions in StackOverflow: Is anybody using the named boolean operators? Which C++ logical operators do you use: and, or, not and the ilk or C style operators? why?

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• Our winners- and some BBQ for everyone

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Congrats to our two winners for the first two comments on my last entry. Steve from Australia and John Lemon. Steve won since he was the first person over the International Date Line to see the post I made so late after a workday on Friday. So not only does he get to live in a country with the 2nd most beautiful women in the world, but now he gets some cool Oracle Swag, too. (Yes, I live on the beach in southern California, so you can guess where 1st place is for that other contest…Now if Steve happens to live in Manly, we may actually have a tie going…) OK, ok, for everyone else, you can be winners, too. How you ask? I will make you the envy of every guy and gal in your neighborhood or campsite. What follows is the way to smoke the best ribs you or anyone you know have ever tasted. Follow my instructions and give it a try. People at your party/cookout/campsite will tell you that they’re the best ribs they’ve ever had, and I will let you take all the credit. Yes, I fully realize this post is going to be longer than any post I’ve done yet. But let’s get serious here. Smoking meat is much more important, agreed? J In all honesty, this is a repeat of another blog I did, so I’m just copying and pasting. Step 1. Get some ribs. I actually really like Costco’s pack. They have both St. Louis and Baby Back. (They are the same ribs, but cut in half down the sides. St. Louis style is the ‘front’ of the ribs closest to the stomach, and ‘Baby back’ is the part of the ribs where is connects to the backbone). I like them both, so here you see I got one pack of each. About 4 racks to a pack. So these two packs for $25 each will feed about 16-20 of my guests. So around 3 bucks a person is a pretty good deal for the best ribs you’ll ever have. Step 2. Prep the ribs the night before you’re going to smoke. You need to trim them to fit your smoker racks, and also take off the membrane and add your rub. Then cover and set in fridge overnight. Here’s how to take off the membrane, which will not break down with heat and smoke like the rest of the meat, so must be removed. Use a butter knife to work in a ways between the membrane and the white bone. Just enough to make room for your finger. Try really hard not to poke through the membrane, you want to keep it whole. See how my gloved fingers can now start to lift up and pull off the membrane? This is what you are trying to do. It’s awesome when the whole thing can come off at once. This one is going great, maybe the best one I’ve ever done. Sometime, it falls apart and doesn't come off in one nice piece. I hate when that happens. Now, add your rub and pat it down once into the meat with your other hand. My rub is not secret. I got it from my mentor, a BBQ competitive chef who is currently ranked #1 in California and #3 in the nation on the BBQ circuit. He does full-day classes in southern California if anyone is interested in taking his class. Go to www.slapyodaddybbq.com to check him out. I tweaked his run recipe a tad and made my own. It’s one part Lawry’s, one part sugar, one part Montreal Steak Seasoning, one part garlic powder, one-half part red chili powder, one-half part paprika, and then 1/20th part cayenne. You can adjust that last ingredient, or leave it out. Real cheap stuff you can get at Costco. This lets you make enough rub to last about a year or two. Don’t make it all at once, make a shaker’s worth and use it up before you make more. Place it all in a bowl, mix well, and then add to a shaker like you see here. You can get a shaker with medium sized holes on it at any restaurant supply store or Smart & Final. The kind you see at pizza places for their red pepper flakes works best. Now cover and place in fridge overnight. Step 3. The next day. Ok, I’m ready to go. Get your stuff together. You will need your smoker, some good foil, a can of peach nectar, a bottle of Agave syrup, and a package of brown sugar. You will need this stuff later. I also use a clean spray bottle, and apple juice. Step 4. Make your fire, or turn on your electric smoker. In this example I’m using my portable charcoal smoker. I got this for only $40. I then modified it to be useful. Once modified, these guys actually work very well. Trust me, your food DOES NOT KNOW how expensive your smoker is. Someone who tells you that you need to spend a bunch of money on a smoker is an idiot. I also have an electric smoker that stays in my backyard. It’s cleaner and larger so I can smoke more food. But this little $40 one works great for going camping. Here is what my fire-bowl looks like. I leave a space in the middle open, and place cold charcoal and wood chucks in a circle going outwards. This makes it so when I dump the hot coals down the middle, they will slowly burn outwards, hitting different wood chucks at different times, allowing me to go 4-5 hours without having to even touch my fire. For ribs, I use apple and pecan wood. Pecan works for anything. Apple or any fruit wood is excellent for pork. So now I make my hot charcoal with a chimney only about half-full. I found a great use for that side-burner on my grill that I never use. It makes a fantastic chimney starter. You never use fluids of any kind, nor ever use that stupid charcoal that has lighter fluid built into it. Never, ever, ever. Step 5. Smoke. Add your ribs in the racks and stack them up in your smoker. I have a digital thermometer on a probe that I use to keep track of the temp in the smoker. I just lay the probe on the top rack and shut the lid. This cheap guy is a little harder to maintain the right temperature of around 225 F, so I do have to keep my eye on it more than my electric one or a more expensive charcoal one with the cool gadgets that regulate your temp for you. Every hour, spray apple juice all over your ribs using that spray bottle. After about 3 hours, you should have a very good crust (called the Bark) on your ribs. Once you have the Bark where you want it, carefully remove your ribs and place them in a tray. We are now ready for a very important part to make the flavor. Get a large piece of foil and place one rib section on it. Splash some of the peach nectar on it, and then a drizzle of the Agave syrup. Then, use your gloved hand to pack on some brown sugar. Do this on BOTH sides, and then completely wrap it up TIGHT in the foil. Do this for each rib section, and then place all the wrapped sections back into the smoker for another 4 to 6 hours. This is where the meat will get tender and flavorful. The first three hours is only to make the smoke bark. You don’t need smoke anymore, since the ribs are wrapped, you only need to keep the heat around 225 for the next 4-6 hours. Obviously you don’t spray anymore. Just time and slow heat. Be patient. It’s actually really hard to overdo it. You can let them go longer, and all that will happen is they will get even MORE tender!!! If you take them out too soon, they will be tough. How do you know? Take out one package (use long tongs) and open it up. If you grab a bone with your tongs and it just falls apart and breaks away from the rest of the meat, you are done!!! Enjoy!!! Step 6. Eat. It pulls apart like this when it’s done. By the way, smoking tri-tip is way easier. Just rub it with the same rub, and put in your smoker for about 2.5 hours at 250 F. That’s it. Low-maintenance. It comes out like this, with a fantastic smoke ring and amazing flavor. Thanks, and I will put up another good tip, about the ZFSSA, around the end of November. Steve 

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• Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  You should always have three builds on your team project. These should be setup and tested using an empty solution before you write any code at all. Figure: Three builds named in the format [TeamProject].[AreaPath]_[Branch].[Gate|CI|Nightly] for every branch.   These builds should use the same XAML build workflow; however you may set them up to run a different set of tests depending on the time it takes to run a full build. Gate – Only needs to run the smallest set of tests, but should run most if not all of the Unit Test. This is run before developers are allowed to check-in CI – This should run all Unit Tests and all of the automated UI tests. It is run after a developer check-in. Nightly – The Nightly build should run all of the Unit Tests, all of the Automated UI tests and all of the Load and Performance tests. The nightly build is time consuming and will run but once a night. Packaging of your Product for testing the next day may be done at this stage as well. Figure: You can control what tests are run and what data is collected while they are running. Note: We do not run all the tests every time because of the time consuming nature of running some tests, but ALL tests should be run overnight. Note: If you had a really large project with thousands of tests including long running Load tests you may need to add a Weekly build to the mix.     Figure: Bad example, you can’t tell what these builds do if they are in a larger list   Figure: Good example, you know exactly what project, branch and type of build these are for.   Technorati Tags: SSW,SSW Rules,VS2010,VS ALM,Team Build 2010,Team Build

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• E.T. Phone "Home" - Hey I've discovered a leak..!

  - by Martin Deh

  Being a member of the WebCenter ATEAM, we are often asked to performance tune a WebCenter custom portal application or a WebCenter Spaces deployment.  Most of the time, the process is pretty much the same.  For example, we often use tools like httpWatch and FireBug to monitor the application, and then perform load tests using JMeter or Selenium.  In addition, there are the fine tuning of the different performance based tuning parameters that are outlined in the documentation and by blogs that have been written by my fellow ATEAMers (click on the "performance" tag in this ATEAM blog).  While performing the load test where the outcome produces a significant reduction in the systems resources (memory), one of the causes that plays a role in memory "leakage" is due to the implementation of the navigation menu UI.  OOTB in both JDeveloper and WebCenter Spaces, there are sample (page) templates that include a "default" navigation menu.  In WebCenter Spaces, this is through the SpacesNavigationModel taskflow region, and in a custom portal (i.e. pageTemplate_globe.jspx) the menu UI is contructed using standard ADF components.  These sample menu UI's basically enable the underlying navigation model to visualize itself to some extent.  However, due to certain limitations of these sample menu implementations (i.e. deeper sub-level of navigations items, look-n-feel, .etc), many customers have developed their own custom navigation menus using a combination of HTML, CSS and JQuery.  While this is supported somewhat by the framework, it is important to know what are some of the best practices in ensuring that the navigation menu does not leak.  In addition, in this blog I will point out a leak (BUG) that is in the sample templates.  OK, E.T. the suspence is killing me, what is this leak? Note: for those who don't know, info on E.T. can be found here In both of the included templates, the example given for handling the navigation back to the "Home" page, will essentially provide a nice little memory leak every time the link is clicked. Let's take a look a simple example, which uses the default template in Spaces. The outlined section below is the "link", which is used to enable a user to navigation back quickly to the Group Space Home page. When you (mouse) hover over the link, the browser displays the target URL. From looking initially at the proposed URL, this is the intended destination.  Note: "home" in this case is the navigation model reference (id), that enables the display of the "pretty URL". Next, notice the current URL, which is displayed in the browser.  Remember, that PortalSiteHome = home.  The other highlighted item adf.ctrl-state, is very important to the framework.  This item is basically a persistent query parameter, which is used by the (ADF) framework to managing the current session and page instance.  Without this parameter present, among other things, the browser back-button navigation will fail.  In this example, the value for this parameter is currently 95K25i7dd_4.  Next, through the navigation menu item, I will click on the Page2 link. Inspecting the URL again, I can see that it reports that indeed the navigation is successful and the adf.ctrl-state is also in the URL.  For those that are wondering why the URL displays Page3.jspx, instead of Page2.jspx. Basically the (file) naming convention for pages created ar runtime in Spaces start at Page1, and then increment as you create additional pages.  The name of the actual link (i.e. Page2) is the page "title" attribute.  So the moral of the story is, unlike design time created pages, run time created pages the name of the file will 99% never match the name that appears in the link. Next, is to click on the quick link for navigating back to the Home page. Quick investigation yields that the navigation was indeed successful.  In the browser's URL there is a home (pretty URL) reference, and there is also a reference to the adf.ctrl-state parameter.  So what's the issue?  Can you remember what the value was for the adf.ctrl-state?  The current value is 3D95k25i7dd_149.  However, the previous value was 95k25i7dd_4.  Here is what happened.  Remember when (mouse) hovering over the link produced the following target URL: http://localhost:8888/webcenter/spaces/NavigationTest/home This is great for the browser as this URL will navigate to the intended targer.  However, what is missing is the adf.ctrl-state parameter.  Since this parameter was not present upon navigation "within" the framework, the ADF framework produced another adf.ctrl-state (object).  The previous adf.ctrl-state basically is orphaned while continuing to be alive in memory.  Note: the auto-creation of the adf.ctrl state does happen initially when you invoke the Spaces application  for the first time.  The following is the line of code which produced the issue: <af:goLink destination="#{boilerBean.globalLogoURIInSpace} ... Here the boilerBean is responsible for returning the "string" url, which in this case is /spaces/NavigationTest/home. Unfortunately, again what is missing is adf.ctrl-state. Note: there are more than one instance of the goLinks in the sample templates. So E.T. how can I correct this? There are 2 simple fixes.  For the goLink's destination, use the navigation model to return the actually "node" value, then use the goLinkPrettyUrl method to add the current adf.ctrl-state: <af:goLink destination="#{navigationContext.defaultNavigationModel.node['home'].goLinkPrettyUrl}"} ... />  Note: the node value is the [navigation model id]  Using a goLink does solve the main issue.  However, since the link basically does a redirect, some browsers like IE will produce a somewhat significant "flash".  In a Spaces application, this may be an annoyance to the users.  Another way to solve the leakage problem, and also remove the flash between navigations is to use a af:commandLink.  For example, here is the code example for this scenario: <af:commandLink id="pt_cl2asf" actionListener="#{navigationContext.processAction}" action="pprnav">    <f:attribute name="node" value="#{navigationContext.defaultNavigationModel.node['home']}"/> </af:commandLink> Here, the navigation node to where home is located is delivered by way of the attribute to the commandLink.  The actual navigation is performed by the processAction, which is needing the "node" value. E.T. OK, you solved the OOTB sample BUG, what about my custom navigation code? I have seen many implementations of creating a navigation menu through custom code.  In addition, there are some blog sites that also give detailed examples.  The majority of these implementations are very similar.  The code usually involves using standard HTML tags (i.e. DIVS, UL, LI, .,etc) and either CSS or JavaScript (JQuery) to produce the flyout/drop-down effect.  The navigation links in these cases are standard <a href... > tags.  Although, this type of approach is not fully accepted by the ADF community, it does work.  The important thing to note here is that the <a> tag value must use the goLinkPrettyURL method of contructing the target URL.  For example: <a href="${contextRoot}${menu.goLinkPrettyUrl}"> The main reason why this type of approach is popular is that links that are created this way (also with using af:goLinks), the pages become crawlable by search engines.  CommandLinks are currently not search friendly.  However, in the case of a Spaces instance this may be acceptable.  So in this use-case, af:commandLinks, which would replace the <a>  (or goLink) tags. The example code given of the af:commandLink above is still valid. One last important item.  If you choose to use af:commandLinks, special attention must be given to the scenario in which java script has been used to produce the flyout effect in the custom menu UI.  In many cases that I have seen, the commandLink can only be invoked once, since there is a conflict between the custom java script with the ADF frameworks own scripting to control the view.  The recommendation here, would be to use a pure CSS approach to acheive the dropdown effects. One very important thing to note.  Due to another BUG, the WebCenter environement must be patched to BP3 (patch  p14076906).  Otherwise the leak is still present using the goLinkPrettyUrl method.  Thanks E.T.!  Now I can phone home and not worry about my application running out of resources due to my custom navigation! 

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• Do you know when to send a done email in Scrum?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  At SSW we have always sent done emails to the owner/requestor to let them know that it is done. Others who are dependent on that tasks are CC’ed so they know they can proceed. But how does that fit into Scrum?   Update 14th April 2010 Rule added to Rules to better Scrum with TFS If you are working on a task: When you complete a Task that is part of a User Story you need to send a done email to the Owner of that Story. You only need to add the Task #, Summary and link to the item in WIWA. Remember that all your tasks should be under 4 hours, do spending lots of time on a Done Email for a Task would be counter productive. Add more information if required, for example you may have completed the task a different way than previously discussed.  Make sure that every User Story has an Owner as per the rules. If you are the owner of a story: When you complete a story you should send a comprehensive done email as per the rules when the story had been completed. Make sure you add a list of all of the Tasks that were completed as part of the story and the Done criteria that you completed. If your done criteria says: Built Successfully 30% Code Coverage All tests passed Then add an illustration to show this. Figure: Show that you have met your Done criteria where possible.   This is all designed to help you Scrum Team members (Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Team) validate the quality of the work that has been completed. Remember that you are not DONE until your team says you are done.   Technorati Tags: SSW,Scrum,SSW Rules

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• Solutions for Project management [closed]

  - by user14416

  The team consists of 3 people. The method of development is Scrum. The language of the project is C++. The project will be under the control of the git system. The start up budget is 0. The following things have to be chosen: Build and Version Numbering Project documentation ( file with the most common info for current stage of the project, which will be changed every time the new version or subversion of the project emerges ) Project management tool ( like Trac or Redmine, I cannot use them, because there is no hosting ) Code documentation ( I consider Doxygen ) The following questions have arisen: What can you add to the above list of the main solutions for project management in the described project? One of three project participants has linux os (No MS Office), one has Windows and MS Office (does not want to use Libre or Open Office), one has Windows, but does not have MS Office. What formats, tools can u suggest using for project documentation? The variant of using online wiki does not fit, it must be files. OneNote mb is a good tool for project management, but because of the reason mentioned above it is not possible. What can you advise? Offer a system for Build and Version Numbering.

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• What is a good support knowledge base tool?

  - by Guillaume

  I have been searching for a tool to help my team organize its knowledge for resolving recurring support cases. I know this question will probably be closed, but I'll try my change anyway because I know that I can have some good answers about that. Context: our team is developing and supporting an huge applications (lots of different screens and workflow processes. We already have a good tool for managing our documentation, but we are struggling with support cases. Support action involve often quite a lot of manual steps to fix stuff and the knowledge for these actions is more 'oral transmission' than modern tools. We need an efficient way to store them in a knowledge base to be able to retrieve similar cases based on patterns (a stacktrace, an error message, a component name, a workflow step, ...) and ranked by similarity. Our wiki search is not very powerful when it come to this kind of search and the team members don't want to 'waste' time writing a report that will never be found... Do you know efficient knowledge base tool for this kind of use case ?

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• Key ATG architecture principles

  - by Glen Borkowski

  Overview The purpose of this article is to describe some of the important foundational concepts of ATG.  This is not intended to cover all areas of the ATG platform, just the most important subset - the ones that allow ATG to be extremely flexible, configurable, high performance, etc.  For more information on these topics, please see the online product manuals. Modules The first concept is called the 'ATG Module'.  Simply put, you can think of modules as the building blocks for ATG applications.  The ATG development team builds the out of the box product using modules (these are the 'out of the box' modules).  Then, when a customer is implementing their site, they build their own modules that sit 'on top' of the out of the box ATG modules.  Modules can be very simple - containing minimal definition, and perhaps a small amount of configuration.  Alternatively, a module can be rather complex - containing custom logic, database schema definitions, configuration, one or more web applications, etc.  Modules generally will have dependencies on other modules (the modules beneath it).  For example, the Commerce Reference Store module (CRS) requires the DCS (out of the box commerce) module. Modules have a ton of value because they provide a way to decouple a customers implementation from the out of the box ATG modules.  This allows for a much easier job when it comes time to upgrade the ATG platform.  Modules are also a very useful way to group functionality into a single package which can be leveraged across multiple ATG applications. One very important thing to understand about modules, or more accurately, ATG as a whole, is that when you start ATG, you tell it what module(s) you want to start.  One of the first things ATG does is to look through all the modules you specified, and for each one, determine a list of modules that are also required to start (based on each modules dependencies).  Once this final, ordered list is determined, ATG continues to boot up.  One of the outputs from the ordered list of modules is that each module can contain it's own classes and configuration.  During boot, the ordered list of modules drives the unified classpath and configpath.  This is what determines which classes override others, and which configuration overrides other configuration.  Think of it as a layered approach. The structure of a module is well defined.  It simply looks like a folder in a filesystem that has certain other folders and files within it.  Here is a list of items that can appear in a module: MyModule: META-INF - this is required, along with a file called MANIFEST.MF which describes certain properties of the module.  One important property is what other modules this module depends on. config - this is typically present in most modules.  It defines a tree structure (folders containing properties files, XML, etc) that maps to ATG components (these are described below). lib - this contains the classes (typically in jarred format) for any code defined in this module j2ee - this is where any web-apps would be stored. src - in case you want to include the source code for this module, it's standard practice to put it here sql - if your module requires any additions to the database schema, you should place that schema here Here's a screenshots of a module: Modules can also contain sub-modules.  A dot-notation is used when referring to these sub-modules (i.e. MyModule.Versioned, where Versioned is a sub-module of MyModule). Finally, it is important to completely understand how modules work if you are going to be able to leverage them effectively.  There are many different ways to design modules you want to create, some approaches are better than others, especially if you plan to share functionality between multiple different ATG applications. Components A component in ATG can be thought of as a single item that performs a certain set of related tasks.  An example could be a ProductViews component - used to store information about what products the current customer has viewed.  Components have properties (also called attributes).  The ProductViews component could have properties like lastProductViewed (stores the ID of the last product viewed) or productViewList (stores the ID's of products viewed in order of their being viewed).  The previous examples of component properties would typically also offer get and set methods used to retrieve and store the property values.  Components typically will also offer other types of useful methods aside from get and set.  In the ProductViewed component, we might want to offer a hasViewed method which will tell you if the customer has viewed a certain product or not. Components are organized in a tree like hierarchy called 'nucleus'.  Nucleus is used to locate and instantiate ATG Components.  So, when you create a new ATG component, it will be able to be found 'within' nucleus.  Nucleus allows ATG components to reference one another - this is how components are strung together to perform meaningful work.  It's also a mechanism to prevent redundant configuration - define it once and refer to it from everywhere. Here is a screenshot of a component in nucleus:  Components can be extremely simple (i.e. a single property with a get method), or can be rather complex offering many properties and methods.  To be an ATG component, a few things are required: a class - you can reference an existing out of the box class or you could write your own a properties file - this is used to define your component the above items must be located 'within' nucleus by placing them in the correct spot in your module's config folder Within the properties file, you will need to point to the class you want to use: $class=com.mycompany.myclass You may also want to define the scope of the class (request, session, or global): $scope=session In summary, ATG Components live in nucleus, generally have links to other components, and provide some meaningful type of work.  You can configure components as well as extend their functionality by writing code. Repositories Repositories (a.k.a. Data Anywhere Architecture) is the mechanism that ATG uses to access data primarily stored in relational databases, but also LDAP or other backend systems.  ATG applications are required to be very high performance, and data access is critical in that if not handled properly, it could create a bottleneck.  ATG's repository functionality has been around for a long time - it's proven to be extremely scalable.  Developers new to ATG need to understand how repositories work as this is a critical aspect of the ATG architecture.   Repositories essentially map relational tables to objects in ATG, as well as handle caching.  ATG defines many repositories out of the box (i.e. user profile, catalog, orders, etc), and this is comprised of both the underlying database schema along with the associated repository definition files (XML).  It is fully expected that implementations will extend / change the out of the box repository definitions, so there is a prescribed approach to doing this.  The first thing to be sure of is to encapsulate your repository definition additions / changes within your own module (as described above).  The other important best practice is to never modify the out of the box schema - in other words, don't add columns to existing ATG tables, just create your own new tables.  These will help ensure you can easily upgrade your application at a later date. xml-combination As mentioned earlier, when you start ATG, the order of the modules will determine the final configpath.  Files within this configpath are 'layered' such that modules on top can override configuration of modules below it.  This is the same concept for repository definition files.  If you want to add a few properties to the out of the box user profile, you simply need to create an XML file containing only your additions, and place it in the correct location in your module.  At boot time, your definition will be combined (hence the term xml-combination) with the lower, out of the box modules, with the result being a user profile that contains everything (out of the box, plus your additions).  Aside from just adding properties, there are also ways to remove and change properties. types of properties Aside from the normal 'database backed' properties, there are a few other interesting types: transient properties - these are properties that are in memory, but not backed by any database column.  These are useful for temporary storage. java-backed properties - by nature, these are transient, but in addition, when you access this property (by called the get method) instead of looking up a piece of data, it performs some logic and returns the results.  'Age' is a good example - if you're storing a birth date on the profile, but your business rules are defined in terms of someones age, you could create a simple java-backed property to look at the birth date and compare it to the current date, and return the persons age. derived properties - this is what allows for inheritance within the repository structure.  You could define a property at the category level, and have the product inherit it's value as well as override it.  This is useful for setting defaults, with the ability to override. caching There are a number of different caching modes which are useful at different times depending on the nature of the data being cached.  For example, the simple cache mode is useful for things like user profiles.  This is because the user profile will typically only be used on a single instance of ATG at one time.  Simple cache mode is also useful for read-only types of data such as the product catalog.  Locked cache mode is useful when you need to ensure that only one ATG instance writes to a particular item at a time - an example would be a customers order.  There are many options in terms of configuring caching which are outside the scope of this article - please refer to the product manuals for more details. Other important concepts - out of scope for this article There are a whole host of concepts that are very important pieces to the ATG platform, but are out of scope for this article.  Here's a brief description of some of them: formhandlers - these are ATG components that handle form submissions by users. pipelines - these are configurable chains of logic that are used for things like handling a request (request pipeline) or checking out an order. special kinds of repositories (versioned, files, secure, ...) - there are a couple different types of repositories that are used in various situations.  See the manuals for more information. web development - JSP/ DSP tag library - ATG provides a traditional approach to developing web applications by providing a tag library called the DSP library.  This library is used throughout your JSP pages to interact with all the ATG components. messaging - a message sub-system used as another way for components to interact. personalization - ability for business users to define a personalized user experience for customers.  See the other blog posts related to personalization.

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• Quantifying the value of refactoring in commercial terms

  - by Myles McDonnell

  Here is the classic scenario; Dev team build a prototype. Business mgmt like it and put it into production. Dev team now have to continue to deliver new features whilst at the same time pay the technical debt accrued when the code base was a prototype. My question is this (forgive me, it's rather open ended); how can the value of the refactoring work be quantified in commercial terms? As developers we can clearly understand and communicate the value in technical terms, such a the removal of code duplication, the simplification of an object model and so on. But this means little to an executive focussed on the commercial elements. What will mean something to this executive is the dev. team being able to deliver requirements at faster velocity. Just making this statement without any metrics that clearly quantify return on investment (increased velocity in return for resource allocated to refactoring) carries little weight. I'm interested to hear from anyone who has had experience, positive or negative, in relation to the above. ----------------- EDIT ---------------- Thanks for the responses so far, all of which I think are good. What I want to develop is a metric that proves (or disproves!) all of these statements. A report that ties velocity to refactoring and shows a positive effect.

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• Breadcrumbs in a modern web application, make sense? [on hold]

  - by Xtreme Biker

  I'm currently beginning with the development of a new web application. The whole web application is going to be bookmarkable and all the pages accesible via GET requests and url parameters. Having said that, let's suppose I've got three entities in my application, Customer, Team and City. Each Customer and Team belong to a city and I've got a city-detail page which displays the detail for a concrete city. So next navigation cases are possible: Customers - Customer detail (id=2) - City detail (id=3) Football teams - Team detail (id=5) - City detail (id=3) Cities - City detail (id=3) There are three possible ways of ending up in a city detail view. My question is, does it make sense to implement a breadcrumb to show such a history, having it available in the browser itself? Would it be more appropiate to show a breadcrumb with the last case, no matter where we're coming from (hierarchical breadcrumb)? That's what Jakob Nielsen points out here: Offering users a Hansel-and-Gretel-style history trail is basically useless, because it simply duplicates functionality offered by the Back button, which is the Web’s second-most-used feature. A history trail can also be confusing: users often wander in circles or go to the wrong site sections. Having each point in a confused progression at the top of the current page doesn’t offer much help. Finally, a history trail is useless for users who arrive directly at a page deep within the site. Also, even if the history trail seems the most natural way to implement it, it requires an extra effort to keep the whole track being HTTP a stateless mean.

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• Tell Us Once&ndash;Guardian Innovation Award Winner

  - by BizTalk Visionary

  Yesterday the Tell Us Once project received it’s latest accolade. My partner in crime in the execution of the delivery of software for this project, Mark Usher,  reports: It’s always great to receive recognition for the effort you put in when working on a project. It’s no secret that here at Solidsoft we are extremely proud of our association with the Government’s Tell Us Once (TUO) programme. Having already been selected by Microsoft as Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2011 Award Winners for Application Integration, we are very pleased that the TUO programme as a whole has been recognised and has won the Guardian Newspaper’s Innovation Nation Award for Frontline Services (link to http://www.guardian.co.uk/innovation-nation-awards )  The TUO entry was judged the winner over three other shortlisted solutions from Dyfed Powys Police, North Yorkshire County Council and Staffordshire County Council. Innovation Nation is a partnership between Virgin Media Business and the Guardian, an initiative to uncover the most innovative businesses, public sector organisations and charities in the UK today.  Its aim is to showcase the ideas, the endeavour and the energy that are making things better in the areas of customer service, unique working practices, frontline government services and collaboration. Solidsoft have been involved with the Tell Us Once programme since its inception in 2007 and worked closely with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to produce a business case for the programme. Teaming up with Atos (who host the application) Solidsoft delivered the first national solution in 2011 and a second phase in April 2012. Whilst currently restricted to distributing citizen data to central government organisations and local government authorities, DWP is now actively engaging with the private sector to see if TUO data can be disclosed to private sector organisations such as banks and building societies. Solidsoft welcome this expansion into the private sector where even more efficiencies will be realised. Mark Usher - Solidsoft Sales and Marketing Director For my part I’d like to say a big thank you to the Solidsoft Team, ATOS team and DWP team that made it happen.

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• PHP file_put_contents File Locking

  - by hozza

  The Senario: You have a file with a string (average sentence worth) on each line. For arguments sake lets say this file is 1Mb in size (thousands of lines). You have a script that reads the file, changes some of the strings within the document (not just appending but also removing and modifying some lines) and then overwrites all the data with the new data. The Questions: Does 'the server' PHP, OS or httpd etc. already have systems in place to stop issues like this (reading/writing half way through a write)? i. If it does, please explain how it works and give examples or links to relevant documentation. ii. If not, are there things I can enable or set-up, such as locking a file until a write is completed and making all other reads and/or writes fail until the previous script has finished writing? My Assumptions and Other Information: The server in question is running PHP and Apache or Lighttpd. If the script is called by one user and is halfway through writing to the file and another user reads the file at that exact moment. The user who reads it will not get the full document, as it hasn't been written yet. (If this assumption is wrong please correct me) I'm only concerned with PHP writing and reading to a text file, and in particular, the functions "fopen"/"fwrite" and mainly "file_put_contents". I have looked at the "file_put_contents" documentation but have not found the level of detail or a good explanation of what the "LOCK_EX" flag is or does. The senario is an EXAMPLE of a worst case senario where I would assume these issues are more likely to occur, due to the large size of the file and the way the data is edited. I want to learn more about these issues and don't want or need answers or comments such as "use mysql" or "why are you doing that" because I'm not doing that, I just want to learn about file read/writing with PHP and don't seem to be looking in the right places/documentation and yes I understand PHP is not the perfect language for working with files in this way...

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• Who should write the test plan?

  - by Cheng Kiang

  Hi, I am in the in-house development team of my company, and we develop our company's web sites according to the requirements of the marketing team. Before releasing the site to them for acceptance testing, we were requested to give them a test plan to follow. However, the development team feels that since the requirements came from the requestors, they would have the best knowledge of what to test, what to lookout for, how things should behave etc and a test plan is thus not required. We are always in an argument over this, and developers find it a waste of time to write down things like:- Click on button A. Key in XYZ in the form field and click button B. You should see behaviour C. which we have to repeat for each requirement/feature requested. This is basically rephrasing what's already in the requirements document. We are moving towards using an Agile approach for managing our projects and this is also requested at the end of each iteration. Unit and integration testing aside, who should be the one to come up with the end user acceptance test plan? Should it be the reqestors or the developers? Many thanks in advance. Regards CK

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• ALMing in Hinglish 2&ndash;Windows 8-Manual Testing Metro Style Apps using MTM11

  - by Tarun Arora

  What is ALMing in Hinglish => Introduction     ????? ?????? ??? ?????? ????, ?????? ??????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????? ?????? 8 ?????? ?????? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????? ?? ???? ???. ??? ???? ???????????? ????? ??????? 2011 ?? ?????? ?? ?? ???? ????? ?????? 8 ?????? ?????? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????? ??. ALMing in Hinglish–Windows 8 Metro Style App manual testing using MTM11   In this second in the series of videos I bring to you Shubhra Maji who is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio dev tools team in Hyderabad along with the very seasoned Aditya Agarwal & Srishti Sridhar who have been working in the Visual Studio team from past several releases. The team wonderfully walks us through manually testing Metro Style Apps in Windows 8 using Microsoft Test Manager 2011. A great thank you for watching, if you have any questions/feedback/suggestions please contact us. Stay Tuned for more… Namaste!   You might also like - ALMing in Hinglish 1-Exploratory Testing in VS11 with Nivedita Bawa

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