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• EmblaCom Oy Maximizes Database Availability and Reduces Costs with MySQL Cluster

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Headquartered in Finland, EmblaCom Oy provides turnkey and cloud-hosted voice solutions to mobile operators around the globe. Since launching the original mobile private branch exchange (PBX) in 1998, the company has focused on helping its partners provide efficient voice communications to their key business customers. The company’s voice solutions are used by millions of subscribers, worldwide. EmblaCom Oy needed to replace several database engines with a standardized, scalable, development-friendly database solution to maximize availability and cut costs. The company chose MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, which has maximized accessibility to EmblaCom’s services for its clients and their hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The initiative has also reduced, by half, the cost of the database solution installation for customers, as well as lowered maintenance and customer service costs. Read the entire case study here.

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• Dual boot problem with ubuntu 12.04 and Vista

  - by vendella dahlahdoo

  Greetings from New Zealand. I have installed Microsoft Windows Vista and then installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my refurbished Compaq nx8220 laptop. I get the following infamous head hurting prompt continually. error: no such partition. grub rescue> Have tried most of the common recommended solutions. Live-CD then install Boot-Repair through the Terminal didn't work. It repaired all the linux stuff when restoring grub and then can't boot into Windows Vista. When I use Boot-Repair to fix the MBR, then I can't boot into Ubuntu. Tried installing BCD 2.1 in Vista and tried all the options one after another in BCD. Still no Ubuntu when selected through the options menu from BCD on restart/reboot. I have tried the boot repair option on the Ubuntu server CD-ROM, tried installing earlier versions of Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, and Ubuntu server 11.10 and 12.04. Still the same result. I tried deleting the Ubuntu partitions through Vista a number of times and reinstalling Ubuntu. I have been trying and retrying all the options in Boot-Repair in different combinations for the past week and a half. I have tried at least 10 times installing and reinstalling Ubuntu. I really love Ubuntu and believe I have exhausted most of the recommended solutions and have spent too much time on this. Its driving me nuts!! please can someone help, I have finally given up (sigh). The following are some outputs from Boot-Repair from my last attempts. http://paste.ubuntu.com/1019227 http://paste.ubuntu.com/1019264 I was only allowed to post two links being a newbie. The only thing left for me to do is the flying Samoan dropkick laptop trick. Thanks in advance. Francis.

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• Drive reporting incorrect free space

  - by Oli

  So I swapped my shiny SATA SSD for an even shinier PCI-E SSD. I run my core OS on the SSD because it's silly-fast. I did this on my old SSD so I created a new EXT4 partition and then just dded the data across (sorry I don't know the exact command I ran anymore) and after reinstalling grub, I booted onto the PCI-E SSD. At first glance everything had worked perfectly and things were running faster than ever. But then I noticed the free disk space on the new, larger drive: it was almost exactly the same as it was on the other disk... A disk that was half its size. So it looks as if I've copied the files across incorrectly and it's copied some of the filesystem metadata along with it. Tools like du and Disk Usage Analyzer come back with the correct figures. Things that look at the partition (and not the files) seem to think the drive is 120GB I've been using this drive for a week now so it's way out of sync with the old SSD so dumping the data and starting again isn't a job that fills me with joy but two questions: Is there a way to fix my filesystem so it knows what it's really on about? fsck e2fsck and badblocks all seem to be able to scan it without finding a problem with it. If I do plug my old SSD back in, copy the data off my PCI-E on to it and then copy it back onto a fresh filesystem (eg juggle the data around), what's the best way of doing that? I obviously want to keep all the permissions and softlinks where they are.

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• Google Indexing Issue after htaccess changes

  - by Klement

  I have a site called www.FuneralCoverFinder.co.za. I have about 30 pages on the site and usually have 29 indexed. (Excluding 15 blog posts) They are new. I recently upgraded my entire site and made some redirection changes in my .htaccess file. I have made my url's more SEO friendly (Removing index.php/) and redirecting dead pages to working pages. I have tons of unique content all checked by grammarly and plagium to ensure I have no duplicate content. I have since resubmited my sitemap to Google and now have only one page indexed. It was within a couple of minutes. I usually see results almost immediately after submitting, now it's stuck on 1 page indexed. I assume I might have made errors in the .htaccess file as this was my first attempt. The site runs perfectly and all the url's redirect the way they should. I'm scared I have some or other loop, although the website runs fine. I still see many of my old indexed pages in the SERP's, I'm just worried that the issue with the new sitemap can cause my rankings some harm. My website is pretty SEO optimized onsite. I have about 1500 indexed backlinks and have been building them steadily over about half a year. I would really appreciate some clarity on this matter.

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• How often do you review fundamentals?

  - by mlnyc

  So I've been out of school for a year and a half now. In school, of course we covered all the fundamentals: OS, databases, programming languages (i.e. syntax, binding rules, exception handling, recursion, etc), and fundamental algorithms. the rest were more in-depth topics on things like NLP, data mining, etc. Now, a year ago if you would have told me to write a quicksort, or reverse a singly-linked list, analyze the time complexity of this 'naive' algorithm vs it's dynamic programming counterpart, etc I would have been able to give you a decent and hopefully satisfying answer. But if you would have asked me more real world questions I might have been stumped (things like how would handle logging for an application, or security difference between GET and POST, differences between SQL Server and Oracle SQL, anything I list on my resume as currently working with [jQuery questions, ColdFusion questions, ...] etc) Now, I feel things are the opposite. I haven't wrote my own sort since graduating, and I don't really have to worry much about theoretical things that do not naturally fall into problems I am trying to solve. For example, I might give you some great SQL solutions using an analytical function that I would have otherwise been stumped on or write a cool web application using angular or something but ask me to write an algo for insertAfter(Element* elem) and I might not be able to do it in a reasonable time frame. I guess my question here to the experienced programmers is how do you balance the need to both learn and experiment with new technologies (fun!), working on personal projects (also fun!) working and solving real world problems in a timeboxed environment (so I might reach out to a library that does what I want rather than re-invent the wheel so that I can focus on the problem I am trying to solve) (work, basically), and refreshing on old theoretical material which is still valid for interviews and such (can be a drag)? Do you review older material (such as famous algorithms, dynamic programming, Big-O analysis, locking implementations) regularly or just when you need it? How much time do you dedicate to both in your 'deliberate practice' and do you have a certain to-do list of topics that you want to work on?

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• How to learn to deliver quality software designs when working on a tight deadline?

  - by chester89

  I read many books about how to design great software, but I kind of struggle to come up with a good design decisions when it comes to business apps, especially when the timeframe is tough. In the company I currently work for, the following situation happen all the time: my teamlead tells me that there's a task to do, I call some guy or a girl from business who tells me exactly what is it they want, and then I start coding. The task always fits in some existing application (we do only web apps or web services), usually it's purpose is to pull data from one datasource and put into the other one, with some business logic attached in the process. I start coding and then, after spending some time on a problem, my code didn't work as expected - either because of technical mistake or my lack of knowledge of the domain. The business is ringing me 2-3 times a day to hurry me up. I ask my team lead to help, he comes up, sees my code and goes like 'What's this?'. Then he throws away about half of my code, including all the design decisions I made, writes 2-3 methods that does the job (each of them usually 200-300 lines long or more, by the way), and task is complete, code works as it should have. The guy is smarter than me, obviously, and I'm aware of that. My goal is to be better software developer, that means write better code, not finish the job quicker with some crappy code. And the thing is, when I have enough time to tackle a problem, I can come up with a design that is good (in my opinion, of course), but I fall short to do so when I'm on a tight deadline. What should I do? I am fully aware that it's rather vague explanation, but please bear with me

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• What is the standard way of using Q15 values?

  - by Alex

  To process 8-bit pixels, to do things like gamma correction without losing information, we normally upsample the values, work in 16 bits or whatever, and then downsample them to 8 bits. Now, this is a somewhat new area for me, so please excuse incorrect terminology etc. For my needs I have chosen to work in "non-standard" Q15, where I only use the upper half of the range (0.0-1.0), and 0x8000 represents 1.0 instead of -1.0. This makes it much easier to calculate things in C. But I ran into a problem with SSSE3. It has the PMULHRSW instruction which multiplies Q15 numbers, but it uses the "standard" range of Q15 is [-1,1-2?¹5], so multplying (my) 0x8000 (1.0) by 0x4000 (0.5) gives 0xC000 (-0.5), because it thinks 0x8000 is -1. This is quite annoying. What am I doing wrong? Should I keep my pixel values in the 0000-7FFF range? This kind of defeats the purpose of it being a fixed-point format. Is there a way around this? Maybe some trick? Is there some kind of definitive treatise on Q15 which discusses all this?

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• Algorithm to zoom a plotted function

  - by astinx

  I'm making a game in android and I need plot a function, my algorithm is this: @Override protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) { float e = 0.5f; //from -x axis to +x evaluate f(x) for (float x = -z(canvas.getWidth()); x < z(canvas.getWidth()); x+=e) { float x1,y1; x1 = x; y1 = f(x); canvas.drawPoint((canvas.getWidth()/2)+x1, (canvas.getHeight()/2)-y1, paintWhite); } super.onDraw(canvas); } This is how it works. If my function is, for example f(x)=x^2, then z(x) is sqrt(x). I evaluate each point between -z(x) to z(x) and then I draw them. As you can see I use the half of the size of the screen to put the function in the middle of the screen. The problem isn't that the code isn't working, actually plots the function. But if the screen is of 320*480 then this function will be really tiny like in the image below. My question is: how can I change this algorithm to scale the function?. BTW what I'm really wanting to do is trace a route to later display an animated sprite, so actually scale this image doesnt gonna help me. I need change the algorithm in order to draw the same interval but in a larger space. Any tip helps, thanks! Current working result Desired result UPDATE: I will try explain more in detail what the problem is. Given this interval [-15...15] (-z(x) to z(x)) I need divide this points in a bigger interval [-320...320] (-x to x). For example, when you use some plotting software like this one. Although the div where is contain the function has 640 px of width, you dont see that the interval is from -320 to 320, you see that the interval is from -6 to 6. How can I achieve this?

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• How to better explain complex software process in software specs?

  - by Lostsoul

  I'm really struggling with my software specs. I am not a professional programmer but enjoy doing it for fun and made some software that I want to sell later but I'm not happy with the code quality. So I wanted to hire a real developer to rewrite my software in a more professional way so it will be maintainable by other developers in the future. I read and found some sample specs and made my own by applying their structure to my document and wanted to get my developer friend to read it and give me advice. After an hour and a half he understood exactly what I was trying to do and how I did it(my algorithms,stack,etc.). How can I get better at explaining things to developers? I add many details and explanations for everything(including working code) but I'm unsure the best way I can learn to pass detailed domain knowledge(my software applies big data, machine learning, graph theory to finance). My end goal is to get them to understand as much as possible from the document and then ask anything they do not understand, but right now it seems they need to extract alot of information from me. How can I get better at communicating domain knowledge to developers?

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• How come there is still so much programming work?

  - by jd_505

  First I'd like to say that I am not pretty sure that this question will meet the guidelines. I think it can goes under the "Freelancing and business concerns" bullet, but I am not sure. Anyway, I will give it a shot. I wonder how the programming jobs hasn't yet "dried" because of the software evolution, for example, I am a developer myself, which means that I do care about software (I mean I am not of the type of guys that needs a computer mainly to just browse the Internet), and still I wouldn't mind if I never receive any more updates on my Ubuntu machine. I find that it provides everything I need, and while the updates provide various bug fixes/improvements, I wouldn't mind using it with it's current state for the rest of my life, for 2 years of Ubuntu usage I have never bumped at a serious bug/problem. Another example is Windows, almost half of it's users still use XP, which is practically ancient, yet they find it satisfying all their needs (and I agreee with them). I could go with many more examples, but by now you are understanding my point and my question. While new "trends" appears all of the time (like a new mobile OS) which runs on new platforms and requires some fresh development work, still the majority of the software effort goes in to what I consider as "completed projects", or at least a state of a project which is enough to be considered as completed. Do you have an explanation ? I can't think of the right tags for this question, please edit it the way you find it to be most appropriate. Thanks.

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• Are my negative internship experiences representative of the real world? [closed]

  - by attemptAtAnonymity

  I'm curious if my current experiences as an intern are representative of actual industry. As background, I'm through the better part of two computing majors and a math major at a major university; I've aced every class and adored all of them, so I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at programming. I got an internship with one of the major software companies, and half way through now I've been shocked at the extraordinarily low quality of code. Comments don't exist, it's all spaghetti code, and everything that could be wrong is even worse. I've done a ton of tutoring/TAing, so I'm very used to reading bad code, but the major industry products I've been seeing trump all of that. I work 10-12 hours a day and never feel like I'm getting anywhere, because it's endless hours of trying to figure out an undocumented API or determine the behavior of some other part of the (completely undocumented) product. I've left work hating the job every day so far, and I desperately want to know if this is what is in store for the rest of my life. Did I draw a short straw on internships (the absurdly large paychecks imply that it's not a low quality position), or is this what the real world is like?

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• How to progress far enough in a year [on hold]

  - by xCasper

  So I came to a realization the other day, I graduate in a year. I will have completed my four year degree in about two and a half (I went to a school that goes full time year round). Anyway, I want to get a job, as a programmer, when I graduate. The problem is, I feel like I am no where near ready. In the last year I cant say I have made any spectacular projects. I know that my advanced programming courses are coming up, but by the time I take them, I will be graduating in 6 months. Not nearly enough time to really take what I learn, apply it, and create something to show for myself. I want to push myself ahead of the game; mainly because my major is Computer Information Systems, so the focus is not programming. In fact, I only get, 4 programming classes. Before anyone says anything, CIS is the closest to a programming major at my school that I am able to do. So the questions come down to this: 1) What can I do to really step up the speed at which I progress (on my own) 2) Should I be aiming for a certain amount of projects in my "Portfolio." 2a) Should they be big projects? P.S: The language we have used in school in c++, I do take a Java class in the spring, and .net over Summer; if any of that matters for anything.

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• How can I convince my boss that ANSI C is inadequate for our new project?

  - by justifiably cowardly

  A few months ago, we started developing an app to control an in-house developed test equipment and record a set of measurements. It should have a simple UI, and would likely require threads due to the continuous recording that must take place. This application will be used for a few years, and shall be maintained by a number of computer science students during this period. Our boss graduated some 30 years ago (not to be taken as an offense; I have more than half that time on my back too) and has mandated that we develop this application in ANSI C. The rationale is that he is the only one that will be around the entire time, and therefore he must be able to understand what we are doing. He also ruled that we should use no abstract data types; he even gave us a list with the name of the global variables (sigh) he wants us to use. I actually tried that approach for a while, but it was really slowing me down to make sure that all pointer operations were safe and all strings had the correct size. Additionally, the number of lines of code that actually related to the problem in hand was a only small fraction of our code base. After a few days, I scrapped the entire thing and started anew using C#. Our boss has already seen the program running and he likes the way it works, but he doesn't know that it's written in another language. Next week the two of us will meet to go over the source code, so that he "will know how to maintain it". I am sort of scared, and I would like to hear from you guys what arguments I could use to support my decision. Cowardly yours,

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• How best to construct our test subjects in unit tests?

  - by Liath

  Some of our business logic classes require quite a few dependencies (in our case 7-10). As such when we come to unit test these the creation become quite complex. In most tests these dependencies are often not required (only some dependencies are required for particular methods). As a result unit tests often require a significant number of lines of code to mock up these useless dependencies (which can't be null because of null checks). For example: [Test] public void TestMethodA() { var dependency5 = new Mock<IDependency1>(); dependency5.Setup(x => x. // some setup var sut = new Sut(new Mock<IDependency1>().Object, new Mock<IDependency2>().Object, new Mock<IDependency3>().Object, new Mock<IDependency4>().Object, dependency5); Assert.SomeAssert(sut.MethodA()); } In this example almost half the test is taken up creating dependencies which aren't used. I've investigated an approach where I have a helper method. [Test] public void TestMethodA() { var dependency5 = new Mock<IDependency1>(); dependency5.Setup(x => x. // some setup var sut = CreateSut(null, null, null, null, dependency5); Assert.SomeAssert(sut.MethodA()); } private Sut CreateSut(IDependency1 d1, IDependency2 d2...) { return new Sut(d1 ?? new Mock<IDependency1>().Object, d2 ?? new Mock<IDependency2>().Object, } But these often grow very complicated very quickly. What is the best way to create these BLL classes in test classes to reduce complexity and simplify tests?

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• How can I get better at explaining complex software processes to developers?

  - by Lostsoul

  I'm really struggling with my software specs. I am not a professional programmer but enjoy doing it for fun and made some software that I want to sell later but I'm not happy with the code quality. So I wanted to hire a real developer to rewrite my software in a more professional way so it will be maintainable by other developers in the future. I read and found some sample specs and made my own by applying their structure to my document and wanted to get my developer friend to read it and give me advice. After an hour and a half he understood exactly what I was trying to do and how I did it(my algorithms,stack,etc.). How can I get better at explaining things to developers? I add many details and explanations for everything(including working code) but I'm unsure the best way I can learn to pass detailed domain knowledge(my software applies big data, machine learning, graph theory to finance). My end goal is to get them to understand as much as possible from the document and then ask anything they do not understand, but right now it seems they need to extract alot of information from me. How can I get better at communicating domain knowledge to developers?

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• Partner Showcase

  - by rituchhibber

  Building a High Performance Employee Self Service Portal with Oracle WebCenter Free Half Day Technical Workshop Organisations started with static corporate intranets at the beginning of the “Noughties”, these have been evolving to the Intranet Portal that is common today. The rise in Employee Self Service leverages off this evolution to transform the intranet as a resource in order to deliver the “Contextual workers control panel”. This empowers employees to do their complete job from a single environment covering transactions, document handling, form completion, watching presentations, participating in discussions through to utilising search functionality. Ether Solutions - the Enterprise Portal specialists, together with C2B2 - the independent middleware experts, will deliver this workshop to you, allowing you to discover how Oracle WebCenter provides a high performance, highly scalable platform for social intranets and EmployeeSelf Service Portals. To register, please click here. When? Wednesday, 12th of December 2012 Where? Institute of Directors, 116 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5ED Who should attend? Lead Developers, Technical Architects, Solution Architects, Technical Leads and other Technical team member interested in learning about WebCenter. Lingotek - Collaborative Translation Technology Lingotek is the leading provider of Collaborative Translation Technology designed to meet the requirements of organizations challenged with communicating, interacting, and commercializing a global audience. Lingotek software helps companies achieve unprecedented control over the translation process and enables companies to capture, grow, and reuse their linguistic assets. Lingotek has deployed systems for some of the most innovative organizations in the United States and has enabled the success of large Fortune 500 corporations, small professional firms, and companies of every size in between. For further information, please click here.

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• How come there is still so much programming work?

  - by jd_505

  I wonder why programming jobs haven't yet "dried up" because of the software evolution, for example, I am a developer myself, which means that I do care about software (I mean I am not of the type of guys that needs a computer mainly to just browse the Internet), and still I wouldn't mind if I never receive any more updates on my Ubuntu machine. I find that it provides everything I need, and while the updates provide various bug fixes/improvements, I wouldn't mind using it with its current state for the rest of my life, for 2 years of Ubuntu usage I have never bumped at a serious bug/problem. Another example is Windows, almost half of it's users still use XP, which is practically ancient, yet they find it satisfying all their needs (and I agree with them). I could go with many more examples, but by now you are understanding my point and my question. While new "trends" appears all of the time (like a new mobile OS) which runs on new platforms and requires some fresh development work, still the majority of the software effort goes in to what I consider as "completed projects", or at least a state of a project which is enough to be considered as completed. Do you have an explanation? I can't think of the right tags for this question; please edit it the way you find it to be most appropriate.

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• Are my negative internship experiences respresentative of the real world?

  - by attemptAtAnonymity

  I'm curious if my current experiences as an intern are representative of actual industry. As background, I'm through the better part of two computing majors and a math major at a major university; I've aced every class and adored all of them, so I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at programming. I got an internship with one of the major software companies, and half way through now I've been shocked at the extraordinarily low quality of code. Comments don't exist, it's all spaghetti code, and everything that could be wrong is even worse. I've done a ton of tutoring/TAing, so I'm very used to reading bad code, but the major industry products I've been seeing trump all of that. I work 10-12 hours a day and never feel like I'm getting anywhere, because it's endless hours of trying to figure out an undocumented API or determine the behavior of some other part of the (completely undocumented) product. I've left work hating the job every day so far, and I desperately want to know if this is what is in store for the rest of my life. Did I draw a short straw on internships (the absurdly large paychecks imply that it's not a low quality position), or is this what the real world is like?

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• Problem video nvidia ubuntu 12.04

  - by dragonov7

  I just did a fresh install of ubuntu 12.04 on my PC (Dell precision 370) but the video is not working as it should. Problems: When I log in to unity 3D I get a transparent bar (where the firefox, libre office, etc icons are) but I can see the tooltips when I put my mouse over where the icons are, I can see the top toolbar with no problem and I see just white on the rest of the desktop! When I log in using unity 2D I see the left bar cut in half (so I can't see the trash icon that is at the botton), the toolbar at the top shows OK and the desktop show OK but with some apps. For example, if I open a terminal and maximize it, it will only show just where the left toolbar "cuts". But if I open firefox it will open fine. Config: My PC comes with a nvidia quadro nvs 280 and I see that by default ubuntu is using the nouveau driver. Workarounds tried: I tried uninstalling the nouveau driver and the desktop works fine but I can use only unity 2D. I tried installing the nvidia-173 drivers using synaptic but I get "Could not apply changes! Fix broken packages first". I go to "Edit - Fix Broken packages" and I get the error: "E: Unable to correct problem, you have held broken packages.E: Error, PkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breakes, this may be caused by held packages.E:Unable to correct dependencies" Output of lspci: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV37GL [Quadro PCI-E Series] (rev a2) Any idea so as to what I should do? Thanks in advance for any help. PS: Ah, the nvidia-173 driver was working fine on ubuntu 10.04.

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• Upgraded from ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 issues

  - by ubuntu novice user

  I recently upgraded 12.04 to 12.10 ubuntu and then all hell broke loose. Being more specific, I have a Compaq machine and its hard disk is partitioned into 3 parts, so when I installed Ubuntu 10.04, I installed it in windows, since then have upgraded with each new ubuntu release via the update manager without any problems. I have installed the 64 bit versions. 12.10 downloaded via update manager, and initial downloading of packages was without problems, however, as it tried to install the packages, error messages appeared. The first was one about missing lib files, but I clicked to continue, since I am a relative novice on ubuntu. It continued, and during the restart process, when it was powering down, the computer hanged on the shutting down bit without rebooting for more than half an hour, so I manually shut down the machine and restarted it. Then a new error message appeared stating could not find disk, and I hit the manual fix option, and it now boots to an empty ubuntu desktop with my wallpaper but no launcher and the graphics appears as if this was put on a 640 x 480 resolution, and the screen no longer fits onto my 19" LCD. I had to use Ctrl-Alt-T to log out and then restart from there. How can I resolve this issue. Please help!

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• Function for building an isosurface (a sphere cut by planes)

  - by GameDevEnthusiast

  I want to build an octree over a quarter of a sphere (for debugging and testing). The octree generator relies on the AIsosurface interface to compute the density and normal at any given point in space. For example, for a full sphere the corresponding code is: // returns <0 if the point is inside the solid virtual float GetDensity( float _x, float _y, float _z ) const override { Float3 P = Float3_Set( _x, _y, _z ); Float3 v = Float3_Subtract( P, m_origin ); float l = Float3_LengthSquared( v ); float d = Float_Sqrt(l) - m_radius; return d; } // estimates the gradient at the given point virtual Float3 GetNormal( float _x, float _y, float _z ) const override { Float3 P = Float3_Set( _x, _y, _z ); float d = this->AIsosurface::GetDensity( P ); float Nx = this->GetDensity( _x + 0.001f, _y, _z ) - d; float Ny = this->GetDensity( _x, _y + 0.001f, _z ) - d; float Nz = this->GetDensity( _x, _y, _z + 0.001f ) - d; Float3 N = Float3_Normalized( Float3_Set( Nx, Ny, Nz ) ); return N; } What is a nice and fast way to compute those values when the shape is bounded by a low number of half-spaces?

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• The Customer Experience Imperative: A Game Changer for Brands

  - by Jeri Kelley

  By Anthony Lye, SVP, Cloud Applications Strategy, Oracle We know that customer experience has emerged as a primary differentiator for businesses today.  I’ve talked a lot about the new age of the empowered consumer. At Oracle we’ve spent a lot of time developing technologies and practices that our customers can implement to greatly improve their customer experience strategies. Of course I’m biased, but I think that we have created a portfolio of the best solutions on the planet to help organizations deal with the challenges of providing great customer experiences. We’ve done this because we started to witness some trends over the last few years. As the average person began to utilize social and mobile technologies more frequently and products commoditized, customer experience truly remained the only sustainable differentiator for businesses.In fact, we have seen that customer experience is often driving the success or the failure of a product or a brand. And as end customers have become more vocal about their experiences with companies on social and mobile channels, they now have the power to decide which brands will win and which brands will lose. To address this customer experience imperative, I believe that business today must do three things really well:Connect with your customers. You have to connect with customers whenever, wherever and however they want. Organizations must provide a great experience on their existing channels— the call center, the brick and mortar store, the field sales organizations, the websites and social properties. Businesses must also be great at managing and delivering journeys on these channels, while quickly adapting to embrace the new channels that emerge. You have to understand mobile. You have to understand social. You have to understand kiosks. These are all new routes to market, new channels where your customers may or may not show up. You have to interact with them where they are. You have to present information in a way that's meaningful to them. As well as providing what we would call a multichannel experience. We have to recognize that customers may start their experience on one channel, but end it on a different channel. It’s important that an organization’s technology solutions enable, not just a multichannel strategy, but a strategy that can power new channels and create customer journeys that cross these channels.Get to know your customers. Next, companies need to get to know the customer as intimately as the customer will allow. Today most customer interactions are anonymous, but it’s important for brands to know which customers drive value. Customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their opinions, but they want to know that those opinions are being heard and acted upon. For this to occur, we need to know much more about the customer and then reward them for their loyalty and for their advocacy.Enable connections. The last thing is to enable people to connect or transact with your brand. We've got to make it really, really simple for customers to do business with us. We can't make them repeat the steps; we can't make them tell us their identity for the fifth time as they move between organizations. These silos can no longer sustain or deliver a good customer experience. It's extremely important that companies be where customers want them to be—that we create profitable journeys for us and for them.Organizations have to make sure that there is a single source of truth that defines the customer. We have to make sure that the technology applications that we rely on understand not just the dimensions of multichannel, but of cross-channel too. We have to enable social at the very core of the overall architecture. We have to use historical analytics, real-time decisioning as well as predictive analytics to help personalize and drive an experience. And these are all technologies that IT needs, that IT is familiar with, but needs to enable for the line of business that in turn can enable for the end customer.  This means that we've got to make our solutions available to the customers in the cloud.In this new age of the empowered consumer, businesses have to focus on delivery mechanisms that reduce the overall TCO, while driving a rapid rate of innovation and a more rapid rate of deployment. At the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, I’ll discuss these issues and more. I hope that you can join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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• The Sound of Two Toilets Flushing: Constructive Criticism for Virgin Atlantic Complaints Department

  - by Geertjan

  I recently had the experience of flying from London to Johannesburg and back with Virgin Atlantic. The good news was that it was the cheapest flight available and that the take off and landing were absolutely perfect. Hence I really have no reason to complain. Instead, I'd like to offer some constructive criticism which hopefully Richard Branson will find sometime while googling his name. Or maybe someone from the Virgin Atlantic Complaints Department will find it, whatever, just want to put this information out there. Arrangement of restroom facilities. Maybe next time you design an airplane, consider not putting your toilets at a right angle right next to your rows of seats. Being able to reach, without even needing to stretch your arm, from your seat to close, yet again, a toilet door that someone, someone obviously sitting very far from the toilets, carelessly forgot to close is not an indicator of quality interior design. Have you noticed how all other airplanes have their toilets in a cubicle separated from the rows of seats? On those airplanes, people sitting in the seats near the toilets are not constantly being woken up throughout the night whenever someone enters/exits the toilet, whenever the light in the toilet is suddenly switched on, and whenever one of the toilets flushes. Bonus points for Virgin Atlantic passengers in the seats adjoining the toilets is when multiple toilets are flushed simultaneously and multiple passengers enter/exit them at the same time, a bit like an unasked for low budget musical of suddenly illuminated grumpy people in crumpled clothes. What joy that brings at 3 AM is hard to describe. Seats with extra leg room. You know how other airplanes have the seats with the extra leg room? You know what those seats tend to have? Extra leg room. It's really interesting how Virgin Atlantic's seats with extra leg room actually have no extra leg room at all. It should have been a give away, the fact that these special seats are found in the same rows as the standard seats, rather than on the cusp of real glory which is where most airlines put their extra leg room seats, with the only actual difference being that they have a slightly different color. Had you called them "seats with a different color" (i.e., almost not quite green, rather than something vaguely hinting at blue), at least I'd have known what I was getting. Picture the joy at 3 AM, rudely awakened from nightmarish slumber, partly grateful to have been released from a grayish dream of faceless zombies resembling one or two of those in a recent toilet line, by multiple adjoining toilets flushing simultaneously, while you're sitting in a seat with extra leg room that has exactly as much leg room as the seats in neighboring rows. You then have a choice of things to be sincerely annoyed about. Food from the '80's. In the '80's, airplane food came in soggy containers and even breakfast, the most important meal of the day, was a sad heap of vaguely gray colors. The culinary highlight tended to be a squashed tomato, which must have been mashed to a pulp with a brick prior to being regurgitated by a small furry animal, and there was also always a piece of immensely horrid pumpkin, as well as a slice of spongy something you'd never seen before. Sausages and mash at 6 AM on an airplane was always a heavy lump of horribleness. Thankfully, all airlines throughout the world changed from this puke inducing strategy around 1987 sometime. Not Virgin Atlantic, of course. The fatty sausages and mash are still there, bringing you flashbacks to Duran Duran, which is what you were listening to (on your walkman) the last time you saw it in an airplane. Even the golden oldie "squashed tomato attached by slime to three wet peas" is on the menu. How wonderful to have all this in a cramped seat with a long row of early morning bleariness lined up for the toilets, right at your side, bumping into your elbow, groggily, one by one, one after another, more and more, fumble-open-door-silence-flush-fumble-open-door, and on and on, while you tentatively push your fork through a soggy pile of colorless mush, fighting the urge to throw up on the stinky socks of whatever nightmarish zombie is bumping into your elbow at the time. But, then again, the plane landed without a hitch, in fact, extremely smoothly, so I'm certainly not blaming the pilots.

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• Session Report - Java on the Raspberry Pi

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On mid-day Wednesday, the always colorful Oracle Evangelist Simon Ritter demonstrated Java on the Raspberry Pi at his session, “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?”. The Raspberry Pi consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there is a single feature that makes the Raspberry Pi significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things really makes it stand out. First, it's $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. You do have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine and Acorn RISC Machine) processor is noteworthy, because it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. When you add in the enormous community support, it offers a great platform for teaching everyone about computing.”Some 200 enthusiastic attendees were present at the session which had the feel of Simon Ritter sharing a fun toy with friends. The main point of the session was to show what Oracle was doing to support Java on the Raspberry Pi in a way that is entertaining and fun. Ritter pointed out that, in addition to being great for teaching, it’s an excellent introduction to the ARM architecture, and runs well with Java and will get better once it has official hard float support. The possibilities are vast.Ritter explained that the Raspberry Pi Project started in 2006 with the goal of devising a computer to inspire children; it drew inspiration from the BBC Micro literacy project of 1981 that produced a series of microcomputers created by the Acorn Computer company. It was officially launched on February 29, 2012, with a first production of 10,000 boards. There were 100,000 pre-orders in one day; currently about 4,000 boards are produced a day. Ritter described the specification as follows:* CPU: ARM 11 core running at 700MHz Broadcom SoC package Can now be overclocked to 1GHz (without breaking the warranty!) * Memory: 256Mb* I/O: HDMI and composite video 2 x USB ports (Model B only) Ethernet (Model B only) Header pins for GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C He took attendees through a brief history of ARM Architecture:* Acorn BBC Micro (6502 based) Not powerful enough for Acorn’s plans for a business computer * Berkeley RISC Project UNIX kernel only used 30% of instruction set of Motorola 68000 More registers, less instructions (Register windows) One chip architecture to come from this was… SPARC * Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) 32-bit data, 26-bit address space, 27 registers First machine was Acorn Archimedes * Spin off from Acorn, Advanced RISC MachinesNext he presented its features:* 32-bit RISC Architecture–  ARM accounts for 75% of embedded 32-bit CPUs today– 6.1 Billion chips sold last year (zero manufactured by ARM)* Abstract architecture and microprocessor core designs– Raspberry Pi is ARM11 using ARMv6 instruction set* Low power consumption– Good for mobile devices– Raspberry Pi can be powered from 700mA 5V only PSU– Raspberry Pi does not require heatsink or fanHe described the current ARM Technology:* ARMv6– ARM 11, ARM Cortex-M* ARMv7– ARM Cortex-A, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R* ARMv8 (Announced)– Will support 64-bit data and addressingHe next gave the Java Specifics for ARM: Floating point operations* Despite being an ARMv6 processor it does include an FPU– FPU only became standard as of ARMv7* FPU (Hard Float, or HF) is much faster than a software library* Linux distros and Oracle JVM for ARM assume no HF on ARMv6– Need special build of both– Raspbian distro build now available– Oracle JVM is in the works, release date TBDNot So RISCPerformance Improvements* DSP Enhancements* Jazelle* Thumb / Thumb2 / ThumbEE* Floating Point (VFP)* NEON* Security Enhancements (TrustZone)He spent a few minutes going over the challenges of using Java on the Raspberry Pi and covered:* Sound* Vision * Serial (TTL UART)* USB* GPIOTo implement sound with Java he pointed out:* Sound drivers are now included in new distros* Java Sound API– Remember to add audio to user’s groups– Some bits work, others not so much* Playing (the right format) WAV file works* Using MIDI hangs trying to open a synthesizer* FreeTTS text-to-speech– Should work once sound works properlyHe turned to JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi:* Currently internal builds only– Will be released as technology preview soon* Work involves optimal implementation of Prism graphics engine– X11?* Once the JavaFX implementation is completed there will be little of concern to developers-- It’s just Java (WORA). He explained the basis of the Serial Port:* UART provides TTL level signals (3.3V)* RS-232 uses 12V signals* Use MAX3232 chip to convert* Use this for access to serial consoleHe summarized his key points. The Raspberry Pi is a very cool (and cheap) computer that is great for teaching, a great introduction to ARM that works very well with Java and will work better in the future. The opportunities are limitless. For further info, check out, Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree. From there, Ritter tried out several fun demos, some of which worked better than others, but all of which were greeted with considerable enthusiasm and support and good humor (even when he ran into some glitches).  All in all, this was a fun and lively session.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #34: Help! I Need Somebody!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Welcome everyone to T-SQL Tuesday Episode 34!  When last we tuned in, Mike Fal (b|t) hosted Trick Shots.  These highlighted techniques or tricks that you figured out on your own which helped you understand SQL Server better. This month, I'm asking you to look back this past week, year, century, or hour...to a time when you COULDN'T figure it out.  When you were stuck on a SQL Server problem and you had to seek help. In the beginning... SQL Server has changed a lot since I started with it.  <Cranky Old Guy> Back in my day, Books Online was neither.  There were no blogs. Google was the third-place search site. There were perhaps two or three community forums where you could ask questions.  (Besides the Microsoft newsgroups...which you had to access with Usenet.  And endure the wrath of...Celko.)  Your "training" was reading a book, made from real dead trees, that you bought from your choice of brick-and-mortar bookstore. And except for your local user groups, there were no conferences, seminars, SQL Saturdays, or any online video hookups where you could interact with a person. You'd have to call Microsoft Support...on the phone...a LANDLINE phone.  And none of this "SQL Family" business!</Cranky Old Guy> Even now, with all these excellent resources available, it's still daunting for a beginner to seek help for SQL Server.  The product is roughly 1247.4523 times larger than it was 15 years ago, and it's simply impossible to know everything about it.*  So whether you are a beginner, or a seasoned pro of over a decade's experience, what do you do when you need help on SQL Server? That's so meta... In the spirit of offering help, here are some suggestions for your topic: Tell us about a person or SQL Server community who have been helpful to you.  It can be about a technical problem, or not, e.g. someone who volunteered for your local SQL Saturday.  Sing their praises!  Let the world know who they are! Do you have any tricks for using Books Online?  Do you use the locally installed product, or are you completely online with BOL/MSDN/Technet, and why? If you've been using SQL Server for over 10 years, how has your help-seeking changed? Are you using Twitter, StackOverflow, MSDN Forums, or another resource that didn't exist when you started? What made you switch? Do you spend more time helping others than seeking help? What motivates you to help, and how do you contribute? Structure your post along the lyrics to The Beatles song Help! Audio or video renditions are particularly welcome! Lyrics must include reference to SQL Server terminology or community, and performances must be in your voice or include you playing an instrument. These are just suggestions, you are free to write whatever you like.  Bonus points if you can incorporate ALL of these into a single post.  (Or you can do multiple posts, we're flexible like that.)  Help us help others by showing how others helped you! Legalese, Your Rights, Yada yada... If you would like to participate in T-SQL Tuesday please be sure to follow the rules below: Your blog post must be published between Tuesday, September 11, 2012 00:00:00 GMT and Wednesday, September 12, 2012 00:00:00 GMT. Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo (above) and hyperlink it back to this post. If you don’t see your post in trackbacks, add the link to the comments below. If you are on Twitter please tweet your blog using the #TSQL2sDay hashtag.  I can be contacted there as @sql_r, in case you have questions or problems with comments/trackback.  I'll have a follow-up post listing all the contributions as soon as I can. Thank you all for participating, and special thanks to Adam Machanic (b|t) for all his help and for continuing this series!

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