Search Results

Search found 19093 results on 764 pages for 'max path'.

Page 614/764 | < Previous Page | 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617 618 619 620 621  | Next Page >

• Turnkey with LightSwitch

  - by Laila

  Microsoft has long wanted to find a replacement for Microsoft Access. The best attempt yet, which is due out in, or before, September is Visual Studio LightSwitch, with which it is said to be as 'easy as flipping a switch' to use Silverlight to create simple form-driven business applications. It is easy to get confused by the various initiatives from Microsoft. No, this isn't WebMatrix. There is no 'Razor', for this isn't meant for cute little ecommerce sites, but is designed to build simple database-applications of the card-box type. It is more clearly a .NET-based solution to the problem that every business seems to suffer from; the plethora of Access-based, and Excel-based 'private' and departmental database-applications. These are a nightmare for any IT department since they are often 'stealth' applications built by the business in the teeth of opposition from the IT Department zealots. As they are undocumented, it is scarily easy to bring a whole department into disarray by decommissioning a PC tucked under a desk somewhere. With LightSwitch, it is easy to re-write such applications in a standard, maintainable, way, using a SQL Server database, deployed somewhere reasonably safe such as Azure. Even Sharepoint or Windows Communication Foundation can be used as data sources. Oracle's ApEx has taken off remarkably well, and has shaken the perception that, for the business user, Oracle must remain a mystic force accessible only to the priests and acolytes. Microsoft, by comparison had only Access, which was first released in 1992, the year of the Madonna conical bustier. It looks just as dated. Microsoft badly needed an entirely new solution to the same business requirement that led to Access's and Foxpro's long-time popularity, but which had the same allure as ApEx. LightSwitch is sound in its ideas, and comfortingly conventional in its architecture. By giving an easy access to SQL Server databases, and providing a 'thumb and blanket' migration path to Access-heads, LightSwitch seems likely to offer a simple way of pulling more Microsoft users into the .NET community. If Microsoft puts its weight behind it, then it will give some glimmer of hope to the many Silverlight developers that Microsoft is capable of seeing through its .NET revolution.

  Read the article

• Shrink NTFS Windows 7 Partition with GParted

  - by user15961

  I am running a dual-boot system with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10. Initially I allocated about 20GB for my Ubuntu partition; however, I quickly ran out of that space and am now looking to expand my partition. Currently my NTFS partition (450GB) has about 130GB of free space. I tried using GParted to shrink the partition but encountered the following error. I booted into windows so I could run chkdsk but the countdown freezes at 1 upon reboot. I tried multiple methods to resolve that issue but nothing seems to work. Finally I gave up, and now I just want to know what is the best way for me to force GParted to shrink the partition regardless of the errors. I don't really have anything important and I don't mind risking the data. I just don't want to wipe the entire NTFS partition because I don't have a Windows install CD and might require Windows later on for some programs. I tried using sudo ntfsresize but that spews out the same error as GParted... Any ideas? Check and repair file system (ntfs) on /dev/sda2 00:00:09 ( ERROR ) calibrate /dev/sda2 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) path: /dev/sda2 start: 36944325 end: 976771119 size: 939826795 (448.14 GiB) check file system on /dev/sda2 for errors and (if possible) fix them 00:00:09 ( ERROR ) ntfsresize -P -i -f -v /dev/sda2 ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0) Device name : /dev/sda2 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Cluster size : 4096 bytes Current volume size: 481191318016 bytes (481192 MB) Current device size: 481191319040 bytes (481192 MB) Checking for bad sectors ... Checking filesystem consistency ... Cluster 63468 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63469 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63465 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63466 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63467 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165621 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165622 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165623 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165624 is referenced multiple times! ERROR: Filesystem check failed! ERROR: 9 clusters are referenced multiply times. NTFS is inconsistent. Run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot it TWICE! The usage of the /f parameter is very IMPORTANT! No modification was and will be made to NTFS by this software until it gets repaired.

  Read the article

• Reduce weight in healthy way - Day 2

  - by krnites

  My second day of reducing weight and it seems most of the blog are correct in saying that you can reduce weight if your calorie consumption is less than what you burn. In one day I have lost 1 lbs without doing anything. My current weight is 177.4 lbs. Yesterday I ate small portion of dinner that I used to eat that also around 7 PM. Normally I eat my dinner around 10 PM and withing 2 hour of eating I go for sleep, but yesterday I ate around 7 PM and went for sleep only after 12.On my second day I have eaten noodles and 3 eggs in breakfast and sesame chicken ( I love it) and fried rice in lunch, I still have not gone for running but had plan to go for running and then swimming. I hope it will at least burn the calories that I had taken. On some site it was written that a normal men body needs around 2000 Calorie a day. So if I am eating less than 2000 calorie ( noodles + 3 eggs = 400+200, rice + sesame chicken = 1300, total = 1900) and burning around 300 calorie, my total calorie intake will be 1600 which is less than what my body needs. So most probably by tomorrow I should come under 176 lb bracket.Apart from counting the calorie that I am taking in everyday and approx number of calorie that I am burning everyday, I had also starting tracking my physical activities on my mobile. I have got a beautiful Samsung Focus S Windows 7.5 mobile. And after browsing through the market I have downloaded couple of health Apps.1. 6 Week training - this has set of exercise and lets you choose the number of sets you want to do for all exercise. Its focus on your core muscles.2. Fast food Calories - This apps has all the fast food chain listed and give the calorie count of each of the food item available on there menu. Like for Burger King's French Fries Large (Salted) contains 500 Calorie.3. Gym Pocket Guide - Contains instructions for different kind of exercise and tells a right way of doing them.4.  RunSat - kind of GPS based application. Its mark the distance you have run, shows the path you have taken on a map, total calorie burnt, laps completed. I love this apps.5. Stop Watch I also have noticed that If I am running in GYM and have television in front of me where a movie or serial is going on which I like,  I normally didn't notice the time. Most of the time running on treadmill is very boring, but if some music video is playing or some kind of sitcom is going, I can run for  a hour or half.So on day 2 I have lost 1 lbs and had learnt that calorie intake should be less then calorie burnt for a given day.

  Read the article

• Running C++ AMP kernels on the CPU

  - by Daniel Moth

  One of the FAQs we receive is whether C++ AMP can be used to target the CPU. For targeting multi-core we have a technology we released with VS2010 called PPL, which has had enhancements for VS 11 – that is what you should be using! FYI, it also has a Linux implementation via Intel's TBB which conforms to the same interface. When you choose to use C++ AMP, you choose to take advantage of massively parallel hardware, through accelerators like the GPU. Having said that, you can always use the accelerator class to check if you are running on a system where the is no hardware with a DirectX 11 driver, and decide what alternative code path you wish to follow.  In fact, if you do nothing in code, if the runtime does not find DX11 hardware to run your code on, it will choose the WARP accelerator which will run your code on the CPU, taking advantage of multi-core and SSE2 (depending on the CPU capabilities WARP also uses SSE3 and SSE 4.1 – it does not currently use AVX and on such systems you hopefully have a DX 11 GPU anyway). A few things to know about WARP It is our fallback CPU solution, not intended as a primary target of C++ AMP. WARP stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform and you can read old info on this MSDN page on WARP. What is new in Windows 8 Developer Preview is that WARP now supports DirectCompute, which is what C++ AMP builds on. It is not currently clear if we will have a CPU fallback solution for non-Windows 8 platforms when we ship. When you create a WARP accelerator, its is_emulated property returns true. WARP does not currently support double precision.   BTW, when we refer to WARP, we refer to this accelerator described above. If we use lower case "warp", that refers to a bunch of threads that run concurrently in lock step and share the same instruction. In the VS 11 Developer Preview, the size of warp in our Ref emulator is 4 – Ref is another emulator that runs on the CPU, but it is extremely slow not intended for production, just for debugging. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• Apache doesn't load .php files

  - by Haddex

  First, sorry for my English and asking something that it's quite answered all over the web. I've read a lot of post about this problem but I still can't find the solution. I'm a web developer who recently moved to Ubuntu from Windows 7. I had a website done (it's online and working) and I set up LAMP to keep working with it. I made a test.php file with: <?php phpinfo(); ?> and put it on /var/www/html directory, it shows all the information about the php and I was really happy: "Ok, it's all done, tomorrow I will work hard" But I placed my whole web into /var/www/html , not in a folder, the index.php is in /var/www/html but guess what: doesn't load any of my .php files, the browser just keep thinking. What I did: I rebooted Apache: /etc/init.d/apache2 restart I tried again with the test.php file and it works fine I put in /var/www/html a .html file and works fine. I looked for /etc/apache2/sites-enable/000-default.conf and it says: DocumentRoot /var/www/html I looked for /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf and it says: DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php ... Edit* I think it's something related to phpmyadmin, like if I'm not able to connect with the database. But I got nothing on the screen when trying to load the page so...I'm not sure. I can access to the url localhost/phpmyadmin and I edited the connection.php file like this: <?php # FileName="Connection_php_mysql.htm" # Type="MYSQL" # HTTP="true" $hostname_rakstadconnection = "localhost"; $database_rakstadconnection = "rakstadclandb"; $username_rakstadconnection = "root"; $password_rakstadconnection = "admin"; $rakstadconnection = mysql_connect($hostname_rakstadconnection, $username_rakstadconnection, $password_rakstadconnection) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR); mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); ?> The name of the database is correct, like the user and password. http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k220/Haddex/Capturadepantallade2014-06-09112609_zpsc45ddb72.png http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k220/Haddex/Capturadepantallade2014-06-09112120_zps0b9e15f7.png *Edit2: could this be because it's a website that I brought to Linux from Windows? I used Dreamweaver. Edit3: I changed the # to /*/, nothing. The error.log file says: [Mon Jun 09 17:08:13.627881 2014] [:error] [pid 1517] [client 127.0.0.1:46663] PHP Warning: require_once(/var/www/html/Connections/rakstadconnection.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/html/index.php on line 1 [Mon Jun 09 17:08:13.627933 2014] [:error] [pid 1517] [client 127.0.0.1:46663] PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required 'Connections/rakstadconnection.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /var/www/html/index.php on line 1 I'm reading error log but...should I add a linux path into a my index.php file? Don't think so. Thanks.

  Read the article

• Pay in the future should make you think in the present

  - by BuckWoody

  Distributed Computing - and more importantly “-as-a-Service” models of computing have a different cost model. This is something that sounds obvious on the surface but it’s often forgotten during the design and coding phase of a project. In on-premises computing, we’re used to purchasing a server and all of the hardware infrastructure and software licenses needed not only for one project, but several. This is an up-front or “sunk” cost that we consume by running code the organization needs to perform its function. Using a direct connection over wires you’ve already paid for, we don’t often have to think about bandwidth, hits on the data store or the amount of compute we use - we just know more is better. In a pay-as-you-go model, however, each of these architecture decisions has a potential cost impact. The amount of data you store, the number of times you access it, and the amount you send back all come with a charge. The offset is that you don’t buy anything at all up-front, so that sunk cost is freed up. And financial professionals know that money now is worth more than money later. Saving that up-front cost allows you to invest it in other things. It’s not just that you’re using things that now cost money - it’s that the design itself in distributed computing has a cost impact. That can be a really good thing, such as when you dynamically add capacity for paying customers. If you can tie back the cost of a series of clicks to what a user will pay to do so, you can set a profit margin that is easy to track. Here’s a case in point: Assume you are using a large instance in Windows Azure to compute some data that you retrieve from a SQL Azure database. If you don’t monitor the path of the application, you may not know what you are really using. Since you’re paying by the size of the instance, it’s best to maximize it all the time. Recently I evaluated just this situation, and found that downsizing the instance and adding another one where needed, adding a caching function to the application, moving part of the data into Windows Azure tables not only increased the speed of the application, but reduced the cost and more closely tied the cost to the profit. The key is this: from the very outset - the design - make sure you include metrics to measure for the cost/performance (sometimes these are the same) for your application. Windows Azure opens up awesome new ways of doing things, so make sure you study distributed systems architecture before you try and force in the application design you have on premises into your new application structure.

  Read the article

• Is Cygwin or Windows Command Prompt preferable for getting a consistent terminal experience for development?

  - by Paul Hazen

  The question: Which is better, installing cygwin or one of its cousins on all my windows machines to have a consistent terminal experience across all my development machines, or becoming well trained in the skill of mentally switching from linux terminal to windows command prompt? Systems I use: OSX Lion on a Macbook Air Windows 8 on a desktop Windows 7 on the same desktop Fedora 16 on the same desktop What I'm trying to accomplish Configure an entirely consistent (or consistent enough) terminal experience across all my machines. "enough" in this context is clearly subjective. Please be clear in your answer why the configuration you suggest is consistent enough. One more thing to keep in mind: While I do write a lot of code intended to run on Windows (actually code that runs on Windows Phone which necessitates a windows machine), I also write a lot of Java code, and prefer to do so in vim. I test a local repo in Java on my windows machine, and push to another test machine running ubuntu later in the development stage. When I push to the ubuntu machine, I'm exclusively in terminal, since I'm accessing it via SSH. Summary, with more accurate question: Is there a good way to accomplish what I'm trying to do, or is it better to get accustomed to remembering different commands based on the system I'm on? Which (if either) is considered "best practice" by the development community? Alternatively, for a consistent development experience, would it be better to write all my code SSHed into another machine, and move things to windows for compile / build only when I needed to? That seems like too much work... but could be a solution. Update: While there are insightful responses below, I have yet to hear an answer that talks about why any given solution is superior. Cygwin/GnuWin32 is certainly a way to accomplish a similar experience on all platforms, but since I'm just learning all things command line, I don't want to set myself up to do a lot of relearning/unlearning in the future. Cygwin/GnuWin32 has its peculiarities I would imagine, and being aware of how that set up works on Windows is a learning curve. Additionally, using Cygwin/GnuWin32 robs me of learning the benefits of PowerShell. As a newcomer to working in a command line, which path should I choose to minimize having to relearn/unlearn things in the future? or as my first paragraph poses: [is it better to use Cygwin] ...or [become] well trained in the skill of mentally switching from linux terminal to windows command prompt?

  Read the article

• design a model for a system of dependent variables

  - by dbaseman

  I'm dealing with a modeling system (financial) that has dozens of variables. Some of the variables are independent, and function as inputs to the system; most of them are calculated from other variables (independent and calculated) in the system. What I'm looking for is a clean, elegant way to: define the function of each dependent variable in the system trigger a re-calculation, whenever a variable changes, of the variables that depend on it A naive way to do this would be to write a single class that implements INotifyPropertyChanged, and uses a massive case statement that lists out all the variable names x1, x2, ... xn on which others depend, and, whenever a variable xi changes, triggers a recalculation of each of that variable's dependencies. I feel that this naive approach is flawed, and that there must be a cleaner way. I started down the path of defining a CalculationManager<TModel> class, which would be used (in a simple example) something like as follows: public class Model : INotifyPropertyChanged { private CalculationManager<Model> _calculationManager = new CalculationManager<Model>(); // each setter triggers a "PropertyChanged" event public double? Height { get; set; } public double? Weight { get; set; } public double? BMI { get; set; } public Model() { _calculationManager.DefineDependency<double?>( forProperty: model => model.BMI, usingCalculation: (height, weight) => weight / Math.Pow(height, 2), withInputs: model => model.Height, model.Weight); } // INotifyPropertyChanged implementation here } I won't reproduce CalculationManager<TModel> here, but the basic idea is that it sets up a dependency map, listens for PropertyChanged events, and updates dependent properties as needed. I still feel that I'm missing something major here, and that this isn't the right approach: the (mis)use of INotifyPropertyChanged seems to me like a code smell the withInputs parameter is defined as params Expression<Func<TModel, T>>[] args, which means that the argument list of usingCalculation is not checked at compile time the argument list (weight, height) is redundantly defined in both usingCalculation and withInputs I am sure that this kind of system of dependent variables must be common in computational mathematics, physics, finance, and other fields. Does someone know of an established set of ideas that deal with what I'm grasping at here? Would this be a suitable application for a functional language like F#? Edit More context: The model currently exists in an Excel spreadsheet, and is being migrated to a C# application. It is run on-demand, and the variables can be modified by the user from the application's UI. Its purpose is to retrieve variables that the business is interested in, given current inputs from the markets, and model parameters set by the business.

  Read the article

• Driving Growth through Smarter Selling

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  With the proliferation of social media and mobile technologies, the world of selling and buying has drastically changed, as buyers now have access to more information than they did in the past. In fact, studies have shown that buyers complete 60 percent of the buying process before they even engage with a salesperson. The old models of selling no longer work effectively; and the new way of selling is driven by customer insights. To succeed, sales need to be proactive, not reactive. They need to engage with the customer early, sometimes even before the customer’s needs are fully understood. In fact, the best sales reps prescribe a solution that the customer doesn't even know they need, often by leveraging social media to listen, engage and collaborate with peers. And they fully tap into the power of analytics and data to drive results.  Let’s look at some stats regarding challenges facing sales today. According to recent studies, sales reps spend 78 percent of their time doing administrative things -- such as planning, searching for information, data entry -- and only 22 percent of the time actually selling. Furthermore, 40 percent of B2B sales reps miss their quota, and only 3 percent of companies can say with confidence that their forecasts are “always accurate.” How do you drive growth in this modern day and age? It's not just getting your sales teams to work harder; it's helping them work smarter and providing them with a solution they want to use, on the device(s) they already know, giving them critical insights and tools to be more productive, increase win rates, and close deals faster. Oracle Sales Cloud was designed to do exactly that. It enables smarter selling that allows reps to sell more, managers to know more, and companies to grow more.  Let’s face it—if all CRM solutions worked well, sales executives wouldn’t be having the same headaches as they had in the past. Join Oracle’s Thomas Kurian and Doug Clemmans on Tuesday, October 22 as they explain: • How today’s sales processes have rendered many CRM systems obsolete • The secrets to smarter selling, leveraging mobile, social, and big data • How Oracle Sales Cloud enables smarter selling—as proven by Oracle and its customers Take the first step down the path toward smarter selling. With Oracle Sales Cloud, reps sell more, managers know more, and companies grow more.

  Read the article

• What's the best way to create a static utility class in python? Is using metaclasses code smell?

  - by rsimp

  Ok so I need to create a bunch of utility classes in python. Normally I would just use a simple module for this but I need to be able to inherit in order to share common code between them. The common code needs to reference the state of the module using it so simple imports wouldn't work well. I don't like singletons, and classes that use the classmethod decorator do not have proper support for python properties. One pattern I see used a lot is creating an internal python class prefixed with an underscore and creating a single instance which is then explicitly imported or set as the module itself. This is also used by fabric to create a common environment object (fabric.api.env). I've realized another way to accomplish this would be with metaclasses. For example: #util.py class MetaFooBase(type): @property def file_path(cls): raise NotImplementedError def inherited_method(cls): print cls.file_path #foo.py from util import * import env class MetaFoo(MetaFooBase): @property def file_path(cls): return env.base_path + "relative/path" def another_class_method(cls): pass class Foo(object): __metaclass__ = MetaFoo #client.py from foo import Foo file_path = Foo.file_path I like this approach better than the first pattern for a few reasons: First, instantiating Foo would be meaningless as it has no attributes or methods, which insures this class acts like a true single interface utility, unlike the first pattern which relies on the underscore convention to dissuade client code from creating more instances of the internal class. Second, sub-classing MetaFoo in a different module wouldn't be as awkward because I wouldn't be importing a class with an underscore which is inherently going against its private naming convention. Third, this seems to be the closest approximation to a static class that exists in python, as all the meta code applies only to the class and not to its instances. This is shown by the common convention of using cls instead of self in the class methods. As well, the base class inherits from type instead of object which would prevent users from trying to use it as a base for other non-static classes. It's implementation as a static class is also apparent when using it by the naming convention Foo, as opposed to foo, which denotes a static class method is being used. As much as I think this is a good fit, I feel that others might feel its not pythonic because its not a sanctioned use for metaclasses which should be avoided 99% of the time. I also find most python devs tend to shy away from metaclasses which might affect code reuse/maintainability. Is this code considered code smell in the python community? I ask because I'm creating a pypi package, and would like to do everything I can to increase adoption.

  Read the article

• Reading a ZFS USB drive with Mac OS X Mountain Lion

  - by Karim Berrah

  The problem: I'm using a MacBook, mainly with Solaris 11, but something with Mac OS X (ML). The only missing thing is that Mac OS X can't read my external ZFS based USB drive, where I store all my data. So, I decided to look for a solution. Possible solution: I decided to use VirtualBox with a Solaris 11 VM as a passthrough to my data. Here are the required steps: Installing a Solaris 11 VM Install VirtualBox on your Mac OS X, add the extension pack (needed for USB) Plug your ZFS based USB drive on your Mac, ignore it when asked to initialize it. Create a VM for Solaris (bridged network), and before installing it, create a USB filter (in the settings of your Vbox VM, go to Ports, then USB, then add a new USB filter from the attached device "grey usb-connector logo with green plus sign")  Install a Solaris 11 VM, boot it, and install the Guest addition check with "ifconfg -a" the IP address of your Solaris VM Creating a path to your ZFS USB drive In MacOS X, use the "Disk Utility" to unmount the USB attached drive, and unplug the USB device. Switch back to VirtualBox, select the top of the window where your Solaris 11 is running plug your ZFS USB drive, select "ignore" if Mac OS invite you to initialize the disk In the VirtualBox VM menu, go to "Devices" then "USB Devices" and select from the dropping menu your "USB device" Connection your Solaris VM to the USB drive Inside Solaris, you might now check that your device is accessible by using the "format" cli command If not, repeat previous steps Now, with root privilege, force a zpool import -f myusbdevicepoolname because this pool was created on another system check that you see your new pool with "zpool status" share your pool with NFS: share -F NFS /myusbdevicepoolname Accessing the USB ZFS drive from Mac OS X This is the easiest step: access an NFS share from mac OS Create a "ZFSdrive" folder on your MacOS desktop from a terminal under mac OS: mount -t nfs IPadressofMySoalrisVM:/myusbdevicepoolname  /Users/yourusername/Desktop/ZFSdrive et voila ! you might access your data, on a ZFS USB drive, directly from your Mountain Lion Desktop. You might play with the share rights in order to alter any read/write rights as needed. You might activate compression, encryption inside the Solaris 11 VM ...

  Read the article

• How employable am I as a programmer?

  - by dsimcha

  I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

  Read the article

• What are these errors when I try to "make" the driver of my wireless network?

  - by Tom Brito

  I got got a wireless to usb adapter, and I'm having some trouble to install the drivers on Ubuntu. First of all, the readme file say to use the "make" command, and I already got errors: $ make make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic' CC [M] /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.o /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c: In function ‘rtl8192_usb_probe’: /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12325: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘open’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12326: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘stop’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12327: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘tx_timeout’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12328: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘do_ioctl’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12329: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘set_multicast_list’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12330: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘set_mac_address’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12331: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘get_stats’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12332: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘hard_start_xmit’ make[2]: *** [/home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.o] Error 1 make[1]: *** [_module_/home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic' make: *** [all] Error 2 /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/ is the path where I copied the drivers on my computer. Any idea how to solve this? (I don't even know what the error is...) update: sudo lshw -class network *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 03 serial: 78:e3:b5:e7:5f:6e size: 10MB/s capacity: 1GB/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10MB/s resources: irq:42 ioport:d800(size=256) memory:fbeff000-fbefffff memory:faffc000-faffffff memory:fbec0000-fbedffff *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface physical id: 2 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:26:18:a1:ae:64 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes wireless=802.11b/g

  Read the article

• Best way to implement a simple bullet trajectory

  - by AirieFenix

  I searched and searched and although it's a fair simple question, I don't find the proper answer but general ideas (which I already have). I have a top-down game and I want to implement a gun which shoots bullets that follow a simple path (no physics nor change of trajectory, just go from A to B thing). a: vector of the position of the gun/player. b: vector of the mouse position (cross-hair). w: the vector of the bullet's trajectory. So, w=b-a. And the position of the bullet = [x=x0+speed*time*normalized w.x , y=y0+speed*time * normalized w.y]. I have the constructor: public Shot(int shipX, int shipY, int mouseX, int mouseY) { //I get mouse with Gdx.input.getX()/getY() ... this.shotTime = TimeUtils.millis(); this.posX = shipX; this.posY = shipY; //I used aVector = aVector.nor() here before but for some reason didn't work float tmp = (float) (Math.pow(mouseX-shipX, 2) + Math.pow(mouseY-shipY, 2)); tmp = (float) Math.sqrt(Math.abs(tmp)); this.vecX = (mouseX-shipX)/tmp; this.vecY = (mouseY-shipY)/tmp; } And here I update the position and draw the shot: public void drawShot(SpriteBatch batch) { this.lifeTime = TimeUtils.millis() - this.shotTime; //position = positionBefore + v*t this.posX = this.posX + this.vecX*this.lifeTime*speed*Gdx.graphics.getDeltaTime(); this.posY = this.posY + this.vecY*this.lifeTime*speed*Gdx.graphics.getDeltaTime(); ... } Now, the behavior of the bullet seems very awkward, not going exactly where my mouse is (it's like the mouse is 30px off) and with a random speed. I know I probably need to open the old algebra book from college but I'd like somebody says if I'm in the right direction (or points me to it); if it's a calculation problem, a code problem or both. Also, is it possible that Gdx.input.getX() gives me non-precise position? Because when I draw the cross-hair it also draws off the cursor position. Sorry for the long post and sorry if it's a very basic question. Thanks!

  Read the article

• career planning advice [closed]

  - by JDB

  Possible Duplicate: Are certifications worth it? I am at the point in my career where people start to veer off into either management-type roles or they focus on solidifying their technical skills to stay in the development game for the long-haul. Here's my story: I've got a degree in economics, an MA in Political Science and an MBA in Finance and Management. In addition, I've done coursework in advanced math and software development (although no degree in math or software). All-in-all, I've got 13 years of post-secondary education under my belt. I, however, currently work as a software developer using C# for desktop, Silverlight, Flex and javascript for web, and objective c for mobile. I've been in software development for the past 3.3 years, and it seems like it comes pretty easy to me. I work in a field called "geospatial information systems," which just involves customization and manipulation of geospatial data. Right now I am looking at one of several certifications. Given this background, which of these certifications has the highest ceiling? CFA PMP various development/technological certifications from Microsoft, etc. Other? My academic and work experience are all heavy on the analytical/development side, esp. so given the MBA and the B.S. in Econ. The political science degree was really a lot of stats. So it seems that I would be good pursuing more of the CFA/analytical role. This is a difficult path, however, because I have no work experience in the financial sector, and the developers in finance are all "quants," which again, I am OK with, but I haven't done much statistical modeling in the past 3.3 years. The PMP would require knowledge of best practices as it pertains explicitly to software development. I also don't enjoy a lot of business travel, a common theme for most PMP jobs I've seen. If certifications is the route, which would you recommend? Anything else? I've thought about going back to try to knock out a B.S. in C.S., but I wasn't sure how long that would take, or what would be involved. Thoughts or recommendations? Thanks in advance! I turn 32 this weekend, which is what has forced me to think about these issues.

  Read the article

• Caching items in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Orchard has its own caching API that while built on top of ASP.NET's caching feature adds a couple of interesting twists. In addition to its usual work, the Orchard cache API must transparently separate the cache entries by tenant but beyond that, it does offer a more modern API. Here's for example how I'm using the API in the new version of my Favicon module: _cacheManager.Get( "Vandelay.Favicon.Url", ctx => { ctx.Monitor(_signals.When("Vandelay.Favicon.Changed")); var faviconSettings = ...; return faviconSettings.FaviconUrl; }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } There is no need for any code to test for the existence of the cache entry or to later fill that entry. Seriously, how many times have you written code like this: var faviconUrl = (string)cache["Vandelay.Favicon.Url"]; if (faviconUrl == null) { faviconUrl = ...; cache.Add("Vandelay.Favicon.Url", faviconUrl, ...); } Orchard's cache API takes that control flow and internalizes it into the API so that you never have to write it again. Notice how even casting the object from the cache is no longer necessary as the type can be inferred from the return type of the Lambda. The Lambda itself is of course only hit when the cache entry is not found. In addition to fetching the object we're looking for, it also sets up the dependencies to monitor. You can monitor anything that implements IVolatileToken. Here, we are monitoring a specific signal ("Vandelay.Favicon.Changed") that can be triggered by other parts of the application like so: _signals.Trigger("Vandelay.Favicon.Changed"); In other words, you don't explicitly expire the cache entry. Instead, something happens that triggers the expiration. Other implementations of IVolatileToken include absolute expiration or monitoring of the files under a virtual path, but you can also come up with your own.

  Read the article

• Proven Approach to Financial Progress Using Modern Best Practice

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE by Larry Simcox, Sr. Director, Oracle Midsize Programs Top performing organizations generate 25 percent higher profit margins and grow at twice the rate of their competitors. How do they do it? Recently, Dr. Stephen G. Timme, President of FinListics Solutions and Adjunct Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, joined me on a webcast to answer that question. I've know Dr. Timme since my days at G-log when we worked together to help customers determine the ROI of transportation management solutions. We were also joined by Steve Cox, Vice President of Oracle Midsize Programs, who recently published an Oracle E-book, "Modern Best Practice Explained". In this webcast, Cox provides his perspective on how best performing companies are moving from best practice to modern best practice.  Watch the webcast replay and you'll learn about the easy to follow, top down approach to: Identify processes that should be targeted for improvement Leverage a modern best practice maturity model to start a path to progress Link financial performance gaps to operational KPIs Improve cash flow by benchmarking key financial metrics Develop intelligent estimates of achievable cash flow benefits Click HERE to watch a replay of the webcast. You might also be interested in the following: Video: Modern Best Practices Defined  AppCast: Modern Best Practices for Growing Companies Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Larry Simcox Senior Director, Oracle Midsize Programs responsible for supporting and creating marketing content ,communications, sales and partner program support for Oracle's go to market activities for midsize companies. I have over 17 years experience helping customers identify the value and ROI from their IT investment. I live in Charlotte NC with my family and my dog Dingo. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

  Read the article

• How can I achieve a 3D-like effect with spritebatch's rotation and scale parameters

  - by Alic44

  I'm working on a 2d game with a top-down perspective similar to Secret of Mana and the 2D Final Fantasy games, with one big difference being that it's an action rpg using a 3-dimensional physics engine. I'm trying to draw an aimer graphic (basically an arrow) at my characters' feet when they're aiming a ranged weapon. At first I just converted the character's aim vector to radians and passed that into spritebatch, but there was a problem. The position of every object in my world is scaled for perspective when it's drawn to the screen. So if the physics engine coordinates are (1, 0, 1), the screen coords are actually (1, .707) -- the Y and Z axis are scaled by a perspective factor of .707 and then added together to get the screen coordinates. This meant that the direction the aimer graphic pointed (thanks to its rotation value passed into spritebatch) didn't match up with the direction the projectile actually traveled over time. Things looked fine when the characters fired left, right, up, or down, but if you fired on a diagonal the perspective of the physics engine didn't match with the simplistic way I was converting the character's aim direction to a screen rotation. Ok, fast forward to now: I've got the aimer's rotation matched up with the path the projectile will actually take, which I'm doing by decomposing a transform matrix which I build from two rotation matrices (one to represent the aimer's rotation, and one to represent the camera's 45 degree rotation on the x axis). My question is, is there a way to get not just rotation from a series of matrix transformations, but to also get a Vector2 scale which would give the aimer the appearance of being a 3d object, being warped by perspective? Orthographic perspective is what I'm going for, I think. So, the aimer arrow would get longer when facing sideways, and shorter when facing north and south because of the perspective. At the same time, it would get wider when facing north and south, and less wide when facing right or left. I'd like to avoid actually drawing the aimer texture in 3d because I'm still using spritebatch's layerdepth parameter at this point in my project, and I don't want to have to figure out how to draw a 3d object within the depth sorting system I already have. I can provide code and more details if this is too vague as a question... This is my first post on stack exchange. Thanks a lot for reading! Note: (I think) I realize it can't be a technically correct 3D perspective, because the spritebatch's vector2 scaling argument doesn't allow for an object to be skewed the way it actually should be. What I'm really interested in is, is there a good way to fake the effect, or should I just drop it and not scale at all? Edit to clarify without the help of a picture (apparently I can't post them yet): I want the aimer arrow to look like it has been painted on the ground at the character's feet, so it should appear to be drawn on the ground plane (in my case the XZ plane) which should be tilted at a 45 degree angle (around the X axis) from the viewing perspective. Alex

  Read the article

• Can a 10-bit monitor connection preserve all tones in 8-bit sRGB gradients on a wide-gamut monitor?

  - by hjb981

  This question is about color management and the use of a higher color depth, 10 bits per channel (30 bits in total, resulting in 1.07 billion colors, or 1024 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "deep color") compared to the standard of 8 bits per channel (24 bits in total, 16.7 million colors, 256 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "true color"). Do not confuse with "32 bit color", which usually refers to standard 8 bit color with an extra channel ("alpha channel") for transparency (used to achieve effects like semi-transparent windows etc). The following can be assumed to be in place: 1: A wide-gamut monitor that supports 10-bit input. Further, it can be assumed that the monitor has been calibrated to its native gamut and that an ICC color profile has been created. 2: A graphics card that supports 10-bit output (and is connected to the monitor via DisplayPort). 3: Drivers for the graphics card that support 10-bit output. If applications that support 10-bit output and color profiles would be used, I would expect them to display images that were saved using different color spaces correctly. For example, both an sRGB and an adobeRGB image should be displayed correctly. If an sRGB image was saved using 8 bits per channel (almost always the case), then the 10-bit signal path would ensure that no tonal gradients were lost in the conversion from the sRGB of the image to the native color space of the monitor. For example: If the image contains a pixel that is pure red in 8 bits (255,0,0), the corresponding value in 10 bits would be (1023,0,0). However, since the monitor has a larger color space than sRGB, sending the signal (1023,0,0) to the monitor would result in a red that was too saturated. Therefore, according to the ICC color profile, the signal would be transformed into a different value with less red saturation, for example (987,0,0). Since there are still plenty of levels left between 0 and 987, all 256 values (0-255) for red in the sRGB color space of the file could be uniquely mapped to color-corrected 10-bit values in the monitor's native color space. However, if the conversion was done in 8 bits, (255,0,0) would be translated to (246,0,0), and there would now only be 247 available levels for the red channel instead of 256, degrading the displayed image quality. My question is: how does this work on Ubuntu? Let's say that I use Firefox (which is color-aware and uses ICC color profiles). Would I get 10-bit processing, thus preserving all levels of an 8-bit picture? What is the situation like for other applications, especially photo applications like Shotwell, Rawtherapee, Darktable, RawStudio, Photivo etc? Does Ubuntu differ from other operating systems (Linux and others) on this point?

  Read the article

• Oracle Virtualization Friday Spotlight - November 8, 2013

  - by Monica Kumar

  Hands-on Private Cloud Simulator In One Hour Submitted by: Doan Nguyen, Senior Principal Product Marketing Director My aeronautics instructor used to say, "you can’t appreciate flying until you take flight." To clarify, this is not about gearing up in a flying squirrel suit and hopping off a cliff (topic for another blog!) but rather about flying an airplane. The idea is to get hands-on with the controls at the cockpit and experience flight before you actually fly a real plane. After the initial 40 hours of flight time, the concept sank in and it really made sense.This concept is what inspired our technical experts to put together the hands-on lab for a private cloud deployment and management self-service model. Yes, we are comparing the lab to a flight simulator! Let’s look at the parallels: To get trained to fly, starting in the simulator gets you off the ground quicker. There is no need to have a real plane to begin with. In a hands-on lab, there is no need for a real server, with networking and real storage installed. All you need is your laptop The simulator is pre-configured, pre-flight check done. Similarly, in a hands-on lab, Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager are pre-configured and assembled using Oracle VM VirtualBox as the container. Software installations are not needed. After time spent training at the controls, you can really appreciate the practical experience of flying. Along the same lines, the hands-on lab is a guided learning path, without the encumbrances of hardware, software installation, so you can learn about cloud deployment and management.  However, unlike the simulator training, your time investment with the lab is only about an hour and not 40 hours! This hands-on lab takes you through private cloud deployment and management using Oracle VM and  Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c in an Infrastructure as a service IaaS model. You will first configure the IaaS cloud as the cloud administrator and then deploy guest virtual machines (VMs) as a self-service user. Then you are ready to take flight into the cloud! Why not step into the cockpit now!

  Read the article

• 5.1 surround sound

  - by rocker9455

  Ok, So i've always had trouble with enabling 5.1 in ubuntu. Running 'alsamixer': I have: Master, Heaphones, PCM, Front, Front Mi, Front Mi, Surround, Center All are at 100% Card:HDA Intel Chip:Realtek ALC888 (This is my onboard sound, Its a dell studio, with 7.1 integrated sound) Running "speaker-test -c6 -twav" I only get the front 2 speakers (Right/Left) making any noise. The others make no noise at all. I have no other sound card to use as all my PCI slots are used up. Daemon.conf: ; daemonize = no ; fail = yes ; allow-module-loading = yes ; allow-exit = yes ; use-pid-file = yes ; system-instance = no ; enable-shm = yes ; shm-size-bytes = 0 # setting this 0 will use the system-default, usually 64 MiB ; lock-memory = no ; cpu-limit = no ; high-priority = yes ; nice-level = -11 ; realtime-scheduling = yes ; realtime-priority = 5 ; exit-idle-time = 20 ; scache-idle-time = 20 ; dl-search-path = (depends on architecture) ; load-default-script-file = yes ; default-script-file = ; log-target = auto ; log-level = notice ; log-meta = no ; log-time = no ; log-backtrace = 0 resample-method = speex-float-1 ; enable-remixing = yes ; enable-lfe-remixing = no flat-volumes = no ; rlimit-fsize = -1 ; rlimit-data = -1 ; rlimit-stack = -1 ; rlimit-core = -1 ; rlimit-as = -1 ; rlimit-rss = -1 ; rlimit-nproc = -1 ; rlimit-nofile = 256 ; rlimit-memlock = -1 ; rlimit-locks = -1 ; rlimit-sigpending = -1 ; rlimit-msgqueue = -1 ; rlimit-nice = 31 ; rlimit-rtprio = 9 ; rlimit-rttime = 1000000 ; default-sample-format = s16le ; default-sample-rate = 44100 ; default-sample-channels = 6 ; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right default-fragments = 8 default-fragment-size-msec = 10

  Read the article

• Speaker Notes...

  - by wulfers

  At a .Net User Group meeting this week, I experienced two poorly prepared speakers floundering through presentations….  As a Lead Technologist at the company I work for, I have experience training technical staff and also giving presentations at code camps.  Here are a few guidelines for aspiring speakers you might find helpful…   1.       Do not stand in front of your audience and read your slides.  This is  offensive to your audience and not what they came for...  Your slides are there to reinforce the information you are presenting and to give the audience a little clarification on some terms you may use and as a visual aid for some complicated issues. 2.       Have someone review your presentation (slides, notes, …) who speaks the language you will be presenting in fluently.  Also record at least ten minutes of your presentation and have that same person review that.  One of the speakers this week used the word “Basically” fifty times in less than thirty minutes…  I started to flinch every time he used the term. 3.       Be Prepared  -  before the presentation begins.  Don’t make any last minute changes to your presentation or demo code the night before.  Don’t patch your laptop or demo servers the night before.  If possible create a virtual image that you only use for presentations and use that (refreshed before every presentation). 4.       Know the level of expertise of your audience.  Speaking above or below their abilities will make or break your presentation. 5.       Deliver what you promise. The presentation this week was supposed to be on BDD (Behavior Driven Develpment).  The presenter completely ran off track and 90% of the discussion was how his team mistakenly used TDD (Test Driven Development), and was unhappy with the results.  Based on his loss of focus we only heard a rushed 10 minute presentation on DBB which was a disservice to the audience. 6.       Practice your presentation with your own small team before you try this on a room full of people you don’t know.  A side benefit of doing this with your own team is that you can get candid feedback from your team and also get kudos for training your own team.  I find I can also turn my presentations into technical white papers and get a third benefit from the work I’ve put into a presentation. 7.       Sharpen your own saw.  Pick a topic that is fairly current.  Something you would like to learn about and would benefit your current career path. 8.       Have fun doing it.

  Read the article

• Best Practices for serializing/persisting String Object Dictionary entities

  - by Mark Heath

  I'm noticing a trend towards using a dictionary of string to object (or sometimes string to string), instead of strongly typed objects. For example, the new Katana project makes heavy use of IDictionary<string,object>. This approach avoids the need to continually update your entity classes/DTOs and the database tables that persist them with new properties. It also avoids the need to create new derived entity types to support new types of entity, since the Dictionary is flexible enough to store any arbitrary properties. Here's a contrived example: class StorageDevice { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } class NetworkShare : StorageDevice { public string Path { get; set; } public string LoginName { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } } class CloudStorage : StorageDevice { public string ServerUri { get; set } public string ContainerName { get; set; } public int PortNumber { get; set; } public Guid ApiKey { get; set; } } versus: class StorageDevice { public IDictionary<string, object> Properties { get; set; } } Basically I'm on the lookout for any talks, books or articles on this approach, so I can pick up on any best practices / difficulties to avoid. Here's my main questions: Does this approach have a name? (only thing I've heard used so far is "self-describing objects") What are the best practices for persisting these dictionaries into a relational database? Especially the challenges of deserializing them successfully with strongly typed languages like C#. Does it change anything if some of the objects in the dictionary are themselves lists of strongly typed entities? Should a second dictionary be used if you want to temporarily store objects that are not to be persisted/serialized across a network, or should you use some kind of namespacing on the keys to indicate this?

  Read the article

• Modelling highly specific business requirements

  - by AndyBursh

  How can one go about modelling highly specific business requirements, which have no precedent in the system? Take for example the following requirement: When a purchase order contains N lines, is over X value in total and is being recorded against project Y, an email needs to be sent to persons A and B with the details This requirement supplements other requirements surrounding purchase orders, but comes in at a much later date in response to some ongoing problem elsewhere in the business. Persons A and B are not part of any role or group in the system, and don't hold any specific responsibility; they are simply the two people the business has appointed to receive these emails in this very specific case. Projects are also data driven, so project Y has no special properties to distinguish it from any other project. The only way to identify it is to compare its identifier to a magic number. How can one go about modelling this kind of case without introducing too much additional complexity? That I can think of right now, there are a couple of options. Perform the checks and actions inline with the existing code. Here we find the correct spot in the code, check the conditions in the requirement and send the emails to hardcoded addresses. Of course this is fraught with issues. At the very least it stops working if one of these people leaves or changes their email address. At worst you have to ensure that any tests and test data are aware that additional actions are taken for a specific set of criteria. Introduce some form of events system. Here we introduce an eventing system, so that we might react to some event, and fulfil the requirement outside of the usual path of execution. This sounds like a cleaner solution than option 1, but the work involved is ultimately probably slightly overkill for this one small requirement. That said, having it in place does allow the system to handle these kinds of specific requirements consistently and easily in the future. Are there any other (good/better) ways of handling highly specific requirements? I mean other than telling the other parts of the business no!

  Read the article

• Legitimate use of the Windows "Documents" folder in programs.

  - by romkyns

  Anyone who likes their Documents folder to contain only things they place there knows that the standard Documents folder is completely unsuitable for this task. Every program seems to want to put its settings, data, or something equally irrelevant into the Documents folder, despite the fact that there are folders specifically for this job1. So that this doesn't sound empty, take my personal "Documents" folder as an example. I don't ever use it, in that I never, under any circumstances, save anything into this folder myself. And yet, it contains 46 folders and 3 files at the top level, for a total of 800 files in 500 folders. That's 190 MB of "documents" I didn't create. Obviously any actual documents would immediately get lost in this mess. My question is: can anything be done to improve the situation sufficiently to make "Documents" useful again, say over the next 5 years? Can programmers be somehow educated en-masse not to use it as a dumping ground? Could the OS start reporting some "fake" location hidden under AppData through the existing APIs, while only allowing Explorer and the various Open/Save dialogs to know where the "real" Documents folder resides? Or are any attempts completely futile or even unnecessary? 1For the record, here's a quick summary of the various standard directories that should be used instead of "Documents": RoamingAppData for user-specific data and settings. This is the directory to use for user-specific non-temporary data. Anything placed here will be available on any machine that a given user logs on to in networks where this is configured. Do not place large files here though, because they slow down login/logout in such environments. LocalAppData for user-and-machine-specific data and settings. This data differs for every user and every machine. This is also where very large user-specific data should be placed. ProgramData for machine-specific data and settings. These are the same regardless of which user is logged on, and will not roam to other machines in a network. GetTempPath for all files that may be wiped without loss of data when not in use. This is also the place for things like caches, because like temporary data, a cache does not need to be backed up. Place your huge cache here and you'll save your user some backup trouble. "Documents" itself should only ever be used if the user specified it manually by entering a path or selecting it in a Save dialog. That is the only time it is ever appropriate to save stuff in "Documents".

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617 618 619 620 621  | Next Page >