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• Seizing the Moment with Mobility

  - by Divya Malik

  Empowering people to work where they want to work is becoming more critical now with the consumerisation of technology. Employees are bringing their own devices to the workplace and expecting to be productive wherever they are. Sales people welcome the ability to run their critical business applications where they can be most effective which is typically on the road and when they are still with the customer. Oracle has invested many years of research in understanding customer's Mobile requirements. “The keys to building the best user experience were building in a lot of flexibility in ways to support sales, and being useful,” said Arin Bhowmick, Director, CRM, for the Applications UX team. “We did that by talking to and analyzing the needs of a lot of people in different roles.” The team studied real-life sales teams. “We wanted to study salespeople in context with their work,” Bhowmick said. “We studied all user types in the CRM world because we wanted to build a user interface and user experience that would cater to sales representatives, marketing managers, sales managers, and more. Not only did we do studies in our labs, but also we did studies in the field and in mobile environments because salespeople are always on the go.” Here is a recent post from Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps which was featured on the Oracle Applications Blog.  Mobile devices are forcing a paradigm shift in the workplace – they’re changing the way businesses can do business and the type of cultures they can nurture. As our customers talk about their mobile needs, we hear them saying they want instant-on access to enterprise data so workers can be more effective at their jobs anywhere, anytime. They also are interested in being more cost effective from an IT point of view. The mobile revolution – with the idea of BYOD (bring your own device) – has added an interesting dynamic because previously IT was driving the employee device strategy and ecosystem. That's been turned on its head with the consumerization of IT. Now employees are figuring out how to use their personal devices for work purposes and IT has to figure out how to adapt. Blurring the Lines between Work and Personal Life My vision of where businesses will be five years from now is that our work lives and personal lives will be more interwoven together. In turn, enterprises will have to determine how to make employees’ work lives fit more into the fabric of their personal lives. And personal devices like smartphones are going to drive significant business value because they let us accomplish things very incrementally. I can be sitting on a train or in a taxi and be productive. At the end of any meeting, I can capture ideas and tasks or follow up with people in real time. Mobile devices enable this notion of seizing the moment – capitalizing on opportunities that might otherwise have slipped away because we're not connected. For the industry shapers out there, this is game changing. The lean and agile workforce is definitely the future. This notion of the board sitting down with the executive team to lay out strategic objectives for a three- to five-year plan, bringing in HR to determine how they're going to staff the strategic activities, kicking off the execution, and then revisiting the plan in three to five years to create another three- to five-year plan is yesterday's model. Businesses that continue to approach innovating in that way are in the dinosaur age. Today it's about incremental planning and incremental execution, which requires a lot of cohesion and synthesis within the workforce. There needs to be this interweaving notion within the workforce about how ideas cascade down, how people engage, how they stay connected, and how insights are shared. How to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Marketplace The notion of Facebook isn’t new. We lived it pre-Internet days with America Online and Prodigy – Facebook is just the renaissance of these services in a more viral and pervasive way. And given the trajectory of the consumerization of IT with people bringing their personal tooling to work, the enterprise has no option but to adapt. The sooner that businesses realize this from a top-down point of view the sooner that they will be able to really drive significant innovation and adapt to the marketplace. There are a small number of companies right now (I think it's closer to 20% rather than 80%, but the number is expanding) that are able to really innovate in this incremental marketplace. So from a competitive point of view, there's no choice but to be social and stay connected. By far the majority of users on Facebook and LinkedIn are mobile users – people on iPhones, smartphones, Android phones, and tablets. It's not the couch people, right? It's the on-the-go people – those people at the coffee shops. Usually when you're sitting at your desk on a big desktop computer, typically you have better things to do than to be on Facebook. This is a topic I'm extremely passionate about because I think mobile devices are game changing. Mobility delivers significant value to businesses – it also brings dramatic simplification from a functional point of view and transforms our work life experience. Hernan Capdevila Vice President, Oracle Applications Development

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• PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

  - by Duncan Mills

  With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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• Add Widget via Action in Toolbar

  - by Geertjan

  The question of the day comes from Vadim, who asks on the NetBeans Platform mailing list: "Looking for example showing how to add Widget to Scene, e.g. by toolbar button click." Well, the solution is very similar to this blog entry, where you see a solution provided by Jesse Glick for VisiTrend in Boston: https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/zoom_capability Other relevant articles to read are as follows: http://netbeans.dzone.com/news/which-netbeans-platform-action http://netbeans.dzone.com/how-to-make-context-sensitive-actions Let's go through it step by step, with this result in the end, a solution involving 4 classes split (optionally, since a central feature of the NetBeans Platform is modularity) across multiple modules: The Customer object has a "name" String and the Droppable capability has a method "doDrop" which takes a Customer object: public interface Droppable {    void doDrop(Customer c);} In the TopComponent, we use "TopComponent.associateLookup" to publish an instance of "Droppable", which creates a new LabelWidget and adds it to the Scene in the TopComponent. Here's the TopComponent constructor: public CustomerCanvasTopComponent() {    initComponents();    setName(Bundle.CTL_CustomerCanvasTopComponent());    setToolTipText(Bundle.HINT_CustomerCanvasTopComponent());    final Scene scene = new Scene();    final LayerWidget layerWidget = new LayerWidget(scene);    Droppable d = new Droppable(){        @Override        public void doDrop(Customer c) {            LabelWidget customerWidget = new LabelWidget(scene, c.getTitle());            customerWidget.getActions().addAction(ActionFactory.createMoveAction());            layerWidget.addChild(customerWidget);            scene.validate();        }    };    scene.addChild(layerWidget);    jScrollPane1.setViewportView(scene.createView());    associateLookup(Lookups.singleton(d));} The Action is displayed in the toolbar and is enabled only if a Droppable is currently in the Lookup: @ActionID(        category = "Tools",        id = "org.customer.controler.AddCustomerAction")@ActionRegistration(        iconBase = "org/customer/controler/icon.png",        displayName = "#AddCustomerAction")@ActionReferences({    @ActionReference(path = "Toolbars/File", position = 300)})@NbBundle.Messages("AddCustomerAction=Add Customer")public final class AddCustomerAction implements ActionListener {    private final Droppable context;    public AddCustomerAction(Droppable droppable) {        this.context = droppable;    }    @Override    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {        NotifyDescriptor.InputLine inputLine = new NotifyDescriptor.InputLine("Name:", "Data Entry");        Object result = DialogDisplayer.getDefault().notify(inputLine);        if (result == NotifyDescriptor.OK_OPTION) {            Customer customer = new Customer(inputLine.getInputText());            context.doDrop(customer);        }    }} Therefore, when the Properties window, for example, is selected, the Action will be disabled. (See the Zoomable example referred to in the link above for another example of this.) As you can see above, when the Action is invoked, a Droppable must be available (otherwise the Action would not have been enabled). The Droppable is obtained in the Action and a new Customer object is passed to its "doDrop" method. The above in pictures, take note of the enablement of the toolbar button with the red dot, on the extreme left of the toolbar in the screenshots below: The above shows the JButton is only enabled if the relevant TopComponent is active and, when the Action is invoked, the user can enter a name, after which a new LabelWidget is created in the Scene. The source code of the above is here: http://java.net/projects/nb-api-samples/sources/api-samples/show/versions/7.3/misc/WidgetCreationFromAction Note: Showing this as an MVC example is slightly misleading because, depending on which model object ("Customer" and "Droppable") you're looking at, the V and the C are different. From the point of view of "Customer", the TopComponent is the View, while the Action is the Controler, since it determines when the M is displayed. However, from the point of view of "Droppable", the TopComponent is the Controler, since it determines when the Action, i.e., which is in this case the View, displays the presence of the M.

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• Part 8: How to name EBS Customizations

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  You might wonder why I am discussing this here. The reason is simple: nearly every project has a bit different naming conventions, which makes a the life always a bit complicated (for developers, but also setup responsible, and also for consultants).  Although we always create a document to describe the technical object naming conventions, I have rarely seen a dedicated document  with functional naming conventions. To be precisely, from my stand point, there should always be one global naming definition for an implementation! Let me discuss some related questions: What is the best convention for the customization reference? How to name database objects (tables, packages etc.)? How to name functional objects like Value Sets, Concurrent Programs, etc. How to separate customizations from standard objects best? What is the best convention for the customization reference? The customization reference is the key you use to reference your customization from other lists, from the project plan etc. Usually it is something like XXHU_CONV_22 (HU=customer abbreviation, CONV=Conversion object #22) or XXFA_DEPRN_RPT_02 (FA=Fixed Assets, DEPRN=Short object group, here depreciation, RPT=Report, 02=2nd report in this area) As this is just a reference (not an object name yet), I would prefer the second option. XX=Customization, FA=Main EBS Module linked (you may have sometimes more, but FA is the main) DEPRN_RPT=Short name to specify the customization 02=a unique number Important here is that the HU isn’t used, because XX is enough to mark a custom object, and the 3rd+4th char can be used by the EBS module short name. How to name database objects (tables, packages etc.)? I was leading different developer teams, and I know that one common way is it to take the Customization reference and add more chars behind to classify the object (like _V for view and _T1 for triggers etc.). The only concern I have with this approach is the reusability. If you name your view XXFA_DEPRN_RPT_02_V, no one will by choice reuse this nice view, as it seams to be specific for this CEMLI. My suggestion is rather to name the view XXFA_DEPRN_PERIODS_V and allow herewith reusability for other CEMLIs (although the view will be deployed primarily with CEMLI package XXFA_DEPRN_RPT_02). (check also one of the following Blogs where I will talk about deployment.) How to name Value Sets, Concurrent Programs, etc. For Value Sets I would go with the same convention as for database objects, starting with XX<Module> …. For Concurrent Programs the situation is a bit different. This “object” is seen and used by a lot of users, and they will search for. In many projects it is common to start again with the company short name, or with XX. My proposal would differ. If you have created your own report and you name it “XX: Invoice Report”, the user has to remember that this report does not start with “I”, it starts with X. Would you like typing an X if you are looking for an Invoice report? No, you wouldn’t! So my advise would be to name it:   “Invoice Report (XXAP)”. Still we know it is custom (because of the XXAP), but the end user will type the key “i” to get it (and will see similar reports starting also with “i”). I hope that the general schema behind has now become obvious. How to separate customizations from standard objects best? I would not have this section here if the naming would not play an important role. Unfortunately, we can not always link a custom application to our own object, therefore the naming is really important. In the file system structure we use our $XXyy_TOP, in JAVA_TOP it is perhaps also “xx” in front. But in the database itself? Although there are different concepts in place, still many implementations are using the standard “apps” approach, means custom objects are stored in the apps schema (which should not cause any trouble). Final advise: review the naming conventions regularly, once a month. You may have to add more! And, publish them! To summarize: Technical and functional customized objects should always follow a naming convention. This naming convention should be project wide, and only one place shall be used to maintain (like in a Wiki). If the name is for the end user, rather put a customization identifier at the end; if it is an internal name, start with XX…

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• Mixing Forms and Token Authentication in a single ASP.NET Application (the Details)

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  The scenario described in my last post works because of the design around HTTP modules in ASP.NET. Authentication related modules (like Forms authentication and WIF WS-Fed/Sessions) typically subscribe to three events in the pipeline – AuthenticateRequest/PostAuthenticateRequest for pre-processing and EndRequest for post-processing (like making redirects to a login page). In the pre-processing stage it is the modules’ job to determine the identity of the client based on incoming HTTP details (like a header, cookie, form post) and set HttpContext.User and Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The actual page (in the ExecuteHandler event) “sees” the identity that the last module has set. So in our case there are three modules in effect: FormsAuthenticationModule (AuthenticateRequest, EndRequest) WSFederationAuthenticationModule (AuthenticateRequest, PostAuthenticateRequest, EndRequest) SessionAuthenticationModule (AuthenticateRequest, PostAuthenticateRequest) So let’s have a look at the different scenario we have when mixing Forms auth and WS-Federation. Anoymous request to unprotected resource This is the easiest case. Since there is no WIF session cookie or a FormsAuth cookie, these modules do nothing. The WSFed module creates an anonymous ClaimsPrincipal and calls the registered ClaimsAuthenticationManager (if any) to transform it. The result (by default an anonymous ClaimsPrincipal) gets set. Anonymous request to FormsAuth protected resource This is the scenario where an anonymous user tries to access a FormsAuth protected resource for the first time. The principal is anonymous and before the page gets rendered, the Authorize attribute kicks in. The attribute determines that the user needs authentication and therefor sets a 401 status code and ends the request. Now execution jumps to the EndRequest event, where the FormsAuth module takes over. The module then converts the 401 to a redirect (302) to the forms login page. If authentication is successful, the login page sets the FormsAuth cookie.   FormsAuth authenticated request to a FormsAuth protected resource Now a FormsAuth cookie is present, which gets validated by the FormsAuth module. This cookie gets turned into a GenericPrincipal/FormsIdentity combination. The WS-Fed module turns the principal into a ClaimsPrincipal and calls the registered ClaimsAuthenticationManager. The outcome of that gets set on the context. Anonymous request to STS protected resource This time the anonymous user tries to access an STS protected resource (a controller decorated with the RequireTokenAuthentication attribute). The attribute determines that the user needs STS authentication by checking the authentication type on the current principal. If this is not Federation, the redirect to the STS will be made. After successful authentication at the STS, the STS posts the token back to the application (using WS-Federation syntax). Postback from STS authentication After the postback, the WS-Fed module finds the token response and validates the contained token. If successful, the token gets transformed by the ClaimsAuthenticationManager, and the outcome is a) stored in a session cookie, and b) set on the context. STS authenticated request to an STS protected resource This time the WIF Session authentication module kicks in because it can find the previously issued session cookie. The module re-hydrates the ClaimsPrincipal from the cookie and sets it.     FormsAuth and STS authenticated request to a protected resource This is kind of an odd case – e.g. the user first authenticated using Forms and after that using the STS. This time the FormsAuth module does its work, and then afterwards the session module stomps over the context with the session principal. In other words, the STS identity wins.   What about roles? A common way to set roles in ASP.NET is to use the role manager feature. There is a corresponding HTTP module for that (RoleManagerModule) that handles PostAuthenticateRequest. Does this collide with the above combinations? No it doesn’t! When the WS-Fed module turns existing principals into a ClaimsPrincipal (like it did with the FormsIdentity), it also checks for RolePrincipal (which is the principal type created by role manager), and turns the roles in role claims. Nice! But as you can see in the last scenario above, this might result in unnecessary work, so I would rather recommend consolidating all role work (and other claims transformations) into the ClaimsAuthenticationManager. In there you can check for the authentication type of the incoming principal and act accordingly. HTH

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• SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remote Diag

  - by juanlarios

  I have had some time this week to try out some tools that I have been meaning to try out. This week I am trying out the SP 2010 Diagnostic Studio. I installed it successfully and tried it on my development evironment. I was able to build a report and a snapshot of the environment. I decided to turn my attention to my Employer's intranet environment. This would allow me to analyze it and measure it against benchmarks. I didn't want to install the Diagnostic studio on the Production Envorinment, lucky for me, the Diagnostic studio can be run remotely, well...kind of. Issue My development environment is a stand alone, full installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. It has Office 2010, SQL 2008 Enterprise, a DC...well you get the point, it's jammed packed! But more importantly it's a stand alone, self contained VM environment. Well Microsoft has instructions as to how to connect remotely with Diagnostic Studio here. The deciving part of this is that the SP2010DS prompts you for credentails. So I thought I was getting the right account to run the reports. I tried all the Power Shell commands in the link above but I still ended up getting the following errors: 06/28/2011 12:50:18    Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request...If the SPN exists, but CredSSP cannot use Kerberos to validate the identity of the target computer and you still want to allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer, use gpedit.msc and look at the following policy: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Delegation -> Allow Fresh Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication.  Verify that it is enabled and configured with an SPN appropriate for the target computer. For example, for a target computer name "myserver.domain.com", the SPN can be one of the following: WSMAN/myserver.domain.com or WSMAN/*.domain.com. Try the request again after these changes. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. 06/28/2011 12:54:47    Access to the path '\\<targetserver>\C$\Users\<account logging in>\AppData\Local\Temp' is denied. You might also get an error message like this: The WinRM client cannot process the request. A computer policy does not allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer. Explanation After looking at the event logs on the target environment, I noticed that there were a several Security Exceptions. After looking at the specifics around who was denied access, I was able to see the account that was being denied access, it was the client machine administrator account. Well of course that was never going to work!!! After some quick Googling, the last error message above will lead you to edit the Local Group Policy on the client server. And although there are instructions from microsoft around doing this, it really will not work in this scenario. Notice the Description and how it only applices to authentication mentioned? Resolution I can tell you what I did, but I wish there was a better way but I simply don't know if it's duable any other way. Because my development environment had it's own DC, I didn't really want to mess with Kerberos authentication. I would also not be smart to connect that server to the domain, considering it has it's own DC. I ended up installing SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio on another Windows 7 Dev environment I have, and connected the machien to the domain. I ran all the necesary remote credentials commands mentioned here. Those commands add the group policy for you! Once I did this I was able to authenticate properly and I was able to get the reports. Conclusion   You can run SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remotely but it will require some specific scenarions. A couple of things I should mention is that as far as I understand, SP2010 DS, will install agents on your target environment to run tests and retrieve the data. I was a Farm Administrator, and also a Server Admin on SharePoint Server. I am not 100% sure if you need all those permissions but I that's just what I have to my internal intranet.   I deally I would like to have a machine that I can have SharePoint 2010 DIagnostic Studio installed and I can run that against client environments. It appears that I will not be able to do that, unless I enable Kerberos on my Windows 7 Machine now. If you have it installed in the same way I would like to have it, please let me know, I'll keep trying to get what I'm after. Hope this helps someone out there doing the same.

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• Why do we use Pythagoras in game physics?

  - by Starkers

  I've recently learned that we use Pythagoras a lot in our physics calculations and I'm afraid I don't really get the point. Here's an example from a book to make sure an object doesn't travel faster than a MAXIMUM_VELOCITY constant in the horizontal plane: MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = <any number>; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = MAXIMUM_VELOCITY * MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; function animate(){ var squared_horizontal_velocity = (x_velocity * x_velocity) + (z_velocity * z_velocity); if( squared_horizontal_velocity <= SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ scalar = squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; } } Let's try this with some numbers: An object is attempting to move 5 units in x and 5 units in z. It should only be able to move 5 units horizontally in total! MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5 * 5; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 25; function animate(){ var x_velocity = 5; var z_velocity = 5; var squared_horizontal_velocity = (x_velocity * x_velocity) + (z_velocity * z_velocity); var squared_horizontal_velocity = 5 * 5 + 5 * 5; var squared_horizontal_velocity = 25 + 25; var squared_horizontal_velocity = 50; // if( squared_horizontal_velocity <= SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ if( 50 <= 25 ){ scalar = squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; scalar = 50 / 25; scalar = 2.0; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; x_velocity = 5 / 2.0; x_velocity = 2.5; z_velocity = z_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = 5 / 2.0; z_velocity = 2.5; // new_horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity // new_horizontal_velocity = 2.5 + 2.5 // new_horizontal_velocity = 5 } } Now this works well, but we can do the same thing without Pythagoras: MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5; function animate(){ var x_velocity = 5; var z_velocity = 5; var horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity; var horizontal_velocity = 5 + 5; var horizontal_velocity = 10; // if( horizontal_velocity >= MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ if( 10 >= 5 ){ scalar = horizontal_velocity / MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; scalar = 10 / 5; scalar = 2.0; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; x_velocity = 5 / 2.0; x_velocity = 2.5; z_velocity = z_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = 5 / 2.0; z_velocity = 2.5; // new_horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity // new_horizontal_velocity = 2.5 + 2.5 // new_horizontal_velocity = 5 } } Benefits of doing it without Pythagoras: Less lines Within those lines, it's easier to read what's going on ...and it takes less time to compute, as there are less multiplications Seems to me like computers and humans get a better deal without Pythagoras! However, I'm sure I'm wrong as I've seen Pythagoras' theorem in a number of reputable places, so I'd like someone to explain me the benefit of using Pythagoras to a maths newbie. Does this have anything to do with unit vectors? To me a unit vector is when we normalize a vector and turn it into a fraction. We do this by dividing the vector by a larger constant. I'm not sure what constant it is. The total size of the graph? Anyway, because it's a fraction, I take it, a unit vector is basically a graph that can fit inside a 3D grid with the x-axis running from -1 to 1, z-axis running from -1 to 1, and the y-axis running from -1 to 1. That's literally everything I know about unit vectors... not much :P And I fail to see their usefulness. Also, we're not really creating a unit vector in the above examples. Should I be determining the scalar like this: // a mathematical work-around of my own invention. There may be a cleverer way to do this! I've also made up my own terms such as 'divisive_scalar' so don't bother googling var divisive_scalar = (squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY); var divisive_scalar = ( 50 / 25 ); var divisive_scalar = 2; var multiplicative_scalar = (divisive_scalar / (2*divisive_scalar)); var multiplicative_scalar = (2 / (2*2)); var multiplicative_scalar = (2 / 4); var multiplicative_scalar = 0.5; x_velocity = x_velocity * multiplicative_scalar x_velocity = 5 * 0.5 x_velocity = 2.5 Again, I can't see why this is better, but it's more "unit-vector-y" because the multiplicative_scalar is a unit_vector? As you can see, I use words such as "unit-vector-y" so I'm really not a maths whiz! Also aware that unit vectors might have nothing to do with Pythagoras so ignore all of this if I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'm a very visual person (3D modeller and concept artist by trade!) and I find diagrams and graphs really, really helpful so as many as humanely possible please!

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• OpenGL 3 and the Radeon HD 4850x2

  - by rotard

  A while ago, I picked up a copy of the OpenGL SuperBible fifth edition and slowly and painfully started teaching myself OpenGL the 3.3 way, after having been used to the 1.0 way from school way back when. Making things more challenging, I am primarily a .NET developer, so I was working in Mono with the OpenTK OpenGL wrapper. On my laptop, I put together a program that let the user walk around a simple landscape using a couple shaders that implemented per-vertex coloring and lighting and texture mapping. Everything was working brilliantly until I ran the same program on my desktop. Disaster! Nothing would render! I have chopped my program down to the point where the camera sits near the origin, pointing at the origin, and renders a square (technically, a triangle fan). The quad renders perfectly on my laptop, coloring, lighting, texturing and all, but the desktop renders a small distorted non-square quadrilateral that is colored incorrectly, not affected by the lights, and not textured. I suspect the graphics card is at fault, because I get the same result whether I am booted into Ubuntu 10.10 or Win XP. I did find that if I pare the vertex shader down to ONLY outputting the positional data and the fragment shader to ONLY outputting a solid color (white) the quad renders correctly. But as SOON as I start passing in color data (whether or not I use it in the fragment shader) the output from the vertex shader is distorted again. The shaders follow. I left the pre-existing code in, but commented out so you can get an idea what I was trying to do. I'm a noob at glsl so the code could probably be a lot better. My laptop is an old lenovo T61p with a Centrino (Core 2) Duo and an nVidia Quadro graphics card running Ubuntu 10.10 My desktop has an i7 with a Radeon HD 4850 x2 (single card, dual GPU) from Saphire dual booting into Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP. The problem occurs in both XP and Ubuntu. Can anyone see something wrong that I am missing? What is "special" about my HD 4850x2? string vertexShaderSource = @" #version 330 precision highp float; uniform mat4 projection_matrix; uniform mat4 modelview_matrix; //uniform mat4 normal_matrix; //uniform mat4 cmv_matrix; //Camera modelview. Light sources are transformed by this matrix. //uniform vec3 ambient_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_direction; in vec4 in_position; in vec4 in_color; //in vec3 in_normal; //in vec3 in_tex_coords; out vec4 varyingColor; //out vec3 varyingTexCoords; void main(void) { //Get surface normal in eye coordinates //vec4 vEyeNormal = normal_matrix * vec4(in_normal, 0); //Get vertex position in eye coordinates //vec4 vPosition4 = modelview_matrix * vec4(in_position, 0); //vec3 vPosition3 = vPosition4.xyz / vPosition4.w; //Get vector to light source in eye coordinates //vec3 lightVecNormalized = normalize(diffuse_direction); //vec3 vLightDir = normalize((cmv_matrix * vec4(lightVecNormalized, 0)).xyz); //Dot product gives us diffuse intensity //float diff = max(0.0, dot(vEyeNormal.xyz, vLightDir.xyz)); //Multiply intensity by diffuse color, force alpha to 1.0 //varyingColor.xyz = in_color * diff * diffuse_color.xyz; varyingColor = in_color; //varyingTexCoords = in_tex_coords; gl_Position = projection_matrix * modelview_matrix * in_position; }"; string fragmentShaderSource = @" #version 330 //#extension GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 : enable precision highp float; //uniform sampler2DArray colorMap; //in vec4 varyingColor; //in vec3 varyingTexCoords; out vec4 out_frag_color; void main(void) { out_frag_color = vec4(1,1,1,1); //out_frag_color = varyingColor; //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, varyingTexCoords.st); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, vec3(varyingTexCoords.st, 0)); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture2DArray(colorMap, varyingTexCoords); }"; Note that in this code the color data is accepted but not actually used. The geometry is outputted the same (wrong) whether the fragment shader uses varyingColor or not. Only if I comment out the line varyingColor = in_color; does the geometry output correctly. Originally the shaders took in vec3 inputs, I only modified them to take vec4s while troubleshooting.

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• Provocative Tweets From the Dachis Social Business Summit

  - by Mike Stiles

  On June 20, all who follow social business and how social is changing how we do business and internal business structures, gathered in London for the Dachis Social Business Summit. In addition to Oracle SVP Product Development, Reggie Bradford, brands and thought leaders posed some thought-provoking ideas and figures. Here are some of the most oft-tweeted points, and our thoughts that they provoked. Tweet: The winners will be those who use data to improve performance.Thought: Everyone is dwelling on ROI. Why isn’t everyone dwelling on the opportunity to make their product or service better (as if that doesn’t have an effect on ROI)? Big data can improve you…let it. Tweet: High performance hinges on integrated teams that interact with each other.Thought: Team members may work well with each other, but does the team as a whole “get” what other teams are doing? That’s the key to an integrated, companywide workforce. (Internal social platforms can facilitate that by the way). Tweet: Performance improvements come from making the invisible visible.Thought: Many of the factors that drive customer behavior and decisions are invisible. Through social, customers are now showing us what we couldn’t see before…if we’re paying attention. Tweet: Games have continuous feedback, which is why they’re so engaging.  Apply that to business operations.Thought: You think your employees have an obligation to be 100% passionate and engaged at all times about making you richer. Think again. Like customers, they must be motivated. Visible insight that they’re advancing on their goals helps. Tweet: Who can add value to the data?  Data will tend to migrate to where it will be most effective.Thought: Not everybody needs all the data. One team will be able to make sense of, use, and add value to data that may be irrelevant to another team. Like a strategized football play, the data has to get sent to the spot on the field where it’s needed most. Tweet: The sale isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the start of a new marketing cycle.Thought: Another reason the ROI question is fundamentally flawed. The sale is not the end of the potential return on investment. After-the-sale service and nurturing begins where the sales “victory” ends. Tweet: A dead sale is one that’s not shared.  People must be incentivized to share.Thought: Guess what, customers now know their value to you as marketers on your behalf. They’ll tell people about your product, but you’ve got to answer, “Why should I?” And you’ve got to answer it with something substantial, not lame trinkets. Tweet: Social user motivations are competition, affection, excellence and curiosity.Thought: Your followers will engage IF; they can get something for doing it, love your culture so much they want you to win, are consistently stunned at the perfection and coolness of your products, or have been stimulated enough to want to know more. Tweet: In Europe, 92% surveyed said they couldn’t care less about brands.Thought: Oh well, so much for loving you or being impressed enough with your products & service that they want you to win. We’ve got a long way to go. Tweet: A complaint is a gift.Thought: Our instinct where complaints are concerned is to a) not listen, b) dismiss the one who complains as a kook, c) make excuses, and d) reassure ourselves with internal group-think that they’re wrong and we’re right. It’s the perfect recipe for how to never, ever grow or get better. In a way, this customer cares more than you do. Tweet: 78% of consumers think peer recommendation is the best form of advertising.  Eventually, engagement is going to eat advertising.Thought: Why is peer recommendation best? Trust. If a friend tells me how great a movie was, I believe him. He has credibility with me. He’s seen it, and he could care less if I buy a ticket. He’s telling me it was awesome because he sincerely believes that it was.  That’s gold. Tweet: 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Thought: This “how mad can we make our customers without losing them” strategy has to end. The customer experience has actual monetary value, money you’re probably leaving on the table. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• Hiring New IT Employees versus Promoting Internally for IT Positions

  Recently I was asked my opinion regarding the hiring of IT professionals in regards to the option of hiring new IT employees versus promoting internally for IT positions. After thinking a little more about this question regarding staffing, specifically pertaining to promoting internally verses new employees; I think my answer to this question is that it truly depends on the situation. However, in most cases I would side with promoting internally. The key factors in this decision should be based on a company/department’s current values, culture, attitude, and existing priorities.  For example if a company values retaining all of its hard earned business knowledge then they would tend to promote existing employees internal over hiring a new employee. Moreover, the company will have to pay to train an existing employee to learn a new technology and the learning curve for some technologies can be very steep. Conversely, if a company values new technologies and technical proficiency over business knowledge then a company would tend to hire new employees because they may already have experience with a technology that the company is planning on using. In this scenario, the company would have to take on the additional overhead of allowing a new employee to learn how the business operates prior to them being fully effective. To illustrate my points above let us look at contractor that builds in ground pools for example.  He has the option to hire employees that are very strong but use small shovels to dig, or employees weak in physical strength but use large shovels to dig. Which employee should the contractor use to dig a hole for a new in ground pool? If we compare the possible candidates for this job we will find that they are very similar to hiring someone internally verses a new hire. The first example represents the existing workers that are very strong regarding the understanding how the business operates and the reasons why in a specific manner. However this employee could be potentially weaker than an outsider pertaining to specific technologies and would need some time to build their technical prowess for a new position much like the strong worker upgrading their shovels in order to remove more dirt at once when digging. The other employee is very similar to hiring a new person that may already have the large shovel but will need to increase their strength in order to use the shovel properly and efficiently so that they can move a maximum amount of dirt in a minimal amount of time. This can be compared to new employ learning how a business operates before they can be fully functional and integrated in the company/department. Another key factor in this dilemma pertains to existing employee and their passion for their work, their ability to accept new responsibility when given, and the willingness to take on responsibilities when they see a need in the business. As much as possible should be considered in this decision down to the mood of the team, the quality of existing staff, learning cure for both technology and business, and the potential side effects of the existing staff.  In addition, there are many more consideration based on the current team/department/companies culture and mood. There are several factors that need to be considered when promoting an individual or hiring new blood for a team. They both can provide great benefits as well as create controversy to a group. Personally, staffing especially in the IT world is like building a large scale system in that all of the components and modules must fit together and preform as one cohesive system in the same way a team must come together using their individually acquired skills so that they can work as one team.  If a module is out of place or is nonexistent then the rest of the team will suffer until the all of its issues are addressed and resolved. Benefits of Promoting Internally Internal promotions give employees a reason to constantly upgrade their technology, business, and communication skills if they want to further their career Employees can control their own destiny based on personal desires Employee already knows how the business operates Companies can save money by promoting internally because the initial overhead of allowing new hires to learn how a company operates is very expensive Newly promoted employees can assist in training their replacements while transitioning to their new role within a company. Existing employees already have a proven track record in regards fitting in with the business culture; this is always an unknown with all new hires Benefits of a New Hire New employees can energize and excite existing employees New employees can bring new ideas and advancements in technology New employees can offer a different perspective on existing issues based on their past experience. As you can see the decision to promote an existing employee from within a company verses hiring a new person should be based on several factors that should ultimately place the business in the best possible situation for the immediate and long term future. How would you handle this situation? Would you hire a new employee or promote from within?

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; YourKit Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do also sell Java profilers with the same feature set. To get all methods of a VS startup you need first to configure it to include System* in the profiled methods and you need to configure * to measure wall clock time. By default it does record only CPU times which allows you to optimize CPU hungry operations. But you will never see a Thread.Sleep(10000) in the profiler blocking the UI in this mode. It can profile as all others processes started from within the profiler but it can also profile the next or all started processes. As usual it can profile in sampling and tracing mode. But since it is a memory profiler as well it does by default also record all object allocations > 1MB. With allocation recording enabled VS2012 did crash but without allocation recording there were no problems. The CPU tab contains the time line of the application and when you click in the graph you the call stacks of all threads at this time. This is really a nice feature. When you select a time region you the CPU Usage estimation for this time window. I have seen many applications consuming 100% CPU only because they did create garbage like crazy. For this is the Garbage Collection tab interesting in conjunction with a time range. This view is like the CPU table only that the CPU graph (green) is missing. All relevant information except for GCs/s is already visible in the CPU tab. Very handy to pinpoint excessive GC or CPU bound issues. The Threads tab does show the thread names and their lifetime. This is useful to see thread interactions or which thread is hottest in terms of CPU consumption. On the CPU tab the call tree does exist in a merged and thread specific view. When you click on a method you get below a list of all called methods. There you can sort for methods with a high own time which are worth optimizing. In the Method List you can select which scope you want to see. Back Traces are the methods which did call you. Callees ist the list of methods called directly or indirectly by your method as a flat list. This is not a call stack but still very useful to see which methods were slow so you can see the “root” cause quite quickly without the need to click trough long call stacks. The last view Merged Calles is a call stacked view of the previous view. This does help a lot to understand did call each method at run time. You would get the same view with a debugger for one call invocation but here you get the full statistics (invocation count) as well. Since YourKit is also a memory profiler you can directly see which objects you have on your managed heap and which objects do hold most of your precious memory. You can in in the Object Explorer view also examine the contents of your objects (strings or whatsoever) to get a better understanding which objects where potentially allocating this stuff.   YourKit is a very easy to use combined memory and performance profiler in one product. The unbeatable single license price makes it very attractive to straightly buy it. Although it is a Java UI it is very responsive and the memory consumption is considerably lower compared to dotTrace and ANTS profiler. What I do really like is to start the YourKit ui and then start the processes I want to profile as usual. There is no need to alter your own application code to be able to inject a profiler into your new started processes. For performance and memory profiling you can simply select the process you want to investigate from the list of started processes. That's the way I like to use profilers. Just get out of the way and let the application run without any special preparations.   Next: Telerik JustTrace

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• Take Two: Comparing JVMs on ARM/Linux

  - by user12608080

  Although the intent of the previous article, entitled Comparing JVMs on ARM/Linux, was to introduce and highlight the availability of the HotSpot server compiler (referred to as c2) for Java SE-Embedded ARM v7,  it seems, based on feedback, that everyone was more interested in the OpenJDK comparisons to Java SE-E.  In fact there were two main concerns: The fact that the previous article compared Java SE-E 7 against OpenJDK 6 might be construed as an unlevel playing field because version 7 is newer and therefore potentially more optimized. That the generic compiler settings chosen to build the OpenJDK implementations did not put those versions in a particularly favorable light. With those considerations in mind, we'll institute the following changes to this version of the benchmarking: In order to help alleviate an additional concern that there is some sort of benchmark bias, we'll use a different suite, called DaCapo.  Funded and supported by many prestigious organizations, DaCapo's aim is to benchmark real world applications.  Further information about DaCapo can be found at http://dacapobench.org. At the suggestion of Xerxes Ranby, who has been a great help through this entire exercise, a newer Linux distribution will be used to assure that the OpenJDK implementations were built with more optimal compiler settings.  The Linux distribution in this instance is Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. Having experienced difficulties getting Ubuntu 11.10 to run on the original D2Plug ARMv7 platform, for these benchmarks, we'll switch to an embedded system that has a supported Ubuntu 11.10 release.  That platform is the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start Board.  It has an ARMv7 Coretex-A8 processor running at 1GHz with 1GB RAM. We'll limit comparisons to 4 JVM implementations: Java SE-E 7 Update 2 c1 compiler (default) Java SE-E 6 Update 30 (c1 compiler is the only option) OpenJDK 6 IcedTea6 1.11pre 6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2 CACAO build 1.1.0pre2 OpenJDK 6 IcedTea6 1.11pre 6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2 JamVM build-1.6.0-devel Certain OpenJDK implementations were eliminated from this round of testing for the simple reason that their performance was not competitive.  The Java SE 7u2 c2 compiler was also removed because although quite respectable, it did not perform as well as the c1 compilers.  Recall that c2 works optimally in long-lived situations.  Many of these benchmarks completed in a relatively short period of time.  To get a feel for where c2 shines, take a look at the first chart in this blog. The first chart that follows includes performance of all benchmark runs on all platforms.  Later on we'll look more at individual tests.  In all runs, smaller means faster.  The DaCapo aficionado may notice that only 10 of the 14 DaCapo tests for this version were executed.  The reason for this is that these 10 tests represent the only ones successfully completed by all 4 JVMs.  Only the Java SE-E 6u30 could successfully run all of the tests.  Both OpenJDK instances not only failed to complete certain tests, but also experienced VM aborts too. One of the first observations that can be made between Java SE-E 6 and 7 is that, for all intents and purposes, they are on par with regards to performance.  While it is a fact that successive Java SE releases add additional optimizations, it is also true that Java SE 7 introduces additional complexity to the Java platform thus balancing out any potential performance gains at this point.  We are still early into Java SE 7.  We would expect further performance enhancements for Java SE-E 7 in future updates. In comparing Java SE-E to OpenJDK performance, among both OpenJDK VMs, Cacao results are respectable in 4 of the 10 tests.  The charts that follow show the individual results of those four tests.  Both Java SE-E versions do win every test and outperform Cacao in the range of 9% to 55%. For the remaining 6 tests, Java SE-E significantly outperforms Cacao in the range of 114% to 311% So it looks like OpenJDK results are mixed for this round of benchmarks.  In some cases, performance looks to have improved.  But in a majority of instances, OpenJDK still lags behind Java SE-Embedded considerably. Time to put on my asbestos suit.  Let the flames begin...

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

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• Using Resources the Right Way

  - by BuckWoody

  It’s an interesting time in computing technology. At one point there was a dearth of information available for solving a given problem, or educating ourselves on broader topics so that we can solve problems in the future. With dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands of web sites and content available (for free, in many cases) from vendors, peers, even colleges and universities, it seems like there is actually too much information. Who has the time to absorb all this information and training? Even if you had the inclination, where to start? In fact, it seems so overwhelming that I often hear people saying that they can’t find the training they need, or that vendor X or Y “doesn’t help their users”. On questioning these folks, however, I often find that they – and sometimes I - haven’t put in the effort to learn what resources we have. That’s where blogs, like this one, can help. If you follow a blog, either by checking it often or perhaps subscribing to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, you’ll be able to spread out the search or create a mental filter for the information you need. But it’s not enough just read a blog or a web page. The creators need real feedback – what doesn’t work, and what does. Yes, you’re allowed to tell a vendor or writer “This helped me because…” so that you reinforce the positives. To be sure, bring up what doesn’t work as well –  that’s fine. But be specific, and be constructive. You’d be surprised at how much it matters. I know for a fact at Microsoft we listen – there is a real live person that reads your comments. I’m sure this is true of other vendors, and I also know that most blog authors – yours truly most especially – wants to know what you think.   In this blog entry I’d to call your attention to three resources you have at your disposal, and how you can use them to help. I’ll try to bring up things like this from time to time that I find useful, and cover in them in more depth like this. Think of this as a synopsis of a longer set of resources that you can use to filter whether you want to research further, bookmark, or forward on to a circle of friends where you think it might help them.   Data Driven Design Concepts http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156154 I’ll start with a great site that walks you through the process of designing a solution from a data-first perspective. As you know, I believe all computing is merely re-arranging data. If you follow that logic as well, you’ll realize that whenever you create a solution, you should start at the data-end of the application. This resource helps you do that. Even if you don’t use the specific technologies the instructions use, the concepts hold for almost any other technology that deals with data. This should be a definite bookmark for a developer, DBA, or Data Architect. When I mentioned my admiration for this resource here at Microsoft, the team that created it contacted me and asked if I’d share an e-mail address to my readers so that you can comment on it. You’re guaranteed to be heard – you can suggest changes, talk about how useful – or not – it is, and so on. Here’s that address:  [email protected]   End-to-End Example of a complete Hybrid Application – with Live Demo https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx I learn by example. I also like having ready-made, live, functional demos that show the completed solution at work. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how a complex, complete, hybrid application that bridges on-premises systems with cloud-based databases, code, functions and more, this is it. It’s a stock-trading simulator, and you can get everything from the design to the code itself, or you can just play with the application. It’s running on Windows Azure, the actual production servers we use for everything else. Using a Cloud-Based Service https://azureconfigweb.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx Along with that stock-trading application, you have a full demonstration and usable code sample of a web-based service available. If you’re a developer, this is a style of code you need to understand for everything from iPhone development to a full Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. So check out these resources. I’ll post more from time to time as I run across them. Hopefully they’ll be as useful to you as they are to me. Oh, and if you have a comment on any of the resources, let them know. And if you have any comments about these or any of my entries, feel free to post away. To quote a famous TV Show: “Hello Seattle – I’m listening…”

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

  - by Jeff

  This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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• Web Services Example - Part 2: Programmatic

  - by Denis T

  In this edition of the ADF Mobile blog we'll tackle part 2 of our Web Service examples.  In this posting we'll take a look at using a SOAP Web Service but calling it programmatically in code and parsing the return into a bean. Getting the sample code: Just click here to download a zip of the entire project.  You can unzip it and load it into JDeveloper and deploy it either to iOS or Android.  Please follow the previous blog posts if you need help getting JDeveloper or ADF Mobile installed.  Note: This is a different workspace than WS-Part1 Defining our Web Service: Just like our first installment, we are using the same public weather forecast web service provided free by CDYNE Corporation.  Sometimes this service goes down so please ensure you know it's up before reporting this example isn't working. We're going to concentrate on the same two web service methods, GetCityForecastByZIP and GetWeatherInformation. Defing the Application: The application setup is identical to the Weather1 version.  There are some improvements to the data that is displayed as part of this example though.  Now we are able to show the associated image along with each forecast line when using the Forecast By Zip feature.  We've also added the temperature Hi/Low values into the UI. Summary of Fundamental Changes In This Application The most fundamental change is that we're binding the UI to the Bean Data Controls instead of directly to the Web Service Data Controls.  This gives us much more flexibility to control the shape of the data and allows us to do caching of the data outside of the Web Service.  This way if your application is, say offline, your bean could still populate with data from a local cache and still show you some UI as opposed to completely failing because you don't have any connectivity. In general we promote this type of programming technique with ADF Mobile to insulate your application from any issues with network connectivity. What's different with this example? We have setup the Web Service DC the same way but now we have managed beans to process the data.  The following classes define the "Model" of our application:  CityInformation-CityForecast-Forecast, WeatherInformation-WeatherDescription.  We use WeatherBean for UI interaction to the model layer.  If you look through this example, we don't really do that much with the java code except use it to grab the image URL from the weather description.  In a more realistic example, you might be using some JDBC classes to persist the data to a local database. To have a good architecture it is always good to keep your model and UI layers separate.  This gets muddied if you start to use bindings on a page invoked from Java code and this java code starts to become your "model" layer.  Since bindings are page specific, your model layer starts to become entwined with your UI.  Not good!  To help with this, we've added some utility functions that let you invoke DC methods without having a binding and thus execute methods from your "model" layer without requiring a binding in your page definition.  We do this with the invokeDataControlMethod of the AdfmfJavaUtilities class.  An example of this method call is available in line 95 of WeatherInformation.java and line 93 of CityInformation.Java. What's a GenericType? Because Web Service Data Controls (and also URL Data Controls AKA REST) use generic name/value pairs to define their structure and don't have strongly typed objects, these are actually stored internally as GenericType objects.  The GenericType class is simply a property map of name/value pairs that can be hierarchical.  There are methods like getAttribute where you supply the index of the attribute or it's string property name.  Why is this important to know?  Because invokeDataControlMethod returns GenericType objects and developers either need to parse these GenericType objects themselves or use one of our helper functions. GenericTypeBeanSerializationHelper This class does exactly what it's name implies.  It's a helper class for developers to aid in serialization of GenericTypes to/from java objects.  This is extremely handy if you have a large GenericType object with many attributes (or you're just lazy like me!) and you just want to parse it out into a real java object you can use more easily.  Here you would use the fromGenericType method.  This method takes the class of the Java object you wish to return and the GenericType as parameters.  The method then parses through each attribute in the GenericType and uses reflection to set that same attribute in the Java class.  Then the method returns that new object of the class you specified.  This is obviously very handy to avoid a lot of shuffling code between GenericType and your own Java classes.  The reverse method, toGenericType is also available when you want to go the other way.  In this case you supply the string that represents the package location in the DataControl definition (Example: "MyDC.myParams.MyCollection") and then pass in the Java object you have that holds the data and a GenericType is returned to you.  Again, it will use reflection to calculate the attributes that match between the java class and the GenericType and call the getters/setters on those. Issues and Possible Improvements: In the next installment we'll show you how to make your web service calls asynchronously so your UI will fill dynamically when the service call returns but in the meantime you show the data you have locally in your bean fed from some local cache.  This gives your users instant delivery of some data while you fetch other data in the background.

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• To refund or not to refund this client?

  - by Mahalia Samuels

  I'd really appreciate your advice on an ongoing project. I presented my client with a proposal and design samples which he approved, and he paid in full instead of the 50% upfront deposit as I'd given him a generous discount. He was then slow in furnishing me with some of the content, but once we did, he expected the website to be finished immediately which was not possible. Because he needed it done urgently, we agreed to try to get it done about 10 working days after the content was provided, but the developer who was helping me let me down. The next week, I completed the website myself and uploaded it to the server on a Friday afternoon. He then calls and texts me on following Sunday while I'm at church to say it's not online (there was probably a problem with his browser). The next morning, I received an email from him demanding a full refund within two days because he couldn't see the website (even though it was live, and I tested it on multiple browsers, a different computer and my phone), and he called me shouting at me because he couldn't access it. Finally when he was able to access it, he was unhappy with a certain detail regarding the slideshow which I began fixing and which was done the next day. He then referred me to another website and said he wanted it to look similar but not identical to it in terms of the layout. He also now wanted to add more features which were not in the original design. I got a designer to work on a new design which I sent to him for review, which if approved would be completed by 15 October, and he approved it last Thursday. He then called me yesterday to say that he wanted to change the design - he only approved it out of impatience. He now wants the website to be more similar to the other website he referred me to and he wants it done before the 15th! Then, he says to me that other people have done websites for him in three days - website's he's complained to me about for lacking dimension because they were just premium themes, whereas we'd designed and coded from scratch. I'm thinking of finishing the website but refunding him in full (or at least the refundable 50%) less domain registration and other non-refundable amounts, just to avoid further escalation of this matter and having him call me next week and say he wants to change it again. These are the applicable terms and conditions as laid out in the agreement: Total amount due for this project is Amount A. Client shall pay Consultant a deposit of Amount B (50% of total amount due for project) in advance before any work commences on the Project. The balance is due within 7 working days of completion of project. Deposit is non-refundable. Should client opt to host elsewhere, applicable transferral fee of Amount C will apply. Estimated project completion time frame is 14 to 30 days from the date Client furnishes Consultant with Brief and all other required media and data, provided that Client has made payment to secure the project. Consultant will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials, or last minute changes and excessive changes may cause subsequent delays. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished work. Major changes in client input or direction or brief will be charged at normal rates. Any work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the attached Proposal will be considered an additional service. Client agrees to pay Consultant for any additional expenses or additional services not included in the attached quotation and proposal if requested by the Client. Web design credit in the name of the Consultant, and link to Consultant’s website shall be placed on the footer of the final Website. Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 7 days written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata at full rates for work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. Advice please?

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• How to get distinct values from the List&lt;T&gt; with LINQ

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  Recently I was working with data from a generic List<T> and one of my objectives is to get the distinct values that is found in the List. Consider that we have this simple class that holds the following properties: public class Product { public string Make { get; set; } public string Model { get; set; } }   Now in the page code behind we will create a list of product by doing the following: private List<Product> GetProducts() { List<Product> products = new List<Product>(); Product p = new Product(); p.Make = "Samsung"; p.Model = "Galaxy S 1"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Samsung"; p.Model = "Galaxy S 2"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Samsung"; p.Model = "Galaxy Note"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Apple"; p.Model = "iPhone 4"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Apple"; p.Model = "iPhone 4s"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "HTC"; p.Model = "Sensation"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "HTC"; p.Model = "Desire"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Nokia"; p.Model = "Some Model"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Nokia"; p.Model = "Some Model"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Sony Ericsson"; p.Model = "800i"; products.Add(p); p = new Product(); p.Make = "Sony Ericsson"; p.Model = "800i"; products.Add(p); return products; }   And then let’s bind the products to the GridView. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { Gridview1.DataSource = GetProducts(); Gridview1.DataBind(); } }   Running the code will display something like this in the page: Now what I want is to get the distinct row values from the list. So what I did is to use the LINQ Distinct operator and unfortunately it doesn't work. In order for it work is you must use the overload method of the Distinct operator for you to get the desired results. So I’ve added this IEqualityComparer<T> class to compare values: class ProductComparer : IEqualityComparer<Product> { public bool Equals(Product x, Product y) { if (Object.ReferenceEquals(x, y)) return true; if (Object.ReferenceEquals(x, null) || Object.ReferenceEquals(y, null)) return false; return x.Make == y.Make && x.Model == y.Model; } public int GetHashCode(Product product) { if (Object.ReferenceEquals(product, null)) return 0; int hashProductName = product.Make == null ? 0 : product.Make.GetHashCode(); int hashProductCode = product.Model.GetHashCode(); return hashProductName ^ hashProductCode; } }   After that you can then bind the GridView like this: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { Gridview1.DataSource = GetProducts().Distinct(new ProductComparer()); Gridview1.DataBind(); } }   Running the page will give you the desired output below: As you notice, it now eliminates the duplicate rows in the GridView. Now what if we only want to get the distinct values for a certain field. For example I want to get the distinct “Make” values such as Samsung, Apple, HTC, Nokia and Sony Ericsson and populate them to a DropDownList control for filtering purposes. I was hoping the the Distinct operator has an overload that can compare values based on the property value like (GetProducts().Distinct(o => o.PropertyToCompare). But unfortunately it doesn’t provide that overload so what I did as a workaround is to use the GroupBy,Select and First LINQ query operators to achieve what I want. Here’s the code to get the distinct values of a certain field. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { DropDownList1.DataSource = GetProducts().GroupBy(o => o.Make).Select(o => o.First()); DropDownList1.DataTextField = "Make"; DropDownList1.DataValueField = "Model"; DropDownList1.DataBind(); } } Running the code will display the following output below:   That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful!

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• Using Unity – Part 4

  - by nmarun

  In this part, I’ll be discussing about constructor and property or setter injection. I’ve created a new class – Product3: 1: public class Product3 : IProduct 2: { 3: public string Name { get; set; } 4: [Dependency] 5: public IDistributor Distributor { get; set; } 6: public ILogger Logger { get; set; } 7:  8: public Product3(ILogger logger) 9: { 10: Logger = logger; 11: Name = "Product 1"; 12: } 13:  14: public string WriteProductDetails() 15: { 16: StringBuilder productDetails = new StringBuilder(); 17: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Name); 18: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Logger.WriteLog()); 19: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Distributor.WriteDistributorDetails()); 20: return productDetails.ToString(); 21: } 22: } This version has a property of type IDistributor and takes a constructor parameter of type ILogger. The IDistributor property has a Dependency attribute (Microsoft.Practices.Unity namespace) applied to it. IDistributor and its implementation are shown below: 1: public interface IDistributor 2: { 3: string WriteDistributorDetails(); 4: } 5:  6: public class Distributor : IDistributor 7: { 8: public List<string> DistributorNames = new List<string>(); 9:  10: public Distributor() 11: { 12: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor1"); 13: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor2"); 14: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor3"); 15: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor4"); 16: } 17: public string WriteDistributorDetails() 18: { 19: StringBuilder distributors = new StringBuilder(); 20: for (int i = 0; i < DistributorNames.Count; i++) 21: { 22: distributors.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", DistributorNames[i]); 23: } 24: return distributors.ToString(); 25: } 26: } ILogger and the FileLogger have the following definition: 1: public interface ILogger 2: { 3: string WriteLog(); 4: } 5:  6: public class FileLogger : ILogger 7: { 8: public string WriteLog() 9: { 10: return string.Format("Type: {0}", GetType()); 11: } 12: } The Unity container creates an instance of the dependent class (the Distributor class) within the scope of the target object (an instance of Product3 class that will be called by doing a Resolve<IProduct>() in the calling code) and assign this dependent object to the attributed property of the target object. To add to it, property injection is a form of optional injection of dependent objects.The dependent object instance is generated before the container returns the target object. Unlike constructor injection, you must apply the appropriate attribute in the target class to initiate property injection. Let’s see how to change the config file to make this work. The first step is to add all the type aliases: 1: <typeAlias alias="Product3" type="ProductModel.Product3, ProductModel"/> 2: <typeAlias alias="ILogger" type="ProductModel.ILogger, ProductModel"/> 3: <typeAlias alias="FileLogger" type="ProductModel.FileLogger, ProductModel"/> 4: <typeAlias alias="IDistributor" type="ProductModel.IDistributor, ProductModel"/> 5: <typeAlias alias="Distributor" type="ProductModel.Distributor, ProductModel"/> Now define mappings for these aliases: 1: <type type="ILogger" mapTo="FileLogger" /> 2: <type type="IDistributor" mapTo="Distributor" /> Next step is to define the constructor and property injection in the config file: 1: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product3" name="ComplexProduct"> 2: <typeConfig extensionType="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.TypeInjectionElement, Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration"> 3: <constructor> 4: <param name="logger" parameterType="ILogger" /> 5: </constructor> 6: <property name="Distributor" propertyType="IDistributor"> 7: <dependency /> 8: </property> 9: </typeConfig> 10: </type> There you see a constructor element that tells there’s a property named ‘logger’ that is of type ILogger. By default, the type of ILogger gets resolved to type FileLogger. There’s also a property named ‘Distributor’ which is of type IDistributor and which will get resolved to type Distributor. On the calling side, I’ve added a new button, whose click event does the following: 1: protected void InjectionButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: unityContainer.RegisterType<IProduct, Product3>(); 4: IProduct product3 = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(); 5: productDetailsLabel.Text = product3.WriteProductDetails(); 6: } This renders the following output: This completes the part for constructor and property injection. In the next blog, I’ll talk about Arrays and Generics. Please see the code used here.

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• Data Binding to Attached Properties

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/06/14/data-binding-to-attached-properties.aspx When I was working on my C#/XAML game framework, I discovered I wanted to try to data bind my sprites to background objects. That way, I could update my objects and the draw functionality would take care of the work for me. After a little experimenting and web searching, it appeared this concept was an impossible dream. Of course, when has that ever stopped me? In my typical way, I started to massively dive down the rabbit hole. I created a sprite on a canvas, and I bound it to a background object. <Canvas Name="GameField" Background="Black"> <Image Name="PlayerStrite" Source="Assets/Ship.png" Width="50" Height="50" Canvas.Left="{Binding X}" Canvas.Top="{Binding Y}"/> </Canvas> Now, we wire the UI item to the background item. public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); this.Loaded += StartGame; }   void StartGame( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { BindingPlayer _Player = new BindingPlayer(); _Player.X = Window.Current.Bounds.Height - PlayerSprite.Height; _Player.X = ( Window.Current.Bounds.Width - PlayerSprite.Width ) / 2.0; } Of course, now we need to actually have our background object. public class BindingPlayer : INotifyPropertyChanged { private double m_X; public double X { get { return m_X; } set { m_X = value; NotifyPropertyChanged(); } }   private double m_Y; public double Y { get { return m_Y; } set { m_Y = value; NotifyPropertyChanged(); } }   public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; protected void NotifyPropertyChanged( [CallerMemberName] string p_PropertyName = null ) { if( PropertyChanged != null ) PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs( p_PropertyName ) ); } } I fired this baby up, and my sprite was correctly positioned on the screen. Maybe the sky wasn't falling after all. Wouldn't it be great if that was the case? I created some code to allow me to move the sprite, but nothing happened. This seems odd. So, I start debugging the application and stepping through code. Everything appears to be working. Time to dig a little deeper. After much profanity was spewed, I stumbled upon a breakthrough. The code only looked like it was working. What was really happening is that there was an exception being thrown in the background thread that I never saw. Apparently, the key call was the one to PropertyChanged. If PropertyChanged is not called on the UI thread, the UI thread ignores the call. Actually, it throws an exception and the background thread silently crashes. Of course, you'll never see this unless you're looking REALLY carefully. This seemed to be a simple problem. I just need to marshal this to the UI thread. Unfortunately, this object has no knowledge of this mythical UI Thread in which we speak. So, I had to pull the UI Thread out of thin air. Let's change our PropertyChanged call to look this. public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; protected void NotifyPropertyChanged( [CallerMemberName] string p_PropertyName = null ) { if( PropertyChanged != null ) Windows.ApplicationModel.Core.CoreApplication.MainView.CoreWindow.Dispatcher.RunAsync( Windows.UI.Core.CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, new Windows.UI.Core.DispatchedHandler( () => { PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs( p_PropertyName ) ); } ) ); } Now, we raised our notification on the UI thread. Everything is fine, people are happy, and the world moves on. You may have noticed that I didn't await my call to the dispatcher. This was intentional. If I am trying to update a slew of sprites, I don't want thread being hung while I wait my turn. Thus, I send the message and move on. It is worth nothing that this is NOT the most efficient way to do this for game programming. We'll get to that in another blog post. However, it is perfectly acceptable for a business app that is running a background task that would like to notify the UI thread of progress on a periodic basis. It is worth noting that this code was written for a Windows Store App. You can do the same thing with WP8 and WPF. The call to the marshaler changes, but it is the same idea.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

  - by Simon Cooper

  All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

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• Why bother writing an Windows 8 app?

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  So you want to know more about development for Window 8. Great! There are lots of reasons you should be excited about this. Since I don’t know why YOU are interested in this, I’ll make a list of reasons people can choose from. (as a side note: whenever I talk about Win8 development I am referring to the Metro Style / WinRt side of things. Apps for the ‘classic’ desktop side of Win8 on Intel are business as usual…) So… Why would you care about making an app for Windows 8? 1. It’s cool. Let’s not beat around the bush: if you like development for a hobby then you’ll love to work on this new platform. You can create apps in a relative short time (short time as in compared to writing a new CRM system) and that makes it great for a hobby product. 2. You’ll stand out. Hey, we all need an ego boost every now and then. We all need to feel special. So if you can manage to be one of the first to have you app in the Store then you’ll likely to be noticed. Just close your eyes for a moment and image you standing in a bar. It’s crowded, and then you casually say “Oh yeah, I just had my app certified and it’s in the Win8 store now”. People will stop talking, will offer you drinks and beautiful women / gorgeous man / furry creatures from Alpha Centauri (whatever your preferences are) will propose. Or maybe not. Anyway…. 3. Make some cash! IDC predicts there will be about 350,000,000 Windows 8 licenses sold in the next year. Think about that number. 350,000,000. And they all have access to the Store. Where you’re app will be. With one little click they can select it, download and somehow magically $1.00 or $2.00 from their bank account is transferred to yours. Now, I am not saying that all of those people will download and buy your app but what if only 1% of them did? Remember: there aren’t that many apps available yet….. 4. Learn. Creating new small apps is a great way to learn new stuff. Yes, you could read about it (on this blog for instance) but the only way to learn something is to do it. So be prepared for the future and learn something new by doing it.Write an app! Now! 5. The biggie (for me at least): it’s fun. Even if you remove the points above it’s still fun to write for these devices and this platform. Now some of you will say : “But why not write a great app for IOS or Android?” I think this is a valid question. Of course the novelty of the platform wears out and points 2 and 3 from above list will not be as relevant as it is today. But still 1 4 and 5 remain. And don’t forget: if you already work on the Microsoft platform it’s not that hard to learn this new Win8 stuff. If you have done some XAML development (be it WPF or Silverlight) you are almost there in becoming a good Win8 developer. So you’ll be more productive much sooner than when you have to learn Objective C or Java. Even if you’re a HTML / Javascript developer (I say developer here, not designer) you’ll be up to speed on Win8 development pretty soon. Yes, you, that funky Web Developer who lives and breathes HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript / Node.Js / JQuery: you too can be a Win8 developer. A first class Win8 developer! So.. Download the stuff you need from http://dev.windows.com install Windows 8 and Visual Studio 12 and by the time you’re ready I’ll be working on the next article: how to do all this? Happy coding!

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• Undeclared Scope in Rock Paper Scissors Simple Game

  - by Rianelle

  #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <cstdlib> #include <ctime> using namespace std; bool win; int winnings; int draws; int loses; string comChoice; string playerChoice; void winGame () { cout << "You won! Play again?" <<endl; cout << "Type y/n" <<endl; char x; cin >> x; if (x == 'y') { beginGame(); } else if ('n'){ cout << "Game Stopped." <<endl; cout << "Number of Draws: " <<draws << endl; cout << "Number of Loses: " <<loses << endl; cout << "Number of Wins: " << winnings << endl; win = true; } } void drawGame (){ ++draws; cout << "Draw! Try again" << endl; return; } void lose () { cout << "You lose! Try again?" <<endl; cout << "Type y/n" <<endl; char feedback; cin >> feedback; if (feedback == 'y') { beginGame(); } else if ('n'){ cout << "Game Stopped." <<endl; cout << "Number of Draws: " <<draws << endl; cout << "Number of Loses: " <<loses << endl; cout << "Number of Wins: " << winnings << endl; } } void beginGame() { cout << "Welcome to the Rock, Paper and Scissors Game!" <<endl; cout << "Let's begin. Type <rock, paper, scissors> for your choice!" <<endl; cin >> playerChoice; srand(time(0)); int randomizer = 1+(rand()%3); if (randomizer == 1) comChoice = "rock"; if (randomizer == 2) comChoice = "paper"; if (randomizer == 3) comChoice = "scissors"; do { if (playerChoice == comChoice) { drawGame(); } if (playerChoice == "rock" && comChoice == "paper") ++loses; lose(); if (playerChoice == "rock" && comChoice == "scissors") ++winnings; winGame(); if (playerChoice == "paper" && comChoice == "rock") ++winnings; winGame(); if (playerChoice == "paper" && comChoice == "scissors") ++loses; lose(); if (playerChoice == "scissors" && comChoice == "rock") ++loses; lose(); if (playerChoice == "scissors" && comChoice == "paper") ++winnings; winGame(); }while (win != true); } int main () { beginGame(); return 0; }

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• CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, Please recommendation for further education of the former performing art manager seeking career in IT industries? [on hold]

  - by Baek Seungjoo

  IT specialists there J Thank you very much for your collective efforts here, and I got huge help reading your professional comments and advices on each questions I have searched so far! This time, I would like to ask for your practical advices or recommendation on what I am struggling on at this moment. I am currently seeking higher education for my career transition from performing art manager and director to “IT software and/or service development and management specialist”. However, as this field is quite new to me, and there are lots of different work positions, I have no idea which grad major I better pursue in order to get qualification. Of course I know this question could sounds wired as it is kind of personal choice. But my lack of understanding on how IT software companies work in general, your practical and experience-based advice will be great help to me, who spent more than two months of self-research on net. OK. Before my question, here is my plan and history, which are quite different from those currently in IT industry I think… 1) Target Firstly, get career transition into IT service or products companies and get experiences. Eventually, pursue IT entrepreneurship in combination with my arts and cultural production and business expertise. 2) Background Career: performing arts director and manager in theatre-based scale opera and musical Art education in youth BA in literature and Chinese studies (Art & Humanities) MA in Cultural & Creative Industries (Art & Humanities) – dissertation with focus on digital prosumption and the lived experience of the prosumer. (a qualitative research on the agents in the digital world) 2) Personally Huge interest in IT hardware and software, and their trend. Skills to build up, repair, tune PCs -of course this is no more than personal hobby, but shows my interests in this field. 4) Problem Encounter a question “So, what do you think you can contribute practically in this position”. This question turn me down everytime I go through job interviews, and I decided more education in the relevant area. Here are my questions. 1) In terms of work positions in IT software companies, I wonder if I can put the comparison of what “Artists” is to “Arts Manager or Director” is what “Developer” is to “Product Manager”. (Of course, this stereotypical division of Artist-Art Manager is out of sense because the domain overlaps to some extent, and is blurring at least in my field, and they are in different contexts, but just speaking easily.) Normally, artist comes with special arts educations, and they live in their own world of artistic inspiration and creation, and they feel alive in practice and on stages. Meanwhile, from the point of staging and managing productions, the role of art manager is critical as well. Our role cares how the production appeals to the audience in effective way, how to make profit and future sustainable management through that, how to set up future strategy in consideration of the external conditions such as political and social circumstances, audience trend and level, other production trends from on-going and historical perspectives, how and what the production make voice to the society from political, economic, humanitarian stances. So, we need keen eyes on economic, political, and societal environment, have to understand human-being and their desires, must know how to make presentation and attract investors, must have sense in managing and fighting over the limited financial resource, how to extend networking and so on. It is common that the two agents create productions in collaboration (normally not in that ideal way but in conflict and fight though J ). So, we need to know each other’s expertise to some extent, for better production. What are the work positions in IT software industries equivalent to the role of “art manager” in performing arts? From my view, considering developers come with special education in the world of computer science, software engineering, or others (self-education sometimes), and they express themselves with the arts of coding, computer languages on the black screen, and make sort of their artistic production online to the audience, I guess there might be someone who collaborate with developers in creating, managing, and launching IT services or products. 2) Which education among CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, is needed for those seeking such work position? Especially for person like me. (At this moment, Information Science has the highest possibility to get in, since I lack Calculus and Math in undergrad educaiton. But please let me know irrespective of this concern, I think there are ways to back it up if CS or SE education needed in my case) 3) Which field between Information Science and HCI can be more practical background regarding job hungting? And which of them have more demands in job market? AS I checked, HCI is more close to CS than IS in its focus of study area. Thank you very much for your patience reading such a long inquiry, and I appreciate to your efforts in advance. Have a nice day in this beautiful summer.

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• How to add another OS entry in Wubi grub

  - by Amey Jah

  I am trying to install another linux distro besides ubuntu. However, I want to retain my existing windows based loader. Currently, as per my knowledge, MsDos loads grub which then loads Ubuntu (with loop back trick). Now, I have a new linux distro installed on /dev/sda8 (/boot for new distro) where as /root for that OS is installed on /dev/sda9. I tried following steps 1. Add entry into 40_custom of ubuntu grub 2. update grub But upon booting via that entry, it is not able to load the new OS and shows me blank screen. What could be the problem? Additional data: grub.cfg file of ubuntu menuentry 'Ubuntu' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple-fc296be2-8c59-4f21-a3f8-47c38cd0d537' { gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod ntfs set root='hd0,msdos5' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos5 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos5 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos5 01CD7BB998DB0870 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 01CD7BB998DB0870 fi loopback loop0 /ubuntu/disks/root.disk set root=(loop0) linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-19-generic root=UUID=01CD7BB998DB0870 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-19-generic } submenu 'Advanced options for Ubuntu' $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-advanced-fc296be2-8c59-4f21-a3f8-47c38cd0d537' { menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-19-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-3.5.0-19-generic-advanced-fc296be2-8c59-4f21-a3f8-47c38cd0d537' { gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod ntfs set root='hd0,msdos5' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos5 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos5 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos5 01CD7BB998DB0870 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 01CD7BB998DB0870 fi loopback loop0 /ubuntu/disks/root.disk set root=(loop0) echo 'Loading Linux 3.5.0-19-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-19-generic root=UUID=01CD7BB998DB0870 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro quiet splash $vt_handoff echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-19-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-19-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-3.5.0-19-generic-recovery-fc296be2-8c59-4f21-a3f8-47c38cd0d537' { insmod gzio insmod ntfs set root='hd0,msdos5' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos5 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos5 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos5 01CD7BB998DB0870 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 01CD7BB998DB0870 fi loopback loop0 /ubuntu/disks/root.disk set root=(loop0) echo 'Loading Linux 3.5.0-19-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-19-generic root=UUID=01CD7BB998DB0870 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-19-generic } } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_lupin ### menuentry 'Linux, with Linux core repo kernel' --class arch --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-core repo kernel-true-0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641'{ load_video set gfxpayload=keep insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos8' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos8 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos8 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos8 0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641 fi echo 'Loading Linux core repo kernel ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641 ro quiet echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img } menuentry 'Linux, with Linux core repo kernel (Fallback initramfs)' --class arch --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-core repo kernel-fallback-0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641' { load_video set gfxpayload=keep insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos8' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos8 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos8 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos8 0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641 fi echo 'Loading Linux core repo kernel ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641 ro quiet echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img } lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk +-sda1 8:1 0 39.2M 0 part +-sda2 8:2 0 19.8G 0 part +-sda3 8:3 0 205.1G 0 part +-sda4 8:4 0 1K 0 part +-sda5 8:5 0 333.7G 0 part /host +-sda6 8:6 0 233.4G 0 part +-sda7 8:7 0 100.4G 0 part +-sda8 8:8 0 100M 0 part +-sda9 8:9 0 14.7G 0 part +-sda10 8:10 0 21.4G 0 part +-sda11 8:11 0 3G 0 part sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom loop0 7:0 0 29G 0 loop / blkid /dev/loop0: UUID="fc296be2-8c59-4f21-a3f8-47c38cd0d537" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="5450-4444" TYPE="vfat" /dev/sda2: LABEL="RECOVERY" UUID="78C4FAC1C4FA80A4" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda3: LABEL="OS" UUID="DACEFCF1CEFCC6B3" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda5: UUID="01CD7BB998DB0870" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda6: UUID="01CD7BB99CA3F750" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda7: LABEL="Windows 8" UUID="01CDBFB52F925F40" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda8: UUID="cdbb5770-d29c-401d-850d-ee30a048ca5e" TYPE="ext2" /dev/sda9: UUID="0f490b6c-e92d-42f0-88e1-0bd3c0d27641" TYPE="ext2" /dev/sda10: UUID="2e7682e5-8917-4edc-9bf9-044fea2ad738" TYPE="ext2" /dev/sda11: UUID="6081da70-d622-42b9-b489-309f922b284e" TYPE="swap Any help is appreciated. Please let me know if you need any extra data.

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