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  • Record Matching Software to Compare two tables and match on % Based

    - by Crazyd
    So I have some table with Name, Address, and Zip with no record data attached; and I have a table which has all the same, but has more information and I need a way to merge the tables when they don't match 100%. How do I match them up if they aren't Identical? I'm a newb @ SQL, but I know they won't match up for the most part and I can't be the only one with this issue. However software which will do this has proven to be difficult. Writing software to do this would even be worse than having to do it in the first place. I know I can do this in excel; kinda, but with the amount of records I have its proving to be difficult over a million.

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  • What is your approach to draw a representation of your network ?

    - by Kartoch
    Hello, I'm looking to the community to see how people are drawing their networks, i.e. using symbols to represent complex topology. You can have hardware approach, where every hardware unit are represented. You can also have "entity" approach, where each "service" is shown. Both are interesting but it is difficult to have both on the same schema (but this is needed, especially using virtualization environment). Furthermore, it is difficult to have complex informations on such representation. For instance security parameters (encrypted link, need for authentication) or specific details (protocol type, ports, encapsulation). So my question is: where your are drawing a representation of your network, what is your approach ? Are you using methodology and/or specific softwares ? What is your recommendations for information to put (or not) ? How to deal with the complexity when the network becomes large and/or you want to put a lot of information on it ? Examples and links to good references will be appreciated.

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  • Excel-based Performance Reviews transformed into Web Application for Performance Management

    - by Webgui
    HR TMS provides enterprise talent management solutions for healthcare, retail and corporate customers, focusing on performance management, compensation management and succession planning. As the competency of nurses and other healthcare workers is critical, the government, via the Joint Commission (JCAHO), tightly monitors their performances. On a regular basis, accredited healthcare organizations are required to review employee performance using a complex set of position dependent job descriptions and competencies. Middlesex Hospital managed their performance reviews for 2500 employees manually with Excel spreadsheets. This was a labor intensive process that proved to be error prone and difficult to manage. Reviews were not always where they belonged and the job descriptions and competencies for healthcare workers were difficult to keep accurate and up to date. As a result, when the Joint Commission visited and requested to see specific review documentation, there was intense stress. Middlesex Hospital needed to automate their review process, pull in the position information from those spreadsheets and be able to deliver reviews online. Users needed to have online access to those reviews from a standard browser. Although the manual system had its issues, it did have the advantage of being very comprehensive and familiar to users. The decision was made to provide a web-based solution that leveraged the look and feel of those spreadsheets in order to insure user acceptance of the system and minimize the training needed. Read the full article here >

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  • Refactoring in domain driven design

    - by Andrew Whitaker
    I've just started working on a project and we're using domain-driven design (as defined by Eric Evans in Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. I believe that our project is certainly a candidate for this design pattern as Evans describes it in his book. I'm struggling with the idea of constantly refactoring. I know refactoring is a necessity in any project and will happen inevitably as the software changes. However, in my experience, refactoring occurs when the needs of the development team change, not as understanding of the domain changes ("refactoring to greater insight" as Evans calls it). I'm most concerned with breakthroughs in understanding of the domain model. I understand making small changes, but what if a large change in the model is necessary? What's an effective way of convincing yourself (and others) you should refactor after you obtain a clearer domain model? After all, refactoring to improve code organization or performance could be completely separate from how expressive in terms of the ubiquitous language code is. Sometimes it just seems like there's not enough time to refactor. Luckily, SCRUM lends it self to refactoring. The iterative nature of SCRUM makes it easy to build a small piece and change and it. But over time that piece will get larger and what if you have a breakthrough after that piece is so large that it will be too difficult to change? Has anyone worked on a project employing domain-driven design? If so, it would be great to get some insight on this one. I'd especially like to hear some success stories, since DDD seems very difficult to get right. Thanks!

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  • My View on ASP.NET Web Forms versus MVC

    - by Ricardo Peres
    Introduction A lot has been said on Web Forms and MVC, but since I was recently asked about my opinion on the subject, here it is. First, I have to say that I really like both technologies and I don’t think any is going away – just remember SharePoint, which is built on top of Web Forms. I see them as complementary, targeting different needs and leveraging different skills. Let’s go through some of their differences. Rapid Application Development Rapid Application Development (RAD) is the development process by which you have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a visual design surface and a toolbox, and you drag components from the toolbox to the design surface and set their properties through a property inspector. It was introduced with some of the earliest Windows graphical IDEs such as Visual Basic and Delphi. With Web Forms you have RAD out of the box. Visual Studio offers a generally good (and extensible) designer for the layout of pages and web user controls. Designing a page may simply be about dragging controls from the toolbox, setting their properties and wiring up some events to event handlers, which are implemented in code behind .NET classes. Most people will be familiar with this kind of development and enjoy it. You can see what you are doing from the beginning. MVC also has designable pages – called views in MVC terminology – the problem is that they can be built using different technologies, some of which, at the moment (MVC 4) do not support RAD – Razor, for example. I believe it is just a matter of time for that to be implemented in Visual Studio, but it will mostly consist on HTML editing, and until that day comes, you have to live with source editing. Development Model Web Forms features the same development model that you are used to from Windows Forms and other similar technologies: events fired by controls and automatic persistence of their properties between postbacks. For that, it uses concepts such as view state, which some may love and others may hate, because it may be misused quite easily, but otherwise does its job well. Another fundamental concept is data binding, by which a collection of data can be fed to a control and have it render that data somehow – just thing of the GridView control. The focus is on the page, that’s where it all starts, and you can place everything in the same code behind class: data access, business logic, layout, etc. The controls take care of generating a great part of the HTML and JavaScript for you. With MVC there is no free lunch when it comes to data persistence between requests, you have to implement it yourself. As for event handling, that is at the core of MVC, in the form of controllers and action methods, you just don’t think of them as event handlers. In MVC you need to think more in HTTP terms, so action methods such as POST and GET are relevant to you, and may write actions to handle one or the other. Also of crucial importance is model binding: the way by which MVC converts your posted data into a .NET class. This is something that ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms has introduced as well, but it is a cornerstone in MVC. MVC also has built-in validation of these .NET classes, which out of the box uses the Data Annotations API. You have full control of the generated HTML - except for that coming from the helper methods, usually small fragments - which requires a greater familiarity with the specifications. You normally rely much more on JavaScript APIs, they are even included in the Visual Studio template, that is because much less is done for you. Reuse It is difficult to accept a professional company/project that does not employ reuse. It can save a lot of time thus cutting costs significantly. Code reused in several projects matures as time goes by and helps developers learn from past experiences. ASP.NET Web Forms was built with reuse in mind, in the form of controls. Controls encapsulate functionality and are generally portable from project to project (with the notable exception of web user controls, those with an associated .ASCX markup file). ASP.NET has dozens of controls and it is very easy to develop new ones, so I believe this is a great advantage. A control can inject JavaScript code and external references as well as generate HTML an CSS. MVC on the other hand does not use controls – it is possible to use them, with some view engines like ASPX, but it is just not advisable because it breaks the flow – where do Init, Load, PreRender, etc, fit? The most similar to controls is extension methods, or helpers. They serve the same purpose – generating HTML, CSS or JavaScript – and can be reused between different projects. What differentiates them from controls is that there is no inheritance and no context – an extension method is just a static method which doesn’t know where it is being called. You also have partial views, which you can reuse in the same project, but there is no inheritance as well. This, in my view, is a weakness of MVC. Architecture Both technologies are highly extensible. I have writtenstarted writing a series of posts on ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility and will probably write another series on MVC extensibility as well. A number of scenarios are covered in any of these models, and some extensibility points apply to both, because, of course both stand upon ASP.NET. With Web Forms, if you’re like me, you start by defining you master pages, pages and controls, with some helper classes to glue everything. You may as well throw in some JavaScript, but probably you’re main work will be with plain old .NET code. The controls you define have the chance to inject JavaScript code and references, through either the ScriptManager or the page’s ClientScript object, as well as generating HTML and CSS code. The master page and page model with code behind classes offer a number of “hooks” by which you can change the normal way of things, for example, in a page you can access any control on the master page, add script or stylesheet references to its head and even change the page’s title. Also, with Web Forms, you typically have URLs in the form “/SomePath/SomePage.aspx?SomeParameter=SomeValue”, which isn’t really SEO friendly, no to mention the HTML that some controls produce, far from standards, optimization and best practices. In MVC, you also normally start by defining the master page (or layout) and views, which are the visible parts, and then define controllers on separate files. These controllers do not know anything about the views, except the names and types of the parameters that will be passed to and from them. The controller will be responsible for the data access and business logic, eventually relying on additional classes for this purpose. On a controller you only receive parameters and return a result, which may be a request for the rendering of a view, a redirection to another URL or a JSON object, to name just a few. The controller class does not know anything about the web, so you can effectively reuse it in a non-web project. This separation and the lack of programmatic access to the UI elements, makes it very difficult to implement, for example, something like SharePoint with MVC. OK, I know about Orchard, but it isn’t really a general purpose development framework, but instead, a CMS that happens to use MVC. Not having controls render HTML for you gives you in turn much more control over it – it is your responsibility to create it, which you can either consider a blessing or a curse, in the later case, you probably shouldn’t be using MVC at all. Also MVC URLs tend to be much more SEO-oriented, if you design your controllers and actions properly. Testing In a well defined architecture, you should separate business logic, data access logic and presentation logic, because these are all different things and it might even be the need to switch one implementation for another: for example, you might design a system which includes a data access layer, a business logic layer and two presentation layers, one on top of ASP.NET and the other with WPF; and the data access layer might be implemented first using NHibernate and later on switched for Entity Framework Code First. These changes are not that rare, so care should be taken in designing the system to make them possible. Web Forms are difficult to test, because it relies on event handlers which are only fired in web contexts, when a form is submitted or a page is requested. You can call them with reflection, but you have to set up a number of mocking objects first, HttpContext.Current first coming to my mind. MVC, on the other hand, makes testing controllers a breeze, so much that it even includes a template option for generating boilerplate unit test classes up from start. A well designed – from the unit test point of view - controller will receive everything it needs to work as parameters to its action methods, so you can pass whatever values you need very easily. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything can be tested: views, for instance, are difficult to test without actually accessing the site, but MVC offers the possibility to compile views at build time, so that, at least, you know you don’t have syntax errors beforehand. Myths Some popular but unfounded myths around MVC include: You cannot use controls in MVC: not true, actually, you can, at least with the Web Forms (ASPX) view engine; the declaration and usage is exactly the same as with Web Forms; You cannot specify a base class for a view: with the ASPX view engine you can use the Inherits Page directive, with this and all the others you can use the pageBaseType and userControlBaseType attributes of the <page> element; MVC shields you from doing “bad things” on your views: well, you can place any code on a code block, at least with the ASPX view engine (you may be starting to see a pattern here), even data access code; The model is the entity model, tied to an O/RM: the model is actually any class that you use to pass values to a view, including (but generally not recommended) an entity model; Unit tests come with no cost: unit tests generally don’t cover the UI, although there are frameworks just for that (see WatiN, for example); also, for some tests, you will have to mock or replace either the HttpContext.Current property or the HttpContextBase class yourself; Everything is testable: views aren’t, without accessing the site; MVC relies on HTML5/some_cool_new_javascript_framework: there is no relation whatsoever, MVC renders whatever you want it to render and does not require any framework to be present. The thing is, the subsequent releases of MVC happened in a time when Microsoft has become much more involved in standards, so the files and technologies included in the Visual Studio templates reflect this, and it just happens to work well with jQuery, for example. Conclusion Well, this is how I see it. Some folks may think that I am being too rude on MVC, probably because I don’t like it, but that’s not true: like I said, I do like MVC and I am starting my new projects with it. I just don’t want to go along with that those that say that MVC is much superior to Web Forms, in fact, some things you can do much more easily with Web Forms than with MVC. I will be more than happy to hear what you think on this!

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  • What, if anything, to do about bow-shaped burndowns?

    - by Karl Bielefeldt
    I've started to notice a recurring pattern to our team's burndown charts, which I call a "bowstring" pattern. The ideal line is the "string" and the actual line starts out relatively flat, then curves down to meet the target like a bow. My theory on why they look like this is that toward the beginning of the story, we are doing a lot of debugging or exploratory work that is difficult to estimate remaining work for. Sometimes it even goes up a little as we discover a task is more difficult once we get into it. Then we get into implementation and test which is more predictable, hence the curving down graph. Note I'm not talking about a big scale like BDUF, just the natural short-term constraint that you have to find the bug before you can fix it, coupled with the fact that stories are most likely to start toward the beginning of a two-week iteration. Is this a common occurrence among scrum teams? Do people see it as a problem? If so, what is the root cause and some techniques to deal with it?

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  • Visual Studio, .NET Framework, and language versions

    - by Scott Dorman
    Every so often a question comes up about how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and a .NET programming language relate to each other. Mostly, these questions have to do with versions. The reality is that these are actually three different “products” that are versioned independently of each other but are related. Looking at how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework version, and the CLR versions relate to each other results in the following: Visual Studio CLR .NET Framework Visual Studio .NET (Ranier) 1.0.3705 1.0 Visual Studio 2003 (Everett) 1.1.4322 1.1 Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) 2.0.50727 2.0 Visual Studio 2005 with .NET 3.0 Extensions 2.0.50727 2.0, 3.0 Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) 2.0.50727 2.0 SP1, 3.0 SP1, 3.5 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 2.0.50727 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 (Hawaii) 4.0.30319 4.0 The actual Visual Studio version numbers are: Product Name Version Ship Date Visual Studio .NET 7.0.???? 02/2002 Visual Studio .NET 2002 SP1 7.0.????   Visual Studio 2003 7.1.???? 04/2003 Visual Studio 2003 SP1 7.1.6030 09/13/2006 Visual Studio 2005 8.0.5072   Visual Studio 2005 SP1   12/14/2006 Visual Studio 2008 9.0.21022.8 11/19/2007 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 9.0.30729.1   Visual Studio 2010 10.0.30319.1 04/12/2010 (For those entries that are missing information, it simply means that I didn’t already know it and/or couldn’t easily find it online.) So far, everything seems fairly reasonable and isn’t terribly difficult to keep coordinated. However, when you start trying to find language versions and how those relate to .NET Framework, CLR, or Visual Studio releases it becomes more difficult. The breakdown for the programming languages that are part of Visual Studio are: Framework CLR Language     C# VB F# 1.0 1.0.3705 1.0 7.0 - 1.1 1.1.4322 1.1 7.1 - 2.0 2.0.50727 2.0 8.0 - 3.0 2.0.50727 2.0 8.0 - 3.5 2.0.50727 2.0 9.0 - 4.0 4.0.30319 4.0 10.0 2.0   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,.NET

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  • How do you deal with translating theory into practice?

    - by Mr. Shickadance
    Hello all! Being a computer scientist in a research field I am often tasked with working alongside professionals outside of the software domain (think math people, electrical engineer etc), and then translating their theories and ideas into real-world implementations. I often find it difficult when they present a theoretical problem which appears to be somewhat disconnected from reality. I am not saying that the theory is bogus, only that it is difficult to translate into real-world situations. For example, recently I have been working with software defined radios. We are exploring many different areas, but often the math specialists in my group would present a problem which is heavily grounded in theory (signal processing, physics, whatever). I often struggle at times where it is hard to draw direct parallels between the theory and the real-world implementation that I need to develop. Say we are working on an energy detector, the theory person in my group would say "you need to measure the noise variance with no signal present." This leads me to think "how the hell do I isolate noise from a signal in reality?" There are many examples, but I hope you see where I am going. So, my question is how does one deal with implementation of theoretical concepts when the theory seems detached from reality? Or at least when the connections are not so clear. Or perhaps, the person with the 'theory' may be ignorant of real restrictions? Note: I found this to be a hard question to ask - hopefully you are following me. If you have suggestions on how I could improve it, by all means let me know! Thanks for looking! EDIT: To be a bit more clear, I understand in situations like this that I must learn that specific domain myself to an extent (i.e. signal processing), but I am more concerned with when those theoretical concepts do not appear to be as grounded in practice as one would like.

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  • Why is there never any controversy regarding the switch statement? [closed]

    - by Nick Rosencrantz
    We all know that the gotostatement should only be used on very rare occasions if at all. It has been discouraged to use the goto statement countless places countless times. But why it there never anything like that about the switch statement? I can understand the position that the switch statement should always be avoided since anything with switch can always be expressed by if...else... which is also more readable and the syntax of the switch statement if difficult to remember. Do you agree? What are the arguments in favor of keeping the 'switch` statement? It can also be difficult to use if what you're testing changes from say an integer to an object, then C++ or Java won't be able to perform the switch and neither C can perform switch on something like a struct or a union. And the technique of fall-through is so very rarely used that I wonder why it was never presented any regret of having switch at all? The only place I know where it is best practice is GUI code and even that switch is probably better coded in a more object-oriented way.

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  • SQL Query for Determining SharePoint ACL Sizes

    - by Damon Armstrong
    When a SharePoint Access Control List (ACL) size exceeds more than 64kb for a particular URL, the contents under that URL become unsearchable due to limitations in the SharePoint search engine.  The error most often seen is The Parameter is Incorrect which really helps to pinpoint the problem (its difficult to convey extreme sarcasm here, please note that it is intended).  Exceeding this limit is not unheard of – it can happen when users brute force security into working by continually overriding inherited permissions and assigning user-level access to securable objects. Once you have this issue, determining where you need to focus to fix the problem can be difficult.  Fortunately, there is a query that you can run on a content database that can help identify the issue: SELECT [SiteId],      MIN([ScopeUrl]) AS URL,      SUM(DATALENGTH([Acl]))/1024 as AclSizeKB,      COUNT(*) AS AclEntries FROM [Perms] (NOLOCK) GROUP BY siteid ORDER BY AclSizeKB DESC This query results in a list of ACL sizes and entry counts on a site-by-site basis.  You can also remove grouping to see a more granular breakdown: SELECT [ScopeUrl] AS URL,       SUM(DATALENGTH([Acl]))/1024 as AclSizeKB,      COUNT(*) AS AclEntries FROM [Perms] (NOLOCK) GROUP BY ScopeUrl ORDER BY AclSizeKB DESC

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  • How can we plan projects realistically while accounting for support issues?

    - by Thomas Clayson
    We're having a problem at work: we're trying to schedule work so that we can assess time scales and get deadline dates. The problem is that it's difficult to plan for a project without knowing everything that's going to happen. For instance, right now we've planned all our projects through the start of December, however in that time we will have various in house and external meetings, teleconferences and extra work. It's all well and good to say that a project will take three weeks, but if there is a week's worth of interruption in that time then the date of completion will be pushed back a week. The problem is 3 fold: When we schedule projects the time scales are taken literally. If we estimate three weeks, the deadline is set for three week's time, the client is told, and there is no room for extension. Interim work and such means that we lose productive time working on the project. Sometimes clients don't have the time that we need to take to do the work, so they'll sometimes come to us and say they need a project done by the end of the month even when we think that the work will take two months - not to mention we already have work to be doing. We have a Gantt chart which we are trying to fill in with all the projects we have and we fill in timesheets, but they're not compared to the Gantt chart at all. This makes it difficult to say "Well, we scheduled 3 weeks for this project, but we've lost a week here so the deadline has to move back a week." It's also not professional to keep missing deadlines we've communicated to the client. How do other people deal with this type of situation? How do you manage the planning of projects? How much "extra" time do you schedule into a project to account for non-project work that occurs during a project? How do you deal with support issues and bugs and stuff? Things you can't account for during planning? UPDATE Lots of good answers thank you.

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  • State of the art Culling and Batching techniques in rendering

    - by Kristian Skarseth
    I'm currently working with upgrading and restructuring an OpenGL render engine. The engine is used for visualising large scenes of architectural data (buildings with interior), and the amount of objects can become rather large. As is the case with any building, there is a lot of occluded objects within walls, and you naturally only see the objects that are in the same room as you, or the exterior if you are on the outside. This leaves a large number of objects that should be occluded through occlusion culling and frustum culling. At the same time there is a lot of repetative geometry that can be batched in renderbatches, and also a lot of objects that can be rendered with instanced rendering. The way I see it, it can be difficult to combine renderbatching and culling in an optimal fashion. If you batch too many objects in the same VBO it's difficult to cull the objects on the CPU in order to skip rendering that batch. At the same time if you skip the culling on the cpu, a lot of objects will be processed by the GPU while they are not visible. If you skip batching copletely in order to more easily cull on the CPU, there will be an unwanted high amount of render calls. I have done some research into existing techniques and theories as to how these problems are solved in modern graphics, but I have not been able to find any concrete solution. An idea a colleague and me came up with was restricting batches to objects relatively close to eachother e.g all chairs in a room or within a radius of n meeters. This could be simplified and optimized through use of oct-trees. Does anyone have any pointers to techniques used for scene managment, culling, batching etc in state of the art modern graphics engines?

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  • How to connect to internet using huawei E303C datacard

    - by Rahul Choudhary
    It is very difficult to use ubuntu. After six hours of research on various websites and ubuntu blogs I was unable to connect to internet using my Huawei DataCard E303C. I wonder that if it takes so much long time to figure out how to connect to internet using a 3g datacard (Huawei E303C) to connect to internet, then how would I do my daily computing tasks using ubuntu. Is there anyone who can help me with that. My personal practical experiences says that using ubuntu instead of windows is not different but tough. Yes it is very tough to use ubuntu. Why it cannot be like we double click and software gets installed as it happens in windows and why we always have to use terminal to install everything. Why everything in ubuntu is very difficult and tough to accomplish. I am drifting away from ubuntu. Can any developer at ubuntu help keep my interest in ubuntu? Is there anyone who can lure me to use ubuntu again?

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 11/30/2011

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Coding - the new Latin | @BBCRoryCJ BBC Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones reports on why "the campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills - particularly coding - in schools is gathering force." BPM Business Value Patterns | SOA Partner Community Blog Juergen Kress shares the presentation he and Matthias Ziegler from Accenture delivered at the SOA & BPM Integration Days event in Germany in October. Coherence 3.7.1 Resources Busy blogger Juergen Kress shares links to screencasts and other resources for those interested in Oracle Coherence 3.7.1. OBIEE 11.1.1 - Introduction to OBIEE 11g Full Sample App "The OBIEE 11g Full Sample App (FSA) is a comprehensive collection of examples designed to demonstrate the latest Oracle BIEE 11g capabilities and design best practices." Solaris 11 Customer Maintenance Lifecycle | Gerry Haskins Gerry Haskins launches a new blog devoted to Solaris "policies, best practices, clarifications, and lots of other stuff." Harnessing Business Events for Predictive Decision Making - part 1 / 3 | Sanjeev Sharma "Data growth is outpacing storage capacity by a factor of two and computing power is still very much bounded by Moore's Law, doubling only every 18 months," says Sanjeev Sharma. The Latest Research from the SEI | Douglas C. SchmidtSchmidt shares information on several recently published Software Engineering Institute (SEI) technical reports that "highlight the latest work of SEI technologists in Agile methods, insider threat,the SMART Grid Maturity Model, acquisition, and CMMI." Tiger/Line Shape Files and Oracle | Bradley D. Brown "Have you ever needed to load an ESRI "shape file" and wondered if that's an easy effort or a difficult effort? I know I have and I assumed that it was a pretty difficult effort. However, I learned today that's actually pretty easy!" -- Oracle ACE Director Bradley Brown of TUSC. Webcast: Enterprise Clouds with Oracle VM Tuesday, December 6, 2011, 9:00 am PT / Noon ET. Featuring Adam Hawley (Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle) and Dan Herrup (Principal Systems Engineer, Oracle Corporate Citizenship). SOA Made Simple; Architects in AZ; Cloud Migration Introduction This week on the Architect Home Page on OTN.

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  • What is the best way to design a table with an arbitrary id?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have the need to create a table with a unique id as the PK. The ID is a surrogate key. Originally, I had a natural key, but requirement changes have undermined this idea. Then, I considered adding an auto incrementing identity. But, this presents problems. A. I can't specify my own ID. B. The ID's are difficult to reset. Both of these together make it difficult to copy over this table with new data or move the table across domains, e.g. Dev to QA. I need to refer to these ID's from the front end, JavaScript...so they must not change. So, the only way I am aware of to meet all these challenges is to make a GUID ID. This way, I can overwrite the ID's when I need to or I can generate a new one without concern for order (E.G. an int based id would require I know the last inserted ID). Is a GUID the best way to accomplish my goals? Considering that a GUID is a string and joining on a string is an expensive task, is there a better way?

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  • How to hire support people?

    - by Martin
    I manage a tech support team at a mid-sized software company. We are the last line of support, so issues that we can't fix need to be escalated to the development team. When I joined the company, our team wasn't capable of much beyond using a specific set of troubleshooting steps to solve known issues and escalating anything else to the developers. It's always been a goal of mine for our team to shoulder as much of the support burden as possible without ever bothering a developer. Over the past few years, I, along with several new hires I've made, have made pretty good progress in that direction. We've coded our own troubleshooting tools which now ship with several of our products. When users have never-before-seen issues, we analyze stack traces and troubleshoot down to the code level, and if we need to submit a bug, half the time we've already identified in the code where in the code the bug is and offered a patch to fix it. Here's the problem I've always had: finding support people capable of the work I've described above is really difficult. I've hired 3 people in the past 3 years, and I've probably looked at several thousand resumes and conducted several hundred phone screens to do so. I know it's pretty well accepted that hiring good people is tough in the tech industry, but it seems that support is especially difficult -- there are clearly thousands of people walking around calling themselves support analysts, but 99%+ of them seemingly aren't capable of anything beyond reading a script. I'm curious if anyone has experience recruiting the sort of folks I'm talking about, and if you have any suggestions to share. We've tried all sorts of things -- different job titles/descriptions, using headhunters, etc. And while we've managed to hire a few good folks, it's basically taken us a year to find an appropriate candidate for each opening we've had, and I can't help but wonder if there's something we could be doing differently.

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  • How to analyze a scenario where a bug didn't get caught and adjust development workflow to prevent similar errors

    - by durron597
    I had a bug that was really difficult to track down, because all the unit tests were green, but the production application didn't work properly. Here's what happened: I had a filter class that set my application to ignore data that was not in some specified time windows. The unit test, which seemed thorough to me, turned green. Additionally, my integration tests also produced results as expected. Production, however, did not work. As a result of the first two bullets, this problem was very difficult to find. It turned out the problem was that my test dates were using my time zone (America/Chicago) but the production data was providing dates in UTC, which I did not realize, and the logic for the filter wasn't correct for UTC dates. (I was using joda time DateTime objects). Where did my workflow break down? Did I fail to produce a spec that specified that the logic needed to handle dates in any time zone? Did I fail to thoroughly consider all cases at the unit test level? Did I fail to insure the integration test was sufficiently similar to production? Other? What changes can I make to my workflow to better prevent this sort of mistake in the future? How can I more effectively debug a problem when there is an issue in production but not in testing?

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  • GPU based procedual terrain borders?

    - by OnePie
    I'm working on a game that preferibly should feature a combination of designed and procedually generated terrain where the designer specifies in somewhat detailed terms what type of terrain a given area will have (grasslands, forest etc...) and then a precedual algorithm takes care of the rest. I'm not talking about minecraft style biomoes, but rather the game map for a strategy game. Each 'area' will not take up that much of the screen, and thus be more akin to a tile whose texture is procedually generated. While procedually generating terrain textures on the GPU are not that difficult, the hard part is making the borders between them look good. Currently, the 'tiles' are large enough to be visible (due to memory constraints mainly, we are talking planetary sized textures for a game taking place in space and on a continental ground view with seamless transitions between them) and creating good borders between them with an algorithm that is fast enough to be useful has proven difficult. Sampling the n-surrounding pixels and using the combiened result did not yield very good borders and was fairly slow on the GPU to boot (ca 12ms for me, that is without any lighning or shading and with very simple terrain texture shaders). So are there any practical known methods to solve this problem?

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  • ASP.NET design not SOLID

    - by w0051977
    SOLID principles are described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_%28object-oriented_design%29 I am developing a large ASP.NET app. The previous developer created a few very large classes each with lots of different purposes. It is very difficult to maintain and extend. The classes are deployed to the web server along with the code behind files etc. I want to share a small amount of the app with another application. I am considering moving all of the classes of the ASP.NET web app to a DLL, so the small subset of functionality can be shared. I realise it would be better to only share the classes which contain code to be shared but because of the dependencies this is proving to be very difficult e.g. class A contains code that should be shared, however class A contains references to classes B, C, D, E, F, G etc, so class A cannot be shared on its own. I am planning to refactor the code in the future. As a temporary solution I am planning to convert all the classes into a single class library. Is this a bad idea and if so, is there an alternative? as I don't have time to refactor at the moment.

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  • Visually and audibly unambiguous subset of the Latin alphabet?

    - by elliot42
    Imagine you give someone a card with the code "5SBDO0" on it. In some fonts, the letter "S" is difficult to visually distinguish from the number five, (as with number zero and letter "O"). Reading the code out loud, it might be difficult to distinguish "B" from "D", necessitating saying "B as in boy," "D as in dog," or using a "phonetic alphabet" instead. What's the biggest subset of letters and numbers that will, in most cases, both look unambiguous visually and sound unambiguous when read aloud? Background: We want to generate a short string that can encode as many values as possible while still being easy to communicate. Imagine you have a 6-character string, "123456". In base 10 this can encode 10^6 values. In hex "1B23DF" you can encode 16^6 values in the same number of characters, but this can sound ambiguous when read aloud. ("B" vs. "D") Likewise for any string of N characters, you get (size of alphabet)^N values. The string is limited to a length of about six characters, due to wanting to fit easily within the capacity of human working memory capacity. Thus to find the max number of values we can encode, we need to find that largest unambiguous set of letters/numbers. There's no reason we can't consider the letters G-Z, and some common punctuation, but I don't want to have to go manually pairwise compare "does G sound like A?", "does G sound like B?", "does G sound like C" myself. As we know this would be O(n^2) linguistic work to do =)...

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  • The SQL Server Setup Portal

    - by BuckWoody
    One of the tasks that takes a long time for the data professional is setting up SQL Server. No, it isn’t that difficult to slide a DVD in a drive and click “Setup” but the overall process of planning the hardware and software environment, making decisions for high-availability, security and dozens of other choices can make the process more difficult. And then, of course, there are the inevitable issues that arise. Microsoft supports literally hundreds and even thousands of combinations of hardware and software drivers from vendors you’ve never even heard of. Making all of that work together is a small miracle, so things are bound to arise that you need to deal with. So, to help you out, we’ve designed a new “SQL Server Setup Portal”. It’s a one-stop-shop for everything you need to know about planning and setting up SQL Server. As time goes on you’ll see even more content added. There are already whitepapers, videos, and multiple places to search on everything from topic names to error codes. So go check it out – and if you have to do a lot of SQL Server Setups – and especially if you don’t – bookmark it as a favorite! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Should I learn the easier framework as a start? [closed]

    - by gunbuster363
    I've been a programmer for 2 years. I learned Java SE, C from college and learned Cobol from the workplace. I've noticed that there is a hype about framework and I actually don't know what is a framework. It is so cool that my colleague once said you cannot find a new job without knowing something like struct spring hibernate. And we should know Java EE too because it was aimed for enterprise application. I've never code something such as server-client web application, and I think I need to try it out. But which language should I code in? I can't decide between the following 2: 1) Java. It is heavily used by many company so I could easily reuse the experience gained. But Java and its related framework are pretty heavy (for the machine and operation). It is on-demand. 2) ROR. It is cool. The syntax of ruby is simple. I can get a better hand on it. And maybe I can learn the concept easily and possibly correctly. However, not much company here would use it. All the job ads are about J2EE/C#. Should I learn the easy one or the difficult one? Not to mention there are a lot of frameworks out there for Java, which makes the decision much more difficult.

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  • O'reilly certification in PHP worth it?

    - by editzombie
    I asked this question over on stack overflow but I didn't realise it wasn't really the place for not so technical questions. I've seen quite a few related threads on this forum so I thought I'd try and get some feedback here: This is my first time asking a question on this forum, though I´ve read it a lot. I apologise if this is repeating a thread. I´m interested in getting into web development. I am a video editor by trade but living in Spain the way things are at the moment its very difficult to find work. I have some very basic knowledge of HTML and CSS and a little bit of flash and have designed a few little personal websites myself. I also worked for a online marketing production company where I worked a little on blog design in Blogger amongst other social media. So thats my background, but I´m trying to expand my skills and get into web development as a career or in general part of my skill base, I was thinking particularly about PHP/MySQL. I have worked a little on some of the Lynda.com tutorials and have invested in a book (Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache). I´m still finding it very difficult to progress. I know I should really try some practice projects (any reccomendations would be welcome). But I was also thinking about doing one of the O´Reilly certification courses and was wondering whether it would be worthwhile for a noob like me. I hear that the courses are associated with an American University which I guess gives it more clout. Any other thoughts you guys have about how to make progress in learning web development would be fantasic. Thanks in advance.

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  • Leadership Tip&ndash;Vent Up!

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Leadership is difficult, for many reasons. One of those reasons is that we not only need to keep ourselves motivated when difficult or challenging times come, but we also need to motivate our teams and keep them focussed on the tasks at hand regardless of the mortars being rained down around them. Inexperienced (and experienced) leaders can fall into the “me-too” mentality – that is, the leader sees themselves as part of the team member instead of the leader of the team. Once a leader changes the teams view that he/she is a peer and not the leader, dynamics can change on the team. One of the biggest dangers is that the leader starts sharing frustrations, fears, concerns, etc. with the team that they’re supposed to be leading on to victory. This can destroy a team’s morale and productivity. One simple thing you can do to counter this is remember this rule when it comes to venting: Vent Up! Don’t vent sideways or down, vent up. Vent to the people above you – they’re the ones that tend to have the power to actually change things anyway. You as a leader stay healthy by getting your frustrations and concerns off your chest, your team is still insulated from it, and your superiors are aware of issues that need to be addressed or can coach you through the obstacles. D

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  • How to deal with bad developers who hold back the project

    - by ILovePaperTowels
    We're at the end of a project, but we continue to run into issues because of a single piece of the project. This piece is handled by a specific developer. Finally, we grabbed latest and started reviewing it. It's just horrendous code! Trying to step through it was difficult and it's a relatively simple workflow. The point of this question is, how to deal with this situation. The developer has a hard time accepting criticism (constructive or otherwise) and feels he is more knowledgeable than others on the team who are, well, highly decorated, experienced and accomplished developers. It's difficult to even get into a topic about development because it turns into "I know what I'm talking about and you're just wrong!" type of conversation. A request has already been put in to replace this developer but it is a hard sell since devs are in short supply where we are and this is a corporation with a LOT of political bs. Management has been notified a few times but nothing is happening.

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