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• Creative, busy Devoxx week

  - by JavaCecilia

  I got back from my first visit to the developer conference Devoxx in Antwerp. I can't describe the vibes of the conference, it was a developer amusement park, hackergartens, fact sessions, comic relief provided by Java Posse, James Bond and endless hallway discussions.All and all - I had a lot of fun, my main mission was to talk about Oracle's main focus for OpenJDK which besides development and bug fixing is making sure the infrastructure is working out for the full community. My focus was not to hang out at night club the Noxx, but that was came included in the package :)The London Java community leaders Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg are leading discussions in the community to lay out the necessary requirements for the infrastructure for build and test in the open. They called a first meeting at JavaOne gathering 25 people, including people from RedHat, IBM and Oracle. The second meeting at Devoxx included 14 participants and had representatives from Oracle and IBM. I hope we really can find a way to collaborate on this, making sure we deliver an efficient infrastructure for all engineers to contribute to OpenJDK with.My home in all of this was the BOF rooms and the sessions there meeting the JUG leaders, talking about OpenJDK infrastructure and celebrating the Duchess Duke Award together with the others. The restaurants in the area was slower than I've ever seen, so I missed out on Trisha Gee's brilliant replay of the workshop "The Problem with Women in IT - an Agile Approach" where she masterly leads the audience (a packed room, 50-50 gender distribution) to solve the problem of including more diversity in the developer community. A tough and sometimes sensitive topic where she manages to keep the discussion objective with a focus of improving the matter from a business perspective. Mattias Karlsson is organizing the Java developer conference Jfokus in Stockholm and was there talking to Andres Almires planning a Hackergarten with a possible inclusion of an OpenJDK bugathon. That would be really cool, especially as the Oracle Stockholm Java development office is just across the water from the Jfokus venue, some of the local JVM engineers will likely attend and assist, even though the bug smashing theme will likely be more starter level build warnings in Swing or langtools than fixing JVM bugs.I was really happy that I managed to catch a seat for the Java Posse live podcast "the Third Presidential Debate" a lot of nerd humor, a lot of beer, a lot of fun :) The new member Chet had a perfect dead pan delivery and now I just have to listen more to the podcasts! Can't get the most perfect joke out of my head, talking about beer "As my father always said: Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" - hilarious :)I attended the sessions delivered by my Stockholm office colleagues Marcus Lagergren (on dynamic languages on the jvm, JavaScript in particular) and Joel Borggrén-Franck (Annotations) and was happy to see the packed room and all the questions raised at the end.There's loads of stuff to write about the event, but just have to pace myself for now. It was a fantastic event, captain Stephan Janssen with crew should be really proud to provide this forum to the developer community!

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• The Case for Complimentary Software Copies

  - by GGBlogger

  As the Geriatric Geek you can understand that I’ve been writing and studying for over 60 years. That means that I’ve seen insane changes in the computer software industry. I’ve made the joke that I get a new college education every 6 months or so. Of course that’s an exaggeration but it doesn’t make the feeling go away. I have a long standing and strong relationship with Microsoft so I’m armed with virtually every tool they make. It also means that I have access to tons of training material. But here’s the rub… Last year I started a definitive read of Professional Visual Basic 2008. The purpose was to fill in holes in my understanding of various things. I’m currently on page 1119 of some 1400 pages. During this sojourn I’ve decided that the future is web related which is to say that the future of “thick client” applications running as Windows applications is likely to slowly disappear. To that end I’ve taken a side trip or two into the world of ASP (including XML), Silverlight and cloud development. After carefully avoiding (that’s tongue in cheek) XML for years I finally had to bite the bullet, so to speak, and start learning XML in earnest. The most recent result of that was trail downloads of Altova’s MissionKit 2010 for Software Architects and Liquid Technologies Liquid XML Studio Developer Edition. These are both beautiful products and I want to learn them and write about them. Now comes the rub… While 30 day evaluations are generous in allowing casual users to assess these technologies for purchase they are NOT long enough to allow an author to evaluate, learn and ultimately write about them. Even if I devoted the full 30 days to learning, using and writing about say Altova’s suite I wouldn’t have enough time. Liquid XML may be a little easier to learn (one product as opposed to 8).  Add to that the fact that I frequently get sidetracked to add to my kit and it really blows out. It can be extremely frustrating when I’ve devoted hours to a project and suddenly discover that to complete it I will either need to purchase a license or abandon the project. Since my life blood does not depend on the product I end up abandoning the project and moving on. So to the folks from whom I request complimentary copies… I guarantee that if I convert your product to doing paid development work I will purchase a license to do that but as long as I am using your product to study for the purpose of writing samples, teaching use or otherwise promoting your product to other paying customers I will ask that you give me a license so that I can do that without facing the dread expiration of a 30 day trial.

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• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

  Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted.  I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example.  A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.  As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They obviously offshore all development and have little oversight over that offshore development, and they probably have a small team at that.  Evidenced by the poor grammar throughout the game. They're seeking to maximize revenue and pushing to do as little development as possible, which would mean a small team. They're horribly understaffed in the customer support department as evidenced by never replying to this forum and never responding to bug reports or help requests (I've had one open with no response AT ALL for over a month . . .) They have way inadequate testing, no CI, and probably no automated unit tests.  You can see this by the poor grammar throughout the game and the type of bugs that show up. They aren't following a formal development process (no Agile, Waterfall, or anything else) as evidenced by their lack of predictable release cycle and lack of visibility. I'm guessing that the internal code base is terrible, otherwise, there wouldn't be an "Age II" that had nothing more than a new visual interface and a few rule tweaks.  This is also evidenced by the itty bitty scope of bug fixes and their inability to really fix bugs. Their Architect sucks.  Really, 42k user is all you can handle on a single server?  Could you REALLY not come up with a better way to scale to handle users?  They've built isolated worlds, instead of a single continuous world. Back to milking people for money--to really progress, you have to spend money. All of this adds up to knowing, deliberate actions on the part of management.  They CHOOSE to do this (like AOL choosing to send more discs instead of improve quality). So, what can we learn? This game will never really improve, since the bosses don't care, they're only in it for the money. The game will never have good support.  Again, the owners don't care. Giving them money only perpetuates this scam (and yes, I've given them money, way too much money. :() They don't care if you quit.  There's a new sucker born every day. Don't EVER go to work for them.  I've worked both with and for people like this and the culture is NEVER good. Ah well. Technorati Tags: Evony

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• Guiding Management to the Correct Decision

  - by Blumer

  My supervisor (also a developer) and I have a running joke about writing a book called "Managing From Beneath: Subversively Guiding Management to the Right Decision" and including a number of "techniques" we've developed for helping those who make the decisions to make the right ones. So far, we've got (cynicism warning!): BIC It! BIC stands for "Bury In Committee." When a bad idea comes up that someone wants to champion, we try to get it deferred to a committee for input. Typically it will either get killed outright (especially if other members of the committee are competing for you as a resource), or it will be hung up long enough that the proponent forgets about it. Smart, Stupid, or Expensive? When someone gets a visionary idea, offer them three ways to do it: a smart way, a stupid way, and an expensive way. The hope is that you've at least got a 2/3 shot of not having to do it the way that makes a piece of your soul die. All-Pro. It's a preemptive pro/con list in which you get into the mind of the (pr)opponent and think what would be cons against doing it your way. Twist them into pros and present them in your pro list before they have a chance to present them as cons. Dependicitis. Link pending decisions together, ideally with the proponent's pet project as the final link in the chain. Use this leverage to force action on those that have been put off. Preemptive Acceptance. Sometimes it's clear that management is going to go a particular direction regardless of advice to the contrary, and it's time to make the best of it. Take the opportunity to get something else you need, though. Approach the sponsor out of the blue and take the first step: "You know, I've been thinking about it, and while it's not the route I would advise, as long as we can get the schedule and budget for Project Awesome loosened up, I can work some magic to make your project fly." So ... what techniques have you come up with to try to head off the problem projects or make the best of what may come?

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• SQL Saturday 43 (Redmond, WA) Review

  - by BuckWoody

  Last Saturday (June 12th) we held a “SQL Saturday” (more about those here) event in Redmond, Washington. The event was held at the Microsoft campus, at the Mixer in our new location called the “Commons”. This is a mall-like area that we have on campus, and the Mixer is a large building with lots of meeting rooms, so it made a perfect location for the event. There was a sign to find the parking, and once there they had a sign to show how to get to the building. Since it’s a secure facility, Greg Larsen and crew had a person manning the door so that even late arrivals could get in. We had about 400 sign up for the event, and a little over 300 attend (official numbers later). I think we would have had a lot more, but the sun was out – and you just can’t underestimate the effect of that here in the Pacific Northwest. We joke a lot about not seeing the sun much, but when a day like what we had on Saturday comes around, and on a weekend at that, you’d cancel your wedding to go outside to play in the sun. And your spouse would agree with you for doing it. We had some top-notch speakers, including Clifford Dibble and Kalen Delany. The food was great, we had multiple sponsors (including Confio who seems to be at all of these) and the attendees were from all over the professional spectrum, from developers to BI to DBA’s. Everyone I saw was very engaged, and when I visited room-to-room I saw almost no one in the halls – everyone was in the sessions. I also saw a much larger Microsoft presence this year, especially from Dan Jones’ team. I had a great turnout at my session, and yes, I was wearing an Oracle staff shirt. I did that because I wanted to show that the session I gave on “SQL Server for the Oracle DBA” was non-marketing – I couldn’t exactly bash Oracle wearing their colors! These events are amazing. I can’t emphasize enough how much I appreciate the volunteers and how much work they put into these events, and to you for coming. If you’re reading this and you haven’t attended one yet, definitely find out if there is one in your area – and if not, start one. It’s a lot of work, but it’s totally worth it.       Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• When a problem is resolved

  - by Rob Farley

  This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jen McCown, and she’s picked the topic of Resolutions. It’s a new year, and she’s thinking about what people have resolved to do this year. Unfortunately, I’ve never really done resolutions like that. I see too many people resolve to quit smoking, or lose weight, or whatever, and fail miserably. I’m not saying I don’t set goals, but it’s not a thing for New Year. The obvious joke is “1920x1080” as a resolution, but I’m not going there. I think Resolving is a strange word. It makes it sound like I’m having to solve a problem a second time, when actually, it’s more along the lines of solving a problem well enough for it to count as finished. If something has been resolved, a solution has been provided. There is a resolution, through the provision of a solution. It’s a strangeness of English. When I look up the word resolution at dictionary.com, it has 12 options, including “settling of a problem”. There’s a finality about resolution. If you resolve to do something, you’re saying “Yes. This is a done thing. I’m resolving to do it, which means that it may as well be complete already.” I like to think I resolve problems, rather than just solving them. I want my solving to be final and complete. If I tune a query, I don’t want to find that I’m back in there, re-tuning it at some point. Strangely, if I re-solve a problem, that implies that I didn’t resolve it in the first place. I only solved it. Temporarily. We “data-folk” live in a world where the most common answer is “It depends.” Frustratingly, the thing an answer depends on may still be changing in the system in question. That probably means that any solution that is put in place may need reinvestigating at some point later. So do I resolve things? Yes. Am I Chuck Norris, and solve things so well the world would break first? No. Do these two claims happily sit beside each other? No, unfortunately not. But I happily take responsibility for things, and let my clients depend on me to see it through. As far as they are concerned, it is resolved. And so I resolve to keep resolving, right through 2011.

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• SQL Saturday 43 (Redmond, WA) Review

  - by BuckWoody

  Last Saturday (June 12th) we held a “SQL Saturday” (more about those here) event in Redmond, Washington. The event was held at the Microsoft campus, at the Mixer in our new location called the “Commons”. This is a mall-like area that we have on campus, and the Mixer is a large building with lots of meeting rooms, so it made a perfect location for the event. There was a sign to find the parking, and once there they had a sign to show how to get to the building. Since it’s a secure facility, Greg Larsen and crew had a person manning the door so that even late arrivals could get in. We had about 400 sign up for the event, and a little over 300 attend (official numbers later). I think we would have had a lot more, but the sun was out – and you just can’t underestimate the effect of that here in the Pacific Northwest. We joke a lot about not seeing the sun much, but when a day like what we had on Saturday comes around, and on a weekend at that, you’d cancel your wedding to go outside to play in the sun. And your spouse would agree with you for doing it. We had some top-notch speakers, including Clifford Dibble and Kalen Delany. The food was great, we had multiple sponsors (including Confio who seems to be at all of these) and the attendees were from all over the professional spectrum, from developers to BI to DBA’s. Everyone I saw was very engaged, and when I visited room-to-room I saw almost no one in the halls – everyone was in the sessions. I also saw a much larger Microsoft presence this year, especially from Dan Jones’ team. I had a great turnout at my session, and yes, I was wearing an Oracle staff shirt. I did that because I wanted to show that the session I gave on “SQL Server for the Oracle DBA” was non-marketing – I couldn’t exactly bash Oracle wearing their colors! These events are amazing. I can’t emphasize enough how much I appreciate the volunteers and how much work they put into these events, and to you for coming. If you’re reading this and you haven’t attended one yet, definitely find out if there is one in your area – and if not, start one. It’s a lot of work, but it’s totally worth it.       Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• run script as another user from a root script with no tty stdin

  - by viktor tron

  Using CentOs, I want to run a script as user 'training' as a system service. I use daemontools to monitor the process, which needs a launcher script that is run as root and has no tty standard in. Below I give my four different attempts which all fail. : #!/bin/bash exec >> /var/log/training_service.log 2>&1 setuidgid training training_command This last line is not good enough since for training_command, we need environment for trqaining user to be set. : su - training -c 'training_command' This looks like it (http://serverfault.com/questions/44400/run-a-shell-script-as-a-different-user) but gives 'standard in must be tty' as su making sure tty is present to potentially accept password. I know I could make this disappear by modifying /etc/sudoers (a la http://superuser.com/questions/119376/bash-su-script-giving-an-error-standard-in-must-be-a-tty) but i am reluctant and unsure of consequences. : runuser - training -c 'training_command' This one gives runuser: cannot set groups: Connection refused. I found no sense or resolution to this error. : ssh -p100 training@localhost 'source $HOME/.bashrc; training_command' This one is more of a joke to show desparation. Even this one fails with Host key verification failed. (the host key IS in known_hosts, etc). Note: all of 2,3,4 work as they should if I run the wrapper script from a root shell. problems only occur if the system service monitor (daemontools) launches it (no tty terminal I guess). I am stuck. Is this something so hard to achieve? I appreciate all insight and guidance to best practice. (this has also been posted on superuser: http://superuser.com/questions/434235/script-calling-script-as-other-user)

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• Custom HTTP Status Codes (a la Twitter 420: Enhance Your Calm) [migrated]

  - by Max Bucknell

  I'm currently implementing an HTTP API, my first ever. I've been spending a lot of time looking at the Wikipedia page for HTTP status codes, because I'm determined to implement the right codes for the right situations. Listed on that page is a code with number 420, which is a custom code that Twitter used to use for rate limiting. There is already a code for rate limiting, though. It's 429. This led me to wonder why they would set a custom one, when there is already a use case. Is that just being cute? And if so, then which circumstances would make it acceptable to return a different status code, and what, if any problems may clients have with it? I read somewhere that Mozilla doesn't implement the joke 418: I’m a teapot response, which makes me think that clients choose which status codes they implement. If that's true, then I can imagine Twitter's funny little enhance your calm code being problematic. Unless I'm mistaken, and we can appropriate any code number to mean whatever we like, and that only convention dictates that 404 means not found, and 429 means take it easy.

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• Ctrl + 1 and Ctrl + 2 key combinations don't work

  - by musicfreak

  I noticed back in August (when I got StarCraft 2) that the key combinations Ctrl + 1 and Ctrl + 2 didn't work. I thought this was weird because Ctrl + 3 and all the other combinations worked fine (including Shift + 1, etc), so I didn't think much of it; I just shrugged it off as a SC2 bug. Now, 4 months later, I decided to play a completely unrelated game--Dawn of War 2--and noticed the same thing: those two specific key combinations don't work. To make sure I wasn't going insane, I tried it in Chrome and a couple other applications, and alas, it didn't work. I remember playing strategy games over the summer before StarCraft 2 and it worked fine. Any idea as to what went wrong? My keyboard, a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 1000 (I know, insert Microsoft joke here), is a little over a year old, so I'm going to assume it's not dying until proven otherwise. Things I've tried ActiveHotkeys says the key combination is not a global hotkey. Tried another keyboard--still doesn't work. The key combinations do work in a virtual machine (tried with both Windows and Ubuntu as guests).

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• Windows Bluescreen - atikmpag.sys

  - by Mochan

  Information Name: atikmpag.sys bluescreen (BSOD or BlueScreen of Death) Error code: 0x00000116 Appears when: Playing games, watching videos Can be reproduced: Yes Cause: Graphics Card is the main assumption System Specifications Before we begin - I will inform you of my specifications. OS: Windows 7 x64 Home Edition Model: Dell Inspiron 15R Special Edition (aka Inspiron 7520) (Add 2GB of RAM to the model linked) Hard Drive: 1TB CPU: Intel Quad-Core i7 Sandy Bridge (I think) Processor at 2.10GHz (I think it can be clocked to 3GHz?) RAM: 6GB (I think 1 x 4GB and 1 x 2GB) Display: 15.6" HD (1366x768) Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7500M 2GB Details So now that you know some basics about my computer, I'll get to the problem. Being an Ubuntu user I hardly use Windows, but occasionally I do. Like to run Skyrim and other games incompatible with Linux and WINE. The new Sims 3 Seasons patch is also now not supported. When playing these two games and other ones, theoretically. I have also heard others saying that while watching HD movies and video series it also happens. While watching the bluescreen as it happens, I see it is the 'atikmpag.sys' error. I have not installed much and nothing significant. I think I have downloaded Skyrim, Firefox and The Sims 3. I haven't done much more... since Ubuntu is definitely the best in comparison! (No hate, just a joke :P). I can reproduce it easily (just by running a game for less than a minute). It is always there each time, but it's never at a specific time or anything. So far I have found that it may be caused by lack of power to the graphics card, or it may be damaged or fried. Since I've had the computer for a mere 4 months (and have had other problems with it also). I have contacted Dell but they are useless beyond belief. Anyone with any information, solutions or details are encouraged to share your knowledge, as it would be immensely appreciated.

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• Speeding up Outlook Express on Windows XP over satellite

  - by John

  My brother is in the field with Doctors Without Borders. I'm posting this question on his behalf. We use outlook express (on a pc running windows XP) and a 9600 baud dial up satellite phone modem to get our email direct from the server in Paris. As this is a very expensive way to communicate (our satellite bill is $50K a year, no joke), it seems like trying to streamline is a good idea. Here's the question- when we connect, the sequence goes: Send outbox mails. This goes pretty quickly, probably 10-15 seconds for each email, up to maybe a couple minutes for an email of 150k or so). The status bar moves pretty quickly, according to the emails sent. The system then says "Checking for new messages on (our account name), and "Receiving list of messages from server". This takes a long time. Like 10-15 minutes. The status bar crawls along. Then it receives the messages. "Receiving messages from server". Again, each message takes 10-15 seconds, and this part moves along reasonably fast. I'm curious as to what is going on in the second part. It takes forever, and doesn't seem to be part of the sending or receiving messages themselves. Is there a way to speed up the process by changing a preference with communicating with the server or something? Does anyone have any advice for him speeding up what Outlooks Express is doing? Obviously his software is ancient and adding more software is not realistic based on the connection speed. Thanks!

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• Is there an high quality natural text reader for the mac?

  - by Another Registered User

  I'm reading about 150 pages of text on screen, every day. I will have to read about 15.000 in the next upcoming months. No joke. Well, the problem is this: I suffer from a sort of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which forces me to read every sentence up to 10 times until I really get it. Mac OS X Snow Leopard has a built-in text reader with the name "Alex". Although it is already pretty good quality, I know there are far better natural sounding voices out there. I have heard already voices that are absolutely amazing compared to Alex. They're so good, that you can't tell anymore the difference between a real person or a computer. Alex still has this "metal factor" in its voice, which makes my ears hurt after 8 hours of listening. The next problem with Alex is, that he never makes a break after a sentence. Also, it's not possible to think about a sentence and then continue reading. It's also not possible to have him repeat a sentence, without tedious text selection and shortcut usage. Actually, the best tool I can imagine would have the option to read a sentence and move on to the next one after pressing a special key, OR repeating the previously one after pressing a special key. That would help so much! And if that's even with one of those bell lab / AT&T / whatever super-natural voices, even better! But it would be already a great relief if there was just a better tool to control Alex. To let him make breaks after sentences or let him speak big chunks of text sentence-by-sentence with fine-grained control over repetition and moving on. Is there anything?

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• Starting airplay from command line, to send output of 'Say' Mac OS X command to airplay

  - by Fabien

  Ok, Sunday question :) Trying to make a little joke... 1) if you open a terminal, and type "say -a ?", Mac OS X will give you the list of devices it can send spoken words to. On mine, it says: 39 AirPlay 47 Built-in Output 2) I have a Denon airplay-ready received in my living room and I'm trying to send spoken words to my wife downstairs... I can send music without any problem using iTunes so, from an infrastructure standpoint, I'm all set. 3) I want my computer to say (out of the blue) "Honey, why don't you bring me a cup of coffee". I can make it say that locally on my internal laptop speakers, but I can't seem to send that to device 39 successfully. I am suspecting that there are a few other things that need to be setup before it works, i.e. setting up airplay output to "denon", maybe opening a channel and reserving it. I don't know. Has anyone played with this? Is there a way to setup airplay from the command line? That would be awesome :)

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• How/when do you study?

  - by Sergei

  Would be interesting to find out how other sysadmins are educating themselves. I find myself in the need of constantly learning new things. I prefer to spend more time on the subject and know it thoroughly knowing that not doing so will kick me back in the future. This can be frustrating sometimes as it feels that I move too slowly. Our company has account on safari.oreilly.com and I am reading a book or two at any given time. I also read sysadmin related blogs for ideas and tips and to keep myself in the tune with the trends. I cannot do any study at home as I would rather spend my out of work hours with my family plus I find it hard/impossible to study at home due to the inability to concentrate at home. So I mostly study while on the train, luckily my commute time takes up to 2 hours a day. I also read a lot at work and don't feel guilty about it. To fix/implement/plan, I need to have a solid knowledge and if it requires time then this is a part of my job being a sysadmin. There is a joke that says "sysadmin is a person that knows a lot about everytihng and as a result knows nothing" - I think ther is a grain of truth here...

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• replacing the default console emulator under Windows XP

  - by Gilles

  How can I replace the default program providing console windows under Windows XP? I know of alternative programs, and I have a shortcut to start cmd.exe in Console2. But now I want console applications to start in Console2 rather than the default console program, even when I have no control over the program that starts the console application. (I.e. a non-console program starts consoleapp.exe, and I can't change it to start Console2 instead, but I still want the application to be started inside a new instance of Console2.) (Note that I want to replace the console itself, that is, the window in which console (i.e. text mode) applications run. And I must be able to run arbitrary, unmodified console applications: a substitute for a specific console program such as Cmd won't do me any good.) EDIT: So what I'm after is a CSRSS replacement, which leads to OT: I want to know when Microsoft is going to make a decent CSRSS replacement. Not being able to adjust the width of a "terminal" by resizing the window is a complete joke. Go download the ISE already. (It's included in Win7/2008R2.) But as far as I understand this ISE is an environment for Powershell, not a general console emulator.

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• Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

  - by user462779

  Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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• Is SugarCRM really adequate for custom development (or adequate at all)? [closed]

  - by dukeofgaming

  Have you used SugarCRM for custom development successfully?, if so, have you done it programmatically or through the Module Builder? Were you successful? If not, why? I used SugarCRM for a project about two years ago, I ran into errors from the very installation, having to hack the actual installation file to deploy the software in the server and other erros that I can't recall now. Two years after, I'm picking it up for a project once again. I'm feeling like I should have developed the whole thing from scratch myself. Some examples: I couldn't install it in the server (again). I had to install it locally, then copy the files and database over to the server and manually edit the config file. Constantly getting deployment errors from the module builder. One reason is SugarCRM keeps creating a record in the upgrade_history table for a file that does not exist, I keep deleting such record and it keeps coming back corrupt. I get other deployment errors, but have not figured them out. then I have to rollback all files and database to try again. I deleted a custom module with relationships, the relationships stayed in the other modules and cannot be deleted anymore, PHP warnings all over the place. Quick create for custom modules does not appear, hack needed. Its whole cache directory is a joke, permanent data/files are stored there. The module builder interface disappears required fields. Edit the wrong thing, module builder won't deploy again, then pray Quick Repair and/or Rebuild Relationships do the trick. My impression of SugarCRM now is that, regardless of its pretty exterior and apparent functionality, it is a very low quality piece of software. This even scared me more: http://amplicate.com/hate/sugarcrm; a quote: I wis this info had been available when I tried to implement it 2 years ago... I searched high and low and the only info I found was positive. Yes, it's a piece of crap. The community edition was full of bugs... nothing worked. Essentially I got fired for implementing it. I'm glad though, because now I work for myself, am much happier and make more money... so, I should really thank SugarCRM for sucking so much I guess! I figured that perhaps some of you have had similar experiences, and have either sticked with SugarCRM or moved on to another solution. I'm very interested in knowing what your resolutions were -or your current situations are- to make up my own mind, since the project I'm working on is long term and I'm feeling SugarCRM will be more an obstacle than an aid. After further failed attempts to continue using this software I continued to stumble upon dead-ends when using the module editor, I could only recover from this errors by using version control. We are now moving on to a custom implementation using Symfony; perhaps if we were using it with its out-of-the-box modules we would have sticked with it.

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• IE9 Beta

  - by Daniel Moth

  I've been using Internet Explorer 8 since the early pre-release bits, but I never tried IE9 until today – the day the Beta is available. I downloaded it from here: http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ The download took longer than what I expected, but I was doing other stuff, so no bother. After coming down, it asked me to reboot my computer. Really hate when apps do that, but I did it anyway. The first time I launched it, it prompted me with a list of add-ons I should disable including the start-up time that I could save fore each one. It even let me configure the prompt so, for example, it won't prompt me again unless an add-on contributes to more than 1 second of the startup time. Cool. First thing I noticed is that the search bar had gone and, as you'd expect, you have to search from the address box. I totally despise this feature. The first thing I've been doing with all versions of IE is to turn off the automatic searching from the address bar and now I have no way of searching if I do that. Ridiculous. The second thing I notice is that the tabs are next to the address bar and cannot be moved to go below it. One word for that decision: appalling (and, no, I didn't accidentally drop an 'e' and added an 'l' in the previous word). The third thing I notice to the right is the favorites button (star icon) and when I click on it, it brings up the favorites explorer under it on the right; then I pin the explorer and it jumps to the left(!). Why move the entry point to this feature to the right instead of leaving it on the left is beyond me (other than wanting to retrain me on what I've been used to for all this time), but the fact that pinning it makes it jump sides is… an "astonishing" design decision. As I browse I notice a little annoying pop up in the bottom left every time I hover over a link; there is no status bar. I correctly guessed to right click at the top and turn on the status bar (which also got rid of the popup thereafter) and while I am at it, I bring back my favorites bar which was hidden by default (and am pleased to see that all my favorites are still there). The next thing I notice, I like: IE9 is fast. No joke, I visit sites and they seem to be loading visibly much faster – try it! Beyond the speed, I am interested to find out what else is new. I searched and found a few good links: What's new in Internet Explorer 9 Internet Explorer 9 Features (check out the links under "Clean") Top Features If you are a developer, check out IE's msdn home for many articles, e.g. this section on Canvas and SVG. Either way: wherever you are, get IE9 Beta now and judge for yourself. If you don't like it, you can always uninstall (which auto-restores the previous version). Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• First Impressions of a MacBook (from a PC guy)

  - by dgreen

  Disclaimer: I've been a PC guy my entire working career. I'd probably characterize myself as a power user. Never afraid to bust out the console line. But working with a Mac is totally foreign to me. So for those Mac guys who are curious, this is how your world appears from the outside to a computer literate person :)My Macbook Air has arrived! And it's a thing of beauty:First, the specs: 13" MacBook Air, 2.0GHz Core i7 processor. Upgraded to 8GB of RAM for an additional $100, SSD flash storage  = 256GB. The plan is ultimately to use this baby for some iOS development but also some decent lifting in Windows with Visual Studio. Done a lot of reading  and between VMWare Fusion, Parallels and Bootcamp...I'm going to go with VMWare Fusion for $49.99And now my impressions (please re-read disclaimer before proceeding!):I open the box and am trying to understand exactly how the magsafe connector works (and how to disconnect it).  Why does it have two socket outlet plugs? Who knows.  I feel like Hansel in Zoolander. The files are "in" the computer.Stuck in my external hard drive (usb). So how do I get to the files? To the Googles!Argh...it can't read my external NTFS drive. Fat32 can't support field over 4GB…problematic since some of my existing VMWare image files are much larger than 4GB. Didn't see this coming.Three year old loves iPhoto. Super easy to use. Don't even know what I'm doing but I've already (accidentally) discovered the image filtering options. Fun stuff.First thing I downloaded ever => Chrome. I need something to ground me, something familiar. My token, if you will (sorry, gratuitous Inception joke).Ok, I get it… Finder == windows explorer. But where is my hierarchical structure? I miss the tree :(On that note, yeah…how do I see what "path" my files reside in? I'm afraid to know the answer. You know what scares more though…this notion of a smart folder. Feel like the godfather - just get the job done, I don't care how you handle it, I don't want to know...just get it done. What the hell is AirDrop?Mail…just worked. Still in shock that they have a free client for yahoo mail (please no yahoo jokes).mail -> deleting a message takes 5 seconds. Have they heard of async?"Command" key instead of "Control" ok, then what the $%&^! is the control key for then"aliases" == shortcuts I thinkI don't see the file system. And I'm scared. All these things I'm downloading…these .dmg files (bad name) where are they going? Can't seem to delete when they're doneUgh...realized need to buy a mini-to-vga adaptor if I want to use my external monitor ($13 on ebay, $39 in apple store).Windows docking is trickiest for me…this notion of detached windows with a menu bar at the top. I don't like this paradigm, it's confusing. But maybe because I've been using Windows for too long.Evernote, Dropbox desktop clients seem almost identical…few quirks here and there I need to get used to.iTunes is still a bit gross. In a weird way it's actually worse on a Mac if thats possible. This is not the MacBook's fault…this is a software design issue. Overall: UI will take some getting used to. Can't decide if this represents the future and I'm stuck in the past…or this is the past and I've been spoiled by the future (which would be Windows…don't be hating I happen to be very productive in Win7)  So there you go - my 90 minute first impression of the MacBook universe.

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• How can I work efficiently on a desktop sharing workflow?

  - by OSdave

  I am a freelance Magento developer, based in Spain. One of my clients is a Germany based web development company and they're asking me something I think it's impossible. OK, maybe not impossible but definitely not a preferred way of doing things. One of their clients has a Magento Entreprise installation, which is the paid (and I think proprietary) version of Magento. Their client has forbidden them to download the files from his server. My client is asking me now to study one particular module of the application in order to interact with it from a custom module I'll have to develop. As they have a read-only ssh access to their client's server, they came up with this solution: Set up a desktop/screen sharing session between one of their developer's station and mine, alongsides with a skype conversation. Their idea is that I'll say to the developer: show me file foo.php The developer will then open this foo.php file in his IDE. I'll have then to ask him to show me the bar method, the parent class, etc... Remember that it's a read-only session, so forget about putting a Zend_Debug::log() anywhere, and don't even think about a xDebug breakpoint (they don't use any kind of debugger, sic). Their client has also forbidden them to use any version control system... My first reaction when they explained to me this was (and I actually did say it outloud to them): Well, find another client. but they took it as a joke from me. I understand that in a business point of view rejecting a client is not a good practice, but I think that the condition of this assignment make it impossible to complete. At least according to my workflow. I mean, the way I work or learn a new framework/program is: download all files and copy of db on my pc create a git repository and a branch run the application locally use breakpoints use Zend_Debug::log() write the code and tests commit to git repo upload to (test/staging first if there is one, production if not) server I have agreed to try the desktop sharing session, although I think it will be a waste of time. On one hand I don't mind, they pay me for that time, but I know me and I don't like the sensation of loosing my time. On the other hand, I have other clients for whom I can work according to my workflow. I am about to say to them that I cannot (don't want to) do it. Well, I'll first try this desktop sharing session: maybe I'm wrong and it can actually work. But I like to consider myself as a professional, and I know that I don't know everything. So I try to keep an open mind and I am always willing to learn new stuff. So my questions are: Can this desktop-sharing workflow work? What should be done in order to take the most of it? Taking into account all the obstacles (geographic locations, no local, no git), is there another way for me to work on that project?

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• How far did DevExpress get with Javascript refactoring?

  - by MattX

  Over a year ago, I remember watching one of DevExpress evangelists previewing or at least promoting rich Javascript refactoring (beyond just limited intellisense) within the Visual Studio shell, I recall part of CodeRush/DevExpress product line. I was excited. On checking today (lmgtfy) I can find only very very limited reference to it, just one small italtic line about beta in product description, no videos, no blog posts, no community buzz. Was it dropped? Vapourware? Poor implementation that they dont even promote it? With Javascript arguably the most popular programming language ever and with a VM for it on practically every machine in last 10 years, why is editor support so poor? (Compared with those for Java and C#)? You see the likes of ScottGu bragging we now have jQuery intellisense but compare this to richness of C# support in the IDE it is a joke. Someone once said since there are many style of writing Javascript a rich IDE (beyond intellisense) with refactoring support is difficult, but if several engines can interpret/compile JS with same result surely it should be hard to analysis it to support stuff like rename variable, extract method, move to another namespace (or JS minic of it), etc.. Am I wrong?

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• Rails Fixtures Don't Seem to Support Transitive Associations

  - by Rick Wayne

  So I've got 3 models in my app, connected by HABTM relations: class Member < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :groups end class Group < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :software_instances end class SoftwareInstance < ActiveRecord::Base end And I have the appropriate join tables, and use foxy fixtures to load them: -- members.yml -- rick: name: Rick groups: cals -- groups.yml -- cals: name: CALS software_instances: delphi -- software_instances.yml -- delphi: name: No, this is not a joke, someone in our group is still maintaining Delphi apps... And I do a rake db:fixtures:load, and examine the tables. Yep, the join tables groups_members and groups_software_instances have appropriate IDs in, big numbers generated by hashing the fixture names. Yay! And if I run script/console, I can look at rick's groups and see that cals is in there, or cals's software_instances and delphi shows up. (Likewise delphi knows that it's in the group cals.) Yay! But if I look at rick.groups[0].software_instances...nada. []. And, oddly enough, rick.groups[0].id is something like 30 or 10, not 398398439. I've tried swapping around where the association is defined in the fixtures, e.g. -- members.yml -- rick name: rick -- groups.yml -- cals name: CALS members: rick No error, but same result. (Later: Confirmed, same behavior on MySQL. In fact I get the same thing if I take the foxification out and use ERB to directly create the join tables, so: -- license_groups_software_instances -- cals_delphi: group_id: <%= Fixtures.identify 'cals' % software_instance_id: <%= Fixtures.identify 'delphi' $ Before I chuck it all, reject foxy fixtures and all who sail in her and just hand-code IDs...anybody got a suggestion as to why this is happening? I'm currently working in Rails 2.3.2 with sqlite3, this occurs on both OS X and Ubuntu (and I think with MySQL too). TIA, my compadres.

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• Javascript/CSS rollover menus are patented and subject to licensing?

  - by Scott B

  Very interesting finding that a client brought to my attention today regarding javascript style rollover menus. They got a call from their legal dept that they need to change the manner in which their rollover menu is activated (at the risk of having to pay license to continue using the navigation technique). Its no April fools joke, apparently this is really happening. Apparently a company named Webvention LLC has obtained enforcement rights to a patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,251,294 - "Accessing, assembling, and using bodies of Information." A menu link, that when rolled over, expands to show a list of categorized, related links. Dropdown menus and slide-out menus are examples of this patented navigational methodology. A key component of this patent is that the dropdown/slide-out action must be initiated by a rollover or mouseover event. If the dropdown/slide-out action is initiated by any other event, such as a mouse-click event, then this behavior is not in violation of the patent. Anyone ever heard of this or know of the validity of its claims? Website is here: http://www.webventionllc.com/

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• What framework would allow for the largest coverage of freelance developers in the media/digital mar

  - by optician

  This question is not about which is the best, it is about which makes the most business sense to use as a company's platform of choice for ongoing freelance development. I'm currently trying to decide what framework to move my company in regarding frameworks for web application work. Options are ASP.NET MVC Django CakePHP/Symfony etc.. Struts Pearl on Rails Please feel free to add more to the discussion. I currently work in ASP.NET MVC in my Spare time, and find it incredibly enjoyable to work with. It is my first experince with an MVC framework for the web, so I can't talk on the others. The reason for not pushing this at the company is that I feel that there are not many developers in the Media/Marketing world who would work with this, so it may be hard to extend the team, or at least cost more. I would like to move into learning and pushing Django, partly to learn python, partly to feel a bit cooler (all my geeky friends use Java/Python/c++). Microsoft is the dark side to most company's I work with (Marketing/Media focused). But again I'm worried about developers in this sector. PHP seems like the natural choice, but I'm scared by the sheer amount of possible frameworks, and also that the quality of developer may be lower. I know there are great php developers out there, but how many of them know multiple frameworks? Are they similar enough that anyone decent at php can pick them up? Just put struts in the list as an option, but personally I live with a Java developer, and considering my experience with c#, I'm just not that interested in learning Java (selfish personal geeky reasons) Final option was a joke http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/perl_on_rails.shtml

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