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ISACA Webcast follow up: Managing High Risk Access and Compliance with a Platform Approach to Privileged Account Management

- by Darin Pendergraft

Last week we presented how Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) could be used to manage high risk, privileged accounts. If you missed the webcast, here is a link to the replay: ISACA replay archive (NOTE: you will need to use Internet Explorer to view the archive) For those of you that did join us on the call, you will know that I only had a little bit of time for Q&A, and was only able to answer a few of the questions that came in. So I wanted to devote this blog to answering the outstanding questions. Here they are. 1. Can OPAM track admin or DBA activity details during a password check-out session? Oracle Audit Vault is monitoring these activities which can be correlated to check-out events. 2. How would OPAM handle simultaneous requests? OPAM can be configured to allow for shared passwords. By default sharing is turned off. 3. How long are the passwords valid? Are the admins required to manually check them in? Password expiration can be configured and set in the password policy according to your corporate standards. You can specify if you want forced check-in or not. 4. Can 2-factor authentication be used with OPAM? Yes - 2-factor integration with OPAM is provided by integration with Oracle Access Manager, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. 5. How do you control access to OPAM to ensure that OPAM admins don't override the functionality to access privileged accounts? OPAM provides separation of duties by using Admin Roles to manage access to targets and privileged accounts and to control which operations admins can perform. 6. How and where are the passwords stored in OPAM? OPAM uses Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS) Credential Store Framework (CSF) to securely store passwords. This is the same system used by Oracle Applications. 7. Does OPAM support hierarchical/level based privileges? Is the log maintained for independent review/audit? Yes. OPAM uses the Fusion Middleware (FMW) Audit Framework to store all OPAM related events in a dedicated audit database. 8. Does OPAM support emergency access in the case where approvers are not available until later? Yes. OPAM can be configured to release a password under a "break-glass" emergency scenario. 9. Does OPAM work with AIX? Yes supported UNIX version are listed in the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide at:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 10. Does OPAM integrate with Sun Identity Manager? Yes. OPAM can be integrated with SIM using the REST APIs. OPAM has direct integration with Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. 11. Is OPAM available today and what does it cost? Yes. OPAM is available now. Ask your Oracle Account Manager for pricing. 12. Can OPAM be used in SAP environments? Yes, supported SAP version are listed in the "certified component section" of the SAP connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e25327/intro.htm#autoId0 13. How would this product integrate, if at all, with access to a particular field in the DB that need additional security such as SSN's? OPAM can work with DB Vault and DB Firewall to provide the fine grained access control for databases. 14. Is VM supported? As a deployment platform Oracle VM is supported. For further details about supported Virtualization Technologies see Oracle Fusion Middleware Supported System configurations here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/ias/downloads/fusion-certification-100350.html 15. Where did this (OPAM) technology come from? OPAM was built by Oracle Engineering. 16. Are all Linux flavors supported? How about BSD? BSD is not supported. For supported UNIX version see the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 17. What happens if users don't check passwords in at the end of a work task? In OPAM a time frame can be defined how long a password can be checked out. The security admin can force a check-in at any given time. 18. is MySQL supported? Yes, supported DB version are listed in the "certified component section" of the DB connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e28315/intro.htm#BABGJJHA 19. What happens when OPAM crashes and you need to use the password? OPAM can be configured for high availability, but if required, OPAM data can be backed up/recovered. See the OPAM admin guide. 20. Is OPAM Standalone product or does it leverage other components from IDM? OPAM can be run stand-alone, but will also leverage other IDM components

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Five Things Learned at the BSR Conference in San Francisco on Nov 2nd-4th

- by Evelyn Neumayr

The BSR Conference 2011—“Redefining Leadership”—held from Nov 2nd to Nov 4th in San Francisco, with Oracle as one of the main sponsors, saw senior business executives, civil society representatives, and other experts from around the world gathering to share strategies and insights on the future of sustainability. The general conference sessions kicked off on November 2nd with a plenary address by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Other sessions were presented by CEOs of the caliber of Carl Bass (Autodesk), Brian Dunn (Best Buy), Carlos Brito (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Ofra Strauss (Strauss Group). Here are five key highlights from the conference: 1. The main leadership challenge is integrating sustainability into core business functions and overcoming short-termism. The “BSR GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business Poll 2011” - a survey of nearly 500 business leaders from 300 member companies - shows that 84% of respondents are optimistic that global businesses will embrace CSR/sustainability as part of their core strategies and operations in the next five years but consider integrating sustainability into their core business functions the key challenge. It is still difficult for many companies that are committed to the sustainability agenda to find investors that understand the long-term implications and as Al Gore said “Many companies are given the signal by the investors that it is the short term results that matter and that is a terribly debilitating force in the market.” 2. Companies are required to address increasing compliance requirements and transparency in their supply chain, especially in relation with conflict minerals legislation and water management. The Dodd-Frank legislation, OECD guidelines, and the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules require companies to monitor upstream the sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, but given the complexity of this issue companies need to collaborate and partner with peer companies in their industry as well as in other industries to understand how to address conflict minerals in their supply chains. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ (IPE) China Water Pollution Map enables the public to access thousands of environmental quality, discharge, and infraction records released by various government agencies. Empowered with this information, the public has the opportunity to place greater pressure on polluting companies to comply with environmental standards and create solutions to improve their performance. 3. A new standard for reporting on supply chain greenhouse gas emissions is available. The New “Scope 3” Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Inventory Standard, released on October 4th 2011, is the only international greenhouse gas emissions standard that accounts for the full lifecycle of a company’s products. It provides a framework for companies to account for indirect emissions outside of energy use, such as transportation, manufacturing, and distribution, and it incorporates both upstream and downstream impacts of a product. With key investors now listing supplier vulnerability to rising energy prices and disruptions of service as a key concern, greenhouse gas (GHG) management isn’t just for leading companies but a necessity for any business. 4. Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) reporting is becoming increasingly important to investors and other stakeholders. While European investors have traditionally driven the ESG agenda, U.S. investors are increasingly including ESG data in their analyses. This trend will likely increase as stakeholders continue to demand that an ESG lens be applied to their investments. Investors are increasingly looking to partner on sustainability, as they see the benefits of ESG providing significant returns on investment. 5. Software companies are offering an increasing variety of solutions to help drive changes and measure performance internally, in supply chains, and across peer companies. The significant challenge is how to integrate different software systems to facilitate decision-making based on a holistic understanding of trade-offs. Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President, Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle was a panelist in the “Trends in Sustainability Software” session and commented that, “How we think about our business decisions really comes down to how we think about cost. And as long as we don’t assign a cost to things that have an environmental impact or social impact, then we make decisions based on incomplete information. If we could include that in the process that determines ‘Is this product profitable? we would then have a much better decision.” For more information on BSR visit www.brs.org. You can also view highlights of the plenary session at http://www.bsr.org/en/bsr-conference/session-summaries/2011. Oracle is proud to be a sponsor of this BSR conference. By Elena Avesani, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Oracle

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Do you know your ADF "grace period?"

- by Chris Muir

What does the term "support" mean to you in context of vendors such as Oracle giving your organization support with our products? Over the last few weeks I'm taken a straw poll to discuss this very question with customers, and I've received a wide array of answers much to my surprise (which I've paraphrased): "Support means my staff can access dedicated resources to assist them solve problems" "Support means I can call Oracle at anytime to request assistance" "Support means we can expect fixes and patches to bugs in Oracle software" The last expectation is the one I'd like to focus on in this post, keep it in mind while reading this blog. From Oracle's perspective as we're in the business of support, we in fact offer numerous services which are captured on the table in the following page. As the text under the table indicates, you should consult the relevant Oracle Lifetime Support brochures to understand the length of time Oracle will support Oracle products. As I'm a product manager for ADF that sits under the FMW tree of Oracle products, let's consider ADF in particular. The FMW brochure is found here. On page 8 and 9 you'll see the current "Application Development Framework 11gR1 (11.1.1.x)" and "Application Development Framework 11gR2 (11.1.2)" releases are supported out to 2017 for Extended Support. This timeframe is pretty standard for Oracle's current released products, though as new releases roll in we should see those dates extended. On page 8 of the PDF note the comment at the end of this page that refers to the Oracle Support document 209768.1: For more-detailed information on bug fix and patch release policies, please refer to the “Error Correction Support Policy” on MyOracle Support. This policy document is important as it introduces Oracle's Error Correction Support Policy which addresses "patches and fixes". You can find it attached the previous Oracle Support document 209768.1. Broadly speaking while Oracle does provide "generalized support" up to 2017 for ADF, the Error Correction Support Policy dictates when Oracle will provide "patches and fixes" for Oracle software, and this is where the concept of the "grace period" comes in. As Oracle releases different versions of Oracle software, say 11.1.1.4.0, you are fully supported for patches and fixes for that specific version. However when we release the next version, say 11.1.1.5.0, Oracle provides at minimum of 3 months to a maximum of 1 year "grace period" where we'll continue to provide patches and fixes for the previous version. This gives you time to move from 11.1.1.4.0 to 11.1.1.5.0 without being unsupported for patches and fixes. The last paragraph does generalize as I've attempted to highlight the concept of the grace period rather than the specific dates for any version. For specific ADF and FMW versions and their respective grace periods and when they terminated you must visit Oracle Support Note 1290894.1. I'd like to include a screenshot here of the relevant table from that Oracle Support Note but as it is will be frequently updated it's better I force you to visit that note. Be careful to heed the comment in the note: According to policy, the Grace Period has passed because a newer Patch Set has been released for more than a year. Its important to note that the Lifetime Support Policy and Error Correction Support Policy documents are the single source of truth, subject to change, and will provide exceptions when required. This My Oracle Support document is providing a summary of the Grace Period dates and time lines for planning purposes. So remember to return to the policy document for all definitions, note 1290894.1 is a summary only and not guaranteed to be up to date or correct. A last point from Oracle's perspective. Why doesn't Oracle provide patches and fixes for all releases as long as they're supported? Amongst other reasons, it's a matter of practicality. Consider JDeveloper 10.1.3 released in 2005. JDeveloper 10.1.3 is still currently supported to 2017, but since that version was released there has been just under 20 newer releases of JDeveloper. Now multiply that across all Oracle's products and imagine the number of releases Oracle would have to provide fixes and patches for, and maintain environments to test them, build them, staff to write them and more, it's simple beyond the capabilities of even a large software vendor like Oracle. So the "grace period" restricts that patches and fixes window to something manageable. In conclusion does the concept of the "grace period" matter to you? If you define support as "getting assistance from Oracle" then maybe not. But if patches and fixes are important to you, then you need to understand the "grace period" and operate within the bounds of Oracle's Error Correction Support Policy. Disclaimer: this blog post was written July 2012. Oracle Support policies do change from time to time so the emphasis is on you to double check the facts presented in this blog.

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How to Customize Fonts and Colors for Gnome Panels in Ubuntu Linux

- by The Geek

Earlier this week we showed you how to make the Gnome Panels totally transparent, but you really need some customized fonts and colors to make the effect work better. Here’s how to do it. This article is the first part of a multi-part series on how to customize the Ubuntu desktop, written by How-To Geek reader and ubergeek, Omar Hafiz. Changing the Gnome Colors the Easy Way You’ll first need to install Gnome Color Chooser which is available in the default repositories (the package name is gnome-color-chooser). Then go to System > Preferences > Gnome Color Chooser to launch the program. When you see all these tabs you immediately know that Gnome Color Chooser does not only change the font color of the panel, but also the color of the fonts all over Ubuntu, desktop icons, and many other things as well. Now switch to the panel tab, here you can control every thing about your panels. You can change font, font color, background and background color of the panels and start menus. Tick the “Normal” option and choose the color you want for the panel font. If you want you can change the hover color of the buttons on the panel by too. A little below the color option is the font options, this includes the font, font size, and the X and Y positioning of the font. The first two options are pretty straight forward, they change the typeface and the size. The X-Padding and Y-Padding may confuse you but they are interesting, they may give a nice look for your panels by increasing the space between items on your panel like this: X-Padding: Y-Padding: The bottom half of the window controls the look of your start menus which is the Applications, Places, and Systems menus. You can customize them just the way you did with the panel. Alright, this was the easy way to change the font of your panels. Changing the Gnome Theme Colors the Command-Line Way The other hard (not so hard really) way will be changing the configuration files that tell your panel how it should look like. In your Home Folder, press Ctrl+H to show the hidden files, now find the file “.gtkrc-2.0”, open it and insert this line in it. If there are any other lines in the file leave them intact. include “/home/<username>/.gnome2/panel-fontrc” Don’t forget to replace the <user_name> with you user account name. When done close and save the file. Now navigate the folder “.gnome2” from your Home Folder and create a new file and name it “panel-fontrc”. Open the file you just created with a text editor and paste the following in it: style “my_color”{fg[NORMAL] = “#FF0000”}widget “*PanelWidget*” style “my_color”widget “*PanelApplet*” style “my_color” This text will make the font red. If you want other colors you’ll need to replace the Hex value/HTML Notation (in this case #FF0000) with the value of the color you want. To get the hex value you can use GIMP, Gcolor2 witch is available in the default repositories or you can right-click on your panel > Properties > Background tab then click to choose the color you want and copy the Hex value. Don’t change any other thing in the text. When done, save and close. Now press Alt+F2 and enter “killall gnome-panel” to force it to restart or you can log out and login again. Most of you will prefer the first way of changing the font and color for it’s ease of applying and because it gives you much more options but, some may not have the ability/will to download and install a new program on their machine or have reasons of their own for not to using it, that’s why we provided the two way. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware The Splendiferous Array of Culinary Tools [Infographic] Add a Real-Time Earth Wallpaper App to Ubuntu with xplanetFX The Citroen GT – An Awesome Video Game Car Brought to Life [Video] Final Man vs. Machine Round of Jeopardy Unfolds; Watson Dominates Give Chromium-Based Browser Desktop Notifications a Native System Look in Ubuntu Chrome Time Track Is a Simple Task Time Tracker

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Where Facebook Stands Heading Into 2013

- by Mike Stiles

In our last blog, we looked at how Twitter is positioned heading into 2013. Now it’s time to take a similar look at Facebook. 2012, for a time at least, seemed to be the era of Facebook-bashing. Between a far-from-smooth IPO, subsequent stock price declines, and anxiety over privacy, the top social network became a target for comedians, politicians, business journalists, and of course those who were prone to Facebook-bash even in the best of times. But amidst the “this is the end of Facebook” headlines, the company kept experimenting, kept testing, kept innovating, and pressing forward, committed as always to the user experience, while concurrently addressing monetization with greater urgency. Facebook enters 2013 with over 1 billion users around the world. Usage grew 41% in Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Korea and India in 2012. In the Middle East and North Africa, an average 21 new signups happen per minute. Engagement and time spent on the site would impress the harshest of critics. Facebook, while not bulletproof, has become such an integrated daily force in users’ lives, it’s getting hard to imagine any future mass rejection. You want to see a company recognizing weaknesses and shoring them up. Mobile was a weakness in 2012 as Facebook was one of many caught by surprise at the speed of user migration to mobile. But new mobile interfaces, better mobile ads, speed upgrades, standalone Messenger and Pages mobile apps, and the big dollar acquisition of Instagram, were a few indicators Facebook won’t play catch-up any more than it has to. As a user, the cool thing about Facebook is, it knows you. The uncool thing about Facebook is, it knows you. The company’s walking a delicate line between the public’s competing desires for customized experiences and privacy. While the company’s working to make privacy options clearer and easier, Facebook’s Paul Adams says data aggregation can move from acting on what a user is engaging with at the moment to a more holistic view of what they’re likely to want at any given time. To help learn about you, there’s Open Graph. Embedded through diverse partnerships, the idea is to surface what you’re doing and what you care about, and help you discover things via your friends’ activities. Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Mike Vernal, says building mobile social apps connected to Facebook in such ways is the next wave of big innovation. Expect to see that fostered in 2013. The Facebook site experience is always evolving. Some users like that about Facebook, others can’t wait to complain about it…on Facebook. The Facebook focal point, the News Feed, is not sacred and is seeing plenty of experimentation with the insertion of modules. From upcoming concerts, events, suggested Pages you might like, to aggregated “most shared” content from social reader apps, plenty could start popping up between those pictures of what your friends had for lunch. As for which friends’ lunches you see, that’s a function of the mythic EdgeRank…which is also tinkered with. When Facebook changed it in September, Page admins saw reach go down and the high anxiety set in quickly. Engagement, however, held steady. The adjustment was about relevancy over reach. (And oh yeah, reach was something that could be charged for). Facebook wants users to see what they’re most likely to like, based on past usage and interactions. Adding to the “cream must rise to the top” philosophy, they’re now even trying out ordering post comments based on the engagement the comments get. Boy, it’s getting competitive out there for a social engager. Facebook has to make $$$. To do that, they must offer attractive vehicles to marketers. There are a myriad of ad units. But a key Facebook marketing concept is the Sponsored Story. It’s key because it encourages content that’s good, relevant, and performs well organically. If it is, marketing dollars can amplify it and extend its reach. Brands can expect the rollout of a search product and an ad network. That’s a big deal. It takes, as Open Graph does, the power of Facebook’s user data and carries it beyond the Facebook environment into the digital world at large. No one could target like Facebook can, and some analysts think it could double their roughly $5 billion revenue stream. As every potential revenue nook and cranny is explored, there are the users themselves. In addition to Gifts, Facebook thinks users might pay a few bucks to promote their own posts so more of their friends will see them. There’s also word classifieds could be purchased in News Feeds, though they won’t be called classifieds. And that’s where Facebook stands; a wildly popular destination, a part of our culture, with ever increasing functionalities, the biggest of big data, revenue strategies that appeal to marketers without souring the user experience, new challenges as a now public company, ongoing privacy concerns, and innovations that carry Facebook far beyond its own borders. Anyone care to write a “this is the end of Facebook” headline? @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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Auto-Configuring SSIS Packages

- by Davide Mauri

SSIS Package Configurations are very useful to make packages flexible so that you can change objects properties at run-time and thus make the package configurable without having to open and edit it. In a complex scenario where you have dozen of packages (even in in the smallest BI project I worked on I had 50 packages), each package may have its own configuration needs. This means that each time you have to run the package you have to pass the correct Package Configuration. I usually use XML configuration files and I also force everyone that works with me to make sure that an object that is used in several packages has the same name in all package where it is used, in order to simplify configurations usage. Connection Managers are a good example of one of those objects. For example, all the packages that needs to access to the Data Warehouse database must have a Connection Manager named DWH. Basically we define a set of “global” objects so that we can have a configuration file for them, so that it can be used by all packages. If a package as some specific configuration needs, we create a specific – or “local” – XML configuration file or we set the value that needs to be configured at runtime using DTLoggedExec’s Package Parameters: http://dtloggedexec.davidemauri.it/Package%20Parameters.ashx Now, how we can improve this even more? I’d like to have a package that, when it’s run, automatically goes “somewhere” and search for global or local configuration, loads it and applies it to itself. That’s the basic idea of Auto-Configuring Packages. The “somewhere” is a SQL Server table, defined in this way In this table you’ll put the values that you want to be used at runtime by your package: The ConfigurationFilter column specify to which package that configuration line has to be applied. A package will use that line only if the value specified in the ConfigurationFilter column is equal to its name. In the above sample. only the package named “simple-package” will use the line number two. There is an exception here: the $$Global value indicate a configuration row that has to be applied to any package. With this simple behavior it’s possible to replicate the “global” and the “local” configuration approach I’ve described before. The ConfigurationValue contains the value you want to be applied at runtime and the PackagePath contains the object to which that value will be applied. The ConfiguredValueType column defined the data type of the value and the Checksum column is contains a calculated value that is simply the hash value of ConfigurationFilter plus PackagePath so that it can be used as a Primary Key to guarantee uniqueness of configuration rows. As you may have noticed the table is very similar to the table originally used by SSIS in order to put DTS Configuration into SQL Server tables: SQL Server SSIS Configuration Type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141682.aspx Now, how it works? It’s very easy: you just have to call DTLoggedExec with the /AC option: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /AC:"localhost;ssis_auto_configuration;ssiscfg.configuration" the AC option expects a string with the following format: <database_server>;<database_name>;<table_name>; only Windows Authentication is supported. When DTLoggedExec finds an Auto-Configuration request, it injects a new connection manager in the loaded package. The injected connection manager is named $$DTLoggedExec_AutoConfigure and is used by the two SQL Server DTS Configuration ($$DTLoggedExec_Global and $$DTLoggedExec_Local) also injected by DTLoggedExec, used to load “local” and “global” configuration. Now, you may start to wonder why this approach cannot be used without having all this stuff going around, but just passing to a package always two XML DTS Configuration files, (to have to “local” and the “global” configurations) doing something like this: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /CONF:”global.dtsConfig” /CONF:”mypackage.dtsConfig” The problem is that this approach doesn’t work if you have, in one of the two configuration file, a value that has to be applied to an object that doesn’t exists in the loaded package. This situation will raise an error that will halt package execution. To solve this problem, you may want to create a configuration file for each package. Unfortunately this will make deployment and management harder, since you’ll have to deal with a great number of configuration files. The Auto-Configuration approach solve all these problems at once! We’re using it in a project where we have hundreds of packages and I can tell you that deployment of packages and their configuration for the pre-production and production environment has never been so easy! To use the Auto-Configuration option you have to download the latest DTLoggedExec release: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/62218 Feedback, as usual, are very welcome!

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Cardinality Estimation Bug with Lookups in SQL Server 2008 onward

- by Paul White

Cost-based optimization stands or falls on the quality of cardinality estimates (expected row counts). If the optimizer has incorrect information to start with, it is quite unlikely to produce good quality execution plans except by chance. There are many ways we can provide good starting information to the optimizer, and even more ways for cardinality estimation to go wrong. Good database people know this, and work hard to write optimizer-friendly queries with a schema and metadata (e.g. statistics) that reduce the chances of poor cardinality estimation producing a sub-optimal plan. Today, I am going to look at a case where poor cardinality estimation is Microsoft’s fault, and not yours. SQL Server 2005 SELECT th.ProductID, th.TransactionID, th.TransactionDate FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 1 AND th.TransactionDate BETWEEN '20030901' AND '20031231'; The query plan on SQL Server 2005 is as follows (if you are using a more recent version of AdventureWorks, you will need to change the year on the date range from 2003 to 2007): There is an Index Seek on ProductID = 1, followed by a Key Lookup to find the Transaction Date for each row, and finally a Filter to restrict the results to only those rows where Transaction Date falls in the range specified. The cardinality estimate of 45 rows at the Index Seek is exactly correct. The table is not very large, there are up-to-date statistics associated with the index, so this is as expected. The estimate for the Key Lookup is also exactly right. Each lookup into the Clustered Index to find the Transaction Date is guaranteed to return exactly one row. The plan shows that the Key Lookup is expected to be executed 45 times. The estimate for the Inner Join output is also correct – 45 rows from the seek joining to one row each time, gives 45 rows as output. The Filter estimate is also very good: the optimizer estimates 16.9951 rows will match the specified range of transaction dates. Eleven rows are produced by this query, but that small difference is quite normal and certainly nothing to worry about here. All good so far. SQL Server 2008 onward The same query executed against an identical copy of AdventureWorks on SQL Server 2008 produces a different execution plan: The optimizer has pushed the Filter conditions seen in the 2005 plan down to the Key Lookup. This is a good optimization – it makes sense to filter rows out as early as possible. Unfortunately, it has made a bit of a mess of the cardinality estimates. The post-Filter estimate of 16.9951 rows seen in the 2005 plan has moved with the predicate on Transaction Date. Instead of estimating one row, the plan now suggests that 16.9951 rows will be produced by each clustered index lookup – clearly not right! This misinformation also confuses SQL Sentry Plan Explorer: Plan Explorer shows 765 rows expected from the Key Lookup (it multiplies a rounded estimate of 17 rows by 45 expected executions to give 765 rows total). Workarounds One workaround is to provide a covering non-clustered index (avoiding the lookup avoids the problem of course): CREATE INDEX nc1 ON Production.TransactionHistory (ProductID) INCLUDE (TransactionDate); With the Transaction Date filter applied as a residual predicate in the same operator as the seek, the estimate is again as expected: We could also force the use of the ultimate covering index (the clustered one): SELECT th.ProductID, th.TransactionID, th.TransactionDate FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WITH (INDEX(1)) WHERE th.ProductID = 1 AND th.TransactionDate BETWEEN '20030901' AND '20031231'; Summary Providing a covering non-clustered index for all possible queries is not always practical, and scanning the clustered index will rarely be optimal. Nevertheless, these are the best workarounds we have today. In the meantime, watch out for poor cardinality estimates when a predicate is applied as part of a lookup. The worst thing is that the estimate after the lookup join in the 2008+ plans is wrong. It’s not hopelessly wrong in this particular case (45 versus 16.9951 is not the end of the world) but it easily can be much worse, and there’s not much you can do about it. Any decisions made by the optimizer after such a lookup could be based on very wrong information – which can only be bad news. If you think this situation should be improved, please vote for this Connect item. © 2012 Paul White – All Rights Reserved twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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Telerik Releases a new Visual Entity Designer

Love LINQ to SQL but are concerned that it is a second class citizen? Need to connect to more databases other than SQL Server? Think that the Entity Framework is too complex? Want a domain model designer for data access that is easy, yet powerful? Then the Telerik Visual Entity Designer is for you. Built on top of Telerik OpenAccess ORM, a very mature and robust product, Teleriks Visual Entity Designer is a new way to build your domain model that is very powerful and also real easy to use. How easy? Ill show you here. First Look: Using the Telerik Visual Entity Designer To get started, you need to install the Telerik OpenAccess ORM Q1 release for Visual Studio 2008 or 2010. You dont need to use any of the Telerik OpenAccess wizards, designers, or using statements. Just right click on your project and select Add|New Item from the context menu. Choose Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model from the Visual Studio project templates. (Note to existing OpenAccess users, dont run the Enable ORM wizard or any other OpenAccess menu unless you are building OpenAccess Entities.) You will then have to specify the database backend (SQL Server, SQL Azure, Oracle, MySQL, etc) and connection. After you establish your connection, select the database objects you want to add to your domain model. You can also name your model, by default it will be NameofyourdatabaseEntityDiagrams. You can click finish here if you are comfortable, or tweak some advanced settings. Many users of domain models like to add prefixes and suffixes to classes, fields, and properties as well as handle pluralization. I personally accept the defaults, however, I hate how DBAs force underscores on me, so I click on the option to remove them. You can also tweak your namespace, mapping options, and define your own code generation template to gain further control over the outputted code. This is a very powerful feature, but for now, I will just accept the defaults. When we click finish, you can see your domain model as a file with the .rlinq extension in the Solution Explorer. You can also bring up the visual designer to view or further tweak your model by double clicking on the model in the Solution Explorer. Time to use the model! Writing a LINQ Query Programming against the domain model is very simple using LINQ. Just set a reference to the model (line 12 of the code below) and write a standard LINQ statement (lines 14-16). (OpenAccess users: notice the you dont need any using statements for OpenAccess or an IObjectScope, just raw LINQ against your model.) 1: using System; 2: using System.Linq; 3: //no need for anOpenAccess using statement 4: 5: namespace ConsoleApplication3 6: { 7: class Program 8: { 9: static void Main(string[] args) 10: { 11: //a reference tothe data context 12: NorthwindEntityDiagrams dat = new NorthwindEntityDiagrams(); 13: //LINQ Statement 14: var result = from c in dat.Customers 15: where c.Country == "Germany" 16: select c; 17: 18: //Print out the company name 19: foreach (var cust in result) 20: { 21: Console.WriteLine("CompanyName: " + cust.CompanyName); 22: } 23: //keep the consolewindow open 24: Console.Read(); 25: } 26: } 27: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Lines 19-24 loop through the result of our LINQ query and displays the results. Thats it! All of the super powerful features of OpenAccess are available to you to further enhance your experience, however, in most cases this is all you need. In future posts I will show how to use the Visual Designer with some other scenarios. Stay tuned. Enjoy! Technorati Tags: Telerik,OpenAccess,LINQ Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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"Yes, but that's niche."

- by Geertjan

JavaOne 2012 has come to an end though it feels like it hasn't even started yet! What happened, time is a weird thing. Too many things to report on. James Gosling's appearance at the JavaOne community keynote was seen, by everyone (which is quite a lot) of people I talked to, as the highlight of the conference. It was interesting that the software for the Duke's Choice Award winning Liquid Robotics that James Gosling is now part of and came to talk about is a Swing application that uses the WorldWind libraries. It was also interesting that James Gosling pointed out to the conference: "There are things you can't do using HTML." That brings me to the wonderful counter argument to the above, which I spend my time running into a lot: "Yes, but that's niche." It's a killer argument, i.e., it kills all discussions completely in one fell swoop. Kind of when you're talking about someone and then this sentence drops into the conversation: "Yes, but she's got cancer now." Here's one implementation of "Yes, but that's niche": Person A: All applications are moving to the web, tablet, and mobile phone. That's especially true now with HTML5, which is going to wipe away everything everywhere and all applications are going to be browser based. Person B: What about air traffic control applications? Will they run on mobile phones too? And do you see defence applications running in a browser? Don't you agree that there are multiple scenarios imaginable where the Java desktop is the optimal platform for running applications? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. Here's another implementation, though it contradicts the above [despite often being used by the same people], since JavaFX is a Java desktop technology: Person A: Swing is dead. Everyone is going to be using purely JavaFX and nothing else. Person B: Does JavaFX have a docking framework and a module system? Does it have a plugin system? These are some of the absolutely basic requirements of Java desktop software once you get to high end systems, e.g., banks, defence force, oil/gas services. Those kinds of applications need a web browser and so they love the JavaFX WebView component and they also love the animated JavaFX charting components. But they need so much more than that, i.e., an application framework. Aren't there requirements that JavaFX isn't meeting since it is a UI toolkit, just like Swing is a UI toolkit, and what they have in common is their lack, i.e., natively, of any kind of application framework? Don't people need more than a single window and a monolithic application structure? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. In other words, anything that doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy is "niche", for no other reason than that it doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy... regardless of the actual needs of real developers. Saying "Yes, but that's niche", kills the discussion completely, because it relegates one side of the conversation to the arcane and irrelevant corners of the universe. You're kind of like Cobol now, as soon as "Yes, but that's niche" is said. What's worst about "Yes, but that's niche" is that it doesn't enter into any discussion about user requirements, i.e., there's so few that need this particular solution that we don't even need to talk about them anymore. Note, of course, that I'm not referring specifically or generically to anyone or anything in particular. Just picking up from conversations I've picked up on as I was scurrying around the Hilton's corridors while looking for the location of my next presentation over the past few days. It does, however, mean that there were people thinking "Yes, but that's niche" while listening to James Gosling pointing out that HTML is not the be-all and end-all of absolutely everything. And so this all leaves me wondering: How many applications must be part of a niche for the niche to no longer be a niche? And what if there are multiple small niches that have the same requirements? Don't all those small niches together form a larger whole, one that should be taken seriously, i.e., a whole that is not a niche?

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SPARC T4-4 Delivers World Record Performance on Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark

- by Brian

Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server delivered world record performance with subsecond response time on the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 11. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved throughput of 430,000 cube-queries/hour with an average response time of 0.85 seconds and the median response time of 0.43 seconds. This was achieved by using only 60% of the available CPU resources leaving plenty of headroom for future growth. The SPARC T4-4 server operated on an Oracle OLAP cube with a 4 billion row fact table of sales data containing 4 dimensions. This represents as many as 90 quintillion aggregate rows (90 followed by 18 zeros). Performance Landscape Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark 4 Billion Fact Table Rows System Queries/hour Users* Response Time (sec) Average Median SPARC T4-4 430,000 7,300 0.85 0.43 * Users - the supported number of users with a given think time of 60 seconds Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 1 TB memory Data Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR) 2 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (each with 80 FMODs) Redo Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR with 8 HDD) Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.3) with Oracle OLAP option Benchmark Description The Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark is a workload designed to demonstrate and stress the Oracle OLAP product's core features of fast query, fast update, and rich calculations on a multi-dimensional model to support enhanced Data Warehousing. The bulk of the benchmark entails running a number of concurrent users, each issuing typical multidimensional queries against an Oracle OLAP cube consisting of a number of years of sales data with fully pre-computed aggregations. The cube has four dimensions: time, product, customer, and channel. Each query user issues approximately 150 different queries. One query chain may ask for total sales in a particular region (e.g South America) for a particular time period (e.g. Q4 of 2010) followed by additional queries which drill down into sales for individual countries (e.g. Chile, Peru, etc.) with further queries drilling down into individual stores, etc. Another query chain may ask for yearly comparisons of total sales for some product category (e.g. major household appliances) and then issue further queries drilling down into particular products (e.g. refrigerators, stoves. etc.), particular regions, particular customers, etc. Results from version 2 of the benchmark are not comparable with version 1. The primary difference is the type of queries along with the query mix. Key Points and Best Practices Since typical BI users are often likely to issue similar queries, with different constants in the where clauses, setting the init.ora prameter "cursor_sharing" to "force" will provide for additional query throughput and a larger number of potential users. Except for this setting, together with making full use of available memory, out of the box performance for the OLAP Perf workload should provide results similar to what is reported here. For a given number of query users with zero think time, the main measured metrics are the average query response time, the median query response time, and the query throughput. A derived metric is the maximum number of users the system can support achieving the measured response time assuming some non-zero think time. The calculation of the maximum number of users follows from the well-known response-time law N = (rt + tt) * tp where rt is the average response time, tt is the think time and tp is the measured throughput. Setting tt to 60 seconds, rt to 0.85 seconds and tp to 119.44 queries/sec (430,000 queries/hour), the above formula shows that the T4-4 server will support 7,300 concurrent users with a think time of 60 seconds and an average response time of 0.85 seconds. For more information see chapter 3 from the book "Quantitative System Performance" cited below. -- See Also Quantitative System Performance Computer System Analysis Using Queueing Network Models Edward D. Lazowska, John Zahorjan, G. Scott Graham, Kenneth C. Sevcik external local Oracle Database 11g – Oracle OLAP oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 11/2/2012.

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Sending Outlook Invites

- by Daniel Moth

Sending an Outlook invite for a meeting (also referred to as S+ in Microsoft) is a simple thing to get right if you just run the quick mental check below, which is driven by visual cues in the Outlook UI. I know that some folks don’t do this often or are new to Outlook, so if you know one of those folks share this blog post with them and if they read nothing else ask them to read step 7. Add on the To line the folks that you want to be at the meeting. Indicate optional invitees. Click on the “To” button to bring up the dialog that lets you move folks to be Optional (you can also do this from the Scheduling Assistant). Set the Reminder according to the attendee that has to travel the most. 5 minutes is the minimum. Use the Response Options and uncheck the "Request Response" if your event is going ahead regardless of who can make it or not, i.e. if everyone is optional. Don’t force every recipient to make an extra click, instead make the extra click yourself - you are the organizer. Add a good subject Make the subject such that just by reading it folks know what the meeting is about. Examples, e.g. "Review…", "Finalize…", "XYZ sync up" If this is only between two people and what is commonly referred to as a one to one, the subject would be something like "MyName/YourName 1:1" Write the subject in such a way that when the recipient sees this on their calendar among all the other items, they know what this meeting is about without having to see location, recipients, or any other information about the invite. Add a location, typically a meeting room. If recipients are from different buildings, schedule it where the folks that are doing the other folks a favor live. Otherwise schedule it wherever the least amount of people will have to travel. If you send me an invite to come to your building, and there is more of us than you, you are silently sending me the message that you are doing me a favor so if you don’t want to do that, include a note of why this is in your building, e.g. "Sorry we are slammed with back to back meetings today so hope you can come over to our building". If this is in someone's office, the location would be something like "Moth's office (7/666)" where in parenthesis you see the office location. If some folks are remote in another building/country, or if you know you picked a time which wasn't free for everyone, add an Online option (click the Lync Meeting button). Add a date and time. This MUST be at a time that is showing on the recipients’ calendar as FREE or at worst TENTATIVE. You can check that on the Scheduling Assistant. The reality is that this is not always possible, so in that case you MUST say something about it in the Invite Body, e.g. "Sorry I can see X has a conflict, but I cannot find a better slot", or "With so many of us there are some conflicts and I cannot find a better slot so hope this works", or "Apologies but due to Y we must have this meeting at this time and I know there are some conflicts, hope you can make it anyway". When you do that, I better not be able to find a better slot myself for all of us, and of course when you do that you have implicitly designated the Busy folks as optional. Finally, the body of the invite. This has the agenda of the meeting and if applicable the courtesy apologies due to messing up steps 6 & 7. This should not be the introduction to the meeting, in other words the recipients should not be surprised when they see the invite and go to the body to read it. Notifying them of the meeting takes place via separate email where you explain the purpose and give them a heads up that you'll be sending an invite. That separate email is also your chance to attach documents, don’t do that as part of the invite. TIP: If you have sent mail about the meeting, you can then go to your sent folder to select the message and click the "Meeting" button (Ctrl+Alt+R). This will populate the body with the necessary background, auto select the mandatory and optional attendees as per the TO/CC line, and have a subject that may be good enough already (or you can tweak it). Long to write, but very quick to remember and enforce since most of it is common sense and the checklist is driven of the visual cues in the UI you use to send the invite. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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How Can I Safely Destroy Sensitive Data CDs/DVDs?

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

You have a pile of DVDs with sensitive information on them and you need to safely and effectively dispose of them so no data recovery is possible. What’s the most safe and efficient way to get the job done? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader HaLaBi wants to know how he can safely destroy CDs and DVDs with personal data on them: I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and may cause harm. Scratching them badly is what I always do but it takes long time and I managed to read some of the data in the scratched CDs/DVDs. What’s the way to physically destroy a CD/DVD safely? How should he approach the problem? The Answer SuperUser contributor Journeyman Geek offers a practical solution coupled with a slightly mad-scientist solution: The proper way is to get yourself a shredder that also handles cds – look online for cd shredders. This is the right option if you end up doing this routinely. I don’t do this very often – For small scale destruction I favour a pair of tin snips – they have enough force to cut through a cd, yet are blunt enough to cause small cracks along the sheer line. Kitchen shears with one serrated side work well too. You want to damage the data layer along with shearing along the plastic, and these work magnificently. Do it in a bag, cause this generates sparkly bits. There’s also the fun, and probably dangerous way – find yourself an old microwave, and microwave them. I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area of course, and not using your mother’s good microwave. There’s a lot of videos of this on YouTube – such as this (who’s done this in a kitchen… and using his mom’s microwave). This results in a very much destroyed cd in every respect. If I was an evil hacker mastermind, this is what I’d do. The other options are better for the rest of us. Another contributor, Keltari, notes that the only safe (and DoD approved) way to dispose of data is total destruction: The answer by Journeyman Geek is good enough for almost everything. But oddly, that common phrase “Good enough for government work” does not apply – depending on which part of the government. It is technically possible to recover data from shredded/broken/etc CDs and DVDs. If you have a microscope handy, put the disc in it and you can see the pits. The disc can be reassembled and the data can be reconstructed — minus the data that was physically destroyed. So why not just pulverize the disc into dust? Or burn it to a crisp? While technically, that would completely eliminate the data, it leaves no record of the disc having existed. And in some places, like DoD and other secure facilities, the data needs to be destroyed, but the disc needs to exist. If there is a security audit, the disc can be pulled to show it has been destroyed. So how can a disc exist, yet be destroyed? Well, the most common method is grinding the disc down to destroy the data, yet keep the label surface of the disc intact. Basically, it’s no different than using sandpaper on the writable side, till the data is gone. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part II)

I would now like to expand a little on what I stumbled through in part I of my Visual Studio 2010 post and touch on a few other features of VS 2010. Specifically, I want to generate some code based off of an Entity Framework model and tie it up to an actual data source. Im not going to take the easy way and tie to a SQL Server data source, though, I will tie it to an XML data file instead. Why? Well, why not? This is purely for learning, there are probably much better ways to get strongly-typed classes around XML but it will force us to go down a path less travelled and maybe learn a few things along the way. Once we get this XML data and the means to interact with it, I will revisit data binding to this data in a WPF form and see if I cant get reading, adding, deleting, and updating working smoothly with minimal code. To begin, I will use what was learned in the first part of this blog topic and draw out a data model for the MFL (My Football League) - I dont want the NFL to come down and sue me for using their name in this totally football-related article. The data model looks as follows, with Teams having Players, and Players having a position and statistics for each season they played: Note that when making the associations between these entities, I was given the option to create the foreign key but I only chose to select this option for the association between Player and Position. The reason for this is that I am picturing the XML that will contain this data to look somewhat like this: <MFL> <Position/> <Position/> <Position/> <Team> <Player> <Statistic/> </Player> </Team> </MFL> Statistic will be under its associated Player node, and Player will be under its associated Team node no need to have an Id to reference it if we know it will always fall under its parent. Position, however, is more of a lookup value that will not have any hierarchical relationship to the player. In fact, the Position data itself may be in a completely different xml file (something Id like to play around with), so in any case, a player will need to reference the position by its Id. So now that we have a simple data model laid out, I would like to generate two things based on it: A class for each entity with properties corresponding to each entity property An IO class with methods to get data for each entity, either all instances, by Id or by parent. Now my experience with code generation in the past has consisted of writing up little apps that use the code dom directly to regenerate code on demand (or using tools like CodeSmith). Surely, there has got to be a more fun way to do this given that we are using the Entity Framework which already has built-in code generation for SQL Server support. Lets start with that built-in stuff to give us a base to work off of. Right click anywhere in the canvas of our model and select Add Code Generation Item: So just adding that code item seemed to do quite a bit towards what I was intending: It apparently generated a class for each entity, but also a whole ton more. I mean a TON more. Way too much complicated code was generated now that code is likely to be a black box anyway so it shouldnt matter, but we need to understand how to make this work the way we want it to work, so lets get ready to do some stumbling through that text template (tt) file. When I open the .tt file that was generated, right off the bat I realize there is going to be trouble there is no color coding, no intellisense no nothing! That is going to make stumbling through more like groping blindly in the dark while handcuffed and hopping on one foot, which was one of the alternate titles I was considering for this blog. Thankfully, the community comes to my rescue and I wont have to cast my mind back to the glory days of coding in VI (look it up, kids). Using the Extension Manager (Available under the Tools menu), I did a quick search for tt editor in the Online Gallery and quickly found the Tangible T4 Editor: Downloading and installing this was a breeze, and after doing so I got some color coding and intellisense while editing the tt files. If you will be doing any customizing of tt files, I highly recommend installing this extension. Next, well see if that is enough help for us to tweak that tt file to do the kind of code generation that we wantDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Training a 'replacement', how to enforce standards?

- by Mohgeroth

Not sure that this is the right stack exchange site to ask this of, but here goes... Scope I work for a small company that employs a few hundred people. The development team for the company is small and works out of visual foxpro. A specific department in the company hired me in as a 'lone gunman' to fix and enhance a pre-existing invoicing system. I've successfully taken an Access application that suffered from a lot of risks and limitations and converted it into a C# application driven off of a SQL server backend. I have recently obtained my undergraduate and am no expert by any means. To help make up for that I've felt that earning microsoft certifications will force me to understand more about .net and how it functions. So, after giving my notice with 9 months in advance, 3 months ago a replacement finally showed up. Their role is to learn what I have been designing to an attempt to support the applications designed in C#. The Replacement Fresh out of college with no real-world work experience, the first instinct for anything involving data was and still is listboxes... any time data is mentioned the list box is the control of choice for the replacement. This has gotten to the point, no matter how many times I discuss other controls, where I've seen 5 listboxes on a single form. Classroom experience was almost all C++ console development. So, an example of where I have concern is in a winforms application: Users need to key Reasons into a table to select from later. Given that I know that a strongly typed data set exists, I can just drag the data source from the toolbox and it would create all of this for me. I realize this is a simple example but using databinding is the key. For the past few months now we have been talking about the strongly typed dataset, how to use it and where it interacts with other controls. Data sets, how they work in relation to binding sources, adapters and data grid views. After handing this project off I expected questions about how to implement these since for me this is the way to do it. What happened next simply floors me: An instance of an adapter from the strongly typed dataset was created in the activate event of the form, a table was created and filled with data. Then, a loop was made to manually add rows to a listbox from this table. Finally, a variable was kept to do lookups to figure out what ID the record was for updates if required. How do they modify records you ask? That was my first question too. You won't believe how simple it is, all you do it double click and they type into a pop-up prompt the new value to change it to. As a data entry operator, all the modal popups would drive me absolutely insane. The final solution exceeds 100 lines of code that must be maintained. So my concern is that none of this is sinking in... the department is only allowed 20 hours a week of their time. Up until last week, we've only been given 4-5 hours a week if I'm lucky. The past week or so, I've been lucky to get 10. Question WHAT DO I DO?! I have 4 weeks left until I leave and they fully 'support' this application. I love this job and the opportunity it has given me but it's time for me to spread my wings and find something new. I am in no way, shape or form convinced that they are ready to take over. I do feel that the replacement has the technical ability to 'figure it out' but instead of learning they just write code to do all of this stuff manually. If the replacement wants to code differently in the end, as long as it works I'm fine with that as horrifiying at it looks. However to support what I have designed they MUST to understand how it works and how I have used controls and the framework to make 'magic' happen. This project has about 40 forms, a database with over 30 some odd tables, triggers and stored procedures. It relates labor to invoices to contracts to projections... it's not as simple as it was three years ago when I began this project and the department is now in a position where they cannot survive without it. How in the world can I accomplish any of the following?: Enforce standards or understanding in constent design when the department manager keeps telling them they can do it however they want to Find a way to engage the replacement in active learning of the framework and system design that support must be given for Gracefully inform sr. management that 5-9 hours a week is simply not enough time to learn about the department, pre-existing processes, applications that need to be supported AND determine where potential enhancements to the system go... Yes I know this is a wall of text, thanks for reading through me but I simply don't know what I should be doing. For me, this job is a monster of a reference and things would look extremely bad if I left and things fell apart. How do I handle this?

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Database Rebuild

- by Robert May

I promised I’d have a simpler mechanism for rebuilding the database. Below is a complete MSBuild targets file for rebuilding the database from scratch. I don’t know if I’ve explained the rational for this. The reason why you’d WANT to do this is so that each developer has a clean version of the database on their local machine. This also includes the continuous integration environment. Basically, you can do whatever you want to the database without fear, and in a minute or two, have a completely rebuilt database structure. DBDeploy (including the KTSC build task for dbdeploy) is used in this script to do change tracking on the database itself. The MSBuild ExtensionPack is used in this target file. You can get an MSBuild DBDeploy task here. There are two database scripts that you’ll see below. First is the task for creating an admin (dbo) user in the system. This script looks like the following: USE [master] GO If not Exists (select Name from sys.sql_logins where name = '$(User)') BEGIN CREATE LOGIN [$(User)] WITH PASSWORD=N'$(Password)', DEFAULT_DATABASE=[$(DatabaseName)], CHECK_EXPIRATION=OFF, CHECK_POLICY=OFF END GO EXEC master..sp_addsrvrolemember @loginame = N'$(User)', @rolename = N'sysadmin' GO USE [$(DatabaseName)] GO CREATE USER [$(User)] FOR LOGIN [$(User)] GO ALTER USER [$(User)] WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA=[dbo] GO EXEC sp_addrolemember N'db_owner', N'$(User)' GO The second creates the changelog table. This script can also be found in the dbdeploy.net install\scripts directory. CREATE TABLE changelog ( change_number INTEGER NOT NULL, delta_set VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, start_dt DATETIME NOT NULL, complete_dt DATETIME NULL, applied_by VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL, description VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL ) GO ALTER TABLE changelog ADD CONSTRAINT Pkchangelog PRIMARY KEY (change_number, delta_set) GO Finally, Here’s the targets file. <Projectxmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Update"> <PropertyGroup> <DatabaseName>TestDatabase</DatabaseName> <Server>localhost</Server> <ScriptDirectory>.\Scripts</ScriptDirectory> <RebuildDirectory>.\Rebuild</RebuildDirectory> <TestDataDirectory>.\TestData</TestDataDirectory> <DbDeploy>.\DBDeploy</DbDeploy> <User>TestUser</User> <Password>TestPassword</Password> <BCP>bcp</BCP> <BCPOptions>-S$(Server) -U$(User) -P$(Password) -N -E -k</BCPOptions> <OutputFileName>dbDeploy-output.sql</OutputFileName> <UndoFileName>dbDeploy-output-undo.sql</UndoFileName> <LastChangeToApply>99999</LastChangeToApply> </PropertyGroup> <ImportProject="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\ExtensionPack\4.0\MSBuild.ExtensionPack.tasks"/> <UsingTask TaskName="Ktsc.Build.DBDeploy" AssemblyFile="$(DbDeploy)\Ktsc.Build.dll"/> <ItemGroup> <VariableInclude="DatabaseName"> <Value>$(DatabaseName)</Value> </Variable> <VariableInclude="Server"> <Value>$(Server)</Value> </Variable> <VariableInclude="User"> <Value>$(User)</Value> </Variable> <VariableInclude="Password"> <Value>$(Password)</Value> </Variable> </ItemGroup> <TargetName="Rebuild">  <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.SqlServer.SqlCmd Variables="@(Variable)" Database="$(DatabaseName)" TaskAction="Execute" CommandLineQuery ="ALTER DATABASE $(DatabaseName) SET OFFLINE WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE"/>  <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Sql2008.DatabaseTaskAction="SetOnline" DatabaseItem="$(DatabaseName)"/>  <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Sql2008.DatabaseTaskAction="Delete" DatabaseItem="$(DatabaseName)"/>  <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Sql2008.DatabaseTaskAction="Create" DatabaseItem="$(DatabaseName)" Force="True"/>  <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.SqlServer.SqlCmd TaskAction="Execute" Server="(local)" Database="$(DatabaseName)" InputFiles="$(RebuildDirectory)\0002 Create Admin User.sql" Variables="@(Variable)" />  <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.SqlServer.SqlCmd TaskAction="Execute" Server="(local)" Database="$(DatabaseName)" LogOn="$(User)" Password="$(Password)" InputFiles="$(RebuildDirectory)\0003 Create Changelog.sql" Variables="@(Variable)" /> <CallTarget Targets="Update;ImportData"/> </Target> <TargetName="Update" DependsOnTargets="CreateUpdateScript"> <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.SqlServer.SqlCmd TaskAction="Execute" Server="(local)" Database="$(DatabaseName)" LogOn="$(User)" Password="$(Password)" InputFiles="$(OutputFileName)" Variables="@(Variable)" /> </Target> <TargetName="CreateUpdateScript"> <ktsc.Build.DBDeploy DbType="mssql" DbConnection="User=$(User);Password=$(Password);Data Source=$(Server);Initial Catalog=$(DatabaseName);" Dir="$(ScriptDirectory)" OutputFile="..\$(OutputFileName)" UndoOutputFile="..\$(UndoFileName)" LastChangeToApply="$(LastChangeToApply)"/> </Target> <TargetName="ImportData"> <ItemGroup> <TestData Include="$(TestDataDirectory)\*.dat"/> </ItemGroup> <ExecCommand="$(BCP) $(DatabaseName).dbo.%(TestData.Filename) in"%(TestData.Identity)"$(BCPOptions)"/> </Target> </Project> Technorati Tags: MSBuild

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Managing Your First SharePoint Project or Team

- by Mark Rackley

(*editor’s note* If you have proper SharePoint Training, know the difference between a site and a site collection, and have the utmost respect for the knowledge of your SharePoint team skip this blog and go directly to meetdux.com, do not pass go, do not collect $200… otherwise, please proceed) Dear Mr. or Mrs. I-know-nothing-about-SharePoint-but-hey,-I-have-manager-in-my-title-so-I’ll-tell-you-how-to-your-job, Thank you so much for joining the Acme corporation. We appreciate your eagerness and willingness to jump in and help us accomplish all of our goals here at acme (these roadrunner rockets don’t make themselves). You may have noticed that we have this thing called SharePoint lying around and we have invested some time in money to make it not a complete piece of garbage. So, I thought I’d give you some pointers to help make your stay here enjoyable and productive. Yeah… you don’t really know SharePoint Just because you had a mysite at your last organization or had a SharePoint 2003 team site does NOT mean you comprehend the vastness that is SharePoint. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know what should and should not be done. No, we CAN’T just query the SQL database directly. Yes, it really does take that long. No, we can’t do that out-of-the-box. Your experience doesn’t mean as much as you think it means… Yes, I’m aware that you co-created the internet with Al Gore and have been managing projects since I was blowing up GI Joe figures with firecrackers, however SharePoint is not like anything you have worked with before from a management perspective. Please don’t tell us the proper way to do our job or tell us how “you” would do it, and PLEASE don’t utter the words “I used to do some .NET development so let me know if you get stuck and need some guidance.” It MAY be possible for a incredible project manager to manage a SharePoint project and not understand the technology, but if you force your ideas on us or treat us like we don’t really know what we’re doing then you will prove yourself to NOT be one of those types. Oh no you didn’t… Please don’t tell us how you can bring in a group of guys of Kazakhstan to do the project for $20/hr. There are many companies out there who can do some really crappy SharePoint work and we don’t want to be stuck maintaining their junk. Do you know what it means to deploy a solution? Neither do some of those companies out there. However, there are are few AWESOME consulting firms out there but $150/hr is cheap for these guys. Believe me, it’s worth it though. You get what you pay for! Show us some respect We truly do appreciate and value your opinion and experience, but when we tell you something is different in SharePoint don’t be condescending and dismiss OUR experience and opinions. We have spent a lot of time and energy learning a very complicated technology that can open up a world of possibilities when used properly. We just want to make sure it is used properly. It’s not the same as .NET development. It’s not like a regular web application. There’s more going on behind the scenes than you can possibly fathom. Have a little faith in us please and listen when we talk. You may actually learn a thing or two. Take some time to learn the technology There is hope… you don’t have to be totally worthless. Take some time to learn SharePoint. Learn what it is and what it can do. Invest some time in learning our SharePoint environment. What’s our logical architecture and taxonomy? What governance do we have in place? If you just thought “huh?” then yes, I’m talking to you. Sincerely, Your SharePoint Team (This rant is not pointed at any particular organization or person. If you think it’s about you, you are wrong. This is just a general rant based upon things people have told me and things I’ve seen. If you don’t think it applies to you, please move on. If you think you might be guilty of handling your SharePoint team the wrong way, then just please listen, learn, and have a little faith in your team. You all have the same goal in mind. Also, take the time to learn something about SharePoint, you will all be less frustrated with each other.)

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Jersey 2 in GlassFish 4 - First Java EE 7 Implementation Now Integrated (TOTD #182)

- by arungupta

The JAX-RS 2.0 specification released their Early Draft 3 recently. One of my earlier blogs explained as the features were first introduced in the very first draft of the JAX-RS 2.0 specification. Last week was another milestone when the first Java EE 7 specification implementation was added to GlassFish 4 builds. Jakub blogged about Jersey 2 integration in GlassFish 4 builds. Most of the basic functionality is working but EJB, CDI, and Validation are still a TBD. Here is a simple Tip Of The Day (TOTD) sample to get you started with using that functionality. Create a Java EE 6-style Maven project mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.mojo.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=webapp-javaee6 -DgroupId=example -DartifactId=jersey2-helloworld -DarchetypeVersion=1.5 -DinteractiveMode=false Note, this is still a Java EE 6 archetype, at least for now. Open the project in NetBeans IDE as it makes it much easier to edit/add the files. Add the following <respositories> <repositories> <repository> <id>snapshot-repository.java.net</id> <name>Java.net Snapshot Repository for Maven</name> <url>https://maven.java.net/content/repositories/snapshots/</url> <layout>default</layout> </repository></repositories> Add the following <dependency>s <dependency> <groupId>junit</groupId> <artifactId>junit</artifactId> <version>4.10</version> <scope>test</scope></dependency><dependency> <groupId>javax.ws.rs</groupId> <artifactId>javax.ws.rs-api</artifactId> <version>2.0-m09</version> <scope>test</scope></dependency><dependency> <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.core</groupId> <artifactId>jersey-client</artifactId> <version>2.0-m05</version> <scope>test</scope></dependency> The complete list of Maven coordinates for Jersey2 are available here. An up-to-date status of Jersey 2 can always be obtained from here. Here is a simple resource class: @Path("movies")public class MoviesResource { @GET @Path("list") public List<Movie> getMovies() { List<Movie> movies = new ArrayList<Movie>(); movies.add(new Movie("Million Dollar Baby", "Hillary Swank")); movies.add(new Movie("Toy Story", "Buzz Light Year")); movies.add(new Movie("Hunger Games", "Jennifer Lawrence")); return movies; }} This resource publishes a list of movies and is accessible at "movies/list" path with HTTP GET. The project is using the standard JAX-RS APIs. Of course, you need the trivial "Movie" and the "Application" class as well. They are available in the downloadable project anyway. Build the project mvn package And deploy to GlassFish 4.0 promoted build 43 (download, unzip, and start as "bin/asadmin start-domain") as asadmin deploy --force=true target/jersey2-helloworld.war Add a simple test case by right-clicking on the MoviesResource class, select "Tools", "Create Tests", and take defaults. Replace the function "testGetMovies" to @Testpublic void testGetMovies() { System.out.println("getMovies"); Client client = ClientFactory.newClient(); List<Movie> movieList = client.target("http://localhost:8080/jersey2-helloworld/webresources/movies/list") .request() .get(new GenericType<List<Movie>>() {}); assertEquals(3, movieList.size());} This test uses the newly defined JAX-RS 2 client APIs to access the RESTful resource. Run the test by giving the command "mvn test" and see the output as ------------------------------------------------------- T E S T S-------------------------------------------------------Running example.MoviesResourceTestgetMoviesTests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.561 secResults :Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0 GlassFish 4 contains Jersey 2 as the JAX-RS implementation. If you want to use Jersey 1.1 functionality, then Martin's blog provide more details on that. All JAX-RS 1.x functionality will be supported using standard APIs anyway. This workaround is only required if Jersey 1.x functionality needs to be accessed. The complete source code explained in this project can be downloaded from here. Here are some pointers to follow JAX-RS 2 Specification Early Draft 3 Latest status on specification (jax-rs-spec.java.net) Latest JAX-RS 2.0 Javadocs Latest status on Jersey (Reference Implementation of JAX-RS 2 - jersey.java.net) Latest Jersey API Javadocs Latest GlassFish 4.0 Promoted Build Follow @gf_jersey Provide feedback on Jersey 2 to [email protected] and JAX-RS specification to [email protected].

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boot issues - long delay, then "gave up waiting for root device"

- by chazomaticus

I've had this issue on and off for about two years now. I noticed it on a new (custom built) machine running 10.04 when that first came out, but then it went away until a few months ago. I've gone through a number of hard drive changes but I can't say specifically what if anything I changed hardware-wise to make it stop or start happening. I had assumed upgrading to a modern Ubuntu version would fix the issue, so I installed 12.04 beta on a spare partition last night, but it's still happening. Here's the issue. After grub loads and I select a kernel to boot, the screen goes blank save for a blinking cursor. It sits in this state for many long minutes before it finally gives up and gives me an initramfs shell with the message gave up waiting for root device (and lists the /dev/disk/by-uuid/... path it was waiting for) but no other specific diagnostic information. Now, here's the tricky part. For one, the problem is intermittent - sometimes it progresses from the blinking cursor to the Ubuntu splash boot screen in a few seconds, and once it gets that far it always continues booting fine. The really bizarre thing is that I can "force" it to "find" the root device by repeatedly pressing the space bar and hitting the machine's power button. If I tap those enough, eventually I will notice the hard drive light coming on, at which point it will always continue the boot process after a few seconds. Interestingly, if I wait slightly too long before pressing the power button (30s?), as soon as I press it I get the gave up waiting message and the initramfs shell. I've tried setting up /etc/fstab (and the grub menu.lst or whatever it's called nowadays) to use device names (e.g. /dev/sda1) instead of UUIDs, but I get the same effect just with the device name, not UUID, in the error message. I should also mention that when I boot to Windows 7, there is no issue. It boots slowly all the time just by virtue of being Windows, but it never hangs indefinitely. This would seem to indicate it's a problem in Ubuntu, not the hardware. It's pretty annoying to have to babysit the computer every time it boots. Any ideas? I'm at a loss. Not even sure how to diagnose the issue. Thanks! EDIT: Here's some dmesg output from 10.04. The 15 second gap is where it was doing nothing. I pressed the power button and space bar a few times, and the stuff at 16 seconds happened. Not sure what any of it means. [ 1.320250] scsi18 : ahci [ 1.320294] scsi19 : ahci [ 1.320320] ata19: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfd4fe000 port 0xfd4fe100 ir q 18 [ 1.320323] ata20: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfd4fe000 port 0xfd4fe180 ir q 18 [ 1.403886] usb 2-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4 [ 1.562558] usb 2-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [ 16.477824] ata16: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477843] ata19: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477857] ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477895] ata15: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477906] ata20: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477977] ata17: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478003] ata12: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478046] ata13: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478063] ata14: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478108] ata11: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478123] ata18: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [ 16.478127] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478157] ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478193] ata18.00: ATAPI: MARVELL VIRTUALL, 1.09, max UDMA/66 After that, it took its sweet time, and I had to keep hitting space bar to coax it along. Here's some more dmesg output from a little later in the boot process: [ 17.982291] input: BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00 :13.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input4 [ 17.982335] generic-usb 0003:046E:5506.0002: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Key board [BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:13.0-2/input0 [ 18.005211] input: BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00 :13.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.1/input/input5 [ 18.005274] generic-usb 0003:046E:5506.0003: input,hiddev96,hidraw2: USB HID v1.10 Device [BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:13.0-2/input1 [ 22.484906] EXT4-fs (sda6): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem [ 22.484910] EXT4-fs (sda6): write access will be enabled during recovery [ 22.548542] EXT4-fs (sda6): recovery complete [ 22.549074] EXT4-fs (sda6): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode [ 32.516772] Adding 20482832k swap on /dev/sda5. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:20482832k [ 32.742540] udev: starting version 151 [ 33.002004] Bluetooth: Atheros AR30xx firmware driver ver 1.0 [ 33.008135] parport_pc 00:09: reported by Plug and Play ACPI [ 33.008186] parport0: PC-style at 0x378, irq 7 [PCSPP,TRISTATE] [ 33.012076] lp: driver loaded but no devices found [ 33.037271] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [ 33.090256] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven). Any clues in there?

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OpenGL 3 and the Radeon HD 4850x2

- by rotard

A while ago, I picked up a copy of the OpenGL SuperBible fifth edition and slowly and painfully started teaching myself OpenGL the 3.3 way, after having been used to the 1.0 way from school way back when. Making things more challenging, I am primarily a .NET developer, so I was working in Mono with the OpenTK OpenGL wrapper. On my laptop, I put together a program that let the user walk around a simple landscape using a couple shaders that implemented per-vertex coloring and lighting and texture mapping. Everything was working brilliantly until I ran the same program on my desktop. Disaster! Nothing would render! I have chopped my program down to the point where the camera sits near the origin, pointing at the origin, and renders a square (technically, a triangle fan). The quad renders perfectly on my laptop, coloring, lighting, texturing and all, but the desktop renders a small distorted non-square quadrilateral that is colored incorrectly, not affected by the lights, and not textured. I suspect the graphics card is at fault, because I get the same result whether I am booted into Ubuntu 10.10 or Win XP. I did find that if I pare the vertex shader down to ONLY outputting the positional data and the fragment shader to ONLY outputting a solid color (white) the quad renders correctly. But as SOON as I start passing in color data (whether or not I use it in the fragment shader) the output from the vertex shader is distorted again. The shaders follow. I left the pre-existing code in, but commented out so you can get an idea what I was trying to do. I'm a noob at glsl so the code could probably be a lot better. My laptop is an old lenovo T61p with a Centrino (Core 2) Duo and an nVidia Quadro graphics card running Ubuntu 10.10 My desktop has an i7 with a Radeon HD 4850 x2 (single card, dual GPU) from Saphire dual booting into Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP. The problem occurs in both XP and Ubuntu. Can anyone see something wrong that I am missing? What is "special" about my HD 4850x2? string vertexShaderSource = @" #version 330 precision highp float; uniform mat4 projection_matrix; uniform mat4 modelview_matrix; //uniform mat4 normal_matrix; //uniform mat4 cmv_matrix; //Camera modelview. Light sources are transformed by this matrix. //uniform vec3 ambient_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_direction; in vec4 in_position; in vec4 in_color; //in vec3 in_normal; //in vec3 in_tex_coords; out vec4 varyingColor; //out vec3 varyingTexCoords; void main(void) { //Get surface normal in eye coordinates //vec4 vEyeNormal = normal_matrix * vec4(in_normal, 0); //Get vertex position in eye coordinates //vec4 vPosition4 = modelview_matrix * vec4(in_position, 0); //vec3 vPosition3 = vPosition4.xyz / vPosition4.w; //Get vector to light source in eye coordinates //vec3 lightVecNormalized = normalize(diffuse_direction); //vec3 vLightDir = normalize((cmv_matrix * vec4(lightVecNormalized, 0)).xyz); //Dot product gives us diffuse intensity //float diff = max(0.0, dot(vEyeNormal.xyz, vLightDir.xyz)); //Multiply intensity by diffuse color, force alpha to 1.0 //varyingColor.xyz = in_color * diff * diffuse_color.xyz; varyingColor = in_color; //varyingTexCoords = in_tex_coords; gl_Position = projection_matrix * modelview_matrix * in_position; }"; string fragmentShaderSource = @" #version 330 //#extension GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 : enable precision highp float; //uniform sampler2DArray colorMap; //in vec4 varyingColor; //in vec3 varyingTexCoords; out vec4 out_frag_color; void main(void) { out_frag_color = vec4(1,1,1,1); //out_frag_color = varyingColor; //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, varyingTexCoords.st); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, vec3(varyingTexCoords.st, 0)); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture2DArray(colorMap, varyingTexCoords); }"; Note that in this code the color data is accepted but not actually used. The geometry is outputted the same (wrong) whether the fragment shader uses varyingColor or not. Only if I comment out the line varyingColor = in_color; does the geometry output correctly. Originally the shaders took in vec3 inputs, I only modified them to take vec4s while troubleshooting.

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My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

- by Valter Minute

Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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Breaking 1NF to model subset constraints. Does this sound sane?

- by Chris Travers

My first question here. Appologize if it is in the wrong forum but this seems pretty conceptual. I am looking at doing something that goes against conventional wisdom and want to get some feedback as to whether this is totally insane or will result in problems, so critique away! I am on PostgreSQL 9.1 but may be moving to 9.2 for this part of this project. To re-iterate: Does it seem sane to break 1NF in this way? I am not looking for debugging code so much as where people see problems that this might lead. The Problem In double entry accounting, financial transactions are journal entries with an arbitrary number of lines. Each line has either a left value (debit) or a right value (credit) which can be modelled as a single value with negatives as debits and positives as credits or vice versa. The sum of all debits and credits must equal zero (so if we go with a single amount field, sum(amount) must equal zero for each financial journal entry). SQL-based databases, pretty much required for this sort of work, have no way to express this sort of constraint natively and so any approach to enforcing it in the database seems rather complex. The Write Model The journal entries are append only. There is a possibility we will add a delete model but it will be subject to a different set of restrictions and so is not applicable here. If and when we allow deletes, we will probably do them using a simple ON DELETE CASCADE designation on the foreign key, and require that deletes go through a dedicated stored procedure which can enforce the other constraints. So inserts and selects have to be accommodated but updates and deletes do not for this task. My Proposed Solution My proposed solution is to break first normal form and model constraints on arrays of tuples, with a trigger that breaks the rows out into another table. CREATE TABLE journal_line ( entry_id bigserial primary key, account_id int not null references account(id), journal_entry_id bigint not null, -- adding references later amount numeric not null ); I would then add "table methods" to extract debits and credits for reporting purposes: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION debits(journal_line) RETURNS numeric LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE AS $$ SELECT CASE WHEN $1.amount < 0 THEN $1.amount * -1 ELSE NULL END; $$; CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION credits(journal_line) RETURNS numeric LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE AS $$ SELECT CASE WHEN $1.amount > 0 THEN $1.amount ELSE NULL END; $$; Then the journal entry table (simplified for this example): CREATE TABLE journal_entry ( entry_id bigserial primary key, -- no natural keys :-( journal_id int not null references journal(id), date_posted date not null, reference text not null, description text not null, journal_lines journal_line[] not null ); Then a table method and and check constraints: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION running_total(journal_entry) returns numeric language sql immutable as $$ SELECT sum(amount) FROM unnest($1.journal_lines); $$; ALTER TABLE journal_entry ADD CONSTRAINT CHECK (((journal_entry.running_total) = 0)); ALTER TABLE journal_line ADD FOREIGN KEY journal_entry_id REFERENCES journal_entry(entry_id); And finally we'd have a breakout trigger: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION je_breakout() RETURNS TRIGGER LANGUAGE PLPGSQL AS $$ BEGIN IF TG_OP = 'INSERT' THEN INSERT INTO journal_line (journal_entry_id, account_id, amount) SELECT NEW.id, account_id, amount FROM unnest(NEW.journal_lines); RETURN NEW; ELSE RAISE EXCEPTION 'Operation Not Allowed'; END IF; END; $$; And finally CREATE TRIGGER AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE ON journal_entry FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE_PROCEDURE je_breaout(); Of course the example above is simplified. There will be a status table that will track approval status allowing for separation of duties, etc. However the goal here is to prevent unbalanced transactions. Any feedback? Does this sound entirely insane? Standard Solutions? In getting to this point I have to say I have looked at four different current ERP solutions to this problems: Represent every line item as a debit and a credit against different accounts. Use of foreign keys against the line item table to enforce an eventual running total of 0 Use of constraint triggers in PostgreSQL Forcing all validation here solely through the app logic. My concerns are that #1 is pretty limiting and very hard to audit internally. It's not programmer transparent and so it strikes me as being difficult to work with in the future. The second strikes me as being very complex and required a series of contraints and foreign keys against self to make work, and therefore it strikes me as complex, hard to sort out at least in my mind, and thus hard to work with. The fourth could be done as we force all access through stored procedures anyway and this is the most common solution (have the app total things up and throw an error otherwise). However, I think proof that a constraint is followed is superior to test cases, and so the question becomes whether this in fact generates insert anomilies rather than solving them. If this is a solved problem it isn't the case that everyone agrees on the solution....

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Where would a spam bot be located?

- by Tim

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

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Issue with a point coordinates, which creates an unwanted triangle

- by Paul

I would like to connect the points from the red path, to the y-axis in blue. I figured out that the problem with my triangles came from the first point (V0) : it is not located where it should be. In the console, it says its location is at 0,0, but in the emulator, it is not. The code : for(int i = 1; i < 2; i++) { CCLOG(@"_polyVertices[i-1].x : %f, _polyVertices[i-1].y : %f", _polyVertices[i-1].x, _polyVertices[i-1].y); CCLOG(@"_polyVertices[i].x : %f, _polyVertices[i].y : %f", _polyVertices[i].x, _polyVertices[i].y); ccDrawLine(_polyVertices[i-1], _polyVertices[i]); } The output : _polyVertices[i-1].x : 0.000000, _polyVertices[i-1].y : 0.000000 _polyVertices[i].x : 50.000000, _polyVertices[i].y : 0.000000 And the result : (the layer goes up, i could not take the screenshot before the layer started to go up, but the first red point starts at y=0) : Then it creates an unwanted triangle when the code continues : Would you have any idea about this? (So to force the first blue point to start at 0,0, and not at 50,0 as it seems to be now) Here is the code : - (void)generatePath{ float x = 50; //first red point float y = 0; for(int i = 0; i < kMaxKeyPoints+1; i++) { if (i<3){ _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); x = 150 + (random() % (int) 30); y += -40; } else if(i<20){ //going right _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); x += (random() % (int) 30); y += -40; } else if(i<25){ //stabilize _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); x = 150 + (random() % (int) 30); y += -40; } else if(i<30){ //going left _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); //x -= (random() % (int) 10); x = 150 + (random() % (int) 30); y += -40; } else { //back to normal _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); x = 150 + (random() % (int) 30); y += -40; } } } -(void)generatePolygons{ static int prevFromKeyPointI = -1; static int prevToKeyPointI = -1; // key points interval for drawing while (_hillKeyPoints[_fromKeyPointI].y > -_offsetY+winSizeTop) { _fromKeyPointI++; } while (_hillKeyPoints[_toKeyPointI].y > -_offsetY-winSizeBottom) { _toKeyPointI++; } if (prevFromKeyPointI != _fromKeyPointI || prevToKeyPointI != _toKeyPointI) { _nPolyVertices = 0; float x1 = 0; int keyPoints = _fromKeyPointI; for (int i=_fromKeyPointI; i<_toKeyPointI; i++){ //V0: at (0,0) _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(x1, y1); //first blue point _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(x1, y1); //V1: to the first "point" _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); keyPoints++; //from point at index 0 to 1 //V2, same y as point n°2: _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(0, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(0, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); //V1 again _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; //V2 again _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; //CCLOG(@"_nPolyVertices V2 again : %i", _nPolyVertices); //V3 = same x,y as point at index 1 _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); y1 = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices].y; _nPolyVertices++; } prevFromKeyPointI = _fromKeyPointI; prevToKeyPointI = _toKeyPointI; } } - (void) draw { //RED glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); for(int i = MAX(_fromKeyPointI, 1); i <= _toKeyPointI; ++i) { glColor4f(1.0, 0, 0, 1.0); ccDrawLine(_hillKeyPoints[i-1], _hillKeyPoints[i]); } //BLUE glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1); for(int i = 1; i < 2; i++) { CCLOG(@"_polyVertices[i-1].x : %f, _polyVertices[i-1].y : %f", _polyVertices[i-1].x, _polyVertices[i-1].y); CCLOG(@"_polyVertices[i].x : %f, _polyVertices[i].y : %f", _polyVertices[i].x, _polyVertices[i].y); ccDrawLine(_polyVertices[i-1], _polyVertices[i]); } } Thanks

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"Imprinting" as a language feature?

- by MKO

Idea I had this idea for a language feature that I think would be useful, does anyone know of a language that implements something like this? The idea is that besides inheritance a class can also use something called "imprinting" (for lack of better term). A class can imprint one or several (non-abstract) classes. When a class imprints another class it gets all it's properties and all it's methods. It's like the class storing an instance of the imprinted class and redirecting it's methods/properties to it. A class that imprints another class therefore by definition also implements all it's interfaces and it's abstract class. So what's the point? Well, inheritance and polymorphism is hard to get right. Often composition gives far more flexibility. Multiple inheritance offers a slew of different problems without much benefits (IMO). I often write adapter classes (in C#) by implementing some interface and passing along the actual methods/properties to an encapsulated object. The downside to that approach is that if the interface changes the class breaks. You also you have to put in a lot of code that does nothing but pass things along to the encapsulated object. A classic example is that you have some class that implements IEnumerable or IList and contains an internal class it uses. With this technique things would be much easier Example (c#) [imprint List<Person> as peopleList] public class People : PersonBase { public void SomeMethod() { DoSomething(this.Count); //Count is from List } } //Now People can be treated as an List<Person> People people = new People(); foreach(Person person in people) { ... } peopleList is an alias/variablename (of your choice)used internally to alias the instance but can be skipped if not needed. One thing that's useful is to override an imprinted method, that could be achieved with the ordinary override syntax public override void Add(Person person) { DoSomething(); personList.Add(person); } note that the above is functional equivalent (and could be rewritten by the compiler) to: public class People : PersonBase , IList<Person> { private List<Person> personList = new List<Person>(); public override void Add(object obj) { this.personList.Add(obj) } public override int IndexOf(object obj) { return personList.IndexOf(obj) } //etc etc for each signature in the interface } only if IList changes your class will break. IList won't change but an interface that you, someone in your team, or a thirdparty has designed might just change. Also this saves you writing a whole lot of code for some interfaces/abstract classes. Caveats There's a couple of gotchas. First we, syntax must be added to call the imprinted classes's constructors from the imprinting class constructor. Also, what happends if a class imprints two classes which have the same method? In that case the compiler would detect it and force the class to define an override of that method (where you could chose if you wanted to call either imprinted class or both) So what do you think, would it be useful, any caveats? It seems it would be pretty straightforward to implement something like that in the C# language but I might be missing something :) Sidenote - Why is this different from multiple inheritance Ok, so some people have asked about this. Why is this different from multiple inheritance and why not multiple inheritance. In C# methods are either virtual or not. Say that we have ClassB who inherits from ClassA. ClassA has the methods MethodA and MethodB. ClassB overrides MethodA but not MethodB. Now say that MethodB has a call to MethodA. if MethodA is virtual it will call the implementation that ClassB has, if not it will use the base class, ClassA's MethodA and you'll end up wondering why your class doesn't work as it should. By the terminology sofar you might already confused. So what happens if ClassB inherits both from ClassA and another ClassC. I bet both programmers and compilers will be scratching their heads. The benefit of this approach IMO is that the imprinting classes are totally encapsulated and need not be designed with multiple inheritance in mind. You can basically imprint anything.

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My rhythm game runs choppy even with high frame rate

- by felipedrl

I'm coding a rhythm game and the game runs smoothly with uncapped fps. But when I try to cap it around 60 the game updates in little chunks, like hiccups, as if it was skipping frames or at a very low frame rate. The reason I need to cap frame rate is because in some computers I tested, the fps varies a lot (from ~80 - ~250 fps) and those drops are noticeable and degrade response time. Since this is a rhythm game this is very important. This issue is driving me crazy. I've spent a few weeks already on it and still can't figure out the problem. I hope someone more experienced than me could shed some light on it. I'll try to put here all the hints I've tried along with two pseudo codes for game loops I tried, so I apologize if this post gets too lengthy. 1st GameLoop: const uint UPDATE_SKIP = 1000 / 60; uint nextGameTick = SDL_GetTicks(); while(isNotDone) { // only false when a QUIT event is generated! if (processEvents()) { if (SDL_GetTicks() > nextGameTick) { update(UPDATE_SKIP); render(); nextGameTick += UPDATE_SKIP; } } } 2nd Game Loop: const uint UPDATE_SKIP = 1000 / 60; while (isNotDone) { LARGE_INTEGER startTime; QueryPerformanceCounter(&startTime); // process events will return false in case of a QUIT event processed if (processEvents()) { update(frameTime); render(); } LARGE_INTEGER endTime; do { QueryPerformanceCounter(&endTime); frameTime = static_cast<uint>((endTime.QuadPart - startTime.QuadPart) * 1000.0 / frequency.QuadPart); } while (frameTime < UPDATE_SKIP); } [1] At first I thought it was a timer resolution problem. I was using SDL_GetTicks, but even when I switched to QueryPerformanceCounter, supposedly less granular, I saw no difference. [2] Then I thought it could be due to a rounding error in my position computation and since game updates are smaller in high FPS that would be less noticeable. Indeed there is an small error, but from my tests I realized that it is not enough to produce the position jumps I'm getting. Also, another intriguing factor is that if I enable vsync I'll get smooth updates @60fps regardless frame cap code. So why not rely on vsync? Because some computers can force a disable on gfx card config. [3] I started printing the maximum and minimum frame time measured in 1sec span, in the hope that every a few frames one would take a long time but still not enough to drop my fps computation. It turns out that, with frame cap code I always get frame times in the range of [16, 18]ms, and still, the game "does not moves like jagger". [4] My process' priority is set to HIGH (Windows doesn't allow me to set REALTIME for some reason). As far as I know there is only one thread running along with the game (a sound callback, which I really don't have access to it). I'm using AudiereLib. I then disabled Audiere by removing it from the project and still got the issue. Maybe there are some others threads running and one of them is taking too long to come back right in between when I measured frame times, I don't know. Is there a way to know which threads are attached to my process? [5] There are some dynamic data being created during game run. But It is a little bit hard to remove it to test. Maybe I'll have to try harder this one. Well, as I told you I really don't know what to try next. Anything, I mean, anything would be of great help. What bugs me more is why at 60fps & vsync enabled I get an smooth update and at 60fps & no vsync I don't. Is there a way to implement software vsync? I mean, query display sync info? Thanks in advance. I appreciate the ones that got this far and yet again I apologize for the long post. Best Regards from a fellow coder.

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