Search Results

Search found 15578 results on 624 pages for 'place and route'.

Page 568/624 | < Previous Page | 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575  | Next Page >

• University teaches DOS-style C++, how to deal with it

  - by gaidal

  Half a year ago I had a look at available programming educations. I chose this one because unlike most of the choices: The majority of the courses seemed to be about something concrete and useful; the languages used are C++ and Java which are platform-independent; later courses include developing for mobile devices and a course on Android development, which seemed modern and relevant. Now after two introductory courses we're just starting with C++, and my programming professor seems a bit weird. He's tested us on things like "why should you use constants" and "why are globals bad" in a kind of mechanical way, without much context, before teaching actual programming. His handouts use system("pause"), system("cls"), and getch() from some conio.h that seems ancient according to what I've read. I just did a task that was about printing the "ASCII letters from 32 to 255" (huh?), with an example picture showing a table with Windows' Extended ASCII - of course I got other results for 128-255 on my Arch Linux that uses Unicode, and this isn't mentioned at all. I don't know, it just doesn't seem right... As if he is teaching programming because he has to, perhaps? Should I bring such things up? Hmm. I was looking forward to learning from someone who really knows stuff, and in an academic, rigorous way, like SICP or something. Aren't professors in programming supposed to be like that? I studied math for a while and every teacher and assistant there were really precise about what they said, but this is my second programming teacher that is sort of disappointing. Oh well. Now, question: Is this what to expect from universities or Not OK, and how do I deal with it? I have never touched the language C++ (or C) until now, and am not the right person to jump up and say "This is So Wrong!", so if I google something and find 10 people who say "xxx is blasphemy", how do I skillfully communicate this? I do think it would be better for those classmates who are total beginners not to learn bad habits (such as these vibes of total ignorance of other platforms!) during the upcoming courses, but don't want to disrespect the teacher. I don't know if it's reasonable or just cocky to bring up things like "what about other platforms?" or "but what about this article or stackoverflow answer that I read that said..." for every assignment? Or, if he keeps ignoring non-Windows-programming, should I give up and focus on my own projects or somehow argue that this really isn't OK nowadays? Are there any programming teachers out there, what do you think? By the way these are web-based courses, all interaction between teachers and students takes place in a forum. EDIT: A few answers seem to be making some incorrect assumptions, so maybe I should add a few things. I have been doing programming for fun on and off for 10 years, am pretty comfortable in 3 languages and read programming blogs et c regularly. Also, I feel kind of done being a student, having a degree in another field. I just need another, relevant diploma to work as a programmer, so I'm going back for that. Studying computer science for 5 years is not for me anymore, even though I enjoy learning and solving problems in my free time. Second, let me highlight that I don't expect it to be like the industry at all, quite the contrary. I expect it to be academic, dry and unnecessarily correct. No, it's not just math. Every professor I have had in math, or Japanese (major) or Chinese (minor) have been very very academic, discussing subtle points for hours with passion. But the courses I'm taking now and a previous one in programming don't seem serious. They neither resemble industry NOR academia. That is the problem. And it's not because I can't learn programming anyway. Third, I don't necessarily want to learn C++ or Android development, and I know I could teach myself those and anything else if I wanted to. But I am going back to school anyway, and those platform-independent languages and mobile stuff made me think that maybe they're serious about teaching something relevant here. Seems like I got this wrong, but we'll see.

  Read the article

• Avoiding coupling

  - by Seralize

  It is also true that a system may become so coupled, where each class is dependent on other classes that depend on other classes, that it is no longer possible to make a change in one place without having a ripple effect and having to make subsequent changes in many places.[1] This is why using an interface or an abstract class can be valuable in any object-oriented software project. Quote from Wikipedia Starting from scratch I'm starting from scratch with a project that I recently finished because I found the code to be too tightly coupled and hard to refactor, even when using MVC. I will be using MVC on my new project aswell but want to try and avoid the pitfalls this time, hopefully with your help. Project summary My issue is that I really wish to keep the Controller as clean as possible, but it seems like I can't do this. The basic idea of the program is that the user picks wordlists which is sent to the game engine. It will pick random words from the lists until there are none left. Problem at hand My main problem is that the game will have 'modes', and need to check the input in different ways through a method called checkWord(), but exactly where to put this and how to abstract it properly is a challenge to me. I'm new to design patterns, so not sure whether there exist any might fit my problem. My own attempt at abstraction Here is what I've gotten so far after hours of 'refactoring' the design plans, and I know it's long, but it's the best I could do to try and give you an overview (Note: As this is the sketch, anything is subject to change, all help and advice is very welcome. Also note the marked coupling points): Wordlist class Wordlist { // Basic CRUD etc. here! // Other sample methods: public function wordlistCount($user_id) {} // Returns count of how many wordlists a user has public function getAll($user_id) {} // Returns all wordlists of a user } Word class Word { // Basic CRUD etc. here! // Other sample methods: public function wordCount($wordlist_id) {} // Returns count of words in a wordlist public function getAll($wordlist_id) {} // Returns all words from a wordlist public function getWordInfo($word_id) {} // Returns information about a word } Wordpicker class Wordpicker { // The class needs to know which words and wordlists to exclude protected $_used_words = array(); protected $_used_wordlists = array(); // Wordlists to pick words from protected $_wordlists = array(); /* Public Methods */ public function setWordlists($wordlists = array()) {} public function setUsedWords($used_words = array()) {} public function setUsedWordlists($used_wordlists = array()) {} public function getRandomWord() {} // COUPLING POINT! Will most likely need to communicate with both the Wordlist and Word classes /* Protected Methods */ protected function _checkAvailableWordlists() {} // COUPLING POINT! Might need to check if wordlists are deleted etc. protected function _checkAvailableWords() {} // COUPLING POINT! Method needs to get all words in a wordlist from the Word class } Game class Game { protected $_session_id; // The ID of a game session which gets stored in the database along with game details protected $_game_info = array(); // Game instantiation public function __construct($user_id) { if (! $this->_session_id = $this->_gameExists($user_id)) { // New game } else { // Resume game } } // This is the method I tried to make flexible by using abstract classes etc. // Does it even belong in this class at all? public function checkWord($answer, $native_word, $translation) {} // This method checks the answer against the native word / translation word, depending on game mode public function getGameInfo() {} // Returns information about a game session, or creates it if it does not exist public function deleteSession($session_id) {} // Deletes a game session from the database // Methods dealing with game session information protected function _gameExists($user_id) {} protected function _getProgress($session_id) {} protected function _updateProgress($game_info = array()) {} } The Game /* CONTROLLER */ /* "Guess the word" page */ // User input $game_type = $_POST['game_type']; // Chosen with radio buttons etc. $wordlists = $_POST['wordlists']; // Chosen with checkboxes etc. // Starts a new game or resumes one from the database $game = new Game($_SESSION['user_id']); $game_info = $game->getGameInfo(); // Instantiates a new Wordpicker $wordpicker = new Wordpicker(); $wordpicker->setWordlists((isset($game_info['wordlists'])) ? $game_info['wordlists'] : $wordlists); $wordpicker->setUsedWordlists((isset($game_info['used_wordlists'])) ? $game_info['used_wordlists'] : NULL); $wordpicker->setUsedWords((isset($game_info['used_words'])) ? $game_info['used_words'] : NULL); // Fetches an available word if (! $word_id = $wordpicker->getRandomWord()) { // No more words left - game over! $game->deleteSession($game_info['id']); redirect(); } else { // Presents word details to the user $word = new Word(); $word_info = $word->getWordInfo($word_id); } The Bit to Finish /* CONTROLLER */ /* "Check the answer" page */ // ?????????????????? ( http://pastebin.com/cc6MtLTR ) Make sure you toggle the 'Layout Width' to the right for a better view. Thanks in advance. Questions To which extent should objects be loosely coupled? If object A needs info from object B, how is it supposed to get this without losing too much cohesion? As suggested in the comments, models should hold all business logic. However, as objects should be independent, where to glue them together? Should the model contain some sort of "index" or "client" area which connects the dots? Edit: So basically what I should do for a start is to make a new model which I can more easily call with oneliners such as $model->doAction(); // Lots of code in here which uses classes! How about the method for checking words? Should it be it's own object? I'm not sure where I should put it as it's pretty much part of the 'game'. But on another hand, I could just leave out the 'abstraction and OOPness' and make it a method of the 'client model' which will be encapsulated from the controller anyway. Very unsure about this.

  Read the article

• XNA - Use Mouse To Rotate & Arrow Keys To Scroll A Linearly Wrapped Texture:

  - by The Thing

  Using XNA I'm working on my first, relatively simple, videogame for the PC. At the moment my game window is 1024 X 768 and I have a 'Starfield' linearly wrapped background texture 1280 X 1280 in size whose origin has been set to its center point (width / 2, height / 2). This texture is drawn onscreen using (graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth / 2, graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight / 2) to place the origin in the center of the window. I want to be able to use the horizontal movement of the mouse to rotate my texture left or right and use the arrow keys to scroll the texture in four directions. From my own related coding experiments I have found that once I rotate the texture it no longer scrolls in the direction I want, it's as if somehow the XNA framework's 'sense of direction' has been 'rotated' along with the texture. As an example of what I've described above lets say I rotate the texture 45 degrees to the right, then pressing the up arrow key results in the texture scrolling diagonally from top-right to bottom-left. This is not what I want, regardless of the degree or direction of rotation I want my texture to scroll straight up, straight down, or to the left or right depending on which arrow key was pressed. How do I go about accomplishing this? Any help or guidance is appreciated. To finish up there are two points I'd like to clarify: [1] The reason I'm using linear wrapping on my starfield texture is that it gives a nice impression of an endless starfield. [2] Using a texture at least 1280 X 1280 in conjunction with a game window of 1024 X 768 means that at no point in it's rotation will the edges of the texture become visible. Thanks for reading..... Update # 1 - as requested by RCIX: The code below is what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned 'related coding experiments'. As you can see I am scrolling a linearly wrapped texture in the direction I've moved the mouse relative to the center of the screen. This works perfectly if I don't rotate the texture, but once I do rotate it the direction of the scrolling gets messed up for some reason. public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; int x; int y; float z = 250f; Texture2D Overlay; Texture2D RotatingBackground; Rectangle? sourceRectangle; Color color; float rotation; Vector2 ScreenCenter; Vector2 Origin; Vector2 scale; Vector2 Direction; SpriteEffects effects; float layerDepth; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } protected override void Initialize() { graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 1024; graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 768; graphics.ApplyChanges(); Direction = Vector2.Zero; IsMouseVisible = true; ScreenCenter = new Vector2(graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth / 2, graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight / 2); Mouse.SetPosition((int)graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth / 2, (int)graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight / 2); sourceRectangle = null; color = Color.White; rotation = 0.0f; scale = new Vector2(1.0f, 1.0f); effects = SpriteEffects.None; layerDepth = 1.0f; base.Initialize(); } protected override void LoadContent() { spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); Overlay = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Overlay"); RotatingBackground = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Background"); Origin = new Vector2((int)RotatingBackground.Width / 2, (int)RotatingBackground.Height / 2); } protected override void UnloadContent() { } protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { float timePassed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; MouseState ms = Mouse.GetState(); Vector2 MousePosition = new Vector2(ms.X, ms.Y); Direction = ScreenCenter - MousePosition; if (Direction != Vector2.Zero) { Direction.Normalize(); } x += (int)(Direction.X * z * timePassed); y += (int)(Direction.Y * z * timePassed); //No rotation = texture scrolls as intended, With rotation = texture no longer scrolls in the direction of the mouse. My update method needs to somehow compensate for this. //rotation += 0.01f; base.Update(gameTime); } protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, null, SamplerState.LinearWrap, null, null); spriteBatch.Draw(RotatingBackground, ScreenCenter, new Rectangle(x, y, RotatingBackground.Width, RotatingBackground.Height), color, rotation, Origin, scale, effects, layerDepth); spriteBatch.Draw(Overlay, Vector2.Zero, Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } }

  Read the article

• Thinking differently about BI delivery

  - by jamiet

  My day job involves implementing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions which, as I have said before, is simply about giving people the information they need to do their jobs. I’m always interested in learning about new ways of achieving that aim and that is my motivation for writing blog entries that are not concerned with SQL or SQL Server per se. Implementing BI systems usually involves hacking together a bunch third party products with some in-house “glue” and delivering information using some shiny, expensive web-based front-end tool; the list of vendors that supply such tools is big and ever-growing. No doubt these tools have their place and of late I have started to wonder whether they can be supplemented with different ways of delivering information. The problem I have with these separate web-based tools is exactly that – they are separate web-based tools. What’s the problem with that you might ask? I’ll explain! They force the information worker to go somewhere unfamiliar in order to get the information they need to do their jobs. Would it not be better if we could deliver information into the tools that those information workers are already using and not force them to go somewhere else? I look at the rise of blogging over recent years and I realise that what made them popular is that people can subscribe to RSS feeds and have information pushed to them in their tool of choice rather than them having to go and find the information for themselves in a tool that has been foisted upon them. Would it not be a good idea to adopt the principle of subscription for the benefit of delivering BI information as well? I think it would and in the rest of this blog entry I’ll outline such a scenario where the power of subscription could be used to enhance the delivery of information to information workers. Typical questions that information workers ask might be: What are my year-on-year sales figures? What was my footfall yesterday? How many widgets have I sold so far today? Each of those questions includes a time element and that shouldn’t surprise us, any BI system that I have worked on includes the dimension of time. Now, what do people use to view and organise their time-oriented information? Its not a trick question, they use a calendar and in the enterprise space more often than not that calendar is managed using Outlook. Given then that information workers are already looking at their calendar in Outlook anyway would it not make sense then to deliver information into that same calendar? Of course it would. Calendars are a great way of visualising information such as sales figures. Observe: Just in this single screenshot I have managed to convey a multitude of information. The information worker can see, at a glance, information about hourly/daily/weekly/monthly sales and, moreover, he/she is viewing that information right inside the tool that they use every day. There is no effort on the part of him/her, the information just appears hour after hour, day after day. Taking the idea further, each one of those calendar items could be a mini-dashboard in its own right. Double-clicking on an item could show a plethora of other information about that time slot such as breaking the sales down per region or year-over-year comparisons. Perhaps the title could employ a sparkline? Loads of possibilities. The point is that calendars are a completely natural way to visualise information; we should make more use of them! The real beauty of delivering information using calendars for us BI developers is that it should be so easy. In the case of Outlook we don’t need to write complicated VBA code that can go and manipulate a person’s calendar, simply publishing data in a format that Outlook can understand is sufficient and happily such formats already exist; iCalendar is the accepted format and the even more flexible xCalendar is hopefully on its way as well.   I’d like to make one last point and this one is with my SQL Server hat on. Reporting Services 2008 R2 introduced the ability to publish data as subscribable Atom feeds so it seems logical that it could also be a vehicle for delivering calendar feeds too. If you think this would be a good idea go and vote for it at Publish data as iCalendar feeds and please please please add some comments (especially if you vote it down). Work smarter, not harder! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Multiple enemy array in LibGDX

  - by johnny-b

  I am trying to make a multiple enemy array, where every 30 secods a new bullet comes from a random point. And if the bullet is clicked it should disapear and a pop like an explosion should appear. And if the bullet hits the ball then the ball pops. so the bullet should change to a different sprite or texture. same with the ball pop. But all that happens is the bullet if touched pops and nothing else happens. And if modified then the bullet keeps flashing as the update is way too much. I have added COMMENTS in the code to explain more on the issues. below is the code. if more code is needed i will provide. Thank you public class GameRenderer { private GameWorld myWorld; private OrthographicCamera cam; private ShapeRenderer shapeRenderer; private SpriteBatch batcher; // Game Objects private Ball ball; private ScrollHandler scroller; private Background background; private Bullet bullet1; private BulletPop bPop; private Array<Bullet> bullets; // This is for the delay of the bullet coming one by one every 30 seconds. /** The time of the last shot fired, we set it to the current time in nano when the object is first created */ double lastShot = TimeUtils.nanoTime(); /** Convert 30 seconds into nano seconds, so 30,000 milli = 30 seconds */ double shotFreq = TimeUtils.millisToNanos(30000); // Game Assets private TextureRegion bg, bPop; private Animation bulletAnimation, ballAnimation; private Animation ballPopAnimation; public GameRenderer(GameWorld world) { myWorld = world; cam = new OrthographicCamera(); cam.setToOrtho(true, 480, 320); batcher = new SpriteBatch(); // Attach batcher to camera batcher.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined); shapeRenderer = new ShapeRenderer(); shapeRenderer.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined); // This is suppose to produce 10 bullets at random places on the background. bullets = new Array<Bullet>(); Bullet bullet = null; float bulletX = 00.0f; float bulletY = 00.0f; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { bulletX = MathUtils.random(-10, 10); bulletY = MathUtils.random(-10, 10); bullet = new Bullet(bulletX, bulletY); AssetLoader.bullet1.flip(true, false); AssetLoader.bullet2.flip(true, false); bullets.add(bullet); } // Call helper methods to initialize instance variables initGameObjects(); initAssets(); } private void initGameObjects() { ball = GameWorld.getBall(); bullet1 = myWorld.getBullet1(); bPop = myWorld.getBulletPop(); scroller = myWorld.getScroller(); } private void initAssets() { bg = AssetLoader.bg; ballAnimation = AssetLoader.ballAnimation; bullet1Animation = AssetLoader.bullet1Animation; ballPopAnimation = AssetLoader.ballPopAnimation; } // This is to take the bullet away when clicked or touched. public void onClick() { for (int i = 0; i < bullets.size; i++) { if (bullets.get(i).getBounds().contains(0, 0)) bullets.removeIndex(i); } } private void drawBackground() { batcher.draw(bg1, background.getX(), background.getY(), background.getWidth(), backgroundMove.getHeight()); } public void render(float runTime) { Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL30.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); batcher.begin(); // Disable transparency // This is good for performance when drawing images that do not require // transparency. batcher.disableBlending(); drawBackground(); batcher.enableBlending(); // when the bullet hits the ball, it should be disposed or taken away and a ball pop sprite/texture should be put in its place if (bullet1.collides(ball)) { // draws the bPop texture but the bullet does not go just keeps going around, and the bPop texture goes. batcher.draw(AssetLoader.bPop, 195, 273); } batcher.draw(AssetLoader.ballAnimation.getKeyFrame(runTime), ball.getX(), ball.getY(), ball.getWidth(), ball.getHeight()); // this is where i am trying to make the bullets come one by one, and if removed via the onClick() then bPop animation // should play but does not??? if(TimeUtils.nanoTime() - lastShot > shotFreq){ // Create your stuff for (int i = 0; i < bullets.size; i++) { bullets.get(i); batcher.draw(AssetLoader.bullet1Animation.getKeyFrame(runTime), bullet1.getX(), bullet1.getY(), bullet1.getOriginX(), bullet1.getOriginY(), bullet1.getWidth(), bullet1.getHeight(), 1.0f, 1.0f, bullet1.getRotation()); if (bullets.removeValue(bullet1, false)) { batcher.draw(AssetLoader.ballPopAnimation.getKeyFrame(runTime), bPop1.getX(), bPop1.getY(), bPop1.getWidth(), bPop1.getHeight()); } } /* Very important to set the last shot to now, or it will mess up and go full auto */ lastShot = TimeUtils.nanoTime(); } // End SpriteBatch batcher.end(); } } Thank you

  Read the article

• World Backup Day

  - by red(at)work

  Here at Red Gate Towers, the SQL Backup development team have been hunkered down in their shed for the last few months, with the toolbox, blowtorch and chamois leather out, upgrading SQL Backup. When we started, autumn leaves were falling. Now we're about to finish, spring flowers are budding. If not quite a gleaming new machine, at the very least a familiar, reliable engine with some shiny new bits on it will trundle magnificently out of the workshop. One of the interesting things I've noticed about working on software development teams is that the team is together for so long 'implementing' stuff - designing, coding, testing, fixing bugs and so on - that you occasionally forget why you're doing what you're doing. Doubt creeps in. It feels like a long time since we launched this project in a fanfare of optimism and enthusiasm, and all that clarity of purpose and mission "yee-haw" has dissipated with the daily pressures of development. Every now and again, we look up from our bunker and notice all those thousands of users out there, with their different configurations and working practices and each with their own set of problems and requirements, and we ask ourselves "does anyone care about what we're doing?" Has the world moved on while we've been busy? Could we have been doing something more useful with the time and talent of all these excellent people we've assembled? In truth, you can research and test and validate all you like, but you never really know if you've done the right thing (or at least, something valuable for some users) until you release. All projects suffer this insecurity. If they don't, maybe you're not worrying enough about what you're building. The two enemies of software development are certainty and complacency. Oh, and of course, rival teams with Nerf guns. The goal of SQL Backup 7 is to make it so easy to schedule regular restores of your backups that you have no excuse not to. Why schedule a restore? Because your data is not as good as your last backup. It's only as good as your last successful restore. If you're not checking your backups by restoring them and running an integrity check on the database, you're only doing half the job. It seems that most DBAs know that this is best practice, but it can be tricky and time-consuming to set up, so it's one of those tasks that can get forgotten in the midst all the other demands on their time. Sometimes, they're just too busy firefighting. But if it was simple to do? That was our inspiration for SQL Backup 7. So it was heartening to read Brent Ozar's blog post the other day about World Backup Day. To be honest, I'd never heard of World Backup Day (Talk Like a Pirate Day, yes, but not this one); however, its emphasis on not just backing up your data but checking the validity of those backups was exactly the same message we had in mind when building SQL Backup 7. It's printed on a piece of A3 above our planning board - "Make backup verification so easy to do that no DBA has an excuse for not doing it" It's the missing piece that completes the puzzle. Simple idea, great concept, useful feature, but, as it turned out, far from straightforward to implement. The problem is the future. As Marty McFly discovered over the course of three movies, the future is uncertain and hard to predict - so when you are scheduling a restore to take place an hour, day, week or month after the backup, there are all kinds of questions that you wouldn't normally have to consider. Where will this backup live? Will it even exist at the time? Will it be split into multiple files? What will the file names be? Will it be encrypted? What files should it be restored to? SQL Backup needs to know what to expect at the time the restore job is actually run. Of course, a DBA will know the answer to all these questions, but to deliver the whole point of version 7, we wanted to make it easy for them to input that information into SQL Backup. We think we've done that. When you create your scheduled backup job, there is now an option to create a "reminder" to follow it up with a scheduled restore to verify the resulting backups. Actually, it's much more than a reminder, as it stores all the relevant data so you can click it and pre-populate the wizard with all the right settings to set up your verification restores. Simple. But, what do you think? We'd love you to try it. Post by Brian Harris

  Read the article

• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

  Read the article

• Pirates, Treasure Chests and Architectural Mapping

  Pirate 1: Why do pirates create treasure maps? Pirate 2: I do not know.Pirate 1: So they can find their gold. Yes, that was a bad joke, but it does illustrate a point. Pirates are known for drawing treasure maps to their most prized possession. These documents detail the decisions pirates made in order to hide and find their chests of gold. The map allows them to trace the steps they took originally to hide their treasure so that they may return. As software engineers, programmers, and architects we need to treat software implementations much like our treasure chest. Why is software like a treasure chest? It cost money, time,  and resources to develop (Usually) It can make or save money, time, and resources (Hopefully) If we operate under the assumption that software is like a treasure chest then wouldn’t make sense to document the steps, rationale, concerns, and decisions about how it was designed? Pirates are notorious for documenting where they hide their treasure.  Shouldn’t we as creators of software do the same? By documenting our design decisions and rationale behind them will help others be able to understand and maintain implemented systems. This can only be done if the design decisions are correctly mapped to its corresponding implementation. This allows for architectural decisions to be traced from the conceptual model, architectural design and finally to the implementation. Mapping gives software professional a method to trace the reason why specific areas of code were developed verses other options. Just like the pirates we need to able to trace our steps from the start of a project to its implementation,  so that we will understand why specific choices were chosen. The traceability of a software implementation that actually maps back to its originating design decisions is invaluable for ensuring that architectural drifting and erosion does not take place. The drifting and erosion is prevented by allowing others to understand the rational of why an implementation was created in a specific manor or methodology The process of mapping distinct design concerns/decisions to the location of its implemented is called traceability. In this context traceability is defined as method for connecting distinctive software artifacts. This process allows architectural design models and decisions to be directly connected with its physical implementation. The process of mapping architectural design concerns to a software implementation can be very complex. However, most design decision can be placed in  a few generalized categories. Commonly Mapped Design Decisions Design Rationale Components and Connectors Interfaces Behaviors/Properties Design rational is one of the hardest categories to map directly to an implementation. Typically this rational is mapped or document in code via comments. These comments consist of general design decisions and reasoning because they do not directly refer to a specific part of an application. They typically focus more on the higher level concerns. Components and connectors can directly be mapped to architectural concerns. Typically concerns subdivide an application in to distinct functional areas. These functional areas then can map directly back to their originating concerns.Interfaces can be mapped back to design concerns in one of two ways. Interfaces that pertain to specific function definitions can be directly mapped back to its originating concern(s). However, more complicated interfaces require additional analysis to ensure that the proper mappings are created. Depending on the complexity some Behaviors\Properties can be translated directly into a generic implementation structure that is ready for business logic. In addition, some behaviors can be translated directly in to an actual implementation depending on the complexity and architectural tools used. Mapping design concerns to an implementation is a lot of work to maintain, but is doable. In order to ensure that concerns are mapped correctly and that an implementation correctly reflects its design concerns then one of two standard approaches are usually used. All Changes Come From ArchitectureBy forcing all application changes to come through the architectural model prior to implementation then the existing mappings will be used to locate where in the implementation changes need to occur. Allow Changes From Implementation Or Architecture By allowing changes to come from the implementation and/or the architecture then the other area must be kept in sync. This methodology is more complex compared to the previous approach.  One reason to justify the added complexity for an application is due to the fact that this approach tends to detect and prevent architectural drift and erosion. Additionally, this approach is usually maintained via software because of the complexity. Reference:Taylor, R. N., Medvidovic, N., & Dashofy, E. M. (2009). Software architecture: Foundations, theory, and practice Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons  

  Read the article

• Content in Context: The right medicine for your business applications

  - by Lance Shaw

  For many of you, your companies have already invested in a number of applications that are critical to the way your business is run. HR, Payroll, Legal, Accounts Payable, and while they might need an upgrade in some cases, they are all there and handling the lifeblood of your business. But are they really running as efficiently as they could be? For many companies, the answer is no. The problem has to do with the important information caught up within documents and paper. It’s everywhere except where it truly needs to be – readily available right within the context of the application itself. When the right information cannot be easily found, business processes suffer significantly. The importance of this recently struck me when I recently went to meet my new doctor and get a routine physical. Walking into the office lobby, I couldn't help but notice rows and rows of manila folders in racks from floor to ceiling, filled with documents and sensitive, personal information about various patients like myself.  As I looked at all that paper and all that history, two things immediately popped into my head.  “How do they find anything?” and then the even more alarming, “So much for information security!” It sure looked to me like all those documents could be accessed by anyone with a key to the building. Now the truth is that the offices of many general practitioners look like this all over the United States and the world.  But it had me thinking, is the same thing going on in just about any company around the world, involving a wide variety of important business processes? Probably so. Think about all the various processes going on in your company right now. Invoice payments are being processed through Accounts Payable, contracts are being reviewed by Procurement, and Human Resources is reviewing job candidate submissions and doing background checks. All of these processes and many more like them rely on access to forms and documents, whether they are paper or digital. Now consider that it is estimated that employee’s spend nearly 9 hours a week searching for information and not finding it. That is a lot of very well paid employees, spending more than one day per week not doing their regular job while they search for or re-create what already exists. Back in the doctor’s office, I saw this trend exemplified as well. First, I had to fill out a new patient form, even though my previous doctor had transferred my records over months previously. After filling out the form, I was later introduced to my new doctor who then interviewed me and asked me the exact same questions that I had answered on the form. I understand that there is value in the interview process and it was great to meet my new doctor, but this simple process could have been so much more efficient if the information already on file could have been brought directly together with the new patient information I had provided. Instead of having a highly paid medical professional re-enter the same information into the records database, the form I filled out could have been immediately scanned into the system, associated with my previous information, discrepancies identified, and the entire process streamlined significantly. We won’t solve the health records management issues that exist in the United States in this blog post, but this example illustrates how the automation of information capture and classification can eliminate a lot of repetitive and costly human entry and re-creation, even in a simple process like new patient on-boarding. In a similar fashion, by taking a fresh look at the various processes in place today in your organization, you can likely spot points along the way where automating the capture and access to the right information could be significantly improved. As you evaluate how content-process flows through your organization, take a look at how departments and regions share information between the applications they are using. Business applications are often implemented on an individual department basis to solve specific problems but a holistic approach to overall information management is not taken at the same time. The end result over the years is disparate applications with separate information repositories and in many cases these contain duplicate information, or worse, slightly different versions of the same information. This is where Oracle WebCenter Content comes into the story. More and more companies are realizing that they can significantly improve their existing application processes by automating the capture of paper, forms and other content. This makes the right information immediately accessible in the context of the business process and making the same information accessible across departmental systems which has helped many organizations realize significant cost savings. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, one of our primary goals is to help customers find new ways to be more effective, more cost-efficient and manage information as effectively as possible. We have a series of three webcasts occurring over the next few weeks that are focused on the integration of enterprise content management within the context of business applications. We hope you will join us for one or all three and that you will find them informative. Click here to learn more about these sessions and to register for them. There are many aspects of information management to consider as you look at integrating content management within your business applications. We've barely scratched the surface here but look for upcoming blog posts where we will discuss more specifics on the value of delivering documents, forms and images directly within applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards Enterprise One, Siebel CRM and many others. What do you think?  Are your important business processes as healthy as they can be?  Do you have any insights to share on the value of delivering content directly within critical business processes? Please post a comment and let us know the value you have realized, the lessons learned and what specific areas you are interested in.

  Read the article

• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

  For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

  Read the article

• My own personal use of Oracle Linux

  - by wcoekaer

  It always is easier to explain something with examples... Many people still don't seem to understand some of the convenient things around using Oracle Linux and since I personally (surprise!) use it at home, let me give you an idea. I have quite a few servers at home and I also have 2 hosted servers with a hosted provider. The servers at home I use mostly to play with random Linux related things, or with Oracle VM or just try out various new Oracle products to learn more. I like the technology, it's like a hobby really. To be able to have a good installation experience and use an officially certified Linux distribution and not waste time trying to find the right libraries, I, of course, use Oracle Linux. Now, at least I can get a copy of Oracle Linux for free (even if I was not working for Oracle) and I can/could use that on as many servers at home (or at my company if I worked elsewhere) for testing, development and production. I just go to http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux and download the version(s) I want and off I go. Now, I also have the right (and not because I am an employee) to take those images and put them on my own server and give them to someone else, I in fact, just recently set up my own mirror on my own hosted server. I don't have to remove oracle-logos, I don't have to rebuild the ISO images, I don't have to recompile anything, I can just put the whole binary distribution on my own server without contract. Perfectly free to do so. Of course the source code of all of this is there, I have a copy of the UEK code at home, just cloned from https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-2.6-unbreakable.git. And as you can see, the entire changelog, checkins, merges from Linus's tree, complete overview of everything that got changed from kernel to kernel, from patch to patch, errata to errata. No obfuscating, no tar balls and spending time with diff, or go read bug reports to find out what changed (seems silly to me). Some of my servers are on the external network and I need to be current with security errata, but guess what, no problem, my servers are hooked up to http://public-yum.oracle.com which is open, free, and completely up to date, in a consistent, reliable way with any errata, security or bugfix. So I have nothing to worry about. Also, not because I am an employee. Anyone can. And, with this, I also can, and have, set up my own mirror site that hosts these RPMs. both binary and source rpms. Because I am free to get them and distribute them. I am quite capable of supporting my servers on my own, so I don't need to rely on the support organization so I don't need to have a support subscription :-). So I don't need to pay. Neither would you, at least not with Oracle Linux. Another cool thing. The hosted servers came (unfortunately) with Centos installed. While Centos works just fine as is, I tend to prefer to be current with my security errata(reliably) and I prefer to just maintain one yum repository instead of 2, I converted them over to Oracle Linux as well (in place) so they happily receive and use the exact same RPMs. Since Oracle Linux is exactly the same from a user/application point of view as RHEL, including files like /etc/redhat-release and no changes from .el. to .centos. I know I have nothing to worry about installing one of the RHEL applications. So, OL everywhere makes my life a lot easier and why not... Next! Since I run Oracle VM and I have -tons- of VM's on my machines, in some cases on my big WOPR box I have 15-20 VMs running. Well, no problem, OL is free and I don't have to worry about counting the number of VMs, whether it's 1, or 4, or more than 10 ... like some other alternatives started doing... and finally :) I like to try out new stuff, not 3 year old stuff. So with UEK2 as part of OL6 (and 6.3 in particular) I can play with a 3.0.x based kernel and it just installs and runs perfectly clean with OL6, so quite current stuff in an environment that I know works, no need to toy around with an unsupported pre-alpha upstream distribution with libraries and versions that are not compatible with production software (I have nothing against ubuntu or fedora or opensuse... just not what I can rely on or use for what I need, and I don't need a desktop). pretty compelling. I say... and again, it doesn't matter that I work for Oracle, if I was working elsewhere, or not at all, all of the above would still apply. Student, teacher, developer, whatever. contrast this with $349 for 2 sockets and oneguest and selfsupport per year to even just get the software bits.

  Read the article

• Mounting ddrescue image after recovery (in over my head)

  - by BorgDomination

  I'm having problems mounting the recovery image. I've tried to mount the image multiple ways. quark@DS9 ~ $ sudo mount -t ext4 /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img /mnt mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so quark@DS9 ~ $ sudo mount -r -o loop /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img recover mount: you must specify the filesystem type quark@DS9 ~ $ sudo mount /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img mnt mount: you must specify the filesystem type It doesn't even give me detailed information on the file I just made, nautilus says it's 160gb. quark@DS9 ~ $ file /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img: data quark@DS9 ~ $ mmls /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img Cannot determine partition type I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or if I started this process incorrectly from the beginning. I've outlined what I've done so far below. I'm clueless, I'd appreciate if someone had some input for me. What I have done from the beginning My laptop has two hard drives. One has the dual boot Win7 / Linux Mint system files. Secondary one contained my /home folder. The laptop was jarred and the /home disk was broken. I tried a LiveCD recovery, it failed. Wouldn't even load a Live session with the disk installed. So I turned to ddrescue. quark@DS9 ~ $ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0009fc18 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 112642047 56320000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 138033152 312580095 87273472 83 Linux /dev/sda3 112644094 138033151 12694529 5 Extended /dev/sda5 112644096 132173823 9764864 83 Linux /dev/sda6 132175872 138033151 2928640 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0002a8ea Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 63 312576704 156288321 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xed6d054b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 63 1953520064 976760001 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT sda - 160g internal, holds all system files and all computer functions. sdb - 160g internal, BROKEN, contains about 140g of data I'd like to recover. sdc - 1T external, contains recovery image. Only place that has space to do all this. From this site, https://apps.education.ucsb.edu/wiki/Ddrescue I used this script to create an image of the broken hard drive. I changed the destination to the external USB drive. #!/bin/sh prt=sdb1 src=/dev/$prt dst=/media/jump1/1recover/$prt.img log=$dst.log sudo time ddrescue --no-split $src $dst $log sudo time ddrescue --direct --max-retries=3 $src $dst $log sudo time ddrescue --direct --retrim --max-retries=3 $src $dst $log Everything looked like it came off without a hitch: quark@DS9 ~ $ sudo bash recover1 Press Ctrl-C to interrupt Initial status (read from logfile) rescued: 0 B, errsize: 0 B, errors: 0 Current status rescued: 160039 MB, errsize: 4096 B, current rate: 35588 B/s ipos: 3584 B, errors: 1, average rate: 22859 kB/s opos: 3584 B, time from last successful read: 0 s Finished 12.78user 1060.42system 1:56:41elapsed 15%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4944maxresident)k 312580958inputs+0outputs (1major+601minor)pagefaults 0swaps Press Ctrl-C to interrupt Initial status (read from logfile) rescued: 160039 MB, errsize: 4096 B, errors: 1 Current status rescued: 160039 MB, errsize: 1024 B, current rate: 0 B/s ipos: 1536 B, errors: 1, average rate: 13 B/s opos: 1536 B, time from last successful read: 1.3 m Finished 0.00user 0.00system 3:43.95elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4944maxresident)k 238inputs+0outputs (3major+374minor)pagefaults 0swaps Press Ctrl-C to interrupt Initial status (read from logfile) rescued: 160039 MB, errsize: 1024 B, errors: 1 Current status rescued: 160039 MB, errsize: 1024 B, current rate: 0 B/s ipos: 1536 B, errors: 1, average rate: 0 B/s opos: 1536 B, time from last successful read: 3.7 m Finished 0.00user 0.00system 3:43.56elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4944maxresident)k 8inputs+0outputs (0major+376minor)pagefaults 0swaps It looks like, from where I'm standing it worked perfectly. Here's the log: # Rescue Logfile. Created by GNU ddrescue version 1.14 # Command line: ddrescue --direct --retrim --max-retries=3 /dev/sdb1 /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img /media/jump1/1recover/sdb1.img.log # current_pos current_status 0x00000600 + # pos size status 0x00000000 0x00000400 + 0x00000400 0x00000400 - 0x00000800 0x254314FC00 + I'm not sure how to proceed. Does this mean all of my data is lost???????? Appreciate ANY input!

  Read the article

• How do I pass vertex and color positions to OpenGL shaders?

  - by smoth190

  I've been trying to get this to work for the past two days, telling myself I wouldn't ask for help. I think you can see where that got me... I thought I'd try my hand at a little OpenGL, because DirectX is complex and depressing. I picked OpenGL 3.x, because even with my OpenGL 4 graphics card, all my friends don't have that, and I like to let them use my programs. There aren't really any great tutorials for OpenGL 3, most are just "type this and this will happen--the end". I'm trying to just draw a simple triangle, and so far, all I have is a blank screen with my clear color (when I set the draw type to GL_POINTS I just get a black dot). I have no idea what the problem is, so I'll just slap down the code: Here is the function that creates the triangle: void CEntityRenderable::CreateBuffers() { m_vertices = new Vertex3D[3]; m_vertexCount = 3; m_vertices[0].x = -1.0f; m_vertices[0].y = -1.0f; m_vertices[0].z = -5.0f; m_vertices[0].r = 1.0f; m_vertices[0].g = 0.0f; m_vertices[0].b = 0.0f; m_vertices[0].a = 1.0f; m_vertices[1].x = 1.0f; m_vertices[1].y = -1.0f; m_vertices[1].z = -5.0f; m_vertices[1].r = 1.0f; m_vertices[1].g = 0.0f; m_vertices[1].b = 0.0f; m_vertices[1].a = 1.0f; m_vertices[2].x = 0.0f; m_vertices[2].y = 1.0f; m_vertices[2].z = -5.0f; m_vertices[2].r = 1.0f; m_vertices[2].g = 0.0f; m_vertices[2].b = 0.0f; m_vertices[2].a = 1.0f; //Create the VAO glGenVertexArrays(1, &m_vaoID); //Bind the VAO glBindVertexArray(m_vaoID); //Create a vertex buffer glGenBuffers(1, &m_vboID); //Bind the buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, m_vboID); //Set the buffers data glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(m_vertices), m_vertices, GL_STATIC_DRAW); //Set its usage glVertexAttribPointer(0, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex3D), 0); glVertexAttribPointer(1, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_TRUE, sizeof(Vertex3D), (void*)(3*sizeof(float))); //Enable glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); //Check for errors if(glGetError() != GL_NO_ERROR) { Error("Failed to create VBO: %s", gluErrorString(glGetError())); } //Unbind... glBindVertexArray(0); } The Vertex3D struct is as such... struct Vertex3D { Vertex3D() : x(0), y(0), z(0), r(0), g(0), b(0), a(1) {} float x, y, z; float r, g, b, a; }; And finally the render function: void CEntityRenderable::RenderEntity() { //Render... glBindVertexArray(m_vaoID); //Use our attribs glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS, 0, m_vertexCount); glBindVertexArray(0); //unbind OnRender(); } (And yes, I am binding and unbinding the shader. That is just in a different place) I think my problem is that I haven't fully wrapped my mind around this whole VertexAttribArray thing (the only thing I like better in DirectX was input layouts D:). This is my vertex shader: #version 330 //Matrices uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; uniform mat4 viewMatrix; uniform mat4 modelMatrix; //In values layout(location = 0) in vec3 position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 color; //Out values out vec3 frag_color; //Main shader void main(void) { //Position in world gl_Position = vec4(position, 1.0); //gl_Position = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * modelMatrix * vec4(in_Position, 1.0); //No color changes frag_color = color; } As you can see, I've disable the matrices, because that just makes debugging this thing so much harder. I tried to debug using glslDevil, but my program just crashes right before the shaders are created... so I gave up with that. This is my first shot at OpenGL since the good old days of LWJGL, but that was when I didn't even know what a shader was. Thanks for your help :)

  Read the article

• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

  For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

  Read the article

• Redirect Google crawler to different robots.txt via .htaccess

  - by user3474818

  I have googled for the answer all day and still couldn't find an answer. I have a virtual subdomain www.static.example.com which is a mirror site of www.example.com. It means I have just one root folder for subdomain and domain aswell. I want to redirect crawlers to different robots.txt file - robots_static.txt when they see .static in url in which I will forbid indexing via /disallow command. I want to do this because I have duplicated content in Google search results. Subdomain is showing the exact same content as the main domain. Does anyone know how could I achieve that crawlers sees robots_static.txt instead of robots.txt? What I have managed to find so far is this: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.static.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*robots\.txt.*\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^robots\.txt /robots_static.txt [NC,L] but when I check in webmaster tools, it still sees robots.txt as my robots file instead of robots_static.txt, so it crawls and index everything twice. What did I do wrong? Thanks EDIT: This is my .htaccess file ## # @package Joomla # @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2013 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. # @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt ## ## # READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! # # The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems # with some server configurations. It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already # be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in # your .htaccess file. If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to # beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's. If they work, # it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. ## ## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks ## Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.static.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*robots\.txt.*\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^robots\.txt /robots_static.txt [NC,L] ## Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. # If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below # This attempts to block the most common type of exploit `attempts` to Joomla! # # Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]*\([^)]*\) [OR] # Block out any script that includes a <script> tag in URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C)([^s]*s)+cript.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR] # Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR] # Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) # Return 403 Forbidden header and show the content of the root homepage RewriteRule .* index.php [F] # ## End - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. ## Begin - Custom redirects # # If you need to redirect some pages, or set a canonical non-www to # www redirect (or vice versa), place that code here. Ensure those # redirects use the correct RewriteRule syntax and the [R=301,L] flags. # ## End - Custom redirects ## # Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL # is not directly related to physical file paths. # Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root). ## # RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/system/.* RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET ## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section. # RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}] # # If the requested path and file is not /index.php and the request # has not already been internally rewritten to the index.php script RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php # and the request is for something within the component folder, # or for the site root, or for an extensionless URL, or the # requested URL ends with one of the listed extensions RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC] # and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical file RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f # and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical folder RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d # internally rewrite the request to the index.php script RewriteRule .* index.php [L] # ## End - Joomla! core SEF Section. <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|ttf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$"> Header set Expires "Wed, 15 Apr 2020 20:00:00 GMT" Header set Cache-Control "public" </FilesMatch> <ifModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </ifModule> ########## Begin - Remove Etags # FileETag none # ########## End - Remove Etags

  Read the article

• Key Windows Phone Development Concepts

  - by Tim Murphy

  As I am doing more development in and out of the enterprise arena for Windows Phone I decide I would study for the 70-599 test.  I generally take certification tests as a way to force me to dig deeper into a technology.  Between the development and studying I decided it would be good to put a post together of key development features in Windows Phone 7 environment.  Contrary to popular belief the launch of Windows Phone 8 will not obsolete Windows Phone 7 development.  With the launch of 7.8 coming shortly and people who will remain on 7.X for the foreseeable future there are still consumers needing these apps so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. PhoneApplicationService This is a class that every Windows Phone developer needs to become familiar with.  When it comes to application state this is your go to repository.  It also contains events that help with management of your application’s lifecycle.  You can access it like the following code sample. 1: PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["ValidUser"] = userResult; DeviceNetworkInformation This class allows you to determine the connectivity of the device and be notified when something changes with that connectivity.  If you are making web service calls you will want to check here before firing off. I have found that this class doesn’t actually work very well for determining if you have internet access.  You are better of using the following code where IsConnectedToInternet is an App level property. private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e){ // Validate user access if (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None) { IsConnectedToInternet = true; } else { IsConnectedToInternet = false; } NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged += new NetworkAddressChangedEventHandler(NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged);}void NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged(object sender, EventArgs e){ IsConnectedToInternet = (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None);} Push Notification Push notification allows your application to receive notifications in a way that reduces the application’s power needs. This MSDN article is a good place to get the basics of push notification, but you can see the essential concept in the diagram below.  There are three types of push notification: toast, Tile and raw.  The first two work regardless of the state of the application where as raw messages are discarded if your application is not running.   Live Tiles Live tiles are one of the main differentiators of the Windows Phone platform.  They allow users to find information at a glance from their start screen without navigating into individual apps.  Knowing how to implement them can be a great boost to the attractiveness of your application. The simplest step-by-step explanation for creating live tiles is here. Local Database While your application really only has Isolated Storage as a data store there are some ways of giving you database functionality to develop against.  There are a number of open source ORM style solutions.  Probably the best and most native way I have found is to use LINQ to SQL.  It does take a significant amount of setup, but the ease of use once it is configured is worth the cost.  Rather than repeat the full concepts here I will point you to a post that I wrote previously. Tasks (Bing, Email) Leveraging built in features of the Windows Phone platform is an easy way to add functionality that would be expensive to develop on your own.  The classes that you need to make yourself familiar with are BingMapsDirectionsTask and EmailComposeTask.  This will allow your application to supply directions and give the user an email path to relay information to friends and associates. Event model Because of the ability for users to switch quickly to switch to other apps or the home screen is just one reason why knowing the Windows Phone event model is important.  You need to be able to save data so that if a user gets a phone call they can come back to exactly where they were in your application.  This means that you will need to handle such events as Launching, Activated, Deactivated and Closing at an application level.  You will probably also want to get familiar with the OnNavigatedTo and OnNavigatedFrom events at the page level.  These will give you an opportunity to save data as a user navigates through your app. Summary This is just a small portion of the concepts that you will use while building Windows Phone apps, but these are some of the most critical.  With the launch of Windows Phone 8 this list will probably expand.  Take the time to investigate these topics further and try them out in your apps. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 7,Windows Phone,WP7,Software Development,70-599

  Read the article

• www.domain redirecting to google?

  - by aayush

  Note: A while back i had no place to host my domain, then via namecheap i set it to forward my domain to google I bought webhosting again today and everything was working fine. I set up vhosts and set up www.domain as the server alias. Both worked. Then i tried to set up a alternate subdomain test.domain, but failed (I did it by creating a alternate vhost right below the current one) as it kept redirecting to google. As a test, i replaced the www with test in serveralias, it still redirected to google but now even www redirects to google. I am using cloudflare, and i am really confused how to go about this. I tried listing www as a cname and as a A record, still redirecting to google. I tried checking via proxies e.t.c, its universal and hence not a problem of my PC. Please help, i am really distressed by this. I am running a ubuntu 13.10 x32 stack with LAMP. Here is what my domain.com.conf file looks like <VirtualHost *:80> # The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that # the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating # redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName # specifies what hostname must appear in the request's Host: header to # match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this # value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless. # However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly. ServerName domain.com ServerAlias www.domain.com ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www/domain.com/public_html # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn, # error, crit, alert, emerg. # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular # modules, e.g. #LogLevel info ssl:warn ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf". #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf </VirtualHost> There is a valid index.php file at the end of the documentroot aswell. The website in question is aayushagra.com Edit: On cloudflare i tried removing the www entirely, and it still sent me to google Edit: Zone file ;; Domain: aayushagra.com ;; Exported: 2013-11-03 07:37:52 ;; ;; This file is intended for use for informational and archival ;; purposes ONLY and MUST be edited before use on a production ;; DNS server. In particular, you must: ;; -- update the SOA record with the correct authoritative name server ;; -- update the SOA record with the contact e-mail address information ;; -- update the NS record(s) with the authoritative name servers for this domain. ;; ;; For further information, please consult the BIND documentation ;; located on the following website: ;; ;; http://www.isc.org/ ;; ;; And RFC 1035: ;; ;; http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt ;; ;; Please note that we do NOT offer technical support for any use ;; of this zone data, the BIND name server, or any other third-party ;; DNS software. ;; ;; Use at your own risk. ;; $ORIGIN aayushagra.com. @ 3600 IN SOA aayushagra.com. root.aayushagra.com. ( 2013110301 ; serial 7200 ; refresh 3600 ; retry 86400 ; expire 3600) ; minimum ;; MX Records aayushagra.com. 300 IN MX aayushagra.com. ;; CNAME Records direct.aayushagra.com. 300 IN CNAME aayushagra.com. ;; A Records (IPv4 addresses) www.aayushagra.com. 300 IN A 146.185.140.31 aayushagra.com. 300 IN A 146.185.140.31

  Read the article

• What to leave when you're leaving

  - by BuckWoody

  There's already a post on this topic - sort of. I read this entry, where the author did a good job on a few steps, but I found that a few other tips might be useful, so if you want to check that one out and then this post, you might be able to put together your own plan for when you leave your job.  I once took over the system administrator (of which the Oracle and SQL Server servers were a part) at a mid-sized firm. The outgoing administrator had about a two- week-long scheduled overlap with me, but was angry at the company and told me "hey, I know this is going to be hard on you, but I want them to know how important I was. I'm not telling you where anything is or what the passwords are. Good luck!" He then quit that day. It took me about three days to find all of the servers and crack the passwords. Yes, the company tried to take legal action against the guy and all that, but he moved back to his home country and so largely got away with it. Obviously, this isn't the way to leave a job. Many of us have changed jobs in the past, and most of us try to be very professional about the transition to a new team, regardless of the feelings about a particular company. I've been treated badly at a firm, but that is no reason to leave a mess for someone else. So here's what you should put into place at a minimum before you go. Most of this is common sense - which of course isn't very common these days - and another good rule is just to ask yourself "what would I want to know"? The article I referenced at the top of this post focuses on a lot of documentation of the systems. I think that's fine, but in actuality, I really don't need that. Even with this kind of documentation, I still perform a full audit on the systems, so in the end I create my own system documentation. There are actually only four big items I need to know to get started with the systems: 1. Where is everything/everybody?The first thing I need to know is where all of the systems are. I mean not only the street address, but the closet or room, the rack number, the IU number in the rack, the SAN luns, all that. A picture here is worth a thousand words, which is why I really like Visio. It combines nice graphics, full text and all that. But use whatever you have to tell someone the physical locations of the boxes. Also, tell them the physical location of the folks in charge of those boxes (in case you aren't) or who share that responsibility. And by "where" in this case, I mean names and phones.  2. What do they do?For both the servers and the people, tell them what they do. If it's a database server, detail what each database does and what application goes to that, and who "owns" that application. In my mind, this is one of hte most important things a Data Professional needs to know. In the case of the other administrtors or co-owners, document each person's responsibilities.   3. What are the credentials?Logging on/in and gaining access to the buildings are things that the new Data Professional will need to do to successfully complete their job. This means service accounts, certificates, all of that. The first thing they should do, of course, is change the passwords on all that, but the first thing they need is the ability to do that!  4. What is out of the ordinary?This is the most tricky, and perhaps the next most important thing to know. Did you have to use a "special" driver for that video card on server X? Is the person that co-owns an application with you mentally unstable (like me) or have special needs, like "don't talk to Buck before he's had coffee. Nothing will make any sense"? Do you have service pack requirements for a specific setup? Write all that down. Anything that took you a day or longer to make work is probably a candidate here. This is my short list - anything you care to add? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• What are the industry metrics for average spend on dev hardware and software? [on hold]

  - by RationalGeek

  I'm trying to budget for my dev shop and compare our budget items to industry expectations. I'm hoping to find some information on what percentage of a dev's salary is generally spent on tooling, both hardware and software. Where can I find such information? If instead there is a source that looks at raw dollars that is useful, too. I can extrapolate what I need from that. NOTE: Your anecdotal evidence from your own job will not be very helpful. I'm looking for industry average statistics from a credible source. EDIT: I'm reluctant to even keep this question going based on the passionate negative responses of commenters, but I do think this is valuable information (assuming anyone will care to answer) so let me make one attempt to clarify why I'm looking for this information, and then leave it at that. I'm not sure why understanding and validating my motives is a necessary step to providing the information, but apparently that is the case, so I will do my best. Firstly, let me respond to the idea that us "management types" shouldn't use these types of metrics to evaluate budgets. I agree in part. Ideally, you should spend whatever is necessary on developers in order to keep them fully happy and productive. And this is true of all employees. However, companies operate in a world of limited resources, and every dollar spent in one area means a dollar not spent in another. So it is not enough to simply say "I need to spend $10,000 per developer next year" without having some way to justify that position. One way to help justify it is to compare yourself against the industry. If it is the case that on average a software shops spends 5% (making up that number) of their total development budget (salaries being the large portion of the other 95%, for arguments sake), and I'm only spending 3%, it helps in the justification process. So, it is not my intent to use this information to limit what I spend on developers, but rather to arm myself with the necessary justification to spend what I need to spend on developers to give them the best tools I can. I have been a developer for many years and I understand the need for proper tooling. Next, let's examine the idea that even considering the relationship between a spend on developer salaries and developer tooling is ludicrous and should be banned from budgetary thinking. As Jimmy Hoffa put it in their comment, it's like saying "I'm going to spend no more than 10% of median employee salary on light bulbs and coffee from now on.". Well, yes, it is like saying that, and from a budgeting perspective, this is a useful way to look at things. If you know that, on average, an employee consumes X dollars of coffee a year, then you can project a coffee budget based on that. And you can compare it to an industry metric to understand where you fall: do you spend more on coffee than other companies or less? Why might this be? If you are a coffee supply manager, that seems like a useful thought process. The same seems to hold true for developers. Now, on to the idea that I need to compare "apples to apples" and only look at other shops that are in the same place geographically, the same business, the same application architecture, and the same development frameworks. I guess if I could find such a statistic that said "a shop that is exactly identical to yours spends X on developer tooling" it would be wonderful. But there is plenty of value in an average statistic. Here's an analogy: let's say you are working on a household budget and need to decide how much to spend on groceries. Is it enough to know that the average consumer spends 15% on groceries and therefore decide that you will budget exactly 15%? No. You have to tweak your budget based on your individual needs and situation. But the generalized statistic does help in this evaluation. You can know if your budget is grossly off from what others are doing, and this can help you figure out why this is. So, I will concede the point that it would be better to find statistics that align to my shop, though I think any statistics I could find would be useful for what I'm doing. In that light, let's say that my shop is mostly focused on ASP.NET web applications. That doesn't map perfectly to reality because large enterprises have very heterogenous IT environments. But if I was going to pick one technology that is our focus that would be it. But, if you were to point me at some statistics that are related to a Linux shop doing embedded Java applications, I would still find it useful as a point of comparison. SUMMARY: Let me try to rephrase my question. I'm trying to find industry metrics on how much dev shops spend on developer tooling, both hardware and software. I don't so much care whether it is expressed as a percentage of total budget or as X dollars per dev or as Y percentage of salary. Any metric would be useful. If there are metrics that are specific to ASP.NET dev shops in the Northeast US, all the better, but I would be happy to find anything.

  Read the article

• What Counts for A DBA: Observant

  - by drsql

  When walking up to the building where I work, I can see CCTV cameras placed here and there for monitoring access to the building. We are required to wear authorization badges which could be checked at any time. Do we have enemies?  Of course! No one is 100% safe; even if your life is a fairy tale, there is always a witch with an apple waiting to snack you into a thousand years of slumber (or at least so I recollect from elementary school.) Even Little Bo Peep had to keep a wary lookout.    We nerdy types (or maybe it was just me?) generally learned on the school playground to keep an eye open for unprovoked attack from simpler, but more muscular souls, and take steps to avoid messy confrontations well in advance. After we’d apprehensively negotiated adulthood with varying degrees of success, these skills of watching for danger, and avoiding it,  translated quite well to the technical careers so many of us were destined for. And nowhere else is this talent for watching out for irrational malevolence so appropriate as in a career as a production DBA.   It isn’t always active malevolence that the DBA needs to watch out for, but the even scarier quirks of common humanity.  A large number of the issues that occur in the enterprise happen just randomly or even just one time ever in a spurious manner, like in the case where a person decided to download the entire MSDN library of software, cross join every non-indexed billion row table together, and simultaneously stream the HD feed of 5 different sporting events, making the network access slow while the corporate online sales just started. The decent DBA team, like the going, gets tough under such circumstances. They spring into action, checking all of the sources of active information, observes the issue is no longer happening now, figures that either it wasn’t the database’s fault and that the reboot of the whatever device on the network fixed the problem.  This sort of reactive support is good, and will be the initial reaction of even excellent DBAs, but it is not the end of the story if you really want to know what happened and avoid getting called again when it isn’t even your fault.   When fires start raging within the corporate software forest, the DBA’s instinct is to actively find a way to douse the flames and get back to having no one in the company have any idea who they are.  Even better for them is to find a way of killing a potential problem while the fires are small, long before they can be classified as raging. The observant DBA will have already been monitoring the server environment for months in advance.  Most troubles, such as disk space and security intrusions, can be predicted and dealt with by alerting systems, whereas other trouble can come out of the blue and requires a skill of observing ongoing conditions and noticing inexplicable changes that could signal an emerging problem.  You can’t automate the DBA, because the bankable skill of a DBA is in detecting the early signs of unexpected problems, and working out how to deal with them before anyone else notices them.    To achieve this, the DBA will check the situation as it is currently happening,  and in many cases is likely to have been the person who submitted the problem to the level 1 support person in the first place, just to let the support team know of impending issues (always well received, I tell you what!). Database and host computer settings, configurations, and even critical data might be profiled and captured for later comparisons. He’ll use Monitoring tools, built-in, commercial (Not to be too crassly commercial or anything, but there is one such tool is SQL Monitor) and lots of homebrew monitoring tools to monitor for problems and changes in the server environment.   You will know that you have it right when a support call comes in and you can look at your monitoring tools and quickly respond that “response time is well within the normal range, the query that supports the failing interface works perfectly and has actually only been called 67% as often as normal, so I am more than willing to help diagnose the problem, but it isn’t the database server’s fault and is probably a client or networking slowdown causing the interface to be used less frequently than normal.” And that is the best thing for any DBA to observe…

  Read the article

• ADF Partner Community News Session - Open Invitation: "ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English)"

  - by Frank Nimphius

  After a successful guest performance of Ted Farrell in 2011, this year's international ADF speaker to speak during an ADF News session is Chris Muir from Oracle.  ADF News Session - Friday September 14, 8:30 AM - 9.00 AM (CET) - Topic: ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English) +++ this webcast will be conducted in English +++ dial-in numbers conc. ADF News Session, Sep. 14 2012 You are invited to join the next ADF News Session, that is going to take place September 14 2012 speaker:  Chris Muir / Oracle time:         8:30 AM (CET) duration:  30 minutes topic:        ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English) dial-in webconf: https://oraclemeetings.webex.com conf ID:      595 484 157 confkey:    123456 Please enter your name and an abbreviation of you company name when dialing in (please don´t use blanks and special characters). Please notice that this information will be visible to all participants of the webcast. Thank you. dial-in telco:           +49 (0)69 2222 16 106 or +49 (0)800 66 485 15           ConfCode: 208 503 9           SecurityPasscode: 112233  Other toll-free dial in numbers for EMEA countries are listed below (information is supplied without liability): Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Austria 0800005967 Belgium 080048331 Croatia 0800222323 Czech Republic 800701080 Denmark  80889099 Estonia 8000111325 Egypt 08000000213 Finland 0800112073 France 0805632866 Greece 00800127897 Hungary 0680011201 Iceland 8008779 Ireland 1800932479 Israel 1809452571 Italy 800897629 Latvia 80002397 Luxembourg 80026598 Netherlands 08000235028 Norway 80010796 Poland 8001213557 Portugal 800814990 Romania 0800895563 Russia 81080029351012 Saudi Arabia 8008444320 Slovak Republic 0800001586 Slovenia 080080466 South Africa 0800980961 Spain 800098600 Sweden 856619465 Switzerland 0800650026 Turkey 00800 44632129 Ukraine 0800500166 United Arab Emirates 8000440344 United Kingdom 08006948154  

  Read the article

• Adventures in Windows 8: Solving activation errors

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Note: I tagged this article with “MVVM” because I got a few support requests for MVVM Light regarding this exact issue. In fact it is a Windows 8 issue and has nothing to do with MVVM Light per se… Sometimes when you work on a Windows 8 app, you will get a very annoying issue when starting the app. In that case, the app doesn’t not even start past the Splash screen. Putting a breakpoint in App.xaml.cs doesn’t help because the app doesn’t even reach that point! So what exactly is happening? Well when a Windows 8 app starts, the system is performing a few check first. One of the checks, for instance, is to see if an app with the same package ID is already available. The package ID is a unique value set in the package manifest. In the Solution Explorer, double click on Package.appxmanifest. This opens the manifest in a special editor Click on the Packaging tab See the GUID under Package Name. This is the unique ID I am talking about. If there is a conflict (i.e. if an app is already installed with the exact same ID), Windows will warm the user that the app is already installed. However when you are in the process of developing an app, you install and uninstall the same app many many times (every time that you start in Visual Studio), and sometimes some issues arise, for instance failing to uninstall the app before starting the new instance of the same app. First step if you get such an error When the application fails to start past the splash screen, the first step is to identify what kind of error happened. In my experience the “already installed” is by far the most frequent (in fact I never had another such error), but it can be something else. An annoying thing is that the popup that shows the error is usually started below the Windows 8 app, and so you don’t even see it! This is especially true if you run this in the Simulator. In that case, do the following: Press on the Simulator’s home button, then press on the Desktop tile on the Start menu. The error popup should be shown on the desktop. If your applications runs on the Local machine, you also do the same and press the Windows button, and then from the Start menu press the Desktop tile. Deployment error in Studio Sometimes the same error causes Visual Studio to fail launching the application at all with a deployment error. This is a better case, because at least it is clear that there is an issue. In that case, write down the code that is shown in the Error window (for instance 0x80073D05 in the example below). Once you have the error code, go to the “Troubleshooting packaging, deployment, and query of Windows Store apps” page and look up the code in question. In my case, the error was “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED”, “An error occurred while deleting the package's previously existing application data.” Solving the “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED” issue Update: Before trying the below, you can also try the simple steps: Exit Visual Studio Go to the Start menu Locate your app’s tile. It should be visible in the Start menu directly, towards the far end on the right. Right click the tile and select Uninstall from the App Bar. Restart Visual Studio and try again. Sometimes it helps. If it doesn’t, then try the following: In order to solve the case where Windows, for any reason, fails to delete the existing application before starting the new instance, follow the steps: Open the Package.appxmanifest in Visual Studio Open the Packaging tab. Change the Package name. For tests you can just try to change the last character of the GUID, though I would recommend creating a brand new GUID. Press Start Type GUID Start the GUID Generator application Select Registry Format Press Copy. Paste the new GUID in place of the Package Name in Visual Studio Important: don’t forget to remove the curly brackets at the beginning and at the end of the newly pasted GUID. Then you just have to cross your fingers and start the application again… If it works, celebrate. if it doesn’t work… well at this point I am not sure so good luck with that ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

  Read the article

• Styles for XAML (Silverlight &amp; WPF)

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  This is a quick walk through of how to setup things for skinning within a XAML Application.  First thing, find the App.xaml file within the WPF or Silverlight Project. Within the App.xaml file set some default styles for your controls.  I set the following for a button, label, and border control for an application I am creating. Button Control <Style x:Key="ButtonStyle" TargetType="Button"> <Setter Property="FontFamily" Value="Arial" /> <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="Bold" /> <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="14" /> <Setter Property="Width" Value="180" /> <Setter Property="Height" Value="Auto" /> <Setter Property="Margin" Value="8" /> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="8" /> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="AliceBlue" /> <Setter Property="Background" > <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0"> <GradientStop Color="Black" Offset="0" /> <GradientStop Color="#FF5B5757" Offset="1" /> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> Label Control <Style x:Key="LabelStyle" TargetType="Label"> <Setter Property="Width" Value="Auto"/> <Setter Property="Height" Value="28" /> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Black"/> <Setter Property="Margin" Value="8"/> </Style> Border Control <Style x:Key="BorderStyle" TargetType="Border"> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="4"/> <Setter Property="Width" Value="Auto"/> <Setter Property="Height" Value="Auto" /> <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0,8,0,0"/> <Setter Property="CornerRadius" Value="18"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1,0.5" StartPoint="0,0.5"> <GradientStop Color="CornflowerBlue" Offset="0" /> <GradientStop Color="White" Offset="1" /> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> These provide good examples of setting individual properties to a default, such as; <Setter Property="Width" Value="Auto"/> <Setter Property="Height" Value="Auto" /> Also for settings a more complex property, such as with a LinearGradientBrush; <Setter Property="BorderBrush"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1,0.5" StartPoint="0,0.5"> <GradientStop Color="CornflowerBlue" Offset="0" /> <GradientStop Color="White" Offset="1" /> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> These property setters should be located between the opening and closing <Application.Resources></Application.Resources> tags. <Application x:Class="ScorecardAndDashboard.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" StartupUri="MainWindow.xaml"> <Application.Resources> </Application.Resources> </Application> Now in the pages, user controls, or whatever you are marking up with XAML, for the Style Property just set a StaticResource such as shown below. <!-- Border Control --> <Border Name="borderPollingFrequency" Style="{StaticResource BorderStyle}"> <!-- Label Control --> <Label Content="Trigger Name:" Style="{StaticResource LabelStyle}"></Label> <!-- Button Control --> <Button Content="Save Schedule" Name="buttonSaveSchedule" Style="{StaticResource ButtonStyle}" HorizontalAlignment="Right"/> That's it.  Simple as that.  There are other ways to setup resource files that are separate from the App.xaml, but the App.xaml file is always a good quick place to start.  As moving the styles to a specific resource file later is a mere copy and paste. Original post is available along with other technical ramblings.

  Read the article

• State of the (Commerce) Union: What the healthcare.gov hiccups teach us about the commerce customer experience

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Guest Post by Brenna Johnson, Oracle Commerce Product A lot has been said about the healthcare.gov debacle in the last week. Regardless of your feelings about the Affordable Care Act, there’s a hidden issue in this story that most of the American people don’t understand: delivering a great commerce customer experience (CX) is hard. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The reality of the government’s issues getting the healthcare site up and running smooth is something we in the online commerce community know too well.  If there’s one thing the botched launch of the site has taught us, it’s that regardless of the size of your budget or the power of an executive with a high-profile project, some of the biggest initiatives with the most attention (and the most at stake) don’t go as planned. It may even give you a moment of solace – we have the same issues! But why?  Organizations engage too many separate vendors with different technologies, running sections or pieces of a site to get live. When things go wrong, it takes time to identify the problem – and who or what is at the center of it. Unfortunately, this is a brittle way of setting up a site, making it susceptible to breaks, bugs, and scaling issues. But, it’s the reality of running a site with legacy technology constraints in today’s demanding, customer-centric market. This approach also means there’s also a lot of cooks in lots of different kitchens. You’ve got development and IT, the business and the marketing team, an external Systems Integrator to bring it all together, a digital agency or consultant, QA, product experts, 3rd party suppliers, and the list goes on. To complicate things, different business units are held responsible for different pieces of the site and managing different technologies. And again – due to legacy organizational structure and processes, this is all accepted as the normal State of the Union. Digital commerce has been commonplace for 15 years. Yet, getting a site live, maintained and performing requires orchestrating a cast of thousands (or at least, dozens), big dollars, and some finger-crossing. But it shouldn’t. The great thing about the advent of mobile commerce and the continued maturity of online commerce is that it’s forced organizations to think from the outside, in. Consumers – whether they’re shopping for shoes or a new healthcare plan – don’t care about what technology issues or processes you have behind the scenes. They just want it to work.  They want their experience to be easy, fast, and tailored to them and their needs – whatever they are. This doesn’t sound like a tall order to the American consumer – especially since they interact with sites that do work smoothly.  But the reality is that it takes scores of people, teams, check-ins, late nights, testing, and some good luck to get sites to run, and even more so at Black Friday (or October 1st) traffic levels.  The last thing on a customer’s mind is making excuses for why they can’t buy a product – just get it to work. So what is the government doing? My guess is working day and night to get the site performing  - and having to throw big money at the problem. In the meantime they’re sending frustrated online users to the call center, or even a location where a trained “navigator” can help them in-person to complete their selection. Sounds a lot like multichannel commerce (where broken communication between siloed touchpoints will only frustrate the consumer more). One thing we’ve learned is that consumers spend their time and money with brands they know and trust. When sites are easy to use and adapt to their needs, they tend to spend more, come back, and even become long-time loyalists. Achieving this may require moving internal mountains, but there’s too much at stake to ignore the sea change in how organizations are thinking about their customer. If the thought of re-thinking your internal teams, technologies, and processes sounds like a headache, think about the pain associated with losing valuable customers – and dollars. Regardless if you’re in B2B or B2C, it’s guaranteed that your competitors are making CX a priority. Those early to the game who have made CX a priority have already begun to outpace their competition. So as you’re planning for 2014, look to the news this week. Make sure the customer experience is a focus at your organization. Expectations are at record highs. Map your customer’s journey, and think from the outside, in. How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? If they interact with many touchpoints across your organization, are the call center, website, mobile environment, or brick and mortar location in sync? Do you have the technology in place to achieve this? It’s time to give the people what they want!

  Read the article

• Windows 8 for productivity?

  - by Charles Young

  At long last I’ve started using Windows 8.  I boot from a VHD on which I have installed Office, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.  For a week, now, I’ve been happily writing code and documents and using Visio and PowerPoint.  I am, very much, a ‘productivity’ user rather than a content consumer.   I spend my days flitting between countless windows and browser tabs displayed across dual monitors.  I need to access a lot of different functionality and information in as fluid a fashion as possible. With that in mind, and like so many others, I was worried about Windows 8.  The Metro interface is primarily about content consumption on touch-enabled screens, and not really geared for people like me sitting in front of an 8-core non-touch laptop and an additional Samsung monitor.  I still use a mouse, not my finger.  And I create more than I consume. Clearly, Windows 8 won’t be viable for people like me unless Metro keeps out of my hair when using productivity and development tools.  With this in mind, I had long expected Microsoft to provide some mechanism for switching Metro off.  There was a registry hack in last year’s Developer Preview, but this capability has been removed.   That’s brave.  So, how have things worked out so far? Well, I am really quite surprised.  When I played with the Developer Preview last year, it was clear that Metro was unfinished and didn’t play well enough with the desktop.  Obviously I expected things to improve, but the context switching from desktop to full-screen seemed a heavy burden to place on users.  That sense of abrupt change hasn’t entirely gone away (how could it), but after a few days, I can’t say that I find it burdensome or irritating.   I’ve got used very quickly to ‘gesturing’ with my mouse at the bottom or top right corners of the screen to move between applications, using the Windows key to toggle the Start screen and generally finding my way around.   I am surprised at how effective the Start screen is, given the rather basic grouping features it provides.  Of course, I had to take control of it and sort things the way I want.  If anything, though, the Start screen provides a better navigation and application launcher tool than the old Start menu. What I didn’t expect was the way that Metro enhances the productivity story.  As I write this, I’ve got my desktop open with a maximised Word window.  However, the desktop extends only across about 85% of the width of my screen.  On the left hand side, I have a column that displays the new Metro email client.  This is currently showing me a list of emails for my main work account.  I can flip easily between different accounts and read my email within that same column.  As I work on documents, I want to be able to monitor my inbox with a quick glance. The desktop, of course, has its own snap feature.  I could run the desktop full screen and bring up Outlook and Word side by side.  However, this doesn’t begin to approach the convenience of snapping the Metro email client.  Consider that when I snap a window on the desktop, it initially takes up 50% of the screen.  Outlook doesn’t really know anything about snap, and doesn’t adjust to make effective use of the limited screen estate.  Even at 50% screen width, it is difficult to use, so forget about trying to use it in a Metro fashion. In any case, I am left with the prospect of having to manually adjust everything to view my email effectively alongside Word.  Worse, there is nothing stopping another window from overlapping and obscuring my email.  It becomes a struggle to keep sight of email as it arrives.  Of course, there is always ‘toast’ to notify me when things arrive, but if Outlook is obscured, this just feels intrusive. The beauty of the Metro snap feature is that my email reader now exists outside of my desktop.   The Metro app has been crafted to work well in the fixed width column as well as in full-screen.  It cannot be obscured by overlapping windows.  I still get notifications if I wish.  More importantly, it is clear that careful attention has been given to how things work when moving between applications when ‘snapped’.  If I decide, say to flick over to the Metro newsreader to catch up with current affairs, my desktop, rather than my email client, obligingly makes way for the reader.  With a simple gesture and click, or alternatively by pressing Windows-Tab, my desktop reappears. Another pleasant surprise is the way Windows 8 handles dual monitors.  It’s not just the fact that both screens now display the desktop task bar.  It’s that I can so easily move between Metro and the desktop on either screen.  I can only have Metro on one screen at a time which makes entire sense given the ‘full-screen’ nature of Metro apps.  Using dual monitors feels smoother and easier than previous versions of Windows. Overall then, I’m enjoying the Windows 8 improvements.  Strangely, for all the hype (“Windows reimagined”, etc.), my perception as a ‘productivity’ user is more one of evolution than revolution.  It all feels very familiar, but just better.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575  | Next Page >