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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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• Bridging 10GbE with 12.04 - bridging works but the bridging computer has no internet access

  - by Donal

  I have been trying to get 12.04 bridging working with two 10GbE cards. I have 2 10GbE cards in a linux box being used only for this bridge, 1 with 2 10GbaseT ports and another with a single CX4 port. I have 2 client computers connected with 10GbaseT cards and the CX4 card connects to a procurve switch. I can get the bridging happening mostly the way that I want, The clients receive dhcp information from the dhcp server (not the bridging machine) and can connect to and properly see the rest of the network. Speeds are ok, not amazing but working on that is another matter. My problem is that the bridging machine has no internet access ... meaning I can't update anything or apt-get anything It can ping all other machines on the local network. I've tried the helpful hints from: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkConnectionBridge "Enabling Internet Use on the Bridging Computer" and get the following RTNETLINK answers: File exists but dhclient br0 does nothing for me :( I think if it is anything it a multiple route problem as both br0 and eth4 have ipaddresses ... even though I have only set it up so that br0 has one ... Bridge setup details: /etc/network/interface auto br0 iface br0 inet static address 192.168.0.246 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.0.1 broadcast 192.168.0.255 dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1 dns-search example.com dns-domain example.com #(eth2 & eth3 are the 10GbaseT) #(eth4 is the CX4 connection) pre-up ip link set eth2 down pre-up ip link set eth3 down pre-up ip link set eth4 down pre-up brctl addbr br0 pre-up brctl addif br0 eth4 eth3 eth2 pre-up ip addr flush dev eth3 pre-up ip addr flush dev eth2 pre-up ip addr flush dev eth4 post-down ip link set eth4 down post-down ip link set eth2 down post-down ip link set eth3 down post-down ip link set br0 down post-down brctl delif br0 eth2 eth3 eth4 post-down brctl delbr br0 ifconfig -a br0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:15:17:22:20:34 inet addr:192.168.0.102 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::215:17ff:fe22:2034/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:4957 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1077 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:596320 (596.3 KB) TX bytes:139952 (139.9 KB) eth4 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:60:dd:47:7c:05 inet addr:192.168.0.57 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::260:ddff:fe47:7c05/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:9000 Metric:1 RX packets:15391 errors:0 dropped:51 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1207 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:5916769 (5.9 MB) TX bytes:154312 (154.3 KB) Interrupt:70 route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth4 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 100 0 0 br0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 br0 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 br0 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth4

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• Why is my system freezing when I switch users

  - by ZeroDivide

  Hello I've recently upgraded from 13.04 to 13.10 64bit. I'm running AMD graphics with the proprietary drivers. I have two user accounts. Mine(administrator) and my girlfriend's(standard) My girlfriend clicks "switch user" from my lock screen and logs in fine. I then try to click "switch user" from her lock screen and everything goes black. Then the monitor blinks on and off with just a single cursor. I have no way to access the terminal, the system is unresponsive and I have to hit the power button. Even ctrl + alt + f4 or ctrl + alt + t doesn't get me a terminal. When I press the power button on my system, it does start printing out the shutdown sequence on the monitor. Here is my .xsession-errors Script for ibus started at run_im. Script for auto started at run_im. Script for default started at run_im. Here is hers: init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning init: at-spi2-registryd respawning too fast, stopped init: logrotate main process (4726) killed by TERM signal init: upstart-dbus-session-bridge main process (4865) terminated with status 1 init: gnome-settings-daemon main process (4843) terminated with status 1 init: gnome-session main process (4852) terminated with status 1 init: unity-panel-service main process (4863) killed by KILL signal I found some advice in a forum to look for at-spi2-registryd in my system logs. Perhaps it will be useful. executing this: sudo grep -r at-spi2-registryd /var/log/* produces this: /var/log/lightdm/x-1-greeter.log:** (at-spi2-registryd:4384): WARNING **: Failed to register client: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files /var/log/lightdm/x-1-greeter.log:** (at-spi2-registryd:4384): WARNING **: Unable to register client with session manager /var/log/lightdm/x-2-greeter.log.old:** (at-spi2-registryd:7447): WARNING **: Failed to register client: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files /var/log/lightdm/x-2-greeter.log.old:** (at-spi2-registryd:7447): WARNING **: Unable to register client with session manager /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log:** (at-spi2-registryd:1378): WARNING **: Failed to register client: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log:** (at-spi2-registryd:1378): WARNING **: Unable to register client with session manager /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log.old:** (at-spi2-registryd:1357): WARNING **: Failed to register client: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log.old:** (at-spi2-registryd:1357): WARNING **: Unable to register client with session manager Any ideas what is going on?

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• GWT: Generate more complete crawl error report

  - by Mike

  I'm a developer in charge of managing Webmasters and related issues (including correcting crawl errors) for dozens (hundreds, maybe?) of active sites and as part of my duties I create a report of every discrepancy, including all pages generating a 404 and all pages that link to those pages. Currently within Webmaster Tools I'm able to download a csv file of all pages with a 404 response, but I'm then having to manually click on every single one of those links and copy the "linked from" field to paste into my spreadsheet. This is extremely tedious and seems unnecessary; I would expect the ability to download all that data at once. I'm ultimately looking for the end result of one csv file that has every url with a 404, but also has every url that links to each one of them. Am I overlooking this functionality somewhere or does anyone have a good solution? Edit 1 (2/11/2013): Example of what the csv output looks like now: URL,Response Code,News Error,Detected,Category http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,,11/12/13,Not found Which is great, but let's say 123.php has 5 pages that link to it. Now I have to duplicate that row in my spreadsheet 4 more times, then go into Webmasters, get all the url's that link to the page, and add that data to my spreadsheet. The output I would prefer: URL,Response Code,Linked From,News Error,Detected,Category http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage1.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage2.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage3.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage1.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage2.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage3.php,,11/12/13,Not found Note the (hypothetical) addition of a "Linked From" column, as well as the fact there are only 2 unique URL's now (like before) but all of the "Linked To" pages are shown in one report. Edit 2 (2/12/2013): To clarify, my question is less about detecting and correcting 404's, but more about generating a report of what Google has listed as errors. Oftentimes, these errors aren't even valid anymore but I still need documentation to show that Google detected a problem and that problem is now fixed. Many of the "linked from" url's I find are actually outdated, cached resources. For example, I'll frequently see that the linked-from url is the sitemap, which is actually an old sitemap cached by Google that points to an old page. Neither the sitemap or old page exist, but they still appear in my crawl error reports because they are cached resources.

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• Office 2010 Professional Plus (Top 10 reasons to upgrade)

  - by mbcrump

  Being a huge nerd, I decided that I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest and greatest office. That being, Office 2010 Professional Plus. The biggest concern that I had was loosing all my mail settings from Outlook 2007. Thankfully, it upgrade gracefully and worked like a charm. So lets start this top 10 list. 1) You can upgrade without fear of loosing all your stuff! As you can tell by the screenshot below, you can select what you want to do. I selected to remove all previous versions.    2) Outlook conversations: Just like GMail, you can now group emails by conversations. This is simply awesome and a must have. 3) The ability to ignore conversations. If you are on a email thread that has nothing to do with you. Simply “ignore” the conversation and all emails go into the deleted folder. 4) Quick Steps, do you send an email to the same team member or group constantly. With quick steps, its just one click away. 5) Spell check in the Subject line! 6)  Easier Screenshots, built in just click the button. No more ALT-Printscreen for those that are not aware of the awesome SnagIT 10 that's out. 7) Open in protected view. When you open a document from an email attachment, it lets you know the file may be unsafe. You can click a button to enable editing. This is great for preventing macros.       8) Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell. The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet. 9) Contact actions. If you hover over a name in the form or fields on an email, you get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on the person such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call. 10) Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu – I love the jumplist. I don’t know how much that I would actually use it but it just rocks.

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• Drawing lots of tiles with OpenGL, the modern way

  - by Nic

  I'm working on a small tile/sprite-based PC game with a team of people, and we're running into performance issues. The last time I used OpenGL was around 2004, so I've been teaching myself how to use the core profile, and I'm finding myself a little confused. I need to draw in the neighborhood of 250-750 48x48 tiles to the screen every frame, as well as maybe around 50 sprites. The tiles only change when a new level is loaded, and the sprites are changing all the time. Some of the tiles are made up of four 24x24 pieces, and most (but not all) of the sprites are the same size as the tiles. A lot of the tiles and sprites use alpha blending. Right now I'm doing all of this in immediate mode, which I know is a bad idea. All the same, when one of our team members tries to run it, he gets very bad frame rates (~20-30 fps), and it's much worse when there are more tiles, especially when a lot of those tiles are the kind that are cut into pieces. This all makes me think that the problem is the number of draw calls being made. I've thought of a few possible solutions to this, but I wanted to run them by some people who know what they're talking about so I don't waste my time on something stupid: TILES: When a level is loaded, draw all the tiles once into a frame buffer attached to a big honking texture, and just draw a big rectangle with that texture on it every frame. Put all the tiles into a static vertex buffer when the level is loaded, and draw them that way. I don't know if there's a way to draw objects with different textures with a single call to glDrawElements, or if this is even something I'd want to do. Maybe just put all the tiles into a big giant texture and use funny texture coordinates in the VBO? SPRITES: Draw each sprite with a separate call to glDrawElements. Use a dynamic VBO somehow. Same texture question as number 2 above. Point sprites? This is probably silly. Are any of these ideas sensible? Is there a good implementation somewhere I could look over?

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• Make the Taskbar Buttons Switch to the Last Active Window in Windows 7

  - by The Geek

  The new Windows 7 taskbar’s Aero Peek feature, with the live thumbnails of every window, is awesome… but sometimes you just want to be able to click the taskbar button and have the last open window show up instead. Here’s a quick hack to make it work better. To better understand the problem, imagine having nine windows of the same type open on your screen, but you are primarily working in just one of the windows at a time. So every time you want to switch back, you have to click the taskbar button, and then choose the one you are using from the list, which can be pretty annoying… Now if you know your Windows 7 shortcuts, you’d know that you can simply hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on the taskbar button, and the last window will show up. In fact, you can keep holding down the Ctrl key and keep clicking, and Windows will cycle through the open windows. It’s a useful shortcut, but hardly something you want to do every single time. Instead, we’ll use a quick registry hack to make the normal click switch to the last open window—if you still want to see the thumbnail list, just hover your mouse over the button for half a second to see the full list. Manual Registry Hack for Last Active Window Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then head down to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Once you’re there, create a new 32-bit DWORD value on the right hand side, give it the name LastActiveClick, and set the value to 1. Once you are done, it should look something like this: Once you are done, you’ll have to log off and back on, or you can kill Explorer.exe through Task Manager and re-open it. Download the Registry Hack Instead Since you probably don’t feel like registry hacking, we’ve provided you an easy downloadable version. You can simply download the file, extract it, and then double-click on the LastActiveClick.reg file. Once you are done, you’ll have to log off and back on, just like with the manual registry hack. Download LastActiveClick Registry Hack from howtogeek.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make the Windows 7 Taskbar Work More Like Windows XP or VistaStupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarReorganize Your Taskbar Buttons and Tray Icons in XP/VistaKeyboard Ninja: Create a Hotkey to Switch to Your Open Outlook WindowTaskbar Eliminator Does What the Name Implies: Hides Your Windows Taskbar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• A "First" at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Adam May, Director, Fusion CRM, Oracle Applications Development There are always firsts at OpenWorld. These firsts keep the conference fresh and are the reason people come back year after year. An important first this year is our Fusion CRM customers who are using the product and deriving real benefit from Fusion CRM. Everyone can learn from and interact with them -- including us!  We love talking to customers, especially those who are using our solutions in unexpected ways because they challenge us! At previous OpenWorlds, we presented our overall Fusion vision and our plans for Fusion CRM. Those presentations helped customers plan their strategies and map out their new release uptakes. Fast forward to March of this year when the first Fusion CRM customer went live. Since then we've watched the pace of go-lives accelerate every single month. Now we're at the threshold of another OpenWorld -- with over 45,000 attendees, 2,500 sessions and LOTS of other activities. To avoid having our customers curl into a ball with sensory overload, we designed a Focus On Document to outline the most important Fusion CRM activities. Here are some of the highlights: Anthony Lye's "Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap" on Monday at 3:15 p.m. The CRM Pavilion, open in Moscone West from Monday through Wednesday; features our strategic Fusion CRM partners and provides live demonstrations of their capabilities General Session: "Oracle Fusion CRM--Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use" on Tuesday at 11:45 a.m.; features Anthony Lye and Deloitte "Meet the Fusion CRM Experts" on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.; this session gives customers the opportunity to interact one-on-one with Fusion experts divided into eight categories of expertise CRM Social Reception on Tuesday from 6-8 p.m.; there's no better way to spend the early evening than discussing Fusion CRM with Oracle experts and strategic partners over appetizers and drinks Wednesday night is Oracle's Customer Appreciation event; enjoy Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, etc. beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Treasure Island Be sure to drink plenty of water before sleeping Wednesday night and don't stay out too late because we have lots of great content on Thursday; at the top of the list is "Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement" at 11:15 a.m. We hope you have a fantastic experience at OpenWorld 2012! And here's a little video treat to whet your appetite: http://www.youtube.com/user/FusionAppsAtOracle

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• It's Here! Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Ship

  Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0. I've been using the RC version of Visual Studio 2010 quite a bit for the past couple of months and have really grown to like it. It has a host of features and enhancements that improve developer productivity, from improved IntelliSense to better multiple monitor support. Plus there's something about the user experience that, to me, makes it feel better than Visual Studio 2008. I don't know if it's the new blue color motif or what, but the IDE seems more modern looking and more responsive to my mouse movements and other input. Anyway, if you've not yet downloaded Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0, why not? As with previous versions of Visual Studio there's a free Express Edition and VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 runs side-by-side with earlier versions of Visual Studio and ASP.NET. And with Visual Studio 2010's multi-targeting you can even use VS2010 as your development editor for ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 web applications. (Although be forewarned if you have multiple developers working on the application that the project files in VS2010 and earlier versions of Visual Studio differ.) This week's article on 4Guys explores my favorite new features of Visual Studio 2010. Here's an excerpt: The Visual Studio 2010 user experience is noticeably different than with previous versions. Some of the changes are cosmetic - gone is the decades-old red and orange color scheme, having been replaced with blues and purples - while others are more substantial. For instance, the Visual Studio 2010 shell was rewritten from the ground up to use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). In addition to an updated user experience, Visual Studio introduces an array of new features designed to improve developer productivity. There are new tools for searching for files, types, and class members; it's now easier than ever to use IntelliSense; the Toolbox can be searched using the keyboard; and you can use a single editor - Visual Studio 2010 - to work on. This article explores some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather highlights those features that I, as an ASP.NET developer, find most useful in my line of work. Read on to learn more! And, in closing, here are some helpful VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 links: One click installation for ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Web Developer 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 2 Eight Quick Hit videos showing some of the cool new VS2010 features VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Release Announcement with some great info/links from none other than Scott Guthrie Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Becoming the well-integrated content company (and combating AIUTLVFS)

  - by Lance Shaw

  Every single day, each of us create more and more content. Sometimes it is brand new material and many times it is iterations of existing content, but no one would argue that information and content growth is growing at an almost exponential rate. With all this content being created and stored, a number of problems naturally arise. One of the most common issues that users run into is "Am I Using The Latest Version of this File Syndrome", or AIUTLVFS. This insidious syndrome is all too common and results in ineffective, poor or downright wrong business decisions being made.  When content or files are unavailable or incorrect within the scope of key business processes, the chance for erroneous and costly business decisions is magnified even further. For many companies, the ideal scenario is to be able to connect multiple business systems, both old and new, into one common content repository.  Not only does this reduce content duplication, it also helps guarantee that everyone in various departments is working off the proverbial "same page".  Sounds simple - but for many organizations, the proliferation of file shares, SharePoint sites, and other storage silos of content keep the dream of a more efficient business a distant one. We've created some online assets to help you in your evaluation and eventual improvement of your current content management and delivery systems. Take a few minutes to check out our Online Assessment Tool.  It's quick, easy and just might provide you with insights into how you can improve your current content ecosystem. While you are there, check out our new Infographic that outlines common issues faced by companies today. Feel free to save our informative Infographic PDF and share it with business colleagues and your management to help them understand the business costs and impact of inaction. Together we can stop AIUTLVFS in its tracks and run our businesses more effectively than ever. Additionally, we hope you will take a few minutes to visit our new and informative webpages dedicated to the value of a well connected, fully integrated content management system. It's a great place to learn more about how integrating WebCenter Content into your infrastructure can lower your operational costs while boosting process and worker efficiency.

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• WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference

  - by JuergenKress

  The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner. Each interactive type presents data that may be available in the documentation (in the case of Oracle products), but presents it in a way that is more intuitive and useful to a user of Oracle products because it displays data the way it is used in a real world, best practice scenario. For example, the architectural diagram interactive type provides an image of an architectural diagram that is typically larger than a single slide or paper. The image is scrollable and provides zoom capabilities to easily and clearly view any part of the image. The image itself contains a hotspot map that you can click to get more information about a feature, including reference links to the documentation in question. Linking the visual image of the component and where it fits in the overall architecture of the product, or technology in use, to the technical explanation and how-to materials related to that component is something not offered by the documentation. In a future release, the poster will also enable you to drill down even further into the individual subsystems in nested diagrams to look at the details of that subsystem. In short, the interactive posters are good at showing you the big picture, then quickly and easily getting you to the detailed information you need. In an instant, you can see where a technical component fits into an overall architecture, and zero in on the nitty-gritty details that show you how to do it yourself. Note: This is a first initial release with more features in development. Currently known information: Only Firefox 8.0 and higher is known to work with this product. This product may work with Chrome and Safari browsers, but is known to have issues in Internet Explorer at this time. Smartphones, such as iPads and iPhones, are partially supported WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. BlogTwitterLinkedInMixForumWiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic server quick reference,weblogic overview,weblogic 12c,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): Important architectural piece to a SOA or is it just vendor hype?

  Is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) an important architectural piece to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), or is it just vendor hype in order to sell a particular product such as SOA-in-a-box? According to IBM.com, an ESB is a flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services; it offers a flexible and manageable approach to service-oriented architecture implementation. With this being said, it is my personal belief that ESBs are an important architectural piece to any SOA. Additionally, generic design patterns have been created around the integration of web services in to ESB regardless of any vendor. ESB design patterns, according to Philip Hartman, can be classified in to the following categories: Interaction Patterns: Enable service interaction points to send and/or receive messages from the bus Mediation Patterns: Enable the altering of message exchanges Deployment Patterns: Support solution deployment into a federated infrastructure Examples of Interaction Patterns: One-Way Message Synchronous Interaction Asynchronous Interaction Asynchronous Interaction with Timeout Asynchronous Interaction with a Notification Timer One Request, Multiple Responses One Request, One of Two Possible Responses One Request, a Mandatory Response, and an Optional Response Partial Processing Multiple Application Interactions Benefits of the Mediation Pattern: Mediator promotes loose coupling by keeping objects from referring to each other explicitly, and it lets you vary their interaction independently Design an intermediary to decouple many peers Promote the many-to-many relationships between interacting peers to “full object status” Examples of Interaction Patterns: Global ESB: Services share a single namespace and all service providers are visible to every service requester across an entire network Directly Connected ESB: Global service registry that enables independent ESB installations to be visible Brokered ESB: Bridges services that are reluctant to expose requesters or providers to ESBs in other domains Federated ESB: Service consumers and providers connect to the master or to a dependent ESB to access services throughout the network References: Mediator Design Pattern. (2011). Retrieved 2011, from SourceMaking.com: http://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns/mediator Hartman, P. (2006, 24 1). ESB Patterns that "Click". Retrieved 2011, from The Art and Science of Being an IT Architect: http://artsciita.blogspot.com/2006/01/esb-patterns-that-click.html IBM. (2011). WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance Version 2.0. Retrieved 2011, from IBM.com: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wdpxc/v2r0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.websphere.help.glossary.doc%2Ftopics%2Fglossary.html Oracle. (2005). 12 Interaction Patterns. Retrieved 2011, from Oracle® BPEL Process Manager Developer's Guide: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B31017_01/integrate.1013/b28981/interact.htm#BABHHEHD

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• Windows8, JavaScript and HTML5 - A good thing?

  - by Albers

  Most of us have seen the Windows 8 news regarding support for native HTML5/JavaScript applications. The press has pushed this as a potential threat to the .NET developer community because JavaScript and HTML5 were called "our new developer platform". The press release refers to "Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.".Microsoft has also been hush on details related to these comments. Before we buy the hype and start worrying about a world where we drop our Visual Studio licenses and buy DreamWeaver - let's think about how Windows 8 HTML/JavaScript applications would be implemented. The HTML5 spec offers support for offline applications, but this won't offer the OS-integrated experience the press release refers to. MS has to be planning a way to extend access beyond the traditional JavaScript feature set. Microsoft has a similar option today: HTML Applications or HTAs. They come close to required features, but HTAs need ActiveX or Java integration to provide the promised OS-level access. I'm guessing that Microsoft's future OS strategy isn't built on developers cranking out ActiveX controls or Java applets. So where is Microsoft headed? One possibility is that MS builds a new JavaScript framework from the ground up outside their current APIs. Another idea would be for Microsoft to add support for JavaScript as a first class .NET language using the Dynamic Language Runtime. A solution based on the DLR could be integrated into an HTA-like model to provide the promised access, along with the full range of features in .NET Framework. Security comes included in the Framework. And the work necessary to support this integration would tie in nicely with the effort MS has recently made providing better JavaScript and HTML5 support in Visual Studio 2010. As a bonus, a full-fledged JavaScript DLR implementation would allow single language web solutions across client and server (think node.js) and would appeal to developers who are familiar with JavaScript but have less experience with the Microsoft tech stack. We will all get a better picture after the Build conference in September. But in the mean time we know that Microsoft has a reputation for providing strong developer support. We might want to reserve our harshest judgement and consider that the press release could hint at new opportunities for .NET development.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  ORCLville: OOW 2012 - Crystal BallOracle ACE Director Floyd Teter cooks up some tongue-in-cheek predictions for news and announcements that might come out of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. What's your prediction? Oracle Optimized Solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 | Oracle Hardware Hardware matters, too! The people behind the Oracle Hardware blog have put together a list of Oracle Openworld 2012 sessions focused Oracle Optimized Solutions, "designed, pre-tested, tuned and fully documented architectures for optimal performance and availability." Just plug the session ID numbers into Schedule Builder and you're good to go. AIX Checklist for stable OBIEE deployment | Dick Dunbar "OBIEE is a complicated system with many moving parts and connection points," according to Oracle Business Inteligence escalation engineer Dick Dunbar. "The purpose of this article is to provide a checklist to discuss OBIEE deployment with your systems administrators." Demo for OPN: Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c Oracle Partner Network members can check out a new Coherence Management demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of Management Pack for Oracle Coherence and JVM Diagnostics. "The demo flow showcases the key enhancements made in Enterprise Manager 12c release which includes new customizable performance summary, cache data management and configuration management," according to the WebLogic Partner Community EMEA blog. The Pragmatic Architect: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before | Frank Buschmann "Many architects have technical knowledge that's both impressive and sound, which is indeed an inevitable basis for design success," says Frank Buschmann. "Yet, a lot of software projects fail or suffer due to severe challenges in their architecture. The key to mastery is how architects approach design, what they value, and where they focus their attention and work." As retail dies, whom will be the winners? | Peter Evans-Greenwood "The problem for many retailers is that how consumers shop has changed but the the retailers haven't adapted, " says Peter Evans-Greenwood. "Their sole virtue was to be the last step in a supply chain delivering somebody else's products to the consumer. However, being the last step in the supply chain is no longer a virtue when consumers skip across channels and can reach around the globe, no longer dependant on or limited to what they can find locally." Thought for the Day "Brains require stimulation. If you're locked into a pattern of work, work, and more work, your brain soon habituates - the same way that it lets you stop hearing a clock ticking. So, if you want to be more effective at work, you must, paradoxically, be less single-minded in your devotion to work. Anything you do—anything—that stimulates new segments of your brain will make you a more effective programmer or analyst. I promise, with a money-back guarantee." — Gerald M. Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Understanding clojure keywords

  - by tjb1982

  I'm taking my first steps with Clojure. Otherwise, I'm somewhat competent with JavaScript, Python, Java, and a little C. I was reading this artical that describes destructuring vectors and maps. E.g. => (def point [0 0]) => (let [[x y] point] => (println "the coordinates are:" x y)) the coordinates are: 0 0 but I'm having a difficult time understanding keywords. At first glance, they seem really simple, as they just evaluate to themselves: => :test :test But they seem to be used is so many different ways and I don't understand how to think about them. E.g., you can also do stuff like this: => (defn full-name [& {first :first last :last}] => (println first last)) => (full-name :first "Tom" :last "Brennan") Tom Brennan nil This doesn't seem intuitive to me. I would have guessed the arguments should have been something more like: (full-name {:first "Tom" :last "Brennan"}) because it looks like in the function definition that you're saying "no required arguments, but a variable number of arguments comes in the form of a single map". But it seems more like you're saying "no required arguments, but a variable number of arguments comes which should be a list of alternating keywords and values... ?" I'm not really sure how to wrap my brain around this. Also, things like this confuse me too: => (def population {:humans 5 :zombies 1000}) => (:zombies population) 1000 => (population :zombies) 1000 How do maps and keywords suddenly become functions? If I could get some clarification on the use of keywords in these two examples, that would be really helpful. Update I've also seen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3337888/clojure-named-arguments and while the accepted answer is a great demonstration of how to use keywords with destructuring and named arguments, I'm really looking more for understanding how to think about them--why the language is designed this way and how I can best internalize their use.

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• What should filenames and URLs of images contain for SEO benefit?

  - by Baumr

  We know that good site architecture usually looks like this: example-company.com/ example-company.com/about/ example-company.com/contact/ example-company.com/products/ example-company.com/products/category/ example-company.com/products/category/productname/ Now, when it comes to Google Image search, it is clear that the img alt tag, filename/URL, and surrounding text (captions, headings, paragraphs) have an effect on ranking. I want to ask about the filename of the images that we should use (e.g. product-photo.jpg). ...but first about the URL: Often web developers stick all images in a single folder in the root: example-company.com/img/ — and I have stopped doing that. (I don't want to get into it, but basically, it seems more semantic for images which make up part of the content at each sub-directory) However, when all images appear in a folder, I feel that their filename needs to reflect what they are a bit more than usual, for example: example-company.com/img/example-company-productname-category.jpg It's a longer filename than just product.png, but as long as it's relevant, I see no problem with regards to SEO (unless you're keyword stuffing), and it could even help rank for keywords: "example company" "productname" "category" So no questions there. But what about when we have places images in the site architecture we outlined at the beginning? In other words, what if image URL paths look like this: example-company.com/products/category/productname/productname.jpg My question is, should the URL be kept short like above and only have the "productname" (and some descriptive keywords) as part of it's filename? Or, should it also include the "example-company" and "category"? Like so: example-company.com/products/category/productname/example-company-category-productname.jpg That seems much longer, and redundant when we look at the URL, but here are a few considerations. Images are often downloaded onto computers, and, to the average user, they lose their original URL and thus — it isn't clear where they came from. Also, some social networks, forums, and other platforms leave the filename intact when uploaded. (Many others rewrite it, for example, Pinterest and Facebook.) Another consideration, will this really help (even if ever so slightly) rank in Google Image Search, or at least inform Google that the product is something specific to the "example-company"? For example, what if this product can only be bought at this store and is the flagship product? In addition to an abundance of internal links to this product page, would having the "example company" name and "category" help it appear in "example company" searches? In other words, is less more?

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• Is there a pedagogical game engine?

  - by K.G.

  I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

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• Reporting on common code smells : A POC

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few blog entries, I’ve been looking at parsing TSQL scripts in a variety of ways for a variety of tasks.  In my last entry ‘How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way’, I looked at parsing SQL to report upon uses of SELECT *.  The obvious question leading on from this is, “Great, what about other code smells ?”  Well, using the language service parser to do that was turning out to be a bit of a hard job,  sure I was getting tokens but no real context.  I wasn't even being told when an end of statement had been reached. One of the other parsing options available from Microsoft is exposed in the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom’,  this is ,I believe, installed with the client development tools with SQLServer.  It is much more feature rich than the original parser I had used and breaks a TSQL script into intuitive classes for analysis. So, what sort of smells can I now find using it ?  Well, for an opening gambit quite a nice little list. Use of NOLOCK Set of READ UNCOMMITTED Use of SELECT * Insert without column references Explicit datatype conversion on Sargs Cross server selects Non use of two-part naming convention Table and Query hint usage Changes in set options Use of single line comments Use of ordinal column positions in ORDER BY clause Now, lets not argue the point that “It depends” as smells on some of these, but as an academic exercise it is quite interesting.  The code is available from this link :https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfk32sou4fzl2cw/TSQLDomTest.zip  All the usual disclaimers apply to this code, I cannot be held responsible for anything ranging from mild annoyance through to universe destruction due to the use of this code or examples. The zip file contains a powershell script and my test cases.  The assembly used requires .Net 4 to run, which means that you will need powershell 3 ( though im running through PowerGUI and all works ok ) .  The code searches for all .sql files in the folder hierarchy for the workingpath,  you can override this if you want by simply changing the $Folder variable, and processes each in turn for the smells.  Feedback is not great at the moment, all it does is output to an xml file (Smells.xml) the offset position and a description of the smell found. Right now, I am interested in your feedback.  What do you think ?  Is this (or should it be) more than an academic exercise ?  Can tooling such as this be used as some form of code quality measure ?  Does it Work ? Do you have a case listed above which is not being reported ? Do you have a case that you would love to be reported ? Let me know , please mailto: [email protected]. Thanks

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• Dealing with coworkers when developing, need advice [closed]

  - by Yippie-Kai-Yay

  I developed our current project architecture and started developing it on my own (reaching something like, revision 40). We're developing a simple subway routing framework and my design seemed to be done extremely well - several main models, corresponding views, main logic and data structures were modeled "as they should be" and fully separated from rendering, algorithmic part was also implemented apart from the main models and had a minor number of intersection points. I would call that design scalable, customizable, easy-to-implement, interacting mostly based on the "black box interaction" and, well, very nice. Now, what was done: I started some implementations of the corresponding interfaces, ported some convenient libraries and wrote implementation stubs for some application parts. I had the document describing coding style and examples of that coding style usage (my own written code). I forced the usage of more or less modern C++ development techniques, including no-delete code (wrapped via smart pointers) and etc. I documented the purpose of concrete interface implementations and how they should be used. Unit tests (mostly, integration tests, because there wasn't a lot of "actual" code) and a set of mocks for all the core abstractions. I was absent for 12 days. What do we have now (the project was developed by 4 other members of the team): 3 different coding styles all over the project (I guess, two of them agreed to use the same style :), same applies to the naming of our abstractions (e.g CommonPathData.h, SubwaySchemeStructures.h), which are basically headers declaring some data structures. Absolute lack of documentation for the recently implemented parts. What I could recently call a single-purpose-abstraction now handles at least 2 different types of events, has tight coupling with other parts and so on. Half of the used interfaces now contain member variables (sic!). Raw pointer usage almost everywhere. Unit tests disabled, because "(Rev.57) They are unnecessary for this project". ... (that's probably not everything). Commit history shows that my design was interpreted as an overkill and people started combining it with personal bicycles and reimplemented wheels and then had problems integrating code chunks. Now - the project still does only a small amount of what it has to do, we have severe integration problems, I assume some memory leaks. Is there anything possible to do in this case? I do realize that all my efforts didn't have any benefit, but the deadline is pretty soon and we have to do something. Did someone have a similar situation? Basically I thought that a good (well, I did everything that I could) start for the project would probably lead to something nice, however, I understand that I'm wrong. Any advice would be appreciated, sorry for my bad english.

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• C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

  - by Jonathan Mitchem

  After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

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• best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

  - by DXM

  I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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• Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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• 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.

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• Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

  - by JoshReuben

  About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial   Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx   2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand.   Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity.     support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3  skinnable hooks,  remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities  – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees,  Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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