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• SQL SERVER – BI Quiz Hint – Performance Tuning Cubes – Hints

  - by pinaldave

  I earlier wrote about SQL BI Quiz over here and here. The details of the quiz is here: Working with huge data is very common when it is about Data Warehousing. It is necessary to create Cubes on the data to make it meaningful and consumable. There are cases when retrieving the data from cube takes lots of the time. Let us assume that your cube is returning you data very quickly. Suddenly on one day it is returning the data very slowly. What are the three things will you to diagnose this. After diagnose what you will do to resolve performance issue. Participate in my question over here I required BI Expert Jason Thomas to help with few hints to blog readers. He is one of the leading SSAS expert and writes a complicated subject in simple words. If queries were executing properly before but now take a long time to return the data, it means that there has been a change in the environment in which it is running. Some possible changes are listed below:-  1) Data factors:- Compare the data size then and now. Increase in data can result in different execution times. Poorly written queries as well as poor design will not start showing issues till the data grows. How to find it out? (Ans : SQL Server profiler and Perfmon Counters can be used for identifying the issues and performance  tuning the MDX queries)  2) Internal Factors:- Is some slow MDX query / multiple mdx queries running at the same time, which was not running when you had tested it before? Is there any locking happening due to proactive caching or processing operations? Are the measure group caches being cleared by processing operations? (Ans : Again, profiler and perfmon counters will help in finding it out. Load testing can be done using AS Performance Workbench (http://asperfwb.codeplex.com/) by running multiple queries at once)  3) External factors:- Is some other application competing for the same resources?  HINT : Read “Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services” (http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2007/12/16/identifying-and-resolving-mdx-query-performance-bottlenecks-in-sql-server-2005-analysis-services.aspx) Well, these are great tips. Now win big prizes by participate in my question over here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Validating Spatial Object with IsValidDetailed Function

  - by pinaldave

  What do you prefer – error or warning indicating error may happen with the reason for the error. While writing the previous statement I remember the movie “Minory Report”. This blog post is not about minority report but I will still cover the concept in a single statement “Let us predict the future and prevent the crime which is about to happen in future”. (Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong about the movie concept, I really do not want to hurt your sentiment if you are dedicated fan). Let us switch to the SQL Server world. Spatial data types are interesting concepts. I love writing about spatial data types because it allows me to be creative with shapes (just like toddlers). When working with Spatial Datatypes it is all good when the spatial object works fine. However, when the spatial object has issue or it is created with invalid coordinates it used to give a simple error that there is an issue with the object but did not provide much information. This made it very difficult to debug. If this spatial object was used in the big procedure and while this big procedural error out because of the invalid spatial object, it is indeed very difficult to debug it. I always wished that the more information provided regarding what is the problem with spatial datatype. SQL Server 2012 has introduced the new function IsValidDetailed(). This function has made my life very easy. In simple words this function will check if the spatial object passed is valid or not. If it is valid it will give information that it is valid. If the spatial object is not valid it will return the answer that it is not valid and the reason for the same. This makes it very easy to debug the issue and make the necessary correction. DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'Polygon((2 2, 6 6, 4 2, 2 2))' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'Polygon((2 2, 3 3, 4 4, 5 5, 6 6, 2 2))' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'Polygon((2 2, 4 4, 4 2, 2 3, 2 2))' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'CIRCULARSTRING(2 2, 4 4, 0 0)' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'CIRCULARSTRING(2 2, 4 4, 0 0)' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO DECLARE @p GEOMETRY = 'LINESTRING(2 2, 4 4, 0 0)' SELECT @p.IsValidDetailed() GO Here is the resultset of the above query. You can see any valid query and some invalid query. If the query is invalid it also demonstrates the reason along with the error message. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Spatial Database, SQL Spatial

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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• JCP EC Nomination Materials for 2012

  - by heathervc

  The nomination period of the 2012 Annual JCP EC Elections will begin at the end of September 2012.  The JCP will be accept self-nominations for 2 seats on what will become the merged JCP EC, starting 28 September, with the nomination period ending on Thursday, 11 October. JCP Members (JSPA 2 primary contacts) will receive messages with instructions for nominating and their login credentials via email.  You will need this credential information to login and complete the nomination.The JCP EC Special Election schedule is posted online in the JCP calendar, highlights are below:Nominations for elected seats: 28 September-11 OctoberBallot (ratified and elected): 16-29 OctoberNew members take office: 13 November The ballot with nominees for ratified and nominated seats begins on 16 October. The results will also be available on jcp.org on 30 October. If you are attending JavaOne 2012 in San Francisco, there are several events happening that you may be interested in attending, in particular the following BOF session.Meet the JCP Executive Committee CandidatesSession ID: BOF6307Location: Hilton San Francisco - Golden Gate 3/4/5Date and Time: 10/2/12, 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM We will also be hosting a call for all of the candidates following the nomination period.  The following information is required for self-nomination.1) Contact information/Biography Each EC seat is represented by two people - a primary and alternate representative. Provide the following information for each representative: - Name - Title - Email Address - Mailing Address - Phone Number - Fax - A brief biography (3-5 sentences/~100-200 words) for primary contact - Photograph (prefer jpg format, head only shot) for primary contactBios and photos for the EC members are posted here:http://jcp.org/en/press/news/ec-feature_MEhttp://jcp.org/en/press/news/ec-feature_SE2) Qualification StatementA brief (2-3 paragraph) description of your qualifications for an EC seat; this is a Qualification Statement for the organization you represent. It should include the value and perspective you bring to the EC, your interests in the JCP program, as well as a summary of your current participation or planned participation in the JCP program (your entire organization)--JSRs, participation on Expert Groups, meetings/events attended, etc.  This statement will appear on the ballot and will convince community members that they should vote for you, so please include relevant information about your experience within the JCP program and your investments in Java technology.A few sample qualification statements are available here.3) Position PaperOne of the pieces of information we make available to the JCP membership for voting purposes is a position paper.  If you would like to provide this type of information for the ballot, please prepare in pdf format for posting.  This would be more detail on areas that you would put focus into during your tenure on the JCP EC.You can read more about some of the topics under discussion in the EC here, including links to JCP.Next materials. If you have an interest in participating in the JCP EC, please start preparing these materials now.  We look forward to a successful election process.

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• Working with Reporting Services Filters – Part 3: The TOP and BOTTOM Operators

  - by smisner

  Thus far in this series, I have described using the IN operator and the LIKE operator. Today, I’ll continue the series by reviewing the TOP and BOTTOM operators. Today, I happened to be working on an example of using the TOP N operator and was not successful on my first try because the behavior is just a bit different than we find when using an “equals” comparison as I described in my first post in this series. In my example, I wanted to display a list of the top 5 resellers in the United States for AdventureWorks, but I wanted it based on a filter. I started with a hard-coded filter like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [ResellerSalesAmount] Float Top N 5 And received the following error: A filter value in the filter for tablix 'Tablix1' specifies a data type that is not supported by the 'TopN' operator. Verify that the data type for each filter value is Integer. Well, that puzzled me. Did I really have to convert ResellerSalesAmount to an integer to use the Top N operator? Just for kicks, I switched to the Top % operator like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [ResellerSalesAmount] Float Top % 50 This time, I got exactly the results I expected – I had a total of 10 records in my dataset results, so 50% of that should yield 5 rows in my tablix. So thinking about the problem with Top N some  more, I switched the Value to an expression, like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [ResellerSalesAmount] Float Top N =5 And it worked! So the value for Top N or Top % must reflect a number to plug into the calculation, such as Top 5 or Top 50%, and the expression is the basis for determining what’s in that group. In other words, Reporting Services will sort the rows by the expression – ResellerSalesAmount in this case – in descending order, and then filter out everything except the topmost rows based on the operator you specify. The curious thing is that, if you’re going to hard-code the value, you must enter the value for Top N with an equal sign in front of the integer, but you can omit the equal sign when entering a hard-coded value for Top %. This experience is why working with Reporting Services filters is not always intuitive! When you use a report parameter to set the value, you won’t have this problem. Just be sure that the data type of the report parameter is set to Integer. Jessica Moss has an example of using a Top N filter in a tablix which you can view here. Working with Bottom N and Bottom % works similarly. You just provide a number for N or for the percentage and Reporting Services works from the bottom up to determine which rows are kept and which are excluded.

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• Allocating Entities within an Entity System

  - by miguel.martin

  I'm quite unsure how I should allocate/resemble my entities within my entity system. I have various options, but most of them seem to have cons associated with them. In all cases entities are resembled by an ID (integer), and possibly has a wrapper class associated with it. This wrapper class has methods to add/remove components to/from the entity. Before I mention the options, here is the basic structure of my entity system: Entity An object that describes an object within the game Component Used to store data for the entity System Contains entities with specific components Used to update entities with specific components World Contains entities and systems for the entity system Can create/destroy entites and have systems added/removed from/to it Here are my options, that I have thought of: Option 1: Do not store the Entity wrapper classes, and just store the next ID/deleted IDs. In other words, entities will be returned by value, like so: Entity entity = world.createEntity(); This is much like entityx, except I see some flaws in this design. Cons There can be duplicate entity wrapper classes (as the copy-ctor has to be implemented, and systems need to contain entities) If an Entity is destroyed, the duplicate entity wrapper classes will not have an updated value Option 2: Store the entity wrapper classes within an object pool. i.e. Entities will be return by pointer/reference, like so: Entity& e = world.createEntity(); Cons If there is duplicate entities, then when an entity is destroyed, the same entity object may be re-used to allocate another entity. Option 3: Use raw IDs, and forget about the wrapper entity classes. The downfall to this, I think, is the syntax that will be required for it. I'm thinking about doing thisas it seems the most simple & easy to implement it. I'm quite unsure about it, because of the syntax. i.e. To add a component with this design, it would look like: Entity e = world.createEntity(); world.addComponent<Position>(e, 0, 3); As apposed to this: Entity e = world.createEntity(); e.addComponent<Position>(0, 3); Cons Syntax Duplicate IDs

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• Secret of SQL Trace Duration Column

  - by Dan Guzman

  Why would a trace of long-running queries not show all queries that exceeded the specified duration filter?  We have a server-side SQL Trace that includes RPC:Completed and SQL:BatchCompleted events with a filter on Duration >= 100000.  Nearly all of the queries on this busy OLTP server run in under this 100 millisecond threshold so any that appear in the trace are candidates for root cause analysis and/or performance tuning opportunities. After an application experienced query timeouts, the DBA looked at the trace data to corroborate the problem.  Surprisingly, he found no long-running queries in the trace from the application that experienced the timeouts even though the application’s error log clearly showed detail of the problem (query text, duration, start time, etc.).  The trace did show, however, that there were hundreds of other long-running queries from different applications during the problem timeframe.  We later determined those queries were blocked by a large UPDATE query against a critical table that was inadvertently run during this busy period. So why didn’t the trace include all of the long-running queries?  The reason is because the SQL Trace event duration doesn’t include the time a request was queued while awaiting a worker thread.  Remember that the server was under considerable stress at the time due to the severe blocking episode.  Most of the worker threads were in use by blocked queries and new requests were queued awaiting a worker to free up (a DMV query on the DAC connection will show this queuing: “SELECT scheduler_id, work_queue_count FROM sys.dm_os_schedulers;”).  Technically, those queued requests had not started.  As worker threads became available, queries were dequeued and completed quickly.  These weren’t included in the trace because the duration was under the 100ms duration filter.  The duration reflected the time it took to actually run the query but didn’t include the time queued waiting for a worker thread. The important point here is that duration is not end-to-end response time.  Duration of RPC:Completed and SQL:BatchCompleted events doesn’t include time before a worker thread is assigned nor does it include the time required to return the last result buffer to the client.  In other words, duration only includes time after the worker thread is assigned until the last buffer is filled.  But be aware that duration does include the time need to return intermediate result set buffers back to the client, which is a factor when large query results are returned.  Clients that are slow in consuming results sets can increase the duration value reported by the trace “completed” events.

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• "Well, Swing took a bit of a beating this week..."

  - by Geertjan

  One unique aspect of the NetBeans community presence at JavaOne 2012 was its usage of large panels to highlight and discuss various aspects (e.g., Java EE, JavaFX, etc) of NetBeans IDE usage and tools. For example, here's a pic of one of the panels, taken by Markus Eisele: Above you see me, Sean Comerford from ESPN.com, Gerrick Bivins from Halliburton, Angelo D'Agnano and Ioannis Kostaras from the NATO Programming Center, and Çagatay Çivici from PrimeFaces. (And Tinu Awopetu was also on the panel but not in the picture!) On one of those panels a remark was made which has kind of stuck with me. Henry Arousell, a member of the "NetBeans Platform Discussion Panel", who works on accounting software in Sweden, together with Thomas Boqvist, who was also at JavaOne, said, a bit despondently, I thought, the following words at the start of the demo of his very professional looking accounting software: "Well, Swing took a bit of a beating this week..." That remark comes in the light of several JavaFX sessions held at JavaOne, together with many sessions from the web and mobile worlds making the argument that the browser, tablet, and mobile platforms are the future of all applications everywhere. However, then I had another look at the list of Duke's Choice Award winners: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1854931 OK, there are 10 winners of the Duke's Choice Award this year. Three of them (JDuchess, London Java Community, Student Nokia Developer Group) are not awards for software, but for people or groups. So, that leaves seven awards. Three of them (Hadoop, Jelastic, and Parleys) are, in one way or another, some kind of web-oriented solution, though both Hadoop and Jelastic are broader than that, but are service-oriented solutions, relating to cloud technologies. That leaves four others: NATO air defense software, Liquid Robotics software, AgroSense software, and UNHCR Refugee Registration software. All these are, on the software level, Java desktop solutions that, on the UI layer, make use of Java Swing, together with LuciadMaps (NATO), GeoToolkit (AgroSense), and WorldWind (Liquid Robotics). (And, it went even further than that, i.e., this is not passive usage of Swing but active and motivated: Timon Veenstra, during his AgroSense demo, said "There are far more Swing applications out there than we seem to think. Web developers just make more noise." And, during his Liquid Robotics demo, James Gosling said: "Not everything can be done in HTML.") Seems to me that Java Swing was the enabler of more Duke's Choice Award winners this year than any other UI-oriented Java technology. Now, I'm not going to interpret that one way or another, since I've noticed that interpretations of facts tend to validate some underlying agenda. Take any fact anywhere and you can interpret it to prove whatever opinion you're already holding to be true. Therefore, no interpretation from me. Simply stating the fact that Swing, far from taking a beating during JavaOne 2012, was a more significant user interface enabler of Duke's Choice Award winners than any other Java user interface technology. That's not an interpretation, but a fact.

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• Game Center: Leaderboard score inconsistencies

  - by Hasyimi Bahrudin

  Background I'm currently developing a simple library that mirrors Game Center's functionalities locally. Basically, this library is a system that manages achievements and leaderboards, and optionally sync it with the Game Center. So, if the game is not GC enabled, the game will still have achievements and leaderboards (stored inside a plist). But of course, the leaderboards will then only contain the local player's scores (which is kind of useless, I know :P). Problem Currently I have coded both of the achievements and leaderboards subsystems. The achievements subsystem have already been tested and it works. I'm currently testing the leaderboards subsystem using multiple test user accounts. I loaded the test app on a device and on the simulator, both logged in with 2 different user accounts. Then I performed these steps: I first used the device to upload a score. Then, I ran the simulator, and the score submitted by the user on the device is shown. Which is cool. Then, I used the simulator to upload a score. But on the device, still, only one score is listed. I checked on the Game Center app (to see if the bug lies within my code), and I got the same thing. Under "All players", there is only one score on the device, but there are 2 scores on the simulator. I wanted to make sure that the simulator is not causing this, so I swapped the users on the device and the simulator, and the result is still the same. In other words, the first user is oblivious of the second user's score, but the second user can see the first user's score. Then I tried with a third user. The result: the third user can only see the scores of the first user and himself. The second user still sees the scores of the first user and himself. The first user only sees his own score. Now here comes the weird part. I then make the first user and the second user befriend each other. The result: under "Friends", the first user can see the second user's score, but under "All Players", the first user's score is the only one listed. Screenshots The first user sees this: The second user sees this: So, is this a normal thing when using sandboxed GC accounts? Is this behavior documented somewhere by Apple?

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• Why do some user agents have spam urls in them?

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  If you go to (say) the last 100 entries (visits) to the botsvsbrowsers.com website (exact link, feel free to take a look: http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html ), you'd notice that almost every User Agent that has the keywords "Opera" and "Presto" inside them, will almost certainly have a web link (URL/Web Address) inside it, and it won't just be a normal web address, but a HTML anchor tag/link to that address. Why is this so, I could not even find a single discussion about it on the internet, nowhere, I tried varying my search terms many times. If the user agent contains the words "Opera" and "Presto" it doesnt mean it will have this weblink, but it means there is about an 80% change that it will. A typical anchor tag/link inside a user agent will look like this: Mozilla/4.0 <a href="http://osis-uk.co.uk/disabled-equipment">disability equipment</a> (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60 If you check it out at the website, http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html you will notice that the back and forward arrows are in there unescaped format. This isn't just true for botsvsbrowsers, but several other user agent listing sites. I'm really confused and feel line I'm in a room full of 10,000 people and am the only one seeing this ghost :). If I'm doing statistical analysis, should I include or exclude this type of user agent from my listing (ie: are these just normal users who've set their user agents to attempt to drive some traffic to their sites as they browser the web), or is there something else going on? The fact that it is so consistent in terms of its format leads me to believe that it is an automated process (the setting or alteration of the user agent) so I cannot decide or understand the process by which this change is made (I know how to change a user agent), but unsure which program or facility is doing this, especially since it is exclusive to Opera (Presto) user agents that are beyond I think an 8 or 9 point something browser version. I've run some statistical tests, parsing entries from all over the place, writing custom programs, to get a better understanding of this. Keep in mind that I see normal URL's in user agents infrequently, they are just text such as +http://www.someSite.com appended to a user agent normally, especially if its a crawler or bot it provided its service URL, this is normal and isnt done with an embedded link (A HREF=) etc, so I'm not talking about "those".

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• SQL SERVER – SSAS – Multidimensional Space Terms and Explanation

  - by pinaldave

  I was presenting on SQL Server session at one of the Tech Ed On Road event in India. I was asked very interesting question during ‘Stump the Speaker‘ session. I am sharing the same with all of you over here. Question: Can you tell me in simple words what is dimension, member and other terms of multidimensional space? There is no simple example for it. This is extreme fundamental question if you know Analysis Service. Those who have no exposure to the same and have not yet started on this subject, may find it a bit difficult. I really liked his question so I decided to answer him there as well blog about the same over here. Answer: Here are the most important terms of multidimensional space – dimension, member, value, attribute and size. Dimension – It describes the point of interests for analysis. Member – It is one of the point of interests in the dimension. Value – It uniquely describes the member. Attribute – It is collection of multiple members. Size – It is total numbers for any dimension. Let us understand this further detail taking example of any space. I am going to take example of distance as a space in our example. Dimension – Distance is a dimension for us. Member – Kilometer – We can measure distance in Kilometer. Value – 4 – We can measure distance in the kilometer unit and the value of the unit can be 4. Attribute – Kilometer, Miles, Meter – The complete set of members is called attribute. Size – 100 KM – The maximum size decided for the dimension is called size. The same example can be also defined by using time space. Here is the example using time space. Dimension – Time Member – Date Value – 25 Attribute – 1, 2, 3…31 Size – 31 I hope it is clear enough that what are various multidimensional space and its terms. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Engine Rendering pipeline : Making shaders generic

  - by fakhir

  I am trying to make a 2D game engine using OpenGL ES 2.0 (iOS for now). I've written Application layer in Objective C and a separate self contained RendererGLES20 in C++. No GL specific call is made outside the renderer. It is working perfectly. But I have some design issues when using shaders. Each shader has its own unique attributes and uniforms that need to be set just before the main draw call (glDrawArrays in this case). For instance, in order to draw some geometry I would do: void RendererGLES20::render(Model * model) { // Set a bunch of uniforms glUniformMatrix4fv(.......); // Enable specific attributes, can be many glEnableVertexAttribArray(......); // Set a bunch of vertex attribute pointers: glVertexAttribPointer(positionSlot, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, stride, m->pCoords); // Now actually Draw the geometry glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, m->vertexCount); // After drawing, disable any vertex attributes: glDisableVertexAttribArray(.......); } As you can see this code is extremely rigid. If I were to use another shader, say ripple effect, i would be needing to pass extra uniforms, vertex attribs etc. In other words I would have to change the RendererGLES20 render source code just to incorporate the new shader. Is there any way to make the shader object totally generic? Like What if I just want to change the shader object and not worry about game source re-compiling? Any way to make the renderer agnostic of uniforms and attributes etc?. Even though we need to pass data to uniforms, what is the best place to do that? Model class? Is the model class aware of shader specific uniforms and attributes? Following shows Actor class: class Actor : public ISceneNode { ModelController * model; AIController * AI; }; Model controller class: class ModelController { class IShader * shader; int textureId; vec4 tint; float alpha; struct Vertex * vertexArray; }; Shader class just contains the shader object, compiling and linking sub-routines etc. In Game Logic class I am actually rendering the object: void GameLogic::update(float dt) { IRenderer * renderer = g_application->GetRenderer(); Actor * a = GetActor(id); renderer->render(a->model); } Please note that even though Actor extends ISceneNode, I haven't started implementing SceneGraph yet. I will do that as soon as I resolve this issue. Any ideas how to improve this? Related design patterns etc? Thank you for reading the question.

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• OSB 11g & SAP – Single Channel/Program ID for Multiple IDOCs

  - by Shub Lahiri, A-Team

  Background This note is a supplement to the blog entry, SOA 11g & SAP – Single Channel/Program ID for Multiple IDOCs by Greg Mally. Greg has shown how a single SOA Suite composite can be used with iWay Adapters to receive multiple IDOC types via a single channel in the adapter, corresponding to a single programID on the SAP system. We will try to address the same requirements within the OSB framework here. Project Built - Design Time The basic build of an OSB project with iWay SAP Adapter, as seen in another entry in this blog, consists of working in OSB Design console and Application Explorer. OSB Design Time - Part 1 We will create a placeholder project first in OSB with a proper directory structure, so that we can export the WSDL, XSD and the JCA binding information from Application Explorer directly into this project. Application Explorer - iWay Design Time Tool Receiving IDOCs is classified as an inbound event within Application Explorer. For setting up events, a channel is first defined (e.g. iDoc_Channel) using the same PROGRAMID (RFC destination), as defined within SAP for the OSB server. Next, the same channel is used to export the JCA Inbound Event artifacts for the candidate IDOC, e.g. DEBMAS06 directly to the pre-created OSB project. Note that the validation for schema has been turned off. As a result, this will allow the adapter, at runtime, to use a single channel to receive multiple IDOC types from SAP and pass them on to the OSB runtime engine without any validation. In other words, we do not have to repeat the above step for each IDOC type. OSB Design Time - Part 2 Create 2 simple XML based Business Services to write to a file, e.g.  SAP_DEBMAS_File and SAP_MATMAS_File. Next, generate a Proxy Service using the JCA binding file exported from Application Explorer in the previous section. In the generated proxy service, edit the message flow and add a route node. Add a routing table in the route node with the following routing function. fn:local-name-from-QName(fn:node-name($body/*[1])) This function takes advantage of the fact that the XML payload at runtime, after translation by adapter, has the IDOC type as the top element. With the routing function in place, build the routing table to add 2 branches to route the IDOCs to the appropriate Business Service for writing the XML payload to files in separate directories. This completes the build of the OSB project. Testing - Run-Time After deployment and activation, the SAP adapter will wait to receive multiple types of IDOCs sent from the SAP system using a single channel. Upon receipt of the IDOCs, the OSB project will route them appropriately to save the corresponding XML payloads for different IDOC types in different directories.

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• The value of money

  - by ambreesh

  A dictionary definition of money is "any circulating medium of exchange, including coins, paper money, anddemand deposits". If you ask an economist for a definition of money, you will be introduced to terms like M1, M2, M3, all of which denote tangible assets - currency, and anything that is liquid enough to be used as currency; checks, stamps and now mobile minutes being examples. The macroeconomic theory of money is fascinating - the effect of money supply on exchange rates and interest rates, the concept of the "money multiplier" (if I deposit $10 into a bank, the bank will likely loan $8 of it to someone else, who will then give it to someone else in exchange for goods and services, who will then likely deposit it again, which will result in the bank loaning it again and so on - making that $10 of money supply worth a lot more ($10+$8+$x+...)).  But all this depends on money supply - in other words, money that is printed by the mint. The Treasury Department spends a lot of time figuring out how much money to print, there is lot being written on QE2 now-a-days, which is intended to increase the money supply. Money is used to purchase goods and services, and yes it is saved too but that is so one can purchase goods and services later. Completely unrelated, there is a sea change occurring in the web world, dominated by, I believe, Facebook. With 500M active users and growing, FB has the ability to introduce a "money supply" which is completely unrelated to today's "money". Using today's money, a FB user can buy a certain number of FB$s, and then use the FB$s within FB to purchase goods and services - with the money multiplier kicking in. I remember talking with a colleague about this a few years ago, the true way to monetize the web is to introduce an alternative system to the existing, and FB has the ability to do just that. There is enough momentum, enough mass for FB to start to monetize its user base. And completely screw up the economists at the Treasury, not to mention disintermediating the banks completely. The only other ubiquitous asset is mobile minutes. People exchanging mobile minutes for tangible goods and services happens today, the big difference however is the demographic. While Safaricom offers this ability in Kenya today, FB has the 15-40 year middle class user as their user. And the next generation is growing up with FB as a standard channel for communicating with their peers. Virtual flowers when going in for the kill? If your target is an avid FB user, why not? It certainly is a lot more green - no pun intended!

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• Robust line of sight test on the inside of a polygon with tolerance

  - by David Gouveia

  Foreword This is a followup to this question and the main problem I'm trying to solve. My current solution is an hack which involves inflating the polygon, and doing most calculations on the inflated polygon instead. My goal is to remove this step completely, and correctly solve the problem with calculations only. Problem Given a concave polygon and treating all of its edges as if they were walls in a level, determine whether two points A and B are in line of sight of each other, while accounting for some degree of floating point errors. I'm currently basing my solution on a series of line-segment interection tests. In other words: If any of the end points are outside the polygon, they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B crosses any of the edges from the polygon, then they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B does not cross any of the edges from the polygon, then they are in line of sight. But the problem is dealing correctly with all the edge cases. In particular, it must be able to deal with all the situations depicted below, where red lines are examples that should be rejected, and green lines are examples that should be accepted. I probably missed a few other situations, such as when the line segment from A to B is colinear with an edge, but one of the end points is outside the polygon. One point of particular interest is the difference between 1 and 9. In both cases, both end points are vertices of the polygon, and there are no edges being intersected, but 1 should be rejected while 9 should be accepted. How to distinguish these two? I could check some middle point within the segment to see if it falls inside or not, but it's easy to come up with situations in which it would fail. Point 7 was also pretty tricky and I had to to treat it as a special case, which checks if two points are adjacent vertices of the polygon directly. But there are also other chances of line segments being col linear with the edges of the polygon, and I'm still not entirely sure how I should handle those cases. Is there any well known solution to this problem?

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• links for 2011-02-21

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Calling all enterprise architects | Enterprise architecture - InfoWorld Nominations are now open for the 2011 InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Award, honoring companies whose enterprise architecture initiatives made a difference (tags: ping.fm) Red Tape, Part II : OTN Garage "How do you back up all of that storage? Tape: really fast tape. And, lots of it. This creates a whole variety of very interesting challenges today, elevating the topic to – at the very least – glamorous, but I think it qualifies as being downright hot!" - Kemer Thomson (tags: oracle entarch datastorage) The Buttso Blathers: Using Secure Config Files with the WebLogic Maven Plugin "WebLogic Server has long had a mechanism to provide a more secure way of connecting to the Administration Server from client utilities such that the username and password do not need to be specified and therefore can’t be seen from the process list or command shell history." (tags: oracle weblogic) World-class EA | Open Group Blog "World-class Enterprise Architecture is all about creating definitive collateral that defines how the architecture delivers value for societal value." - Mick Adams (tags: enterprisearchitecture entarch opengroup) Enterprise Process Maps: A Process Picture worth a Million Words (Telecommunications Architecture Corner) "Every BPM project (holistic BPM kick-off, enterprise system implementation, Service-oriented Architecture, business process transformation, corporate performance management, etc.) should be begin with a clear understanding of the business environment..." - Raul Goycoolea (tags: oracle otn telecommunications businessprocess entarch bpm) Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog: WebCenter PS3 Customization Manager- Long Awaited Feature for MDS Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovski shares "really great news for those of you who are working on MDS personalization and customization support in Oracle Fusion Middleware applications." (tags: oracle otn oracleace webcenter enterprise2.0) Oracle WebCenter: Common User Experience Architecture (Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blog) Kellsey Ruppel describes "how the new release of Oracle WebCenter delivers a Common User Experience Architecture." (tags: oracle otn webcenter enterprise2.0) Java / Oracle SOA blog: Do your SOA deployments & configuration with AIA Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond illustrates the use of the SOA Suite / FMW deployment framework, "one of the Application Integration Architecture (AIA) hidden gems." (tags: oracle oracleace soa otn fusionmiddleware) Enterprise Software Development with Java: Clustering Stateful Session Beans with GlassFish 3.1 Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele describes what he did "to get a Stateful Session Bean failover scenario working with two instances on one node." (tags: oracle otn oracleace glassfish) Enhanced REST Support in Oracle Service Bus 11gR1 (SOA Thinker) Jeff Davies illustrates how to re-implement the REST-ful Products services using query strings for passing parameter information. (tags: oracle otn soa REST)

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3)

  - by Ankit G

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Delighted to announce the GA of EM Cloud Control Release 3 on all supported platforms. This release includes a new 12.1.0.3 version of platform (OMS & Agent), along with revised new versions of several Plug-ins and Metadata plug-ins (including a brand new Metadata plug-in for Oracle Virtual Networking). This release marks yet another major & significant milestone for Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control product releases. Following shows the list of new plug-ins versions available along the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3). The new plug-ins have dependency on 12.1.0.3 platform, and customer needs to be on minimum 12.1.0.3 platform (OMS/Agent) version of the product before being able to deploy/use these plug-in versions. (In other words, the new plug-in versions cannot be deployed, unless Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3) is installed or upgraded to). Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3) release includes tons of new features, along with several stability and performance bug fixes and is available for download for all platforms from OTN:Installation/Upgrade paths: EM Customers can do a fresh installation using "Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3)", and will get the latest version of the platform, along with all the latest versions of plug-ins and Metadata plug-ins out of the box. EM Customers who are on Release1 (12.1.0.1+BP1) or Release 2 (12.1.0.2), or on older releases 11g and 10.2.0.5, can choose to use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 bits, to upgrade directly to the latest Release 3, and the plug-ins will be automatically upgraded to the latest versions. Enterprise Manager Certification Matrix is also now available on My Oracle Support - here.

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• Where Are You on the Visualization Maturity Curve?

  - by Celine Beck

  The old phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true now as ever. Providing the right users with access to the right product data, at the right time, can provide significant benefits to a business. This is especially evident with increasing technical and product complexities, elongated supply chains, and growing pressure to bring innovative products to market faster. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why visualization is an integral part of any successful product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy. At a bare minimum, knowledge workers use multiple individual documents of different formats and structure, and leverage visualization solutions to access information; but the real value of visualization can be fully reaped when it is connected to enterprise applications like PLM and tied to the appropriate business context. The picture below illustrates this visualization maturity curve, as we presented during the last Oracle Open World and the transformational effect that visualization can have on PLM processes and performance (check out the post about AutoVue Key Highlights from Oracle Open World 2012 for more information). Organizations are likely to see greater positive impact on business performance when visualization is connected to enterprise systems, allowing access to information coming from multiple sources, such as PLM, supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). This allows organizations to reach higher levels of collaboration and optimize decision-making capacity as users can benefit from in-context access to visual information. For instance, within a PLM system, a design engineer can access a product assembly and review digital annotations added by other users specific to the engineering change request he is reviewing rather than all historical annotations. The last stage on the curve is what we call augmented business visualization (ABV).  ABV is an innovative framework which lets structured data (from Oracle’s Agile PLM for instance) interact with unstructured data (documents, design, 3D models, etc). With this new level of integration, information coming from multiple sources can be presented in a highly visual fashion; color displays can be used in order to identify parts with specific characteristics (for example pending quality issues) and you can take actions directly from within the context of documents and designs, maximizing user productivity. Those who had the chance to attend our PLM session during Oracle Open World already got a sneak peek of our latest augmented business visualization for Oracle’s Agile PLM. The solution generated a lot of wows. Stephen Porter, CEO at Zero Wait State, indicated in a post entitled “The PLM State: the Manhattan Project-Oracle’s Next Big Secret Weapon” that “this kind of synergy between visualization and PLM could qualify as a powerful weapon differentiating Agile PLM from other solutions.” If you are interested in learning more about ABV for Oracle’s Agile PLM and hear about real examples of usage of visualization at all stages of the visualization maturity curve, don’t miss our Visual Decision Making to Optimize New Product Development and Introduction session during the Oracle Value Chain Summit (Feb. 4-6, 2013, San Francisco). We look forward to seeing you there!

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• Customer won't decide, how to deal?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  I write software that involves the use of measured quantities, many input by the user, most displayed, that are fed into calculation models to simulate various physical thing-a-majigs. We have created a data type that allows us to associate a numeric value with a unit, we call these "quantities" (big duh). Quantities and units are unique to dimension. You can't attach kilogram to a length for example. Math on quantities does automatic unit conversion to SI and the type is dimension safe (you can't assign a weight to a pressure for example). Custom UI components have been developed that display the value and its unit and/or allow the user to edit them. Dimensionless quantities, having no units, are a single, custom case implemented within the system. There's a set of related quantities such that our target audience apparently uses them interchangeably. The quantities are used in special units that embed the conversion factors for the related quantity dimensions...in other words, when using these units converting from one to another simply involves multiplying the value by 1 to the dimensional difference. However, conversion to/from the calculation system (SI) still involves these factors. One of these related quantities is a dimensionless one that represents a ratio. I simply can't get the "customer" to recognize the necessity of distinguishing these values and their use. They've picked one and want to use it everywhere, customizing the way we deal with it in special places. In this case they've picked one of the dimensions that has a unit...BUT, they don't want there to be a unit (GRR!!!). This of course is causing us to implement these special overrides for our UI elements and such. That of course is often times forgotten and worse...after a couple months everyone forgets why it was necessary and why we're using this dimensional value, calling it the wrong thing, and disabling the unit. I could just ignore the "customer" and implement the type as the dimensionless quantity, which makes most sense. However, that leaves the team responsible for figuring it out when they've given us a formula using one of the other quantities. We have to not only figure out that it's happening, we have to decide what to do. This isn't a trivial deal. The other option is just to say to hell with it, do it the customer's way, and let it waste continued time and effort because it's just downright confusing as hell. However, I can't count the amount of times someone has said, "Why is this being done this way, it makes no sense at all," and the team goes off the deep end trying to figure it out. What would you do? Currently I'm still attempting to convince them that even if they use terms interchangeably, we at the least can't do that within the product discussion. Don't have high hopes though.

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• What are some good realistic programming related movies (docu-dramas, documentaries, accurate fiction, etc)?

  - by EpsilonVector

  A while ago I asked this question and the result was this. Following the response I got in the meta question I'm re-asking the question with new guidelines to focus it on the direction I wanted it to have originally. ================================================================== The guidelines are as follows: by "programming related" I mean movies from which we can learn about stuff like the development process, or history of software/computers, or programming culture. In other words, they must be grounded in the industry. No tangential stuff. Good entries answer as many of the following criteria as possible: Teach you about the history of the industry, or the development process, or teach you about important industry related topics (software patents for example) Are based on real life events, companies, people, practices, and they are the main focus of the movie After watching them, you feel like you understand or know something about the programmers' world that you didn't before (or you can see how someone could have such a response). You can point to it and say "this faithfully represents the industry/programmer culture at some point in time". This might be something you would show laymen to explain to them what "your people" are like and what is it that you do. Examples for good entries include: Pirates of Silicon Valley- the story of how Microsoft and Apple started the industry. Revolution OS- The story of Linux's rise to fame, and a pretty good cover of the Free Software/Open Source world. Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks- development process. Examples for bad entries: Movies who's sole relevance is that they can be appreciated by programmers. The point of this question is not to be "what are some good movies" with "for a programmer" appended to it. Just because the writers got a few computer jokes right in itself doesn't make it about the industry. Movies where there's a computer related element, but are not about the industry. For example, 24 (the TV series). It's a product of the information age but it isn't actually about it. Another example is movies where there's a really cool programmer character, but are overall about something completely different. Likewise, The Big Bang Theory is not about physics, even though they have a cool physicist as a character. Science fiction, even if it draws ideas from computers. For example, the Matrix trilogy. Movies that you can't point to them and say: this is a faithful representation of our world (at some point in time). If you can't do that then it doesn't mirror the industry. Keep it one entry per answer so that the voting could sort the entries out.

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• Misadventures at Radio Shack

  - by Chris Williams

  While I'm waiting for my Arduino kits to show up, I started reading the Getting Started With Arduino book from O'Reilly (review coming later) and I'm about 40 pages in when I get to a parts list for one of the first projects. Looks pretty straightforward, and even has Radio Shack part numbers next to almost everything. So on my lunch today, I decided to run out to "The Shack" (seriously, that's their rebranding?) to pick up some basics, like a couple resistors, a breadboard, a momentary switch and a pack of pre-cut jumper wires. I found the resistors without any difficulty, and while they didn't have the exact switch I wanted, it was easy enough to find one that would do. That's where my good luck abruptly ended. I was surprised that I couldn't find a breadboard or any jumper wires, so while I was looking around, a guy came up and asked me if I needed some help. I told him I did, explained what I needed and even gave him the Radio Shack part number for the pack of jumper wires. After a couple minutes he says he can't find anything in the system, which was unfortunate but not the end of the world.  So then I asked him about the breadboard, and he pointed me to some blank circuitboards (which are not the same thing) and I said (nicely) that those weren't breadboards and attempted to explain (again) what I needed, at which point he says to me "I don't even know what the hell you're looking for!" I stood there for a moment and tried to process his words. About that time, another salesperson came up and asked what I was trying to find. I told her I needed a breadboard, and she pointed to the blank circuit boards and said "they're right in front of you..." After seeing the look on my face, she thought for a minute and said... "OH! you mean those white things. We don't have those anymore." I thanked her, set everything down on the counter and left. (I wasn't going to buy only half the stuff I needed.. and I was pretty sure I was never going to be buying ANYTHING at that particular location ever again.) Guess I'll be ordering more stuff online at this point. It's a shame really, because I used to LOVE going to Radio Shack as a kid, and looking through all the cool electronics components and stuff, even if I didnt understand what most of them were at the time. Seems like the only thing they carry in any quantity/variety now is cell phones and random stereo connectors.

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• Stop trying to be perfect

  - by Kyle Burns

  Yes, Bob is my uncle too.  I also think the points in the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship (manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org) are all great.  What amazes me is that tend to confuse the term “well crafted” with “perfect”.  I'm about to say something that will make Quality Assurance managers and many development types as well until you think about it as a craftsman – “Stop trying to be perfect”. Now let me explain what I mean.  Building software, as with building almost anything, often involves a series of trade-offs where either one undesired characteristic is accepted as necessary to achieve another desired one (or maybe stave off one that is even less desirable) or a desirable characteristic is sacrificed for the same reasons.  This implies that perfection itself is unattainable.  What is attainable is “sufficient” and I think that this really goes to the heart both of what people are trying to do with Agile and with the craftsmanship movement.  Simply put, sufficient software drives the greatest business value.   I've been in many meetings where “how can we keep anything from ever going wrong” has become the thing that holds us in analysis paralysis.  I've also been the guy trying way too hard to perfect some function to make sure that every edge case is accounted for.  Somewhere in there, something a drill instructor said while I was in boot camp occurred to me.  In response to being asked a question by another recruit having to do with some edge case (I can barely remember the context), he said “What if grasshoppers had machine guns?  Would the birds still **** with them?”  It sounds funny, but there's a lot of wisdom in those words.   “Sufficient” is different for every situation and it’s important to understand what sufficient means in the context of the work you’re doing.  If I’m writing a timesheet application (and please shoot me if I am), I’m going to have a much higher tolerance for imperfection than if you’re writing software to control life support systems on spacecraft.  I’m also likely to have less need for high volume performance than if you’re writing software to control stock trading transactions.   I’d encourage anyone who has read this far to instead of trying to be perfect, try to create software that is sufficient in every way.  If you’re working to make a component that is sufficient “better”, ask yourself if there is any component left that is not yet sufficient.  If the answer is “yes” you’re working on the wrong thing and need to adjust.  If the answer is “no”, why aren’t you shipping and delivering business value?

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• Why is my laptop so sluggish? Or Damn You Facebook and Twitter! Or All Hail Chrome!

  - by John Conwell

  In the past three weeks, I've noticed that my laptop (dual core 2.1GHz, 2Gb RAM) has become amazingly sluggish.  I only uses for communications and data lookup workflows, so the slowness was tolerable.  But today I finally got fed up with the suckyness and decided to get to the root of the problem (I do have strong performance roots after all). It actually didn't take all that long to figure it out.  About a year ago I converted to Google Chrome (away from FireFox).  One of the great tools Chrome has is a "Task Manager" tool, that gives you Windows Task Manager like details for all the tabs open in the browser (Shift + Esc).  Since every tab runs in its own process, its easy from Task Manager (both Windows or Chrome) to identify and kill a single performance offending tab.  This is unlike IE, where you only get aggregate data about all tabs open.  Anyway, I digress.  Today my laptop sucked.  Windows Task Manager told me that I had two memory hogging Chrome tabs, but couldn't tell me which web page those tabs are showing.  Enter Chrome Task Manager which tells you the page title, along with CPU, memory and network utilization of each tab.  Enter my amazement.  Turns out Facebook was using just shy of half a Gb of RAM.  Half a Gigabyte!  That's 512 Megabytes!524,288 Kilobytes! 536,870,912 Bytes!  Or 4,294,967,296 Bits!  In other words, that's a frackin boat load of memory.  Now consider that Facebook is running on pretty much 96.3% (statistics based on absolutely nothing) of every house hold desktop, laptop, netbook, and mobile device in America, that is pretty horrific! And I wasn't playing any Facebook games like FarmWars or MafiaVille.  I just had my normal, default home page up showing me who just had breakfast, or just got finished with their morning run. I'm sorry...let me say that again...HALF A GIG OF RAM!  That is just unforgivable. I can just see my mom calling me up:  Mom: "John...I think I need a new computer.  Mine is really slow these days" John: "What do you have running?" Mom: "Oh, just Facebook" John: "Ok, close Facebook and tell me how fast your computer feels" Mom: "Well...I don't know how fast it is.  All I do is use Facebook" John: "Ok Mom, I'll send you a new computer by Tuesday" Oh yea...and the other offending web page?  It was Twitter, using a quarter of a Gigabyte. God I love social networks!

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• Updating My Online Boggle Solver Using jQuery Templates and WCF

  With WebForms, each ASP.NET page's rendered output includes a <form> element that performs a postback to the same page whenever a Button control within the form is clicked, or whenever the user modifies a control whose AutoPostBack property is set to True. This model simplifies web page development, but carries with it some costs - namely, the large amount of data exchanged between the client and the server during a postback. On postback the browser sends the values of all of its form fields (including hidden ones, like view state, which may be quite large) to the server; the server then sends back the entire contents of the web page. While there are some scenarios where this amount of information needs to be exchanged, in many cases the user has performed some action that requires far less information to be exchanged. With a little bit of forethought and code we can have the browser and server exchange much less data, which leads to more responsive web pages and an improved user experience. Over the past several weeks I've been writing an article series on accessing server-side data from client script. Rather than rely solely on forms and postbacks, many websites use JavaScript code to asynchronously communicate with the server in response to the page loading or some other user action. The server, upon receiving the JavaScript-initiated request, returns just the data needed by the browser, which the browser then seamlessly integrates into the web page. There are a variety of technologies and techniques that can be employed to provide both the needed server- and client-side functionality. Last week's article, Using WCF Services with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library, explored using the Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF, to serve data from the web server and showed how to consume such a service using both the ASP.NET Ajax Library and jQuery. In a previous 4Guys article, Creating an Online Boggle Solver, I built an application to find all solutions in a game of Boggle. (Boggle is a word game trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro that involves several players trying to find as many words as they can in a 4x4 grid of letters.) This article takes the lessons learned in Using WCF Services with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library and uses them to update the user interface for my online Boggle solver, replacing the existing WebForms-based user interface with a more modern and responsive interface. I also used jQuery Templates, a JavaScript-based templating library that is useful for displaying the results from a server-side service. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Stuff I learned at Innovate 2011

  - by David Dorf

  After returning from the NRF Innovate 2011 conference, I picked up few nuggets I thought I'd share here.  These thoughts are a bit random, but I hope they're useful nonetheless.Kevin Kelly opened the conference with six verbs that represent the future.  They were Screening, Interacting, Sharing, Accessing, Flowing, and Generating.  It struck me that these are all ways in which we merge the digital and physical worlds.  The internet of things continues to gain momentum.Some buzzwords:  deal economy, subscription commerce, discovery (instead of search), curationThat last one, curation, came up over and over.  Retailers, especially those in fashion, are finding value in helping their customers organize and present their own collections.  Social media has made sharing such collections easy, and mobile lets them take those ideas into the stores.  Mannequins are becoming less relevant.I heard from both HauteLook and Gilt Groupe (flash sale retailers) that a large percentage of their visits come from mobile devices, and most of those are iOS devices.  I find it interesting that even though Android has passed iPhone in units shipped (and will eventually pass iOS as a whole), its still the Apple crowd that leads the way.RadioShack mentioned their Holiday Heroes campaigned was very successful.  They asked their Foursquare users to check-in at a gym, coffee shop, and transportation hub as part of being a hero.  For this feat, customers were awarded a special badge that was worth 20% off at their next store visit. They claim a 3.5x increase in ticket size vs. regular check-in customers, and a 5x increase vs those that don't check-in at all.I also learned of RadioShack's #28 campaign, which is apparently one of the largest Twitter trends ever.  Their partnership with LIVESTRONG has gotten them followers, impressions, and credit for supporting the fight against cancer.The guys at Invodo showed the importance of video to e-commerce.  They gave compelling examples of how video can show customers the value of products better than just words.The highlight of the show was Guy Kawasaki's talk on innovation, which was not only informative but also peppered with humor and personality.  Back in the early days of the internet boom, Guy turned down the CEO position at Yahoo! because the commute was too long.  By his calculation, that was a $2B mistake.There are other good accounts of the conference at the NRF Blog.

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