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• Advanced TSQL Tuning: Why Internals Knowledge Matters

  - by Paul White

  There is much more to query tuning than reducing logical reads and adding covering nonclustered indexes.  Query tuning is not complete as soon as the query returns results quickly in the development or test environments.  In production, your query will compete for memory, CPU, locks, I/O and other resources on the server.  Today’s entry looks at some tuning considerations that are often overlooked, and shows how deep internals knowledge can help you write better TSQL. As always, we’ll need some example data.  In fact, we are going to use three tables today, each of which is structured like this: Each table has 50,000 rows made up of an INTEGER id column and a padding column containing 3,999 characters in every row.  The only difference between the three tables is in the type of the padding column: the first table uses CHAR(3999), the second uses VARCHAR(MAX), and the third uses the deprecated TEXT type.  A script to create a database with the three tables and load the sample data follows: USE master; GO IF DB_ID('SortTest') IS NOT NULL DROP DATABASE SortTest; GO CREATE DATABASE SortTest COLLATE LATIN1_GENERAL_BIN; GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest', SIZE = 3GB, MAXSIZE = 3GB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest_log', SIZE = 256MB, MAXSIZE = 1GB, FILEGROWTH = 128MB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_SHRINK OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET PARAMETERIZATION SIMPLE ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET MULTI_USER ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET RECOVERY SIMPLE ; USE SortTest; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.TestCHAR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding CHAR(3999) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestCHAR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAX ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAX (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestTEXT ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding TEXT NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestTEXT (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; -- ============= -- Load TestCHAR (about 3s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestCHAR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT padding = REPLICATE(CHAR(65 + (Data.n % 26)), 3999) FROM ( SELECT TOP (50000) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) - 1 FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2, master.sys.columns C3 ORDER BY n ASC ) AS Data ORDER BY Data.n ASC ; -- ============ -- Load TestMAX (about 3s) -- ============ INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAX WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ============= -- Load TestTEXT (about 5s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestTEXT WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(TEXT, padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ========== -- Space used -- ========== -- EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestCHAR'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAX'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestTEXT'; ; CHECKPOINT ; That takes around 15 seconds to run, and shows the space allocated to each table in its output: To illustrate the points I want to make today, the example task we are going to set ourselves is to return a random set of 150 rows from each table.  The basic shape of the test query is the same for each of the three test tables: SELECT TOP (150) T.id, T.padding FROM dbo.Test AS T ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; Test 1 – CHAR(3999) Running the template query shown above using the TestCHAR table as the target, we find that the query takes around 5 seconds to return its results.  This seems slow, considering that the table only has 50,000 rows.  Working on the assumption that generating a GUID for each row is a CPU-intensive operation, we might try enabling parallelism to see if that speeds up the response time.  Running the query again (but without the MAXDOP 1 hint) on a machine with eight logical processors, the query now takes 10 seconds to execute – twice as long as when run serially. Rather than attempting further guesses at the cause of the slowness, let’s go back to serial execution and add some monitoring.  The script below monitors STATISTICS IO output and the amount of tempdb used by the test query.  We will also run a Profiler trace to capture any warnings generated during query execution. DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TC.id, TC.padding FROM dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; Let’s take a closer look at the statistics and query plan generated from this: Following the flow of the data from right to left, we see the expected 50,000 rows emerging from the Clustered Index Scan, with a total estimated size of around 191MB.  The Compute Scalar adds a column containing a random GUID (generated from the NEWID() function call) for each row.  With this extra column in place, the size of the data arriving at the Sort operator is estimated to be 192MB. Sort is a blocking operator – it has to examine all of the rows on its input before it can produce its first row of output (the last row received might sort first).  This characteristic means that Sort requires a memory grant – memory allocated for the query’s use by SQL Server just before execution starts.  In this case, the Sort is the only memory-consuming operator in the plan, so it has access to the full 243MB (248,696KB) of memory reserved by SQL Server for this query execution. Notice that the memory grant is significantly larger than the expected size of the data to be sorted.  SQL Server uses a number of techniques to speed up sorting, some of which sacrifice size for comparison speed.  Sorts typically require a very large number of comparisons, so this is usually a very effective optimization.  One of the drawbacks is that it is not possible to exactly predict the sort space needed, as it depends on the data itself.  SQL Server takes an educated guess based on data types, sizes, and the number of rows expected, but the algorithm is not perfect. In spite of the large memory grant, the Profiler trace shows a Sort Warning event (indicating that the sort ran out of memory), and the tempdb usage monitor shows that 195MB of tempdb space was used – all of that for system use.  The 195MB represents physical write activity on tempdb, because SQL Server strictly enforces memory grants – a query cannot ‘cheat’ and effectively gain extra memory by spilling to tempdb pages that reside in memory.  Anyway, the key point here is that it takes a while to write 195MB to disk, and this is the main reason that the query takes 5 seconds overall. If you are wondering why using parallelism made the problem worse, consider that eight threads of execution result in eight concurrent partial sorts, each receiving one eighth of the memory grant.  The eight sorts all spilled to tempdb, resulting in inefficiencies as the spilled sorts competed for disk resources.  More importantly, there are specific problems at the point where the eight partial results are combined, but I’ll cover that in a future post. CHAR(3999) Performance Summary: 5 seconds elapsed time 243MB memory grant 195MB tempdb usage 192MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort Warning Test 2 – VARCHAR(MAX) We’ll now run exactly the same test (with the additional monitoring) on the table using a VARCHAR(MAX) padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TM.id, TM.padding FROM dbo.TestMAX AS TM ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query takes around 8 seconds to complete (3 seconds longer than Test 1).  Notice that the estimated row and data sizes are very slightly larger, and the overall memory grant has also increased very slightly to 245MB.  The most marked difference is in the amount of tempdb space used – this query wrote almost 391MB of sort run data to the physical tempdb file.  Don’t draw any general conclusions about VARCHAR(MAX) versus CHAR from this – I chose the length of the data specifically to expose this edge case.  In most cases, VARCHAR(MAX) performs very similarly to CHAR – I just wanted to make test 2 a bit more exciting. MAX Performance Summary: 8 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 391MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort warning Test 3 – TEXT The same test again, but using the deprecated TEXT data type for the padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TT.id, TT.padding FROM dbo.TestTEXT AS TT ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query runs in 500ms.  If you look at the metrics we have been checking so far, it’s not hard to understand why: TEXT Performance Summary: 0.5 seconds elapsed time 9MB memory grant 5MB tempdb usage 5MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 596 LOB logical reads Sort warning SQL Server’s memory grant algorithm still underestimates the memory needed to perform the sorting operation, but the size of the data to sort is so much smaller (5MB versus 193MB previously) that the spilled sort doesn’t matter very much.  Why is the data size so much smaller?  The query still produces the correct results – including the large amount of data held in the padding column – so what magic is being performed here? TEXT versus MAX Storage The answer lies in how columns of the TEXT data type are stored.  By default, TEXT data is stored off-row in separate LOB pages – which explains why this is the first query we have seen that records LOB logical reads in its STATISTICS IO output.  You may recall from my last post that LOB data leaves an in-row pointer to the separate storage structure holding the LOB data. SQL Server can see that the full LOB value is not required by the query plan until results are returned, so instead of passing the full LOB value down the plan from the Clustered Index Scan, it passes the small in-row structure instead.  SQL Server estimates that each row coming from the scan will be 79 bytes long – 11 bytes for row overhead, 4 bytes for the integer id column, and 64 bytes for the LOB pointer (in fact the pointer is rather smaller – usually 16 bytes – but the details of that don’t really matter right now). OK, so this query is much more efficient because it is sorting a very much smaller data set – SQL Server delays retrieving the LOB data itself until after the Sort starts producing its 150 rows.  The question that normally arises at this point is: Why doesn’t SQL Server use the same trick when the padding column is defined as VARCHAR(MAX)? The answer is connected with the fact that if the actual size of the VARCHAR(MAX) data is 8000 bytes or less, it is usually stored in-row in exactly the same way as for a VARCHAR(8000) column – MAX data only moves off-row into LOB storage when it exceeds 8000 bytes.  The default behaviour of the TEXT type is to be stored off-row by default, unless the ‘text in row’ table option is set suitably and there is room on the page.  There is an analogous (but opposite) setting to control the storage of MAX data – the ‘large value types out of row’ table option.  By enabling this option for a table, MAX data will be stored off-row (in a LOB structure) instead of in-row.  SQL Server Books Online has good coverage of both options in the topic In Row Data. The MAXOOR Table The essential difference, then, is that MAX defaults to in-row storage, and TEXT defaults to off-row (LOB) storage.  You might be thinking that we could get the same benefits seen for the TEXT data type by storing the VARCHAR(MAX) values off row – so let’s look at that option now.  This script creates a fourth table, with the VARCHAR(MAX) data stored off-row in LOB pages: CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAXOOR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAXOOR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; EXECUTE sys.sp_tableoption @TableNamePattern = N'dbo.TestMAXOOR', @OptionName = 'large value types out of row', @OptionValue = 'true' ; SELECT large_value_types_out_of_row FROM sys.tables WHERE [schema_id] = SCHEMA_ID(N'dbo') AND name = N'TestMAXOOR' ; INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAXOOR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT SPACE(0) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; UPDATE TM WITH (TABLOCK) SET padding.WRITE (TC.padding, NULL, NULL) FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS TM JOIN dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ON TC.id = TM.id ; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAXOOR' ; CHECKPOINT ; Test 4 – MAXOOR We can now re-run our test on the MAXOOR (MAX out of row) table: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) MO.id, MO.padding FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS MO ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; TEXT Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 446 LOB logical reads No sort warning The query runs very quickly – slightly faster than Test 3, and without spilling the sort to tempdb (there is no sort warning in the trace, and the monitoring query shows zero tempdb usage by this query).  SQL Server is passing the in-row pointer structure down the plan and only looking up the LOB value on the output side of the sort. The Hidden Problem There is still a huge problem with this query though – it requires a 245MB memory grant.  No wonder the sort doesn’t spill to tempdb now – 245MB is about 20 times more memory than this query actually requires to sort 50,000 records containing LOB data pointers.  Notice that the estimated row and data sizes in the plan are the same as in test 2 (where the MAX data was stored in-row). The optimizer assumes that MAX data is stored in-row, regardless of the sp_tableoption setting ‘large value types out of row’.  Why?  Because this option is dynamic – changing it does not immediately force all MAX data in the table in-row or off-row, only when data is added or actually changed.  SQL Server does not keep statistics to show how much MAX or TEXT data is currently in-row, and how much is stored in LOB pages.  This is an annoying limitation, and one which I hope will be addressed in a future version of the product. So why should we worry about this?  Excessive memory grants reduce concurrency and may result in queries waiting on the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE wait type while they wait for memory they do not need.  245MB is an awful lot of memory, especially on 32-bit versions where memory grants cannot use AWE-mapped memory.  Even on a 64-bit server with plenty of memory, do you really want a single query to consume 0.25GB of memory unnecessarily?  That’s 32,000 8KB pages that might be put to much better use. The Solution The answer is not to use the TEXT data type for the padding column.  That solution happens to have better performance characteristics for this specific query, but it still results in a spilled sort, and it is hard to recommend the use of a data type which is scheduled for removal.  I hope it is clear to you that the fundamental problem here is that SQL Server sorts the whole set arriving at a Sort operator.  Clearly, it is not efficient to sort the whole table in memory just to return 150 rows in a random order. The TEXT example was more efficient because it dramatically reduced the size of the set that needed to be sorted.  We can do the same thing by selecting 150 unique keys from the table at random (sorting by NEWID() for example) and only then retrieving the large padding column values for just the 150 rows we need.  The following script implements that idea for all four tables: SET STATISTICS IO ON ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestCHAR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id = ANY (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAX ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestTEXT ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; All four queries now return results in much less than a second, with memory grants between 6 and 12MB, and without spilling to tempdb.  The small remaining inefficiency is in reading the id column values from the clustered primary key index.  As a clustered index, it contains all the in-row data at its leaf.  The CHAR and VARCHAR(MAX) tables store the padding column in-row, so id values are separated by a 3999-character column, plus row overhead.  The TEXT and MAXOOR tables store the padding values off-row, so id values in the clustered index leaf are separated by the much-smaller off-row pointer structure.  This difference is reflected in the number of logical page reads performed by the four queries: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestMAX'. logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 00412 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 00413 lob logical reads 446 We can increase the density of the id values by creating a separate nonclustered index on the id column only.  This is the same key as the clustered index, of course, but the nonclustered index will not include the rest of the in-row column data. CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestCHAR (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAX (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestTEXT (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAXOOR (id); The four queries can now use the very dense nonclustered index to quickly scan the id values, sort them by NEWID(), select the 150 ids we want, and then look up the padding data.  The logical reads with the new indexes in place are: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestMAX' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 448 With the new index, all four queries use the same query plan (click to enlarge): Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 6MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 1MB sort set 835 logical reads (CHAR, MAX) 686 logical reads (TEXT, MAXOOR) 597 LOB logical reads (TEXT) 448 LOB logical reads (MAXOOR) No sort warning I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out why trying to eliminate the Key Lookup by adding the padding column to the new nonclustered indexes would be a daft idea Conclusion This post is not about tuning queries that access columns containing big strings.  It isn’t about the internal differences between TEXT and MAX data types either.  It isn’t even about the cool use of UPDATE .WRITE used in the MAXOOR table load.  No, this post is about something else: Many developers might not have tuned our starting example query at all – 5 seconds isn’t that bad, and the original query plan looks reasonable at first glance.  Perhaps the NEWID() function would have been blamed for ‘just being slow’ – who knows.  5 seconds isn’t awful – unless your users expect sub-second responses – but using 250MB of memory and writing 200MB to tempdb certainly is!  If ten sessions ran that query at the same time in production that’s 2.5GB of memory usage and 2GB hitting tempdb.  Of course, not all queries can be rewritten to avoid large memory grants and sort spills using the key-lookup technique in this post, but that’s not the point either. The point of this post is that a basic understanding of execution plans is not enough.  Tuning for logical reads and adding covering indexes is not enough.  If you want to produce high-quality, scalable TSQL that won’t get you paged as soon as it hits production, you need a deep understanding of execution plans, and as much accurate, deep knowledge about SQL Server as you can lay your hands on.  The advanced database developer has a wide range of tools to use in writing queries that perform well in a range of circumstances. By the way, the examples in this post were written for SQL Server 2008.  They will run on 2005 and demonstrate the same principles, but you won’t get the same figures I did because 2005 had a rather nasty bug in the Top N Sort operator.  Fair warning: if you do decide to run the scripts on a 2005 instance (particularly the parallel query) do it before you head out for lunch… This post is dedicated to the people of Christchurch, New Zealand. © 2011 Paul White email: @[email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

  - by rituchhibber

       PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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• Informed TDD &ndash; Kata &ldquo;To Roman Numerals&rdquo;

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/28/informed-tdd-ndash-kata-ldquoto-roman-numeralsrdquo.aspxIn a comment on my article on what I call Informed TDD (ITDD) reader gustav asked how this approach would apply to the kata “To Roman Numerals”. And whether ITDD wasn´t a violation of TDD´s principle of leaving out “advanced topics like mocks”. I like to respond with this article to his questions. There´s more to say than fits into a commentary. Mocks and TDD I don´t see in how far TDD is avoiding or opposed to mocks. TDD and mocks are orthogonal. TDD is about pocess, mocks are about structure and costs. Maybe by moving forward in tiny red+green+refactor steps less need arises for mocks. But then… if the functionality you need to implement requires “expensive” resource access you can´t avoid using mocks. Because you don´t want to constantly run all your tests against the real resource. True, in ITDD mocks seem to be in almost inflationary use. That´s not what you usually see in TDD demonstrations. However, there´s a reason for that as I tried to explain. I don´t use mocks as proxies for “expensive” resource. Rather they are stand-ins for functionality not yet implemented. They allow me to get a test green on a high level of abstraction. That way I can move forward in a top-down fashion. But if you think of mocks as “advanced” or if you don´t want to use a tool like JustMock, then you don´t need to use mocks. You just need to stand the sight of red tests for a little longer ;-) Let me show you what I mean by that by doing a kata. ITDD for “To Roman Numerals” gustav asked for the kata “To Roman Numerals”. I won´t explain the requirements again. You can find descriptions and TDD demonstrations all over the internet, like this one from Corey Haines. Now here is, how I would do this kata differently. 1. Analyse A demonstration of TDD should never skip the analysis phase. It should be made explicit. The requirements should be formalized and acceptance test cases should be compiled. “Formalization” in this case to me means describing the API of the required functionality. “[D]esign a program to work with Roman numerals” like written in this “requirement document” is not enough to start software development. Coding should only begin, if the interface between the “system under development” and its context is clear. If this interface is not readily recognizable from the requirements, it has to be developed first. Exploration of interface alternatives might be in order. It might be necessary to show several interface mock-ups to the customer – even if that´s you fellow developer. Designing the interface is a task of it´s own. It should not be mixed with implementing the required functionality behind the interface. Unfortunately, though, this happens quite often in TDD demonstrations. TDD is used to explore the API and implement it at the same time. To me that´s a violation of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) which not only should hold for software functional units but also for tasks or activities. In the case of this kata the API fortunately is obvious. Just one function is needed: string ToRoman(int arabic). And it lives in a class ArabicRomanConversions. Now what about acceptance test cases? There are hardly any stated in the kata descriptions. Roman numerals are explained, but no specific test cases from the point of view of a customer. So I just “invent” some acceptance test cases by picking roman numerals from a wikipedia article. They are supposed to be just “typical examples” without special meaning. Given the acceptance test cases I then try to develop an understanding of the problem domain. I´ll spare you that. The domain is trivial and is explain in almost all kata descriptions. How roman numerals are built is not difficult to understand. What´s more difficult, though, might be to find an efficient solution to convert into them automatically. 2. Solve The usual TDD demonstration skips a solution finding phase. Like the interface exploration it´s mixed in with the implementation. But I don´t think this is how it should be done. I even think this is not how it really works for the people demonstrating TDD. They´re simplifying their true software development process because they want to show a streamlined TDD process. I doubt this is helping anybody. Before you code you better have a plan what to code. This does not mean you have to do “Big Design Up-Front”. It just means: Have a clear picture of the logical solution in your head before you start to build a physical solution (code). Evidently such a solution can only be as good as your understanding of the problem. If that´s limited your solution will be limited, too. Fortunately, in the case of this kata your understanding does not need to be limited. Thus the logical solution does not need to be limited or preliminary or tentative. That does not mean you need to know every line of code in advance. It just means you know the rough structure of your implementation beforehand. Because it should mirror the process described by the logical or conceptual solution. Here´s my solution approach: The arabic “encoding” of numbers represents them as an ordered set of powers of 10. Each digit is a factor to multiply a power of ten with. The “encoding” 123 is the short form for a set like this: {1*10^2, 2*10^1, 3*10^0}. And the number is the sum of the set members. The roman “encoding” is different. There is no base (like 10 for arabic numbers), there are just digits of different value, and they have to be written in descending order. The “encoding” XVI is short for [10, 5, 1]. And the number is still the sum of the members of this list. The roman “encoding” thus is simpler than the arabic. Each “digit” can be taken at face value. No multiplication with a base required. But what about IV which looks like a contradiction to the above rule? It is not – if you accept roman “digits” not to be limited to be single characters only. Usually I, V, X, L, C, D, M are viewed as “digits”, and IV, IX etc. are viewed as nuisances preventing a simple solution. All looks different, though, once IV, IX etc. are taken as “digits”. Then MCMLIV is just a sum: M+CM+L+IV which is 1000+900+50+4. Whereas before it would have been understood as M-C+M+L-I+V – which is more difficult because here some “digits” get subtracted. Here´s the list of roman “digits” with their values: {1, I}, {4, IV}, {5, V}, {9, IX}, {10, X}, {40, XL}, {50, L}, {90, XC}, {100, C}, {400, CD}, {500, D}, {900, CM}, {1000, M} Since I take IV, IX etc. as “digits” translating an arabic number becomes trivial. I just need to find the values of the roman “digits” making up the number, e.g. 1954 is made up of 1000, 900, 50, and 4. I call those “digits” factors. If I move from the highest factor (M=1000) to the lowest (I=1) then translation is a two phase process: Find all the factors Translate the factors found Compile the roman representation Translation is just a look-up. Finding, though, needs some calculation: Find the highest remaining factor fitting in the value Remember and subtract it from the value Repeat with remaining value and remaining factors Please note: This is just an algorithm. It´s not code, even though it might be close. Being so close to code in my solution approach is due to the triviality of the problem. In more realistic examples the conceptual solution would be on a higher level of abstraction. With this solution in hand I finally can do what TDD advocates: find and prioritize test cases. As I can see from the small process description above, there are two aspects to test: Test the translation Test the compilation Test finding the factors Testing the translation primarily means to check if the map of factors and digits is comprehensive. That´s simple, even though it might be tedious. Testing the compilation is trivial. Testing factor finding, though, is a tad more complicated. I can think of several steps: First check, if an arabic number equal to a factor is processed correctly (e.g. 1000=M). Then check if an arabic number consisting of two consecutive factors (e.g. 1900=[M,CM]) is processed correctly. Then check, if a number consisting of the same factor twice is processed correctly (e.g. 2000=[M,M]). Finally check, if an arabic number consisting of non-consecutive factors (e.g. 1400=[M,CD]) is processed correctly. I feel I can start an implementation now. If something becomes more complicated than expected I can slow down and repeat this process. 3. Implement First I write a test for the acceptance test cases. It´s red because there´s no implementation even of the API. That´s in conformance with “TDD lore”, I´d say: Next I implement the API: The acceptance test now is formally correct, but still red of course. This will not change even now that I zoom in. Because my goal is not to most quickly satisfy these tests, but to implement my solution in a stepwise manner. That I do by “faking” it: I just “assume” three functions to represent the transformation process of my solution: My hypothesis is that those three functions in conjunction produce correct results on the API-level. I just have to implement them correctly. That´s what I´m trying now – one by one. I start with a simple “detail function”: Translate(). And I start with all the test cases in the obvious equivalence partition: As you can see I dare to test a private method. Yes. That´s a white box test. But as you´ll see it won´t make my tests brittle. It serves a purpose right here and now: it lets me focus on getting one aspect of my solution right. Here´s the implementation to satisfy the test: It´s as simple as possible. Right how TDD wants me to do it: KISS. Now for the second equivalence partition: translating multiple factors. (It´a pattern: if you need to do something repeatedly separate the tests for doing it once and doing it multiple times.) In this partition I just need a single test case, I guess. Stepping up from a single translation to multiple translations is no rocket science: Usually I would have implemented the final code right away. Splitting it in two steps is just for “educational purposes” here. How small your implementation steps are is a matter of your programming competency. Some “see” the final code right away before their mental eye – others need to work their way towards it. Having two tests I find more important. Now for the next low hanging fruit: compilation. It´s even simpler than translation. A single test is enough, I guess. And normally I would not even have bothered to write that one, because the implementation is so simple. I don´t need to test .NET framework functionality. But again: if it serves the educational purpose… Finally the most complicated part of the solution: finding the factors. There are several equivalence partitions. But still I decide to write just a single test, since the structure of the test data is the same for all partitions: Again, I´m faking the implementation first: I focus on just the first test case. No looping yet. Faking lets me stay on a high level of abstraction. I can write down the implementation of the solution without bothering myself with details of how to actually accomplish the feat. That´s left for a drill down with a test of the fake function: There are two main equivalence partitions, I guess: either the first factor is appropriate or some next. The implementation seems easy. Both test cases are green. (Of course this only works on the premise that there´s always a matching factor. Which is the case since the smallest factor is 1.) And the first of the equivalence partitions on the higher level also is satisfied: Great, I can move on. Now for more than a single factor: Interestingly not just one test becomes green now, but all of them. Great! You might say, then I must have done not the simplest thing possible. And I would reply: I don´t care. I did the most obvious thing. But I also find this loop very simple. Even simpler than a recursion of which I had thought briefly during the problem solving phase. And by the way: Also the acceptance tests went green: Mission accomplished. At least functionality wise. Now I´ve to tidy up things a bit. TDD calls for refactoring. Not uch refactoring is needed, because I wrote the code in top-down fashion. I faked it until I made it. I endured red tests on higher levels while lower levels weren´t perfected yet. But this way I saved myself from refactoring tediousness. At the end, though, some refactoring is required. But maybe in a different way than you would expect. That´s why I rather call it “cleanup”. First I remove duplication. There are two places where factors are defined: in Translate() and in Find_factors(). So I factor the map out into a class constant. Which leads to a small conversion in Find_factors(): And now for the big cleanup: I remove all tests of private methods. They are scaffolding tests to me. They only have temporary value. They are brittle. Only acceptance tests need to remain. However, I carry over the single “digit” tests from Translate() to the acceptance test. I find them valuable to keep, since the other acceptance tests only exercise a subset of all roman “digits”. This then is my final test class: And this is the final production code: Test coverage as reported by NCrunch is 100%: Reflexion Is this the smallest possible code base for this kata? Sure not. You´ll find more concise solutions on the internet. But LOC are of relatively little concern – as long as I can understand the code quickly. So called “elegant” code, however, often is not easy to understand. The same goes for KISS code – especially if left unrefactored, as it is often the case. That´s why I progressed from requirements to final code the way I did. I first understood and solved the problem on a conceptual level. Then I implemented it top down according to my design. I also could have implemented it bottom-up, since I knew some bottom of the solution. That´s the leaves of the functional decomposition tree. Where things became fuzzy, since the design did not cover any more details as with Find_factors(), I repeated the process in the small, so to speak: fake some top level, endure red high level tests, while first solving a simpler problem. Using scaffolding tests (to be thrown away at the end) brought two advantages: Encapsulation of the implementation details was not compromised. Naturally private methods could stay private. I did not need to make them internal or public just to be able to test them. I was able to write focused tests for small aspects of the solution. No need to test everything through the solution root, the API. The bottom line thus for me is: Informed TDD produces cleaner code in a systematic way. It conforms to core principles of programming: Single Responsibility Principle and/or Separation of Concerns. Distinct roles in development – being a researcher, being an engineer, being a craftsman – are represented as different phases. First find what, what there is. Then devise a solution. Then code the solution, manifest the solution in code. Writing tests first is a good practice. But it should not be taken dogmatic. And above all it should not be overloaded with purposes. And finally: moving from top to bottom through a design produces refactored code right away. Clean code thus almost is inevitable – and not left to a refactoring step at the end which is skipped often for different reasons.   PS: Yes, I have done this kata several times. But that has only an impact on the time needed for phases 1 and 2. I won´t skip them because of that. And there are no shortcuts during implementation because of that.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

  - by Tanu Sood

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mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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• Am I just not understanding TDD unit testing (Asp.Net MVC project)?

  - by KallDrexx

  I am trying to figure out how to correctly and efficiently unit test my Asp.net MVC project. When I started on this project I bought the Pro ASP.Net MVC, and with that book I learned about TDD and unit testing. After seeing the examples, and the fact that I work as a software engineer in QA in my current company, I was amazed at how awesome TDD seemed to be. So I started working on my project and went gun-ho writing unit tests for my database layer, business layer, and controllers. Everything got a unit test prior to implementation. At first I thought it was awesome, but then things started to go downhill. Here are the issues I started encountering: I ended up writing application code in order to make it possible for unit tests to be performed. I don't mean this in a good way as in my code was broken and I had to fix it so the unit test pass. I mean that abstracting out the database to a mock database is impossible due to the use of linq for data retrieval (using the generic repository pattern). The reason is that with linq-sql or linq-entities you can do joins just by doing: var objs = select p from _container.Projects select p.Objects; However, if you mock the database layer out, in order to have that linq pass the unit test you must change the linq to be var objs = select p from _container.Projects join o in _container.Objects on o.ProjectId equals p.Id select o; Not only does this mean you are changing your application logic just so you can unit test it, but you are making your code less efficient for the sole purpose of testability, and getting rid of a lot of advantages using an ORM has in the first place. Furthermore, since a lot of the IDs for my models are database generated, I proved to have to write additional code to handle the non-database tests since IDs were never generated and I had to still handle those cases for the unit tests to pass, yet they would never occur in real scenarios. Thus I ended up throwing out my database unit testing. Writing unit tests for controllers was easy as long as I was returning views. However, the major part of my application (and the one that would benefit most from unit testing) is a complicated ajax web application. For various reasons I decided to change the app from returning views to returning JSON with the data I needed. After this occurred my unit tests became extremely painful to write, as I have not found any good way to write unit tests for non-trivial json. After pounding my head and wasting a ton of time trying to find a good way to unit test the JSON, I gave up and deleted all of my controller unit tests (all controller actions are focused on this part of the app so far). So finally I was left with testing the Service layer (BLL). Right now I am using EF4, however I had this issue with linq-sql as well. I chose to do the EF4 model-first approach because to me, it makes sense to do it that way (define my business objects and let the framework figure out how to translate it into the sql backend). This was fine at the beginning but now it is becoming cumbersome due to relationships. For example say I have Project, User, and Object entities. One Object must be associated to a project, and a project must be associated to a user. This is not only a database specific rule, these are my business rules as well. However, say I want to do a unit test that I am able to save an object (for a simple example). I now have to do the following code just to make sure the save worked: User usr = new User { Name = "Me" }; _userService.SaveUser(usr); Project prj = new Project { Name = "Test Project", Owner = usr }; _projectService.SaveProject(prj); Object obj = new Object { Name = "Test Object" }; _objectService.SaveObject(obj); // Perform verifications There are many issues with having to do all this just to perform one unit test. There are several issues with this. For starters, if I add a new dependency, such as all projects must belong to a category, I must go into EVERY single unit test that references a project, add code to save the category then add code to add the category to the project. This can be a HUGE effort down the road for a very simple business logic change, and yet almost none of the unit tests I will be modifying for this requirement are actually meant to test that feature/requirement. If I then add verifications to my SaveProject method, so that projects cannot be saved unless they have a name with at least 5 characters, I then have to go through every Object and Project unit test to make sure that the new requirement doesn't make any unrelated unit tests fail. If there is an issue in the UserService.SaveUser() method it will cause all project, and object unit tests to fail and it the cause won't be immediately noticeable without having to dig through the exceptions. Thus I have removed all service layer unit tests from my project. I could go on and on, but so far I have not seen any way for unit testing to actually help me and not get in my way. I can see specific cases where I can, and probably will, implement unit tests, such as making sure my data verification methods work correctly, but those cases are few and far between. Some of my issues can probably be mitigated but not without adding extra layers to my application, and thus making more points of failure just so I can unit test. Thus I have no unit tests left in my code. Luckily I heavily use source control so I can get them back if I need but I just don't see the point. Everywhere on the internet I see people talking about how great TDD unit tests are, and I'm not just talking about the fanatical people. The few people who dismiss TDD/Unit tests give bad arguments claiming they are more efficient debugging by hand through the IDE, or that their coding skills are amazing that they don't need it. I recognize that both of those arguments are utter bullocks, especially for a project that needs to be maintainable by multiple developers, but any valid rebuttals to TDD seem to be few and far between. So the point of this post is to ask, am I just not understanding how to use TDD and automatic unit tests?

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• Losing jQuery functionality after postback

  - by David Lozzi

  I have seen a TON of people reporting this issue online, but no actual solutions. I'm not using AJAX or updatepanels, just a dropdown that posts back on selected index change. My HTML is <div id="myList"> <table id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;"> <tr> <td> <tr> <td class="ms-formlabel" style="width: 175px; padding-left: 10px"> <span id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl00_lblDestinationField">Body</span> </td> <td class="ms-formbody" style="width: 485px"> <input name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl00$txtSource" type="text" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl00_txtSource" class="ms-input" style="width:230px" /> <select name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl00$ddlSourceFields" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl00_ddlSourceFields" class="ms-input"> <option value="Some Field Name 1">Some Field Name 1</option> <option value="Some Field Name 2">Some Field Name 2</option> <option value="Some Field Name 3">Some Field Name 3</option> <option value="Some Field Name 4">Some Field Name 4</option> </select> <a href="#" id="appendSelect">append</a> </td> </tr> </td> </tr><tr> <td> <tr> <td class="ms-formlabel" style="width: 175px; padding-left: 10px"> <span id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl01_lblDestinationField">Expires</span> </td> <td class="ms-formbody" style="width: 485px"> <input name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl01$txtSource" type="text" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl01_txtSource" class="ms-input" style="width:230px" /> <select name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl01$ddlSourceFields" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl01_ddlSourceFields" class="ms-input"> <option value="Some Field Name 1">Some Field Name 1</option> <option value="Some Field Name 2">Some Field Name 2</option> <option value="Some Field Name 3">Some Field Name 3</option> <option value="Some Field Name 4">Some Field Name 4</option> </select> <a href="#" id="appendSelect">append</a> </td> </tr> </td> </tr><tr> <td> <tr> <td class="ms-formlabel" style="width: 175px; padding-left: 10px"> <span id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl02_lblDestinationField">Title</span> </td> <td class="ms-formbody" style="width: 485px"> <input name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl02$txtSource" type="text" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl02_txtSource" class="ms-input" style="width:230px" /> <select name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl02$ddlSourceFields" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl02_ddlSourceFields" class="ms-input"> <option value="Some Field Name 1">Some Field Name 1</option> <option value="Some Field Name 2">Some Field Name 2</option> <option value="Some Field Name 3">Some Field Name 3</option> <option value="Some Field Name 4">Some Field Name 4</option> </select> <a href="#" id="appendSelect">append</a> </td> </tr> </td> </tr> </table></div> The above Div tag is static, and the table is generated from a DataList object. On postback the datalist reloads using a new dataset, for example <div id="myList"> <table id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;"> <tr> <td> <tr> <td class="ms-formlabel" style="width: 175px; padding-left: 10px"> <span id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl00_lblDestinationField">Notes</span> </td> <td class="ms-formbody" style="width: 485px"> <input name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl00$txtSource" type="text" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl00_txtSource" class="ms-input" style="width:230px" /> <select name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl00$ddlSourceFields" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl00_ddlSourceFields" class="ms-input"> <option value="Some Field Name 1">Some Field Name 1</option> <option value="Some Field Name 2">Some Field Name 2</option> <option value="Some Field Name 3">Some Field Name 3</option> <option value="Some Field Name 4">Some Field Name 4</option> </select> <a href="#" id="appendSelect">append</a> </td> </tr> </td> </tr><tr> <td> <tr> <td class="ms-formlabel" style="width: 175px; padding-left: 10px"> <span id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl01_lblDestinationField">URL</span> </td> <td class="ms-formbody" style="width: 485px"> <input name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl01$txtSource" type="text" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl01_txtSource" class="ms-input" style="width:230px" /> <select name="ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$dlFields$ctl01$ddlSourceFields" id="ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_dlFields_ctl01_ddlSourceFields" class="ms-input"> <option value="Some Field Name 1">Some Field Name 1</option> <option value="Some Field Name 2">Some Field Name 2</option> <option value="Some Field Name 3">Some Field Name 3</option> <option value="Some Field Name 4">Some Field Name 4</option> </select> <a href="#" id="appendSelect">append</a> </td> </tr> </td> </tr> </table></div> After the postback and the datalist is reloaded, my JQuery doesn't work anymore. No errors, nothing. I don't see any actual changes in the objects in the HTML that should cause this. How do I fix this? Any workarounds or bandaides I can apply? My JQuery is below <script type='text/javascript'> $(document).ready(function () { $('#myList a').live("click", function () { var $selectValue = $(this).siblings('select').val(); var $thatInput = $(this).siblings('input'); var val = $thatInput.val() + ' |[' + $selectValue + ']|'; $thatInput.val(jQuery.trim(val)); }) }); </script> Thanks!!

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• SINGLE SIGN ON SECURITY THREAT! FACEBOOK access_token broadcast in the open/clear

  - by MOKANA

  Subsequent to my posting there was a remark made that this was not really a question but I thought I did indeed postulate one. So that there is no ambiquity here is the question with a lead in: Since there is no data sent from Facebook during the Canvas Load process that is not at some point divulged, including the access_token, session and other data that could uniquely identify a user, does any one see any other way other than adding one more layer, i.e., a password, sent over the wire via HTTPS along with the access_toekn, that will insure unique untampered with security by the user? Using Wireshark I captured the local broadcast while loading my Canvas Application page. I was hugely surprised to see the access_token broadcast in the open, viewable for any one to see. This access_token is appended to any https call to the Facebook OpenGraph API. Using facebook as a single click log on has now raised huge concerns for me. It is stored in a session object in memory and the cookie is cleared upon app termination and after reviewing the FB.Init calls I saw a lot of HTTPS calls so I assumed the access_token was always encrypted. But last night I saw in the status bar a call from what was simply an http call that included the App ID so I felt I should sniff the Application Canvas load sequence. Today I did sniff the broadcast and in the attached image you can see that there are http calls with the access_token being broadcast in the open and clear for anyone to gain access to. Am I missing something, is what I am seeing and my interpretation really correct. If any one can sniff and get the access_token they can theorically make calls to the Graph API via https, even though the call back would still need to be the site established in Facebook's application set up. But what is truly a security threat is anyone using the access_token for access to their own site. I do not see the value of a single sign on via Facebook if the only thing that was established as secure was the access_token - becuase for what I can see it clearly is not secure. Access tokens that never have an expire date do not change. Access_tokens are different for every user, to access to another site could be held tight to just a single user, but compromising even a single user's data is unacceptable. http://www.creatingstory.com/images/InTheOpen.png Went back and did more research on this: FINDINGS: Went back an re ran the canvas application to verify that it was not any of my code that was not broadcasting. In this call: HTTP GET /connect.php/en_US/js/CacheData HTTP/1.1 The USER ID is clearly visible in the cookie. So USER_ID's are fully visible, but they are already. Anyone can go to pretty much any ones page and hover over the image and see the USER ID. So no big threat. APP_ID are also easily obtainable - but . . . http://www.creatingstory.com/images/InTheOpen2.png The above file clearly shows the FULL ACCESS TOKEN clearly in the OPEN via a Facebook initiated call. Am I wrong. TELL ME I AM WRONG because I want to be wrong about this. I have since reset my app secret so I am showing the real sniff of the Canvas Page being loaded. Additional data 02/20/2011: @ifaour - I appreciate the time you took to compile your response. I am pretty familiar with the OAuth process and have a pretty solid understanding of the signed_request unpacking and utilization of the access_token. I perform a substantial amount of my processing on the server and my Facebook server side flows are all complete and function without any flaw that I know of. The application secret is secure and never passed to the front end application and is also changed regularly. I am being as fanatical about security as I can be, knowing there is so much I don’t know that could come back and bite me. Two huge access_token issues: The issues concern the possible utilization of the access_token from the USER AGENT (browser). During the FB.INIT() process of the Facebook JavaScript SDK, a cookie is created as well as an object in memory called a session object. This object, along with the cookie contain the access_token, session, a secret, and uid and status of the connection. The session object is structured such that is supports both the new OAuth and the legacy flows. With OAuth, the access_token and status are pretty much al that is used in the session object. The first issue is that the access_token is used to make HTTPS calls to the GRAPH API. If you had the access_token, you could do this from any browser: https://graph.facebook.com/220439?access_token=... and it will return a ton of information about the user. So any one with the access token can gain access to a Facebook account. You can also make additional calls to any info the user has granted access to the application tied to the access_token. At first I thought that a call into the GRAPH had to have a Callback to the URL established in the App Setup, but I tested it as mentioned below and it will return info back right into the browser. Adding that callback feature would be a good idea I think, tightens things up a bit. The second issue is utilization of some unique private secured data that identifies the user to the third party data base, i.e., like in my case, I would use a single sign on to populate user information into my database using this unique secured data item (i.e., access_token which contains the APP ID, the USER ID, and a hashed with secret sequence). None of this is a problem on the server side. You get a signed_request, you unpack it with secret, make HTTPS calls, get HTTPS responses back. When a user has information entered via the USER AGENT(browser) that must be stored via a POST, this unique secured data element would be sent via HTTPS such that they are validated prior to data base insertion. However, If there is NO secured piece of unique data that is supplied via the single sign on process, then there is no way to guarantee unauthorized access. The access_token is the one piece of data that is utilized by Facebook to make the HTTPS calls into the GRAPH API. it is considered unique in regards to BOTH the USER and the APPLICATION and is initially secure via the signed_request packaging. If however, it is subsequently transmitted in the clear and if I can sniff the wire and obtain the access_token, then I can pretend to be the application and gain the information they have authorized the application to see. I tried the above example from a Safari and IE browser and it returned all of my information to me in the browser. In conclusion, the access_token is part of the signed_request and that is how the application initially obtains it. After OAuth authentication and authorization, i.e., the USER has logged into Facebook and then runs your app, the access_token is stored as mentioned above and I have sniffed it such that I see it stored in a Cookie that is transmitted over the wire, resulting in there being NO UNIQUE SECURED IDENTIFIABLE piece of information that can be used to support interaction with the database, or in other words, unless there were one more piece of secure data sent along with the access_token to my database, i.e., a password, I would not be able to discern if it is a legitimate call. Luckily I utilized secure AJAX via POST and the call has to come from the same domain, but I am sure there is a way to hijack that. I am totally open to any ideas on this topic on how to uniquely identify my USERS other than adding another layer (password) via this single sign on process or if someone would just share with me that I read and analyzed my data incorrectly and that the access_token is always secure over the wire. Mahalo nui loa in advance.

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• PSTN Trunk TDM400P Install on Asterisk / Trixbox

  - by Jona

  Hey All, I'm trying to get a TDM400P card with FXO module to connect to our PSTN line. The card is correctly detected by Linux: [trixbox1.localdomain asterisk]# lspci 00:09.0 Communication controller: Tiger Jet Network Inc. Tiger3XX Modem/ISDN interface I've run setup-pstn which produces the following output trixbox1.localdomain ~]# setup-pstn -------------------------------------------------------------- Detecting PSTN cards and USB PSTN Devices -------------------------------------------------------------- Hardware present! STOPPING ASTERISK Asterisk Stopped STOPPING FOP SERVER FOP Server Stopped Unloading DAHDI hardware modules: done Loading DAHDI hardware modules: wct4xxp: [ OK ] wcte12xp: [ OK ] wct1xxp: [ OK ] wcte11xp: [ OK ] wctdm24xxp: [ OK ] opvxa1200: [ OK ] wcfxo: [ OK ] wctdm: [ OK ] wcb4xxp: [ OK ] wctc4xxp: [ OK ] xpp_usb: [ OK ] Running dahdi_cfg: [ OK ] SETTING FILE PERMISSIONS Permissions OK STARTING ASTERISK Asterisk Started STARTING FOP SERVER FOP Server Started Chan Extension Context Language MOH Interpret Blocked State pseudo default en default In Service 1 from-pstn en default In Service dahdi_scan returns: dahdi_scan [1] active=yes alarms=OK description=Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5 name=WCTDM/4 manufacturer=Digium devicetype=Wildcard TDM400P REV I location=PCI Bus 00 Slot 10 basechan=1 totchans=4 irq=209 type=analog port=1,FXO port=2,none port=3,none port=4,none And asterisk can see the channel: > trixbox1*CLI> dahdi show channel 1 > Channel: 1LI> File Descriptor: 14 > Span: 11*CLI> Extension: I> Dialing: > noI> Context: from-pstn Caller ID: I> > Calling TON: 0 Caller ID name: > Mailbox: none Destroy: 0LI> InAlarm: > 1LI> Signalling Type: FXS Kewlstart > Radio: 0*CLI> Owner: <None> Real: > <None>> Callwait: <None> Threeway: > <None> Confno: -1LI> Propagated > Conference: -1 Real in conference: 0 > DSP: no1*CLI> Busy Detection: no TDD: > no1*CLI> Relax DTMF: no > Dialing/CallwaitCAS: 0/0 Default law: > ulaw Fax Handled: no Pulse phone: no > DND: no1*CLI> Echo Cancellation: > trixbox1128 taps trixbox1(unless TDM > bridged) currently OFF Actual > Confinfo: Num/0, Mode/0x0000 Actual > Confmute: No > Hookstate (FXS only): Onhook A cat of /etc/asterisk/dahdi.conf shows: [trixbox1.localdomain ~]# cat /etc/asterisk/dahdi-channels.conf ; Autogenerated by /usr/sbin/dahdi_genconf on Tue May 25 17:45:13 2010 ; If you edit this file and execute /usr/sbin/dahdi_genconf again, ; your manual changes will be LOST. ; Dahdi Channels Configurations (chan_dahdi.conf) ; ; This is not intended to be a complete chan_dahdi.conf. Rather, it is intended ; to be #include-d by /etc/chan_dahdi.conf that will include the global settings ; ; Span 1: WCTDM/4 "Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5" (MASTER) ;;; line="1 WCTDM/4/0 FXSKS (SWEC: MG2)" signalling=fxs_ks callerid=asreceived group=0 context=from-pstn channel => 1 callerid= group= context=default I have configured a "ZAP Trunk (DAHDI compatibility Mode)" with the ZAP identifier 1 and an outbound route, but when ever I try to make an external call via it I get the "All Circuits are busy now, please try your call again later message". I have one outbound route which uses the dial pattern 9|. and the Trunk Zap/1 and one Zap Trunk which uses Zap Identifier (trunk name): 1 and has no Dial Rules. The FXO module is directly connected to our phone line from BT via a BT-RJ11 cable. When running tail -f /var/log/asterisk/full and placing a call I get the following output: [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP RTP TOS bits 184 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP RTP CoS mark 5 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP VRTP TOS bits 136 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP VRTP CoS mark 6 [May 26 11:10:52] WARNING[2661] pbx.c: FONALITY: This thread has already held the conlock, skip locking [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:1] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "user-callerid,SKIPTTL,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:1] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSER=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:2] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?report") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:3] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?Set(REALCALLERIDNUM=801)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:4] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSER=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:5] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSERCIDNAME=Jona") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:6] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?report") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:7] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSERCID=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:8] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "CALLERID(all)="Jona" <801>") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:9] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "REALCALLERIDNUM=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:10] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CHANNEL(language)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:11] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?continue") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-user-callerid,s,20) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:20] NoOp("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "Using CallerID "Jona" <801>") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:2] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "_NODEST=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:3] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "record-enable,801,OUT,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:1] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?check") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-record-enable,s,4) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:4] AGI("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "recordingcheck,20100526-111052,1274868652.1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Launched AGI Script /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/recordingcheck [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: recordingcheck,20100526-111052,1274868652.1: Outbound recording not enabled [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28>AGI Script recordingcheck completed, returning 0 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:5] MacroExit("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:4] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "dialout-trunk,1,01483890915,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:1] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK=1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:2] GosubIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?sub-pincheck,s,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?disabletrunk,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:4] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_NUMBER=01483890915") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:5] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=tr") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:6] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "OUTBOUND_GROUP=OUT_1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:7] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?nomax") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s,9) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?skipoutcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:10] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:11] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "outbound-callerid,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:1] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERPRES()=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:2] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(REALCALLERIDNUM=801)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?normcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-outbound-callerid,s,6) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:6] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "USEROUTCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:7] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "EMERGENCYCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:8] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "TRUNKOUTCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?trunkcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-outbound-callerid,s,12) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:12] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERID(all)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:13] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERID(all)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:14] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERPRES()=prohib_passed_screen)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:12] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?AGI(fixlocalprefix)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:13] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "OUTNUM=01483890915") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:14] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "custom=DAHDI/1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:15] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=M(setmusic^))") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:16] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "dialout-trunk-predial-hook,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk-predial-hook:1] MacroExit("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:17] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?bypass,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:18] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?customtrunk") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:19] Dial("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DAHDI/1/01483890915,300,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] WARNING[2858] app_dial.c: Unable to create channel of type 'DAHDI' (cause 0 - Unknown) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Everyone is busy/congested at this time (1:0/0/1) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:20] Goto("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "s-CHANUNAVAIL,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s-CHANUNAVAIL,1) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s-CHANUNAVAIL@macro-dialout-trunk:1] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?noreport") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s-CHANUNAVAIL,3) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s-CHANUNAVAIL@macro-dialout-trunk:3] NoOp("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "TRUNK Dial failed due to CHANUNAVAIL (hangupcause: 0) - failing through to other trunks") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:5] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "outisbusy,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outisbusy:1] Playback("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "all-circuits-busy-now,noanswer") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28> Playing 'all-circuits-busy-now.ulaw' (language 'en') [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outisbusy:2] Playback("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "pls-try-call-later,noanswer") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28> Playing 'pls-try-call-later.ulaw' (language 'en') [May 26 11:10:54] WARNING[2661] pbx.c: FONALITY: This thread has already held the conlock, skip locking [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (macro-outisbusy, s, 2) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' in macro 'outisbusy' [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (from-internal, 901483890915, 5) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [h@from-internal:1] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "hangupcall") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:1] ResetCDR("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "vw") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:2] NoCDR("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?skiprg") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,6) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:6] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?skipblkvm") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,9) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?theend") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,11) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:11] Hangup("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (macro-hangupcall, s, 11) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' in macro 'hangupcall' [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (from-internal, h, 1) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' I'm guessing I've missed a configuration step somewhere but no idea where, any help greatly appreciated.

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• Handling aces and finding a segfault in a blackjack program

  - by Bill Adams

  Here's what i have so far... I have yet to figure out how i'm going to handle the 11 / 1 situation with an ace, and when the player chooses an option for hit/stand, i get segfault. HELP!!! #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <time.h> #define DECKSIZE 52 #define VALUE 9 #define FACE 4 #define HANDSIZE 26 typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }Card; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }dealerHand; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }playerHand; Card cards[DECKSIZE]; dealerHand deal[HANDSIZE]; playerHand dealt[HANDSIZE]; char *faceName[]={"two","three", "four","five","six", "seven","eight","nine", "ten", "jack","queen", "king","ace"}; char *suitName[]={"spades","diamonds","clubs","hearts"}; void printDeck(){ int i; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ printf("%s of %s value = %d\n ",cards[i].name,cards[i].suit,cards[i].value); if((i+1)%13==0 && i!=0) printf("-------------------\n\n"); } } void shuffleDeck(){ srand(time(NULL)); int this; int that; Card temp; int c; for(c=0;c<10000;c++){ //c is the index for number of individual card shuffles should be set to c<10000 or more this=rand()%DECKSIZE; that=rand()%DECKSIZE; temp=cards[this]; cards[this]=cards[that]; cards[that]=temp; } } /*void hitStand(i,y){ // I dumped this because of a segfault i couldn't figure out. int k; printf(" Press 1 to HIT or press 2 to STAND:"); scanf("%d",k); if(k=1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } } */ int main(){ int suitCount=0; int faceCount=0; int i; int x; int y; int d; int p; int k; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ //this for statement builds the deck if(faceCount<9){ cards[i].value=faceCount+2; }else{ //assigns face cards as value 10 cards[i].value=10; } cards[i].suit=suitName[suitCount]; cards[i].name=faceName[faceCount++]; if(faceCount==13){ //this if loop increments suit count once cards[i].value=11; //all faces have been assigned, and also suitCount++; //assigns the ace as 11 faceCount=0; } //end building deck } /*printDeck(); //prints the deck in order shuffleDeck(); //shuffles the deck printDeck(); //prints the deck as shuffled This was used in testing, commented out to keep the deck hidden!*/ shuffleDeck(); x=0; y=0; for(i=0;i<4;i++){ //this for loop deals the first 4 cards, dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; //first card to player, second to dealer, dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; //as per standard dealing practice. dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; i++; y++; deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; } printf(" Dealer's hand is: %s of %s and XXXX of XXXX. (Second card is hidden!)\n",deal[0].name,deal[0].suit,deal[1].name,deal[1].suit); printf(" Player's hand is: %s of %s and %s of %s.\n",dealt[0].name,dealt[0].suit,dealt[1].name,dealt[1].suit); printf(" the current value of the index i=%d\n",i); //this line gave me the value of i for testing d=deal[0].value+deal[1].value; p=dealt[0].value+dealt[1].value; if(d==21){ printf(" The Dealer has Blackjack! House win!\n"); }else{ if(d>21){ printf(" The dealer is Bust! You win!\n"); }else{ if(d>17){ printf(" Press 1 to HIT or 2 to STAND"); scanf("%d",k); if(k==1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } }else{ if(d<17){ printf(" Dealer Hits!"); deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; i++; } } } } return 0; }

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• ANSI C blackjack assignment, linux GCC compiler, i'm stuck...

  - by Bill Adams

  Here's what i have so far... I have yet to figure out how i'm going to handle the 11 / 1 situation with an ace, and when the player chooses an option for hit/stand, i get segfault. HELP!!! #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <time.h> #define DECKSIZE 52 #define VALUE 9 #define FACE 4 #define HANDSIZE 26 typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }Card; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }dealerHand; typedef struct { int value; char* suit; char* name; }playerHand; Card cards[DECKSIZE]; dealerHand deal[HANDSIZE]; playerHand dealt[HANDSIZE]; char *faceName[]={"two","three", "four","five","six", "seven","eight","nine", "ten", "jack","queen", "king","ace"}; char *suitName[]={"spades","diamonds","clubs","hearts"}; void printDeck(){ int i; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ printf("%s of %s value = %d\n ",cards[i].name,cards[i].suit,cards[i].value); if((i+1)%13==0 && i!=0) printf("-------------------\n\n"); } } void shuffleDeck(){ srand(time(NULL)); int this; int that; Card temp; int c; for(c=0;c<10000;c++){ //c is the index for number of individual card shuffles should be set to c<10000 or more this=rand()%DECKSIZE; that=rand()%DECKSIZE; temp=cards[this]; cards[this]=cards[that]; cards[that]=temp; } } /*void hitStand(i,y){ // I dumped this because of a segfault i couldn't figure out. int k; printf(" Press 1 to HIT or press 2 to STAND:"); scanf("%d",k); if(k=1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } } */ int main(){ int suitCount=0; int faceCount=0; int i; int x; int y; int d; int p; int k; for(i=0;i<DECKSIZE;i++){ //this for statement builds the deck if(faceCount<9){ cards[i].value=faceCount+2; }else{ //assigns face cards as value 10 cards[i].value=10; } cards[i].suit=suitName[suitCount]; cards[i].name=faceName[faceCount++]; if(faceCount==13){ //this if loop increments suit count once cards[i].value=11; //all faces have been assigned, and also suitCount++; //assigns the ace as 11 faceCount=0; } //end building deck } /*printDeck(); //prints the deck in order shuffleDeck(); //shuffles the deck printDeck(); //prints the deck as shuffled This was used in testing, commented out to keep the deck hidden!*/ shuffleDeck(); x=0; y=0; for(i=0;i<4;i++){ //this for loop deals the first 4 cards, dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; //first card to player, second to dealer, dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; //as per standard dealing practice. dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; i++; y++; deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; } printf(" Dealer's hand is: %s of %s and XXXX of XXXX. (Second card is hidden!)\n",deal[0].name,deal[0].suit,deal[1].name,deal[1].suit); printf(" Player's hand is: %s of %s and %s of %s.\n",dealt[0].name,dealt[0].suit,dealt[1].name,dealt[1].suit); printf(" the current value of the index i=%d\n",i); //this line gave me the value of i for testing d=deal[0].value+deal[1].value; p=dealt[0].value+dealt[1].value; if(d==21){ printf(" The Dealer has Blackjack! House win!\n"); }else{ if(d>21){ printf(" The dealer is Bust! You win!\n"); }else{ if(d>17){ printf(" Press 1 to HIT or 2 to STAND"); scanf("%d",k); if(k==1){ dealt[y].suit=cards[i].suit; dealt[y].name=cards[i].name; dealt[y].value=cards[i].value; y++; i++; } }else{ if(d<17){ printf(" Dealer Hits!"); deal[x].suit=cards[i].suit; deal[x].name=cards[i].name; deal[x].value=cards[i].value; x++; i++; } } } } return 0; }

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• How to find an entry-level job after you already have a graduate degree?

  - by Uri

  Note: I asked this question in early 2009. A couple of months later, I found a great job. I've previously updated this question with some tips for whoever ends up in a similar situation, and now cleaned it up a little for the benefit of the fresh batch of graduates. Original post: In my early 20s I abandoned a great C++ development career path in a major company to go to graduate school and get a research masters (3 years). I did another year in industrial research, and then moved to the US to attend graduate school again, getting another masters and a Ph.D in software engineering from a top school (another 6 years down the drain). I was coding the whole way throughout my degrees (core Java and Eclipse plug-ins) and working on research related to software engineering (usability of APIs). I ended up graduating the year of the recession, with a son on the way and the prospects of no healthcare. Academic jobs and industrial research jobs are quite scarce. Initially, I was naive, thinking that with my background, I could easily find a coding job. Big mistake. It turns out that I'm in a complicated position. Entry level positions are usually offered to college undergraduates. I attended my school's career fairs, but you could immediately see signs of Ph.D. aversion and overqualification issues. Some of the recruiters I spoke with explicitly told me that they wanted 20 year olds with clean slates, and some were looking for interns since they are in various forms of hiring freezes. I managed to get a couple of interviews from these career fairs and through recruiters. However, since I've been out of school for a long time and programming primarily in Java, I am also no longer proficient in C/C++ and the usual range of college-level interview questions that everyone uses. I had no problems with this when I was 19 and interviewing for my first job since a lot of what you do in C is manipulate pointers and I was coding C++ for fun and for school. Later I was routinely doing pointer manipulation on the job, and during my first masters taught college courses with data structures and C++. But even though I remember many properties of C++ well, it's been close to ten years since I regularly used C++ and pointers. As a Java developer I rarely had to work at this level, but experience in OOD and in writing good maintainable code is meaningless for C++ interviews. Reading books as a refresh and looking at sample code did not do the trick. I also looked at mid-to-senior level Java positions, but most of them focused on J2EE APIs rather than on core Java and required a certain number of years in industrial positions. Coding research tools and prior C++ experience doesn't count. So that sends me back to entry-level jobs that are posted through job-boards, and these are not common (mostly they are Monster junk), and small companies are even less likely to answer a Ph.D. compared to the giants who participate in top-10 career fairs. Even worse, in many companies initial screening is done by HR folks who really don't want to deal with anything anomalous like a Ph.D. Any tips on how I should approach this intractable position? For example, what should I write in cover letters? Note that while immigration is not an issue for me, I cannot go freelance as I need the benefits (and in particular group health insurance). During my studies I had no time to contribute to open-source projects or maintain a popular blog, so even if I invested in that now there would be no immediate benefit. Updates: In the two months after posting this I received several offers to work as a core Java developer in the financial industry and accepted one from a firm where I am working to this day. For those who find themselves in similar situations, here are my tips: Give up on trying to find an entry level positions. You can't undo time. Accept the fact that there is Ph.D. discrimination in the job market (some might say rightfully so). It is legal to discriminate based on education. No point fighting it. The most important tip is to focus on the language you are comfortable with. The sad truth about programming in a particular language is that it is not like riding a bike. If you haven't used a language in the last few years, and can't actually apply it routinely (not just as a refresher) before you start your search, it is going to be very difficult to do well in an interview. Now that I'm interviewing others, I routinely see it in folks with a mixed C++/Java background. We maintain "a shadow" of the old language but end up with a weird mix that makes it hard to interview on either. Entry-level folks are at an advantage here since they usually have one language. Memory can help you do great in a screening interview, but without recent day-to-day experience, code tests will be difficult. Despite the supposed relation, core Java programming and J2EE programming are two different things with different skillsets. If you come from academia, you likely have very little J2EE experience and may find it hard to get accepted for a J2EE job. J2EE jobs seem to have a larger list of acronyms in their requirements. In addition, from interviewing J2EE developers it seems that for many there is a focus on mastering specific APIs and architectures, whereas core Java development tends to be secondary. In the same way that I can no longer manipulate pointers well, a J2EE developer may have difficulties doing low level Java manipulation. This puts you at a relative advantage in competing for core Java jobs! If you are able to work for startups (in terms of family life and stability) or migrate to startup-rich areas such as the west coast, you can find many exciting opportunities where advanced degrees are a benefit. I've since been approached by several startups, although I had to decline. Work through a recruiter if possible. They have direct contacts with the hiring parties, allowing you to "stand out". It is better to get a clear yes/no confirmation from a recruiter on whether a company might be interested in interviewing you, than it is to send your resume and hope that someone will ever see it. Recruiters are also a great way of bypassing HR. However, also beware of recruiters. They have a vested interest and will go to various shady practices and pressure tactics. To find a good recruiter, talk to a friend who declined a job offer he got through a recruiter. A good recruiter, to me, is measured in how they handle that. Interview for the jobs that require your core strength. If you're rusty or entirely unfamiliar with a technology around which the job revolves, you're probably not a good match. Yes, you probably have the talent to master them, but most companies would want "instant gratification". I got my offers from companies that wanted core Java developer. I didn't do well on places that wanted advance C++ because I am too rusty and not up to date on recent libraries. I also didn't hear from companies that wanted lots of J2EE experience, and that's ok. Finding companies that want core Java without web is harder, but exists in specific industries (e.g., finance, defense). This requires a lot more legwork in terms of search, but these jobs do exist. There are different interview styles. Some companies focus on puzzles, some companies focus on algorithms, and some companies focus on design and coding skills. I had the most success in places where the questions were the most related to the function I would have been performing. Pick companies accordingly as well.

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• What arguments do I send a function being called by a button in python?

  - by Jared

  I have a UI, in that UI is 4 text fields and 1 int field, then I have a function that calls to another function based on what's inside of the text fields, this function has (self, *args). My function that is being called to takes five arguments and I don't know what to put in it to make it actually work with my UI because python button's send an argument of their own. I have tried self and *args, but it doesn't work. Here is my code, didn't include most of the UI code since it is self explanatory: def crBC(self, IKJoint, FKJoint, bindJoint, xQuan, switch): ''' You should have a controller with an attribute 'ikFkBlend' - The name can be changed after the script executes. Controller should contain an enum - FK/DYN(0), IK(1). Specify the IK joint, then either the dynamic or FK joint, then the bind joint. Then a quantity of joints to pass through and connect. Tested currently on 600 joints (200 x 3), executed in less than a second. Returns nothing. Please open your script editor for details. ''' import itertools # gets children joints of the selected joint chHipIK = cmds.listRelatives(IKJoint, ad = True, type = 'joint') chHipFK = cmds.listRelatives(FKJoint, ad = True, type = 'joint') chHipBind = cmds.listRelatives(bindJoint, ad = True, type = 'joint') # list is built backwards, this reverses the list chHipIK.reverse() chHipFK.reverse() chHipBind.reverse() # appends the initial joint to the list chHipIK.append(IKJoint) chHipFK.append(FKJoint) chHipBind.append(bindJoint) # puts the last joint at the start of the list because the initial joint # was added to the end chHipIK.insert(0, chHipIK.pop()) chHipFK.insert(0, chHipFK.pop()) chHipBind.insert(0, chHipBind.pop()) # pops off the remaining joints in the list the user does not wish to be blended chHipBind[xQuan:] = [] chHipIK[xQuan:] = [] chHipFK[xQuan:] = [] # goes through the bind joints, makes a blend colors for each one, connects # the switch to the blender for a, b, c in itertools.izip(chHipBind, chHipIK, chHipFK): rotBC = cmds.shadingNode('blendColors', asUtility = True, n = a + 'rotate_BC') tranBC = cmds.shadingNode('blendColors', asUtility = True, n = a + 'tran_BC') scaleBC = cmds.shadingNode('blendColors', asUtility = True, n = a + 'scale_BC') cmds.connectAttr(switch + '.ikFkSwitch', rotBC + '.blender') cmds.connectAttr(switch + '.ikFkSwitch', tranBC + '.blender') cmds.connectAttr(switch + '.ikFkSwitch', scaleBC + '.blender') # goes through the ik joints, connects to the blend colors cmds.connectAttr(b + '.rotate', rotBC + '.color1', force = True) cmds.connectAttr(b + '.translate', tranBC + '.color1', force = True) cmds.connectAttr(b + '.scale', scaleBC + '.color1', force = True) # connects FK joints to the blend colors cmds.connectAttr(c + '.rotate', rotBC + '.color2') cmds.connectAttr(c + '.translate', tranBC + '.color2') cmds.connectAttr(c + '.scale', scaleBC + '.color2') # connects blend colors to bind joints cmds.connectAttr(rotBC + '.output', a + '.rotate') cmds.connectAttr(tranBC + '.output', a + '.translate') cmds.connectAttr(scaleBC + '.output', a + '.scale') ------------------- def execCrBC(self, *args): g.crBC(cmds.textField(self.ikJBC, q = True, tx = True), cmds.textField(self.fkJBC, q = True, tx = True), cmds.textField(self.bindJBC, q = True, tx = True), cmds.intField(self.bQBC, q = True, v = True), cmds.textField(self.sCBC, q = True, tx = True)) ------------------- self.bQBC = cmds.intField() cmds.text(l = '') self.sCBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') cmds.button(l = 'Help Docs', c = self.crBC.__doc__) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.button(l = 'Create', c = self.execCrBC) Here is the code causing the problem as requested: import maya.cmds as cmds import jtRigUI.createDummyRig as dum import jtRigUI.createSkeleton as sk import jtRigUI.generalUtilities as gu import jtRigUI.createLegRig as lr import jtRigUI.createArmRig as ar class RUI(dum.Dict, dum.Dummy, sk.Skel, sk.FiSkel, lr.LeanLocs, lr.LegRig, ar.ArmRig, gu.Gutils): def __init__(self, charNameUI, gScaleUI, fingButtonGrp, thumbCheckBox, spineButtonGrp, neckButtonGrp, ikJBC, fkJBC, bindJBC, bQBC, sCBC): rigUI = 'rigUI' if cmds.window(rigUI, exists = True): cmds.deleteUI(rigUI) rigUI = cmds.window(rigUI, t = 'JT Rigging UI', sizeable = False, tb = True, mnb = False, mxb = False, menuBar = True, tlb = True, nm = 5) form = cmds.formLayout() tabs = cmds.tabLayout(innerMarginWidth = 1, innerMarginHeight = 1) rigUIMenu = cmds.menu('Help', hm = True) aboutMenu = cmds.menuItem('about') cmds.popupMenu('about', button = 1) deleteUIMenu = cmds.menu('Delete', hm = True) cmds.menuItem('dummySkeleton') cmds.formLayout(form, edit = True, attachForm = ((tabs, 'top', 0), (tabs, 'left', 0), (tabs, 'bottom', 0), (tabs, 'right', 0)), w = 30) tab1 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Dummy') #cmds.columnLayout(rowSpacing = 10) #cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'A: Dummy Skeleton Setup', w = 400) self.charNameUI = cmds.textFieldGrp (label="Optional Character Name:", ann="Insert a name for the character or leave empty.", tx = '', w = 1) fingJUI = cmds.frameLayout(l = 'B: Number of Fingers', w = 10) cmds.text('\n', h = 5) self.fingButtonGrp = cmds.radioButtonGrp('fingRadio', p = fingJUI, l = 'Fingers: ', sl = 4, w = 1, numberOfRadioButtons = 4, labelArray4 = ['One', 'Two', 'Three', 'Four'], ct2 = ('left', 'left'), cw5 = [60,60,60,60,60]) self.thumbCheckBox = cmds.checkBoxGrp(l = 'Thumb: ', v1 = True) cmds.text('\n', h = 5) spineJUI = cmds.frameLayout(l = 'C: Number of Spine Joints') cmds.text('\n', h = 5) self.spineButtonGrp = cmds.radioButtonGrp('spineRadio', p = spineJUI, l = 'Spine Joints: ', sl = 2, w = 1, numberOfRadioButtons = 3, labelArray3 = ['Three', 'Five', 'Ten'], ct2 = ('left', 'left'), cw4 = [95,95,95,95]) cmds.text('\n', h = 5) neckJUI = cmds.frameLayout(l = 'D: Number of Neck Joints') cmds.text('\n', h = 5) self.neckButtonGrp = cmds.radioButtonGrp('neckRadio', p = neckJUI, l = 'Neck Joints: ', sl = 0, w = 1, numberOfRadioButtons = 3, labelArray3 = ['Two', 'Three', 'Four'], ct2 = ('left', 'left'), cw4 = [95,95,95,95]) cmds.text('\n', h = 5) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout('E: Creation') cmds.text('SAVE FIRST: CAN NOT UNDO', bgc = (0.2,0.2,0.2)) cmds.button(l = '\nCreate Dummy Skeleton\n', c = self.build) # also have it make char name field grey cmds.text('Elbows and Knees must have bend.', bgc = (0.2,0.2,0.2)) cmds.columnLayout() cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') tab2 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Skeleton') cmds.columnLayout(columnAttach = ('both', 5), rowSpacing = 10, columnWidth = 150) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'A: Skeleton Setup') cmds.text('SAVE FIRST: CAN NOT UNDO', bgc = (0.2,0.2,0.2)) cmds.button(l = '\nConvert to Skeleton - Orient - Set LRA\n', c = self.buildSkel) self.gScaleUI = cmds.textFieldGrp (label="Scale Multiplier:", ann="Scale multipler of Character: basis for all further base controllers", tx = '1.0', w = 1, ed = False, en = False, visible = True) cmds.frameLayout('B: Manual Orientation') cmds.text('You must manually check finger, thumb, leg, foot orientation specifically.\nConfirm rest of joints.\nSpine: X aim, Y point backwards from spine, Z to the side.\nFingers: X is aim, Y points upwards, Z to the side - Spread on Y, curl on Z.\nFoot: Pivots on Y, rolls on Z, leans on X.') cmds.columnLayout() cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout('C: Finalize Creation of Skeleton') cmds.button(l = '\nFinalize Skeleton\n', c = self.finishS) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') tab3 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Legs') cmds.columnLayout(columnAttach = ('both', 5), rowSpacing = 10, columnWidth = 150) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'A: Leg Rig Setup') cmds.button(l = '\nGenerate Foot Lean Locators\n', c = self.makeLean) cmds.text('Place on either side of the foot.\nDo not rotate: Automatic orientation in place.') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'B: Rig Legs') cmds.button(l = '\nRig Legs\n', c = self.makeLegs) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') tab4 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Arms') cmds.columnLayout(columnAttach = ('both', 5), rowSpacing = 10, columnWidth = 150) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'A: Arm Rig Setup') cmds.button(l = '\nA: Rig Arms\n', c = self.makeArms) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') tab5 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Spine and Head') cmds.columnLayout(columnAttach = ('both', 5), rowSpacing = 10, columnWidth = 150) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'Spine Rig Setup') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') tab6 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Stretchy IK') cmds.columnLayout(columnAttach = ('both', 5), rowSpacing = 10, columnWidth = 150) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'Stretchy Setup') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.setParent('..') tab6 = cmds.rowColumnLayout('Extras') cmds.scrollLayout(saw = 600, sah = 600, cr = True) cmds.columnLayout(columnAttach = ('both', 5), rowSpacing = 10, columnWidth = 150) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'General Utitlities') cmds.text('\nHere are all my general utilities for various things') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'Automatic Blend Colors Creation and Connection') cmds.rowColumnLayout(nc = 5, w = 10) cmds.text('IK Joint:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text('FK/Dyn Joint:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text('Bind Joint:') self.ikJBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') self.fkJBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') self.bindJBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(' \nBlend Quantity:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text(' \nSwitch Control:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text(l = '') self.bQBC = cmds.intField() cmds.text(l = '') self.sCBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') cmds.button(l = 'Help Docs', c = self.crBC.__doc__) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.button(l = 'Create', c = self.execCrBC) cmds.text(l = '') cmds.setParent('..') cmds.frameLayout(l = 'Make Spline IK Curve Stretch And Squash') cmds.rowColumnLayout(nc = 5, w = 10) cmds.text('Curve Name:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text('Setup Name:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text('Joint Quantity:') self.ikJBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') self.fkJBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') self.bindJBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(' \nSwitch Control:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text(' \nGlobal Control:') cmds.text(l = '') cmds.text(l = '') self.bQBC = cmds.intField() cmds.text(l = '') self.sCBC = cmds.textField() cmds.text(l = '') cmds.button(l = 'Help Docs', c = self.crBC.__doc__) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.button(l = 'Create', c = self.execCrBC) cmds.setParent('..') cmds.showWindow(rigUI) r = RUI('charNameUI', 'gScaleUI', 'fingButtonGrp', 'thumbCheckBox', 'spineButtonGrp', 'neckButtonGrp', 'ikJBC', 'fkJBC', 'bindJBC', 'bQBC', 'sCBC') # last modified at 6.20 pm 29th June 2011

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• 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Michael Snow

  Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

  - by Michael Williamson

  Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• A way of doing real-world test-driven development (and some thoughts about it)

  - by Thomas Weller

  Lately, I exchanged some arguments with Derick Bailey about some details of the red-green-refactor cycle of the Test-driven development process. In short, the issue revolved around the fact that it’s not enough to have a test red or green, but it’s also important to have it red or green for the right reasons. While for me, it’s sufficient to initially have a NotImplementedException in place, Derick argues that this is not totally correct (see these two posts: Red/Green/Refactor, For The Right Reasons and Red For The Right Reason: Fail By Assertion, Not By Anything Else). And he’s right. But on the other hand, I had no idea how his insights could have any practical consequence for my own individual interpretation of the red-green-refactor cycle (which is not really red-green-refactor, at least not in its pure sense, see the rest of this article). This made me think deeply for some days now. In the end I found out that the ‘right reason’ changes in my understanding depending on what development phase I’m in. To make this clear (at least I hope it becomes clear…) I started to describe my way of working in some detail, and then something strange happened: The scope of the article slightly shifted from focusing ‘only’ on the ‘right reason’ issue to something more general, which you might describe as something like  'Doing real-world TDD in .NET , with massive use of third-party add-ins’. This is because I feel that there is a more general statement about Test-driven development to make:  It’s high time to speak about the ‘How’ of TDD, not always only the ‘Why’. Much has been said about this, and me myself also contributed to that (see here: TDD is not about testing, it's about how we develop software). But always justifying what you do is very unsatisfying in the long run, it is inherently defensive, and it costs time and effort that could be used for better and more important things. And frankly: I’m somewhat sick and tired of repeating time and again that the test-driven way of software development is highly preferable for many reasons - I don’t want to spent my time exclusively on stating the obvious… So, again, let’s say it clearly: TDD is programming, and programming is TDD. Other ways of programming (code-first, sometimes called cowboy-coding) are exceptional and need justification. – I know that there are many people out there who will disagree with this radical statement, and I also know that it’s not a description of the real world but more of a mission statement or something. But nevertheless I’m absolutely sure that in some years this statement will be nothing but a platitude. Side note: Some parts of this post read as if I were paid by Jetbrains (the manufacturer of the ReSharper add-in – R#), but I swear I’m not. Rather I think that Visual Studio is just not production-complete without it, and I wouldn’t even consider to do professional work without having this add-in installed... The three parts of a software component Before I go into some details, I first should describe my understanding of what belongs to a software component (assembly, type, or method) during the production process (i.e. the coding phase). Roughly, I come up with the three parts shown below:   First, we need to have some initial sort of requirement. This can be a multi-page formal document, a vague idea in some programmer’s brain of what might be needed, or anything in between. In either way, there has to be some sort of requirement, be it explicit or not. – At the C# micro-level, the best way that I found to formulate that is to define interfaces for just about everything, even for internal classes, and to provide them with exhaustive xml comments. The next step then is to re-formulate these requirements in an executable form. This is specific to the respective programming language. - For C#/.NET, the Gallio framework (which includes MbUnit) in conjunction with the ReSharper add-in for Visual Studio is my toolset of choice. The third part then finally is the production code itself. It’s development is entirely driven by the requirements and their executable formulation. This is the delivery, the two other parts are ‘only’ there to make its production possible, to give it a decent quality and reliability, and to significantly reduce related costs down the maintenance timeline. So while the first two parts are not really relevant for the customer, they are very important for the developer. The customer (or in Scrum terms: the Product Owner) is not interested at all in how  the product is developed, he is only interested in the fact that it is developed as cost-effective as possible, and that it meets his functional and non-functional requirements. The rest is solely a matter of the developer’s craftsmanship, and this is what I want to talk about during the remainder of this article… An example To demonstrate my way of doing real-world TDD, I decided to show the development of a (very) simple Calculator component. The example is deliberately trivial and silly, as examples always are. I am totally aware of the fact that real life is never that simple, but I only want to show some development principles here… The requirement As already said above, I start with writing down some words on the initial requirement, and I normally use interfaces for that, even for internal classes - the typical question “intf or not” doesn’t even come to mind. I need them for my usual workflow and using them automatically produces high componentized and testable code anyway. To think about their usage in every single situation would slow down the production process unnecessarily. So this is what I begin with: namespace Calculator {     /// <summary>     /// Defines a very simple calculator component for demo purposes.     /// </summary>     public interface ICalculator     {         /// <summary>         /// Gets the result of the last successful operation.         /// </summary>         /// <value>The last result.</value>         /// <remarks>         /// Will be <see langword="null" /> before the first successful operation.         /// </remarks>         double? LastResult { get; }       } // interface ICalculator   } // namespace Calculator So, I’m not beginning with a test, but with a sort of code declaration - and still I insist on being 100% test-driven. There are three important things here: Starting this way gives me a method signature, which allows to use IntelliSense and AutoCompletion and thus eliminates the danger of typos - one of the most regular, annoying, time-consuming, and therefore expensive sources of error in the development process. In my understanding, the interface definition as a whole is more of a readable requirement document and technical documentation than anything else. So this is at least as much about documentation than about coding. The documentation must completely describe the behavior of the documented element. I normally use an IoC container or some sort of self-written provider-like model in my architecture. In either case, I need my components defined via service interfaces anyway. - I will use the LinFu IoC framework here, for no other reason as that is is very simple to use. The ‘Red’ (pt. 1)   First I create a folder for the project’s third-party libraries and put the LinFu.Core dll there. Then I set up a test project (via a Gallio project template), and add references to the Calculator project and the LinFu dll. Finally I’m ready to write the first test, which will look like the following: namespace Calculator.Test {     [TestFixture]     public class CalculatorTest     {         private readonly ServiceContainer container = new ServiceContainer();           [Test]         public void CalculatorLastResultIsInitiallyNull()         {             ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();               Assert.IsNull(calculator.LastResult);         }       } // class CalculatorTest   } // namespace Calculator.Test       This is basically the executable formulation of what the interface definition states (part of). Side note: There’s one principle of TDD that is just plain wrong in my eyes: I’m talking about the Red is 'does not compile' thing. How could a compiler error ever be interpreted as a valid test outcome? I never understood that, it just makes no sense to me. (Or, in Derick’s terms: this reason is as wrong as a reason ever could be…) A compiler error tells me: Your code is incorrect, but nothing more.  Instead, the ‘Red’ part of the red-green-refactor cycle has a clearly defined meaning to me: It means that the test works as intended and fails only if its assumptions are not met for some reason. Back to our Calculator. When I execute the above test with R#, the Gallio plugin will give me this output: So this tells me that the test is red for the wrong reason: There’s no implementation that the IoC-container could load, of course. So let’s fix that. With R#, this is very easy: First, create an ICalculator - derived type:        Next, implement the interface members: And finally, move the new class to its own file: So far my ‘work’ was six mouse clicks long, the only thing that’s left to do manually here, is to add the Ioc-specific wiring-declaration and also to make the respective class non-public, which I regularly do to force my components to communicate exclusively via interfaces: This is what my Calculator class looks like as of now: using System; using LinFu.IoC.Configuration;   namespace Calculator {     [Implements(typeof(ICalculator))]     internal class Calculator : ICalculator     {         public double? LastResult         {             get             {                 throw new NotImplementedException();             }         }     } } Back to the test fixture, we have to put our IoC container to work: [TestFixture] public class CalculatorTest {     #region Fields       private readonly ServiceContainer container = new ServiceContainer();       #endregion // Fields       #region Setup/TearDown       [FixtureSetUp]     public void FixtureSetUp()     {        container.LoadFrom(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "Calculator.dll");     }       ... Because I have a R# live template defined for the setup/teardown method skeleton as well, the only manual coding here again is the IoC-specific stuff: two lines, not more… The ‘Red’ (pt. 2) Now, the execution of the above test gives the following result: This time, the test outcome tells me that the method under test is called. And this is the point, where Derick and I seem to have somewhat different views on the subject: Of course, the test still is worthless regarding the red/green outcome (or: it’s still red for the wrong reasons, in that it gives a false negative). But as far as I am concerned, I’m not really interested in the test outcome at this point of the red-green-refactor cycle. Rather, I only want to assert that my test actually calls the right method. If that’s the case, I will happily go on to the ‘Green’ part… The ‘Green’ Making the test green is quite trivial. Just make LastResult an automatic property:     [Implements(typeof(ICalculator))]     internal class Calculator : ICalculator     {         public double? LastResult { get; private set; }     }         One more round… Now on to something slightly more demanding (cough…). Let’s state that our Calculator exposes an Add() method:         ...   /// <summary>         /// Adds the specified operands.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="operand1">The operand1.</param>         /// <param name="operand2">The operand2.</param>         /// <returns>The result of the additon.</returns>         /// <exception cref="ArgumentException">         /// Argument <paramref name="operand1"/> is &lt; 0.<br/>         /// -- or --<br/>         /// Argument <paramref name="operand2"/> is &lt; 0.         /// </exception>         double Add(double operand1, double operand2);       } // interface ICalculator A remark: I sometimes hear the complaint that xml comment stuff like the above is hard to read. That’s certainly true, but irrelevant to me, because I read xml code comments with the CR_Documentor tool window. And using that, it looks like this:   Apart from that, I’m heavily using xml code comments (see e.g. here for a detailed guide) because there is the possibility of automating help generation with nightly CI builds (using MS Sandcastle and the Sandcastle Help File Builder), and then publishing the results to some intranet location.  This way, a team always has first class, up-to-date technical documentation at hand about the current codebase. (And, also very important for speeding up things and avoiding typos: You have IntelliSense/AutoCompletion and R# support, and the comments are subject to compiler checking…).     Back to our Calculator again: Two more R# – clicks implement the Add() skeleton:         ...           public double Add(double operand1, double operand2)         {             throw new NotImplementedException();         }       } // class Calculator As we have stated in the interface definition (which actually serves as our requirement document!), the operands are not allowed to be negative. So let’s start implementing that. Here’s the test: [Test] [Row(-0.5, 2)] public void AddThrowsOnNegativeOperands(double operand1, double operand2) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       Assert.Throws<ArgumentException>(() => calculator.Add(operand1, operand2)); } As you can see, I’m using a data-driven unit test method here, mainly for these two reasons: Because I know that I will have to do the same test for the second operand in a few seconds, I save myself from implementing another test method for this purpose. Rather, I only will have to add another Row attribute to the existing one. From the test report below, you can see that the argument values are explicitly printed out. This can be a valuable documentation feature even when everything is green: One can quickly review what values were tested exactly - the complete Gallio HTML-report (as it will be produced by the Continuous Integration runs) shows these values in a quite clear format (see below for an example). Back to our Calculator development again, this is what the test result tells us at the moment: So we’re red again, because there is not yet an implementation… Next we go on and implement the necessary parameter verification to become green again, and then we do the same thing for the second operand. To make a long story short, here’s the test and the method implementation at the end of the second cycle: // in CalculatorTest:   [Test] [Row(-0.5, 2)] [Row(295, -123)] public void AddThrowsOnNegativeOperands(double operand1, double operand2) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       Assert.Throws<ArgumentException>(() => calculator.Add(operand1, operand2)); }   // in Calculator: public double Add(double operand1, double operand2) {     if (operand1 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand1");     }     if (operand2 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand2");     }     throw new NotImplementedException(); } So far, we have sheltered our method from unwanted input, and now we can safely operate on the parameters without further caring about their validity (this is my interpretation of the Fail Fast principle, which is regarded here in more detail). Now we can think about the method’s successful outcomes. First let’s write another test for that: [Test] [Row(1, 1, 2)] public void TestAdd(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       double result = calculator.Add(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, result); } Again, I’m regularly using row based test methods for these kinds of unit tests. The above shown pattern proved to be extremely helpful for my development work, I call it the Defined-Input/Expected-Output test idiom: You define your input arguments together with the expected method result. There are two major benefits from that way of testing: In the course of refining a method, it’s very likely to come up with additional test cases. In our case, we might add tests for some edge cases like ‘one of the operands is zero’ or ‘the sum of the two operands causes an overflow’, or maybe there’s an external test protocol that has to be fulfilled (e.g. an ISO norm for medical software), and this results in the need of testing against additional values. In all these scenarios we only have to add another Row attribute to the test. Remember that the argument values are written to the test report, so as a side-effect this produces valuable documentation. (This can become especially important if the fulfillment of some sort of external requirements has to be proven). So your test method might look something like that in the end: [Test, Description("Arguments: operand1, operand2, expectedResult")] [Row(1, 1, 2)] [Row(0, 999999999, 999999999)] [Row(0, 0, 0)] [Row(0, double.MaxValue, double.MaxValue)] [Row(4, double.MaxValue - 2.5, double.MaxValue)] public void TestAdd(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       double result = calculator.Add(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, result); } And this will produce the following HTML report (with Gallio):   Not bad for the amount of work we invested in it, huh? - There might be scenarios where reports like that can be useful for demonstration purposes during a Scrum sprint review… The last requirement to fulfill is that the LastResult property is expected to store the result of the last operation. I don’t show this here, it’s trivial enough and brings nothing new… And finally: Refactor (for the right reasons) To demonstrate my way of going through the refactoring portion of the red-green-refactor cycle, I added another method to our Calculator component, namely Subtract(). Here’s the code (tests and production): // CalculatorTest.cs:   [Test, Description("Arguments: operand1, operand2, expectedResult")] [Row(1, 1, 0)] [Row(0, 999999999, -999999999)] [Row(0, 0, 0)] [Row(0, double.MaxValue, -double.MaxValue)] [Row(4, double.MaxValue - 2.5, -double.MaxValue)] public void TestSubtract(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       double result = calculator.Subtract(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, result); }   [Test, Description("Arguments: operand1, operand2, expectedResult")] [Row(1, 1, 0)] [Row(0, 999999999, -999999999)] [Row(0, 0, 0)] [Row(0, double.MaxValue, -double.MaxValue)] [Row(4, double.MaxValue - 2.5, -double.MaxValue)] public void TestSubtractGivesExpectedLastResult(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       calculator.Subtract(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, calculator.LastResult); }   ...   // ICalculator.cs: /// <summary> /// Subtracts the specified operands. /// </summary> /// <param name="operand1">The operand1.</param> /// <param name="operand2">The operand2.</param> /// <returns>The result of the subtraction.</returns> /// <exception cref="ArgumentException"> /// Argument <paramref name="operand1"/> is &lt; 0.<br/> /// -- or --<br/> /// Argument <paramref name="operand2"/> is &lt; 0. /// </exception> double Subtract(double operand1, double operand2);   ...   // Calculator.cs:   public double Subtract(double operand1, double operand2) {     if (operand1 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand1");     }       if (operand2 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand2");     }       return (this.LastResult = operand1 - operand2).Value; }   Obviously, the argument validation stuff that was produced during the red-green part of our cycle duplicates the code from the previous Add() method. So, to avoid code duplication and minimize the number of code lines of the production code, we do an Extract Method refactoring. One more time, this is only a matter of a few mouse clicks (and giving the new method a name) with R#: Having done that, our production code finally looks like that: using System; using LinFu.IoC.Configuration;   namespace Calculator {     [Implements(typeof(ICalculator))]     internal class Calculator : ICalculator     {         #region ICalculator           public double? LastResult { get; private set; }           public double Add(double operand1, double operand2)         {             ThrowIfOneOperandIsInvalid(operand1, operand2);               return (this.LastResult = operand1 + operand2).Value;         }           public double Subtract(double operand1, double operand2)         {             ThrowIfOneOperandIsInvalid(operand1, operand2);               return (this.LastResult = operand1 - operand2).Value;         }           #endregion // ICalculator           #region Implementation (Helper)           private static void ThrowIfOneOperandIsInvalid(double operand1, double operand2)         {             if (operand1 < 0.0)             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand1");             }               if (operand2 < 0.0)             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand2");             }         }           #endregion // Implementation (Helper)       } // class Calculator   } // namespace Calculator But is the above worth the effort at all? It’s obviously trivial and not very impressive. All our tests were green (for the right reasons), and refactoring the code did not change anything. It’s not immediately clear how this refactoring work adds value to the project. Derick puts it like this: STOP! Hold on a second… before you go any further and before you even think about refactoring what you just wrote to make your test pass, you need to understand something: if your done with your requirements after making the test green, you are not required to refactor the code. I know… I’m speaking heresy, here. Toss me to the wolves, I’ve gone over to the dark side! Seriously, though… if your test is passing for the right reasons, and you do not need to write any test or any more code for you class at this point, what value does refactoring add? Derick immediately answers his own question: So why should you follow the refactor portion of red/green/refactor? When you have added code that makes the system less readable, less understandable, less expressive of the domain or concern’s intentions, less architecturally sound, less DRY, etc, then you should refactor it. I couldn’t state it more precise. From my personal perspective, I’d add the following: You have to keep in mind that real-world software systems are usually quite large and there are dozens or even hundreds of occasions where micro-refactorings like the above can be applied. It’s the sum of them all that counts. And to have a good overall quality of the system (e.g. in terms of the Code Duplication Percentage metric) you have to be pedantic on the individual, seemingly trivial cases. My job regularly requires the reading and understanding of ‘foreign’ code. So code quality/readability really makes a HUGE difference for me – sometimes it can be even the difference between project success and failure… Conclusions The above described development process emerged over the years, and there were mainly two things that guided its evolution (you might call it eternal principles, personal beliefs, or anything in between): Test-driven development is the normal, natural way of writing software, code-first is exceptional. So ‘doing TDD or not’ is not a question. And good, stable code can only reliably be produced by doing TDD (yes, I know: many will strongly disagree here again, but I’ve never seen high-quality code – and high-quality code is code that stood the test of time and causes low maintenance costs – that was produced code-first…) It’s the production code that pays our bills in the end. (Though I have seen customers these days who demand an acceptance test battery as part of the final delivery. Things seem to go into the right direction…). The test code serves ‘only’ to make the production code work. But it’s the number of delivered features which solely counts at the end of the day - no matter how much test code you wrote or how good it is. With these two things in mind, I tried to optimize my coding process for coding speed – or, in business terms: productivity - without sacrificing the principles of TDD (more than I’d do either way…).  As a result, I consider a ratio of about 3-5/1 for test code vs. production code as normal and desirable. In other words: roughly 60-80% of my code is test code (This might sound heavy, but that is mainly due to the fact that software development standards only begin to evolve. The entire software development profession is very young, historically seen; only at the very beginning, and there are no viable standards yet. If you think about software development as a kind of casting process, where the test code is the mold and the resulting production code is the final product, then the above ratio sounds no longer extraordinary…) Although the above might look like very much unnecessary work at first sight, it’s not. With the aid of the mentioned add-ins, doing all the above is a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds (while writing this post took hours and days…). The most important thing is to have the right tools at hand. Slow developer machines or the lack of a tool or something like that - for ‘saving’ a few 100 bucks -  is just not acceptable and a very bad decision in business terms (though I quite some times have seen and heard that…). Production of high-quality products needs the usage of high-quality tools. This is a platitude that every craftsman knows… The here described round-trip will take me about five to ten minutes in my real-world development practice. I guess it’s about 30% more time compared to developing the ‘traditional’ (code-first) way. But the so manufactured ‘product’ is of much higher quality and massively reduces maintenance costs, which is by far the single biggest cost factor, as I showed in this previous post: It's the maintenance, stupid! (or: Something is rotten in developerland.). In the end, this is a highly cost-effective way of software development… But on the other hand, there clearly is a trade-off here: coding speed vs. code quality/later maintenance costs. The here described development method might be a perfect fit for the overwhelming majority of software projects, but there certainly are some scenarios where it’s not - e.g. if time-to-market is crucial for a software project. So this is a business decision in the end. It’s just that you have to know what you’re doing and what consequences this might have… Some last words First, I’d like to thank Derick Bailey again. His two aforementioned posts (which I strongly recommend for reading) inspired me to think deeply about my own personal way of doing TDD and to clarify my thoughts about it. I wouldn’t have done that without this inspiration. I really enjoy that kind of discussions… I agree with him in all respects. But I don’t know (yet?) how to bring his insights into the described production process without slowing things down. The above described method proved to be very “good enough” in my practical experience. But of course, I’m open to suggestions here… My rationale for now is: If the test is initially red during the red-green-refactor cycle, the ‘right reason’ is: it actually calls the right method, but this method is not yet operational. Later on, when the cycle is finished and the tests become part of the regular, automated Continuous Integration process, ‘red’ certainly must occur for the ‘right reason’: in this phase, ‘red’ MUST mean nothing but an unfulfilled assertion - Fail By Assertion, Not By Anything Else!

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• Making a app show inside a GUI in Java

  - by José

  Hello. I have one problem I've been dealing with for this week. You see, I'm new to Java, so that's probably it... Anyways, I've started a project out of pure curiosity. I had it done in Java, but in plain CMD-style, which is not very pretty. It calls one of my ten programs, chosen by the user using "Case". Eg.: If you type 1, it will go to program 1. After you finish it, it goes back to selection until the user press 0. After that, I've been trying to make a GUI for it. I've been able to create the selector alone and make it respond to the numbers chosen. If you press 1 and click ok, it will tell you you've chosen program 1. I, however, have not been able to make it run the program. I've been trying to make the program show up in a jPanel, part of the main GUI. I failed miserably. The program runs in separate but I can't make them run together like the CMD one. The apps were made in Eclipse SDK 3.5.2 The GUIs were made in Netbeans IDE 6.8 Here's the code for the GUI only (the prints are in PT-BR, my native language): Main program: /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ /* * ProgramasGUI.java * * Created on 31/01/2010, 22:56:19 */ package Main; import Main.Prog1; /** * * @author Zeh® */ public class ProgramasGUI extends javax.swing.JFrame { /** Creates new form ProgramasGUI */ public ProgramasGUI() { initComponents(); } /** This method is called from within the constructor to * initialize the form. * WARNING: Do NOT modify this code. The content of this method is * always regenerated by the Form Editor. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Generated Code"> private void initComponents() { selecao = new javax.swing.JTextField(); mostrador = new javax.swing.JLabel(); selecionar = new javax.swing.JButton(); mostrador1 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); jPanel1 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); selecao.addActionListener(new java.awt.event.ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { selecaoActionPerformed(evt); } }); mostrador.setText("Qual o programa desejado?"); selecionar.setText("OK"); selecionar.addActionListener(new java.awt.event.ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { selecionarActionPerformed(evt); } }); mostrador1.setText("Saiba aqui o Programa escolhido!"); jPanel1.addComponentListener(new java.awt.event.ComponentAdapter() { public void componentShown(java.awt.event.ComponentEvent evt) { jPanel1ComponentShown(evt); } }); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel1Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel1); jPanel1.setLayout(jPanel1Layout); jPanel1Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel1Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 100, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel1Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel1Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 100, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); javax.swing.GroupLayout layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(getContentPane()); getContentPane().setLayout(layout); layout.setHorizontalGroup( layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap() .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addComponent(selecao, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 203, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addComponent(selecionar, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, 203, Short.MAX_VALUE)) .addGap(18, 18, 18) .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addComponent(mostrador1, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 193, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addComponent(mostrador, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 179, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE))) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGap(162, 162, 162) .addComponent(jPanel1, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE))) .addContainerGap()) ); layout.setVerticalGroup( layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.TRAILING, layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap(39, Short.MAX_VALUE) .addComponent(jPanel1, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addGap(30, 30, 30) .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE) .addComponent(selecao, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addComponent(mostrador, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 30, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE)) .addGap(18, 18, 18) .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE) .addComponent(selecionar) .addComponent(mostrador1)) .addContainerGap()) ); pack(); }// </editor-fold> private void selecaoActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { // TODO add your handling code here: } private void selecionarActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { // TODO add your handling code here: int programa = (int)((Double.parseDouble(selecao.getText()))); switch (programa) { case 1: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 2: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 3: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 4: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 5: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 6: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 7: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 8: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 9: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break; case 10: mostrador1.setText("O programa " + programa + " foi escolhido!" ); break;} } private void jPanel1ComponentShown(java.awt.event.ComponentEvent evt) { int programa = (int)((Double.parseDouble(selecao.getText()))); switch (programa) { case 1: addNotify(Prog1.); break;} } /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String args[]) { java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() { public void run() { new ProgramasGUI().setVisible(true); } }); } // Variables declaration - do not modify private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel1; private javax.swing.JLabel mostrador; private javax.swing.JLabel mostrador1; private javax.swing.JTextField selecao; private javax.swing.JButton selecionar; // End of variables declaration } And here's the sub-program: /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ /* * Prog1.java * * Created on 02/02/2010, 23:57:59 */ package Main; /** * * @author Zeh® */ public class Prog1 extends javax.swing.JPanel { /** Creates new form Prog1 */ public Prog1() { initComponents(); } /** This method is called from within the constructor to * initialize the form. * WARNING: Do NOT modify this code. The content of this method is * always regenerated by the Form Editor. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Generated Code"> private void initComponents() { jLabel1 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); numesc = new javax.swing.JLabel(); jLabel3 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); jLabel4 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); jButton1 = new javax.swing.JButton(); campo = new javax.swing.JTextField(); jLabel1.setText("Saiba aqui o Antecessor!"); numesc.setText("O número escolhido é: X"); jLabel3.setText("Saiba aqui o Sucessor!"); jLabel4.setText("Insira um número para saber seu Antecessor e Sucessor!"); jButton1.setText("Calcular!"); jButton1.addActionListener(new java.awt.event.ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { jButton1ActionPerformed(evt); } }); campo.setText("Insira seu número"); javax.swing.GroupLayout layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(this); this.setLayout(layout); layout.setHorizontalGroup( layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap() .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGap(16, 16, 16) .addComponent(jButton1)) .addComponent(campo, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 100, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE)) .addPreferredGap(javax.swing.LayoutStyle.ComponentPlacement.UNRELATED) .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGap(10, 10, 10) .addComponent(jLabel3)) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGap(10, 10, 10) .addComponent(numesc, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, 154, Short.MAX_VALUE)) .addComponent(jLabel1, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, 164, Short.MAX_VALUE))) .addComponent(jLabel4)) .addContainerGap()) ); layout.setVerticalGroup( layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.TRAILING, layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap() .addComponent(jLabel4) .addGap(18, 18, 18) .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE) .addComponent(campo, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addComponent(jLabel1)) .addPreferredGap(javax.swing.LayoutStyle.ComponentPlacement.UNRELATED) .addComponent(numesc) .addGap(11, 11, 11) .addGroup(layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE) .addComponent(jLabel3) .addComponent(jButton1)) .addContainerGap(24, Short.MAX_VALUE)) ); }// </editor-fold> private void jButton1ActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { int num = (int)((Double.parseDouble(campo.getText()))); numesc.setText("O número escolhido é: " + num); int x = num-1; jLabel1.setText ("O antecessor é: " + x); int y = num+1; jLabel3.setText ("O sucessor é: " + y); } // Variables declaration - do not modify private javax.swing.JTextField campo; private javax.swing.JButton jButton1; private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel1; private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel3; private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel4; private javax.swing.JLabel numesc; // End of variables declaration } Any help would be very appreciated. If I, for some reason, made a mistake typing and/or setting the layout of this post incorrectly, please accept my apologies.

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• Problems with DNS propagation 10 days after a change was made

  - by runlevel6

  The engineering team I work with has been in the process of moving equipment from one datacenter to another. Ten days ago we moved one of our name servers authoritative for our client's domains (ns1.faithhiway.com) and updated its IP address with its respective DNS provider (register.com) to point to the new datacenter. All tests done show that this name server is correctly running at its new location and when queried, returning the correct response for any domains it is responsible for. The problem is that well after 72 hours had gone by we were still seeing more DNS activity at its old IP address than at the new. The good news is that we kept a name server responding on the old IP address for the time being so we are not seeing any issues with the domains our nameserver is responsible for but the goal is to retire that as soon as possible. As you can see from WhatsMyDNS.net, a decent amount of propagation has occurred over the last 10 days since we made this change, but still there are some locations reporting our original IP. Considering that the TTL is only 3600 with the name servers responsible for this domain, it does not make any sense to myself or the other engineers working with me that we are having this issue. Now if I run a DNS check using one of the Register.com DNS servers (direct nameservers for faithhiway.com), I get the following (correct) result: # dig @dns01.gpn.register.com ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @dns01.gpn.register.com. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43232 ;; flags: qr aa; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 5, ADDITIONAL: 5 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 3601 IN A 206.127.2.71 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns01.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns02.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns03.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns04.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns05.gpn.register.com. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: dns01.gpn.register.com. 3600 IN A 98.124.192.1 dns02.gpn.register.com. 3600 IN A 98.124.197.1 dns03.gpn.register.com. 3600 IN A 98.124.193.1 dns04.gpn.register.com. 3600 IN A 69.64.145.225 dns05.gpn.register.com. 3600 IN A 98.124.196.1 ;; Query time: 50 msec ;; SERVER: 98.124.192.1#53(98.124.192.1) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:16:57 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 269 Just as a reference, here are the results when the same query is checked against a variety of Public DNS servers: Google: # dig @8.8.8.8 ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @8.8.8.8. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12773 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 997 IN A 206.127.2.71 ;; Query time: 29 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:17:31 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 52 Level 3: # dig @4.2.2.1 ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @4.2.2.1. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46505 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 2623 IN A 206.127.2.71 ;; Query time: 7 msec ;; SERVER: 4.2.2.1#53(4.2.2.1) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:18:35 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 52 Verizon: # dig @151.197.0.38 ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @151.197.0.38. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 32658 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 3601 IN A 206.127.2.71 ;; Query time: 81 msec ;; SERVER: 151.197.0.38#53(151.197.0.38) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:19:15 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 52 Cisco: # dig @64.102.255.44 ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @64.102.255.44. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 39689 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 5, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 3601 IN A 206.127.2.71 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns01.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns04.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns05.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns02.gpn.register.com. faithhiway.com. 3600 IN NS dns03.gpn.register.com. ;; Query time: 105 msec ;; SERVER: 64.102.255.44#53(64.102.255.44) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:20:05 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 165 OpenDNS: # dig @208.67.222.222 ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @208.67.222.222. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12328 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 169507 IN A 207.200.19.162 ;; Query time: 6 msec ;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:19:29 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 52 SpeakEasy: # dig @66.93.87.2 ns1.faithhiway.com A ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> @66.93.87.2. ns1.faithhiway.com A ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 9342 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns1.faithhiway.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 169323 IN A 207.200.19.162 ;; Query time: 69 msec ;; SERVER: 66.93.87.2#53(66.93.87.2) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 27 15:19:51 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 52 As you can see above, the majority of queries are returning the correct result. But a few (OpenDNS and SpeakEasy in the examples above) are still showing the old IP address. Considering the length of time that has gone by, it seems obvious to me that either we have made a mistake and not thoroughly handled the DNS changes on our end (likely) or there is a problem with either the DNS provider for this domain (Register) or with some of the DNS servers out in the wild (rather unlikely). Any advice on how I can proceed with this? UPDATE (January 31, 2011): First of all, I apologize for the length of both the original question and this update. I contemplated removing some of the excess from the original post but just in case this problem and its solution are helpful to someone else in the future I'm just going to leave everything as it is. Anyway, I've been doing some more research into this problem, and have discovered the following interesting occurrence. While running a check on the glue records for faithhiway.com always resolve correctly, if I go and check a client domain (where ns1.faithhiway.com is authoritative), I get a strange response. It looks like the root servers are returning nsX.faithhiway.com as their old IP addresses still (under Additional Section). Because we have a server still there responding to DNS queries, the trace finishes and returns the correct IP addresses as the final step (again, under Additional Section). The example below uses one of the domains that we use that uses ns1.faithhiway.com as its authoritative DNS server. # dig +trace +nosearch +all +norecurse ignitemail.com ; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> +trace +nosearch +all +norecurse ignitemail.com ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46856 ;; flags: qr ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 13, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;. IN NS ;; ANSWER SECTION: . 7986 IN NS a.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS b.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS c.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS d.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS e.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS f.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS g.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS h.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS i.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS j.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS k.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS l.root-servers.net. . 7986 IN NS m.root-servers.net. ;; Query time: 39 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; WHEN: Mon Jan 31 09:22:17 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 228 ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 16325 ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 14 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ignitemail.com. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 172800 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: a.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.5.6.30 a.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:a83e::2:30 b.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.33.14.30 b.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:231d::2:30 c.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.26.92.30 d.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.31.80.30 e.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.12.94.30 f.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.35.51.30 g.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.42.93.30 h.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.54.112.30 i.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.43.172.30 j.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.48.79.30 k.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.52.178.30 l.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.41.162.30 ;; Query time: 64 msec ;; SERVER: 198.41.0.4#53(a.root-servers.net) ;; WHEN: Mon Jan 31 09:22:17 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 504 ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12860 ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ignitemail.com. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: ignitemail.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.faithhiway.com. ignitemail.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.faithhiway.com. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 172800 IN A 207.200.19.162 ns2.faithhiway.com. 172800 IN A 207.200.50.142 ;; Query time: 152 msec ;; SERVER: 192.54.112.30#53(h.gtld-servers.net) ;; WHEN: Mon Jan 31 09:22:17 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 111 ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43016 ;; flags: qr aa; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ignitemail.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ignitemail.com. 3600 IN A 206.127.2.64 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: ignitemail.com. 3600 IN NS ns1.faithhiway.com. ignitemail.com. 3600 IN NS ns2.faithhiway.com. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns1.faithhiway.com. 3600 IN A 206.127.2.71 ns2.faithhiway.com. 3600 IN A 206.127.2.72 ;; Query time: 25 msec ;; SERVER: 206.127.2.71#53(ns1.faithhiway.com) ;; WHEN: Mon Jan 31 09:22:18 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 127 I really think this is a problem we have somewhere in our setup, but whether it is ignorance of something with DNS on my or my fellow engineer's end or just a dumb mistake we made, I have yet to find it.

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• adresse book with C programming, i have problem with library i think, couldn't complite my code

  - by osabri

  I've divided my code in small programm so it can be easy to excute /* ab_error.c : in case of errors following messages will be displayed */ #include "adressbook.h" static char *errormsg[] = { "", "\nNot enough space on disk", "\nCannot open file", "\nCannot read file", "\nCannot write file" }; void check(int error) { switch(error) { case 0: return; case 1: write_file(); case 2: case 3: case 4: system("cls"); fputs(errormsg[error], stderr); exit(error); } } 2nd /* ab_fileio.c : functions for file input/output */ include "adressbook.h" static char ab_file[] = "ADRESSBOOK.DAT"; //file to save the entries int read_file(void) { int error = 0; FILE *fp; ELEMENT *new_e, *last_e = NULL; DATA buffer; if( (fp = fopen(ab_file, "rb")) == NULL) return -1; //no file found while (fread(&buffer, sizeof(DATA), 1, fp) == 1) //reads one list element after another { if( (new_e = make_element()) == NULL) { error = 1; break; //not enough space } new_e->person = buffer; //copy data to new element new_e->next = NULL; if(hol.first == NULL) //list is empty? hol.first = new_e; //yes else last_e->next = new_e; //no last_e = new_e; ++hol.amount; } if( !error && !feof(fp) ) error = 3; //cannot read file fclose(fp); return error; } /-------------------------------/ int write_file(void) { int error = 0; FILE *fp; ELEMENT *p; if( (p = hol.first) == NULL) return 0; //list is empty if( (fp = fopen(ab_file, "wb")) == NULL) return 2; //cannot open while( p!= NULL) { if( fwrite(&p->person, sizeof(DATA), 1, fp) < 1) { error = 4; break; //cannot write } p = p->next; } fclose(fp); return error; } 3rd /* ab_list.c : functions to manipulate the list */ #include "adressbook.h" HOL hol = {0, NULL}; //global definition for head of list /* -------------------- */ ELEMENT *make_element(void) { return (ELEMENT *)malloc( sizeof(ELEMENT) ); } /* -------------------- */ int ins_element( DATA *newdata) { ELEMENT *new_e, *pre_p; if((new_e = make_element()) == NULL) return 1; new_e ->person = *newdata; // copy data to new element pre_p = search(new_e->person.family_name); if(pre_p == NULL) //no person in list { new_e->next = hol.first; //put it to the begin hol.first = new_e; } else { new_e->next = pre_p->next; pre_p->next = new_e; } ++hol.amount; return 0; } int erase_element( char name, char surname ) { return 0; } /* ---------------------*/ ELEMENT *search(char *name) { ELEMENT *sp, *retp; //searchpointer, returnpointer retp = NULL; sp = hol.first; while(sp != NULL && sp->person.family_name != name) { retp = sp; sp = sp->next; } return(retp); } 4th /* ab_screen.c : functions for printing information on screen */ #include "adressbook.h" #include <conio.h> #include <ctype.h> /* standard prompts for in- and output */ static char pgmname[] = "---- Oussama's Adressbook made in splendid C ----"; static char options[] = "\ 1: Enter new adress\n\n\ 2: Delete entry\n\n\ 3: Change entry\n\n\ 4: Print adress\n\n\ Esc: Exit\n\n\n\ Your choice . . .: "; static char prompt[] = "\ Name . . . .:\n\ Surname . . :\n\n\ Street . . .:\n\n\ House number:\n\n\ Postal code :\n\n\ Phone number:"; static char buttons[] = "\ <Esc> = cancel input <Backspace> = correct input\ <Return> = assume"; static char headline[] = "\ Name Surname Street House Postal code Phone number \n\ ------------------------------------------------------------------------"; static char further[] = "\ -------- continue with any key --------"; /* ---------------------------------- */ int menu(void) //show menu and read user input { int c; system ("cls"); set_cur(0,20); puts(pgmname); set_cur(6,0); printf("%s", options); while( (c = getch()) != ESC && (c < '1' || c > '4')) putch('\a'); return c; } /* ---------------------------------- */ int print_adr_book(void) //display adressbook { int line = 1; ELEMENT *p = hol.first; system("cls"); set_cur(0,20); puts(pgmname); set_cur(2,0); puts(headline); set_cur(5,0); while(p != NULL) //run through list and show entries { printf("%5d %-15s ",line, p->person.family_name); printf("%-12s %-15s ", p->person.given_name, p->person.street); printf("%-4d %-5d %-12d\n",p->person.house_number, p->person.postal_code, p->person.phone); p = p->next; if( p == NULL || ++line %16 == 1) //end of list or screen is full { set_cur(24,0); printf("%s",further); if( getch() == ESC) return 0; set_cur(5,0); scroll_up(0,5,24);//puts(headline); } } return 0; } /* -------------------------------------------*/ int make_entry(void) { char cache[50]; DATA newperson; ELEMENT *p; while(1) { system("cls"); set_cur(0,20); puts(pgmname); set_cur(6,0); puts("Please enter new data:"); set_cur(10,0); puts(prompt); set_cur(24,0); printf("%s",buttons); balken(10, 25, MAXL, ' ',0x70); //input name if(input(newperson.family_name, MAXL, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; balken(12,25, MAXL, ' ', 0x70); //surname if(input(newperson.given_name, MAXL, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; balken(14,25, 30, ' ', 0x70); //street if(input(newperson.street, 30, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; balken(16,25, 4, ' ',0x70); //housenumber if(input(cache, 4, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; newperson.house_number = atol(cache); //to string balken(18,25, 5, ' ',0x70); //postal code if(input(cache, 5, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; newperson.postal_code = atol(cache); //to string balken(20,25, 20, ' ',0x70); //phone number if(input(cache, 20, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; newperson.phone = atol(cache); //to string p = search(newperson.phone); if( p!= NULL && p->person.phone == newperson.phone) { set_cur(22,25); puts("phonenumber already exists!"); set_cur(24,0); printf("%s, further"); getch(); continue; } } } 5th /* adress_book_project.c : main program to create an adressbook */ /* copyrights by Oussama Sabri, June 2010 */ #include "adressbook.h" //project header file int main() { int rv, cmd; //return value, user command if ( (rv = read_file() ) == -1) // no data saved yet rv = make_entry(); check(rv); //prompts an error and quits program on disfunction do { switch (cmd = menu())//calls menu and gets user input back { case '1': rv = make_entry(); break; case '2': //delete entry case '3': //changes entry rv = change_entry(cmd); break; case '4': //prints adressbook on screen rv = print_adr_book(); break; case ESC: //end of program system ("cls"); rv = 0; break; } }while(cmd!= ESC); check ( write_file() ); //save adressbook return 0; } 6th /* Getcb.c --> Die Funktion getcb() liefert die naechste * * Tastatureingabe (ruft den BIOS-INT 0x16 auf). * * Return-Wert: * * ASCII-Code bzw. erweiterter Code + 256 */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> int getcb(void) { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 0; // Subfunktion 0: ein Zeichen // von der Tastatur lesen. int86( 0x16, &intregs, &intregs); if( intregs.h.al != 0) // Falls ASCII-Zeichen, return (intregs.h.al); // dieses zurueckgeben. else // Sonst den erweiterten return (intregs.h.ah + 0x100); // Code + 256 } 7th /* PUTCB.C --> enthaelt die Funktionen * * - putcb() * * - putcb9() * * - balken() * * - input() * * * * Es werden die Funktionen 9 und 14 des Video-Interrupts * * (ROM-BIOS-Interrupt 0x10) verwendet. * * * * Die Prototypen dieser Funktionen stehen in BIO.H */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> #define VIDEO_INT 0x10 /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * putcb(c) gibt das Zeichen auf der aktuellen Cursor-Position * am Bildschirm aus. Der Cursor wird versetzt. * Steuerzeichen Back-Space, CR, LF und BELL werden * ausgefuehrt. * Return-Wert: keiner */ void putcb(unsigned char c) /* Gibt das Zeichen in c auf */ { /* den Bildschirm aus. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 14; /* Subfunktion 14 ("Teletype") */ intregs.h.al = c; intregs.h.bl = 0xf; /* Vordergrund-Farbe im */ /* Grafik-Modus. */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * putcb9(c,count,mode) gibt das Zeichen in c count-mal im * angegebenen Modus auf der aktuellen * Cursor-Position am Bildschirm aus. * Der Cursor wird nicht versetzt. * * Return-Wert: keiner */ void putcb9( unsigned char c, /* das Zeichen */ unsigned count, /* die Anzahl */ unsigned mode ) /* Low-Byte: das Atrribut */ { /* High-Byte: die Bildschirmseite*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 9; /* Subfunktion 9 des Int 0x10 */ intregs.h.al = c; intregs.x.bx = mode; intregs.x.cx = count; int86( VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * balken() positioniert den Cursor und zeichnet einen Balken, * wobei Position, L„nge, Fllzeichen und Attribut * als Argumente bergeben werden. * Der Cursor bleibt auf der ersten Position im Balken. */ void balken( unsigned int zeile, /* Start-Position */ unsigned int spalte, unsigned int laenge, /* Laenge des Balkens */ unsigned char c, /* Fuellzeichen */ unsigned int modus) /* Low-Byte: Attribut */ /* High-Byte: Bildschirmseite */ { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 2; /* Cursor auf der angegebenen */ intregs.h.dh = zeile; /* Bildschirmseite versetzen. */ intregs.h.dl = spalte; intregs.h.bh = (modus >> 8); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); putcb9(c, laenge, modus); /* Balken ausgeben. */ } /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * input() liest Zeichen von der Tastatur ein und haengt '\0' an. * Mit Backspace kann die Eingabe geloescht werden. * Das Attribut am Bildschirm bleibt erhalten. * * Argumente: 1. Zeiger auf den Eingabepuffer. * 2. Anzahl maximal einzulesender Zeichen. * 3. Die optionalen Argumente: Zeichen, mit denen die * Eingabe abgebrochen werden kann. * Diese Liste muá mit CR = '\r' enden! * Return-Wert: Das Zeichen, mit dem die Eingabe abgebrochen wurde. */ #include <stdarg.h> int getcb( void); /* Zum Lesen der Tastatur */ int input(char *puffer, int max,... ) { int c; /* aktuelles Zeichen */ int breakc; /* Abruchzeichen */ int nc = 0; /* Anzahl eingelesener Zeichen */ va_list argp; /* Zeiger auf die weiteren Arumente */ while(1) { *puffer = '\0'; va_start(argp, max); /* argp initialisieren */ c = getcb(); do /* Mit Zeichen der Abbruchliste vergleichen */ if(c == (breakc = va_arg(argp,int)) ) return(breakc); while( breakc != '\r' ); va_end( argp); if( c == '\b' && nc > 0) /* Backspace? */ { --nc; --puffer; putcb(c); putcb(' '); putcb(c); } else if( c >= 32 && c <= 255 && nc < max ) { ++nc; *puffer++ = c; putcb(c); } else if( nc == max) putcb('\7'); /* Ton ausgeben */ } } 8th /* Video.c --> Enthaelt die Funktionen * cls(), * scroll_up(), scroll_down(), * set_cur(), get_cur(), * set_screen_page(), get_screen_page() * * Die Prototypen dieser Funktionen befinden sich in BIO.H */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> #include "bio.h" #define VIDEO_INT 0x10 typedef unsigned char BYTE; void scroll_up( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster hoch rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x600 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 6, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void scroll_down( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster runter rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x700 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 7, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void set_cur( int zeile, int spalte) /* versetzt den Cursor */ { /* der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 2; intregs.h.dh = (BYTE)zeile; intregs.h.dl = (BYTE)spalte; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void get_cur(int *zeile, int *spalte) /* holt die Cursor- */ { /* Position der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 3; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); *zeile = (unsigned)intregs.h.dh; *spalte = (unsigned)intregs.h.dl; } void cls(void) { scroll_up(0,0,24); /* Gesamten Bildschirm loeschen. */ set_cur(0,0); /* Cursor in Home-Position. */ } int get_screen_page(void) /* Aktuelle Bildschirmseite holen.*/ { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 15; /* Subfunktion AH = 15: */ /* Bildschirm-Modus feststellen. */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); return (intregs.h.bh); } void set_screen_page(int seite) /* setzt die aktive Seite des */ { /* Bildschirmpuffers auf die */ /* angegebene Seite. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x500 + seite; /* Subfunktion AH = 5 */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /* ------------------------------------------------------------- Ein kleines Testprogramm : */ /* #include <stdio.h> int main() { cls(); set_cur(23, 0); printf("Weiter mit <Return>\n"); set_cur(12, 20); printf("Ein Test!\n"); getchar(); scroll_up(3, 5, 20); getchar(); scroll_down(6, 5, 20); getchar(); set_screen_page(1); printf("\nAuf der 2. Seite !\n"); getchar(); set_screen_page(0); set_cur(0,0); printf("\nWieder auf der 1. Seite !\n"); getchar(); cls(); return 0; } */ /* Video.c --> Enthaelt die Funktionen * cls(), * scroll_up(), scroll_down(), * set_cur(), get_cur(), * set_screen_page(), get_screen_page() * * Die Prototypen dieser Funktionen befinden sich in BIO.H */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> #include "bio.h" #define VIDEO_INT 0x10 typedef unsigned char BYTE; void scroll_up( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster hoch rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x600 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 6, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void scroll_down( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster runter rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x700 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 7, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void set_cur( int zeile, int spalte) /* versetzt den Cursor */ { /* der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 2; intregs.h.dh = (BYTE)zeile; intregs.h.dl = (BYTE)spalte; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void get_cur(int *zeile, int *spalte) /* holt die Cursor- */ { /* Position der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 3; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); *zeile = (unsigned)intregs.h.dh; *spalte = (unsigned)intregs.h.dl; } void cls(void) { scroll_up(0,0,24); /* Gesamten Bildschirm loeschen. */ set_cur(0,0); /* Cursor in Home-Position. */ } int get_screen_page(void) /* Aktuelle Bildschirmseite holen.*/ { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 15; /* Subfunktion AH = 15: */ /* Bildschirm-Modus feststellen. */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); return (intregs.h.bh); } void set_screen_page(int seite) /* setzt die aktive Seite des */ { /* Bildschirmpuffers auf die */ /* angegebene Seite. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x500 + seite; /* Subfunktion AH = 5 */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /* ------------------------------------------------------------- Ein kleines Testprogramm : */ /* #include <stdio.h> int main() { cls(); set_cur(23, 0); printf("Weiter mit <Return>\n"); set_cur(12, 20); printf("Ein Test!\n"); getchar(); scroll_up(3, 5, 20); getchar(); scroll_down(6, 5, 20); getchar(); set_screen_page(1); printf("\nAuf der 2. Seite !\n"); getchar(); set_screen_page(0); set_cur(0,0); printf("\nWieder auf der 1. Seite !\n"); getchar(); cls(); return 0; } */ /* BIO.H --> Enthaelt die Prototypen der BIOS-Funktionen. */ /* --- Funktionen in VIDEO.C --- */ extern void scroll_up(int anzahl, int anf_zeile,int end_zeile); extern void scroll_down(int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile); extern void set_cur(int zeile, int spalte); extern void get_cur(int *zeile, int *spalte); extern void cls(void); extern int get_screen_page(void); extern void set_screen_page(int page); /* --- Funktionen in GETCB.C / PUTCB.C --- */ extern int getcb(void); extern void putcb(int c); extern void putcb9(int c, unsigned count, unsigned modus); extern void balken(int zeile, int spalte, int laenge, int c, unsigned modus); extern int input(char *puffer, int max,... ); need your help, can't find my mistakes:((

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• Address book with C programming; cannot compile my code.

  - by osabri

  I've divided my code into small programs so it can be easy to excute /* ab_error.c : in case of errors following messages will be displayed */ #include "adressbook.h" static char *errormsg[] = { "", "\nNot enough space on disk", "\nCannot open file", "\nCannot read file", "\nCannot write file" }; void check(int error) { switch(error) { case 0: return; case 1: write_file(); case 2: case 3: case 4: system("cls"); fputs(errormsg[error], stderr); exit(error); } } 2nd /* ab_fileio.c : functions for file input/output */ #include "adressbook.h" static char ab_file[] = "ADRESSBOOK.DAT"; //file to save the entries int read_file(void) { int error = 0; FILE *fp; ELEMENT *new_e, *last_e = NULL; DATA buffer; if( (fp = fopen(ab_file, "rb")) == NULL) return -1; //no file found while (fread(&buffer, sizeof(DATA), 1, fp) == 1) //reads one list element after another { if( (new_e = make_element()) == NULL) { error = 1; break; //not enough space } new_e->person = buffer; //copy data to new element new_e->next = NULL; if(hol.first == NULL) //list is empty? hol.first = new_e; //yes else last_e->next = new_e; //no last_e = new_e; ++hol.amount; } if( !error && !feof(fp) ) error = 3; //cannot read file fclose(fp); return error; } /*-------------------------------*/ int write_file(void) { int error = 0; FILE *fp; ELEMENT *p; if( (p = hol.first) == NULL) return 0; //list is empty if( (fp = fopen(ab_file, "wb")) == NULL) return 2; //cannot open while( p!= NULL) { if( fwrite(&p->person, sizeof(DATA), 1, fp) < 1) { error = 4; break; //cannot write } p = p->next; } fclose(fp); return error; } 3rd /* ab_list.c : functions to manipulate the list */ #include "adressbook.h" HOL hol = {0, NULL}; //global definition for head of list /* -------------------- */ ELEMENT *make_element(void) { return (ELEMENT *)malloc( sizeof(ELEMENT) ); } /* -------------------- */ int ins_element( DATA *newdata) { ELEMENT *new_e, *pre_p; if((new_e = make_element()) == NULL) return 1; new_e ->person = *newdata; // copy data to new element pre_p = search(new_e->person.family_name); if(pre_p == NULL) //no person in list { new_e->next = hol.first; //put it to the begin hol.first = new_e; } else { new_e->next = pre_p->next; pre_p->next = new_e; } ++hol.amount; return 0; } int erase_element( char name, char surname ) { return 0; } /* ---------------------*/ ELEMENT *search(char *name) { ELEMENT *sp, *retp; //searchpointer, returnpointer retp = NULL; sp = hol.first; while(sp != NULL && sp->person.family_name != name) { retp = sp; sp = sp->next; } return(retp); } 4th /* ab_screen.c : functions for printing information on screen */ #include "adressbook.h" #include <conio.h> #include <ctype.h> /* standard prompts for in- and output */ static char pgmname[] = "---- Oussama's Adressbook made in splendid C ----"; static char options[] = "\ 1: Enter new adress\n\n\ 2: Delete entry\n\n\ 3: Change entry\n\n\ 4: Print adress\n\n\ Esc: Exit\n\n\n\ Your choice . . .: "; static char prompt[] = "\ Name . . . .:\n\ Surname . . :\n\n\ Street . . .:\n\n\ House number:\n\n\ Postal code :\n\n\ Phone number:"; static char buttons[] = "\ <Esc> = cancel input <Backspace> = correct input\ <Return> = assume"; static char headline[] = "\ Name Surname Street House Postal code Phone number \n\ ------------------------------------------------------------------------"; static char further[] = "\ -------- continue with any key --------"; /* ---------------------------------- */ int menu(void) //show menu and read user input { int c; system ("cls"); set_cur(0,20); puts(pgmname); set_cur(6,0); printf("%s", options); while( (c = getch()) != ESC && (c < '1' || c > '4')) putch('\a'); return c; } /* ---------------------------------- */ int print_adr_book(void) //display adressbook { int line = 1; ELEMENT *p = hol.first; system("cls"); set_cur(0,20); puts(pgmname); set_cur(2,0); puts(headline); set_cur(5,0); while(p != NULL) //run through list and show entries { printf("%5d %-15s ",line, p->person.family_name); printf("%-12s %-15s ", p->person.given_name, p->person.street); printf("%-4d %-5d %-12d\n",p->person.house_number, p->person.postal_code, p->person.phone); p = p->next; if( p == NULL || ++line %16 == 1) //end of list or screen is full { set_cur(24,0); printf("%s",further); if( getch() == ESC) return 0; set_cur(5,0); scroll_up(0,5,24);//puts(headline); } } return 0; } /* -------------------------------------------*/ int make_entry(void) { char cache[50]; DATA newperson; ELEMENT *p; while(1) { system("cls"); set_cur(0,20); puts(pgmname); set_cur(6,0); puts("Please enter new data:"); set_cur(10,0); puts(prompt); set_cur(24,0); printf("%s",buttons); balken(10, 25, MAXL, ' ',0x70); //input name if(input(newperson.family_name, MAXL, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; balken(12,25, MAXL, ' ', 0x70); //surname if(input(newperson.given_name, MAXL, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; balken(14,25, 30, ' ', 0x70); //street if(input(newperson.street, 30, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; balken(16,25, 4, ' ',0x70); //housenumber if(input(cache, 4, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; newperson.house_number = atol(cache); //to string balken(18,25, 5, ' ',0x70); //postal code if(input(cache, 5, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; newperson.postal_code = atol(cache); //to string balken(20,25, 20, ' ',0x70); //phone number if(input(cache, 20, ESC, CR) == ESC) return 0; newperson.phone = atol(cache); //to string p = search(newperson.phone); if( p!= NULL && p->person.phone == newperson.phone) { set_cur(22,25); puts("phonenumber already exists!"); set_cur(24,0); printf("%s, further"); getch(); continue; } } } 5th /* adress_book_project.c : main program to create an adressbook */ /* copyrights by Oussama Sabri, June 2010 */ #include "adressbook.h" //project header file int main() { int rv, cmd; //return value, user command if ( (rv = read_file() ) == -1) // no data saved yet rv = make_entry(); check(rv); //prompts an error and quits program on disfunction do { switch (cmd = menu())//calls menu and gets user input back { case '1': rv = make_entry(); break; case '2': //delete entry case '3': //changes entry rv = change_entry(cmd); break; case '4': //prints adressbook on screen rv = print_adr_book(); break; case ESC: //end of program system ("cls"); rv = 0; break; } }while(cmd!= ESC); check ( write_file() ); //save adressbook return 0; } 6th /* Getcb.c --> Die Funktion getcb() liefert die naechste * * Tastatureingabe (ruft den BIOS-INT 0x16 auf). * * Return-Wert: * * ASCII-Code bzw. erweiterter Code + 256 */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> int getcb(void) { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 0; // Subfunktion 0: ein Zeichen // von der Tastatur lesen. int86( 0x16, &intregs, &intregs); if( intregs.h.al != 0) // Falls ASCII-Zeichen, return (intregs.h.al); // dieses zurueckgeben. else // Sonst den erweiterten return (intregs.h.ah + 0x100); // Code + 256 } 7th /* PUTCB.C --> enthaelt die Funktionen * * - putcb() * * - putcb9() * * - balken() * * - input() * * * * Es werden die Funktionen 9 und 14 des Video-Interrupts * * (ROM-BIOS-Interrupt 0x10) verwendet. * * * * Die Prototypen dieser Funktionen stehen in BIO.H */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> #define VIDEO_INT 0x10 /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * putcb(c) gibt das Zeichen auf der aktuellen Cursor-Position * am Bildschirm aus. Der Cursor wird versetzt. * Steuerzeichen Back-Space, CR, LF und BELL werden * ausgefuehrt. * Return-Wert: keiner */ void putcb(unsigned char c) /* Gibt das Zeichen in c auf */ { /* den Bildschirm aus. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 14; /* Subfunktion 14 ("Teletype") */ intregs.h.al = c; intregs.h.bl = 0xf; /* Vordergrund-Farbe im */ /* Grafik-Modus. */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * putcb9(c,count,mode) gibt das Zeichen in c count-mal im * angegebenen Modus auf der aktuellen * Cursor-Position am Bildschirm aus. * Der Cursor wird nicht versetzt. * * Return-Wert: keiner */ void putcb9( unsigned char c, /* das Zeichen */ unsigned count, /* die Anzahl */ unsigned mode ) /* Low-Byte: das Atrribut */ { /* High-Byte: die Bildschirmseite*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 9; /* Subfunktion 9 des Int 0x10 */ intregs.h.al = c; intregs.x.bx = mode; intregs.x.cx = count; int86( VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * balken() positioniert den Cursor und zeichnet einen Balken, * wobei Position, L„nge, Fllzeichen und Attribut * als Argumente bergeben werden. * Der Cursor bleibt auf der ersten Position im Balken. */ void balken( unsigned int zeile, /* Start-Position */ unsigned int spalte, unsigned int laenge, /* Laenge des Balkens */ unsigned char c, /* Fuellzeichen */ unsigned int modus) /* Low-Byte: Attribut */ /* High-Byte: Bildschirmseite */ { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 2; /* Cursor auf der angegebenen */ intregs.h.dh = zeile; /* Bildschirmseite versetzen. */ intregs.h.dl = spalte; intregs.h.bh = (modus >> 8); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); putcb9(c, laenge, modus); /* Balken ausgeben. */ } /*---------------------------------------------------------------- * input() liest Zeichen von der Tastatur ein und haengt '\0' an. * Mit Backspace kann die Eingabe geloescht werden. * Das Attribut am Bildschirm bleibt erhalten. * * Argumente: 1. Zeiger auf den Eingabepuffer. * 2. Anzahl maximal einzulesender Zeichen. * 3. Die optionalen Argumente: Zeichen, mit denen die * Eingabe abgebrochen werden kann. * Diese Liste muá mit CR = '\r' enden! * Return-Wert: Das Zeichen, mit dem die Eingabe abgebrochen wurde. */ #include <stdarg.h> int getcb( void); /* Zum Lesen der Tastatur */ int input(char *puffer, int max,... ) { int c; /* aktuelles Zeichen */ int breakc; /* Abruchzeichen */ int nc = 0; /* Anzahl eingelesener Zeichen */ va_list argp; /* Zeiger auf die weiteren Arumente */ while(1) { *puffer = '\0'; va_start(argp, max); /* argp initialisieren */ c = getcb(); do /* Mit Zeichen der Abbruchliste vergleichen */ if(c == (breakc = va_arg(argp,int)) ) return(breakc); while( breakc != '\r' ); va_end( argp); if( c == '\b' && nc > 0) /* Backspace? */ { --nc; --puffer; putcb(c); putcb(' '); putcb(c); } else if( c >= 32 && c <= 255 && nc < max ) { ++nc; *puffer++ = c; putcb(c); } else if( nc == max) putcb('\7'); /* Ton ausgeben */ } } 8th /* Video.c --> Enthaelt die Funktionen * cls(), * scroll_up(), scroll_down(), * set_cur(), get_cur(), * set_screen_page(), get_screen_page() * * Die Prototypen dieser Funktionen befinden sich in BIO.H */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> #include "bio.h" #define VIDEO_INT 0x10 typedef unsigned char BYTE; void scroll_up( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster hoch rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x600 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 6, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void scroll_down( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster runter rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x700 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 7, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void set_cur( int zeile, int spalte) /* versetzt den Cursor */ { /* der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 2; intregs.h.dh = (BYTE)zeile; intregs.h.dl = (BYTE)spalte; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void get_cur(int *zeile, int *spalte) /* holt die Cursor- */ { /* Position der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 3; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); *zeile = (unsigned)intregs.h.dh; *spalte = (unsigned)intregs.h.dl; } void cls(void) { scroll_up(0,0,24); /* Gesamten Bildschirm loeschen. */ set_cur(0,0); /* Cursor in Home-Position. */ } int get_screen_page(void) /* Aktuelle Bildschirmseite holen.*/ { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 15; /* Subfunktion AH = 15: */ /* Bildschirm-Modus feststellen. */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); return (intregs.h.bh); } void set_screen_page(int seite) /* setzt die aktive Seite des */ { /* Bildschirmpuffers auf die */ /* angegebene Seite. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x500 + seite; /* Subfunktion AH = 5 */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /* ------------------------------------------------------------- Ein kleines Testprogramm : */ /* #include <stdio.h> int main() { cls(); set_cur(23, 0); printf("Weiter mit <Return>\n"); set_cur(12, 20); printf("Ein Test!\n"); getchar(); scroll_up(3, 5, 20); getchar(); scroll_down(6, 5, 20); getchar(); set_screen_page(1); printf("\nAuf der 2. Seite !\n"); getchar(); set_screen_page(0); set_cur(0,0); printf("\nWieder auf der 1. Seite !\n"); getchar(); cls(); return 0; } */ /* Video.c --> Enthaelt die Funktionen * cls(), * scroll_up(), scroll_down(), * set_cur(), get_cur(), * set_screen_page(), get_screen_page() * * Die Prototypen dieser Funktionen befinden sich in BIO.H */ /* Hinweis: Es muss ein DOS-Compiler verwendet werden. * * (z.B. der GNU-Compiler fuer DOS auf der CD) */ #include <dos.h> #include "bio.h" #define VIDEO_INT 0x10 typedef unsigned char BYTE; void scroll_up( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster hoch rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x600 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 6, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void scroll_down( int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile) { /* Fenster runter rollen. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x700 + anzahl; /* Subfunktion AH = 7, */ /* AL = Anzahl Zeilen. */ intregs.x.cx = anf_zeile << 8; /* CH=anf_zeile, cl=0 */ intregs.x.dx = (end_zeile <<8) | 79; /* DH=end_zeile,DL=79 */ intregs.h.bh = 7; /* normales Attribut */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void set_cur( int zeile, int spalte) /* versetzt den Cursor */ { /* der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 2; intregs.h.dh = (BYTE)zeile; intregs.h.dl = (BYTE)spalte; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } void get_cur(int *zeile, int *spalte) /* holt die Cursor- */ { /* Position der aktuellen Bildschirmseite.*/ union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 3; intregs.h.bh = (BYTE)get_screen_page(); int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); *zeile = (unsigned)intregs.h.dh; *spalte = (unsigned)intregs.h.dl; } void cls(void) { scroll_up(0,0,24); /* Gesamten Bildschirm loeschen. */ set_cur(0,0); /* Cursor in Home-Position. */ } int get_screen_page(void) /* Aktuelle Bildschirmseite holen.*/ { union REGS intregs; intregs.h.ah = 15; /* Subfunktion AH = 15: */ /* Bildschirm-Modus feststellen. */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); return (intregs.h.bh); } void set_screen_page(int seite) /* setzt die aktive Seite des */ { /* Bildschirmpuffers auf die */ /* angegebene Seite. */ union REGS intregs; intregs.x.ax = 0x500 + seite; /* Subfunktion AH = 5 */ int86(VIDEO_INT, &intregs, &intregs); } /* ------------------------------------------------------------- Ein kleines Testprogramm : */ /* #include <stdio.h> int main() { cls(); set_cur(23, 0); printf("Weiter mit <Return>\n"); set_cur(12, 20); printf("Ein Test!\n"); getchar(); scroll_up(3, 5, 20); getchar(); scroll_down(6, 5, 20); getchar(); set_screen_page(1); printf("\nAuf der 2. Seite !\n"); getchar(); set_screen_page(0); set_cur(0,0); printf("\nWieder auf der 1. Seite !\n"); getchar(); cls(); return 0; } */ /* BIO.H --> Enthaelt die Prototypen der BIOS-Funktionen. */ /* --- Funktionen in VIDEO.C --- */ extern void scroll_up(int anzahl, int anf_zeile,int end_zeile); extern void scroll_down(int anzahl, int anf_zeile, int end_zeile); extern void set_cur(int zeile, int spalte); extern void get_cur(int *zeile, int *spalte); extern void cls(void); extern int get_screen_page(void); extern void set_screen_page(int page); /* --- Funktionen in GETCB.C / PUTCB.C --- */ extern int getcb(void); extern void putcb(int c); extern void putcb9(int c, unsigned count, unsigned modus); extern void balken(int zeile, int spalte, int laenge, int c, unsigned modus); extern int input(char *puffer, int max,... ); need your help, can't find my mistakes:((

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• Convert Java program to C

  - by imicrothinking

  I need a bit of guidance with writing a C program...a bit of quick background as to my level, I've programmed in Java previously, but this is my first time programming in C, and we've been tasked to translate a word count program from Java to C that consists of the following: Read a file from memory Count the words in the file For each occurrence of a unique word, keep a word counter variable Print out the top ten most frequent words and their corresponding occurrences Here's the source program in Java: package lab0; import java.io.File; import java.io.FileReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Calendar; import java.util.Collections; public class WordCount { private ArrayList<WordCountNode> outputlist = null; public WordCount(){ this.outputlist = new ArrayList<WordCountNode>(); } /** * Read the file into memory. * * @param filename name of the file. * @return content of the file. * @throws Exception if the file is too large or other file related exception. */ public char[] readFile(String filename) throws Exception{ char [] result = null; File file = new File(filename); long size = file.length(); if (size > Integer.MAX_VALUE){ throw new Exception("File is too large"); } result = new char[(int)size]; FileReader reader = new FileReader(file); int len, offset = 0, size2read = (int)size; while(size2read > 0){ len = reader.read(result, offset, size2read); if(len == -1) break; size2read -= len; offset += len; } return result; } /** * Make article word by word. * * @param article the content of file to be counted. * @return string contains only letters and "'". */ private enum SPLIT_STATE {IN_WORD, NOT_IN_WORD}; /** * Go through article, find all the words and add to output list * with their count. * * @param article the content of the file to be counted. * @return words in the file and their counts. */ public ArrayList<WordCountNode> countWords(char[] article){ SPLIT_STATE state = SPLIT_STATE.NOT_IN_WORD; if(null == article) return null; char curr_ltr; int curr_start = 0; for(int i = 0; i < article.length; i++){ curr_ltr = Character.toUpperCase( article[i]); if(state == SPLIT_STATE.IN_WORD){ article[i] = curr_ltr; if ((curr_ltr < 'A' || curr_ltr > 'Z') && curr_ltr != '\'') { article[i] = ' '; //printf("\nthe word is %s\n\n",curr_start); if(i - curr_start < 0){ System.out.println("i = " + i + " curr_start = " + curr_start); } addWord(new String(article, curr_start, i-curr_start)); state = SPLIT_STATE.NOT_IN_WORD; } }else{ if (curr_ltr >= 'A' && curr_ltr <= 'Z') { curr_start = i; article[i] = curr_ltr; state = SPLIT_STATE.IN_WORD; } } } return outputlist; } /** * Add the word to output list. */ public void addWord(String word){ int pos = dobsearch(word); if(pos >= outputlist.size()){ outputlist.add(new WordCountNode(1L, word)); }else{ WordCountNode tmp = outputlist.get(pos); if(tmp.getWord().compareTo(word) == 0){ tmp.setCount(tmp.getCount() + 1); }else{ outputlist.add(pos, new WordCountNode(1L, word)); } } } /** * Search the output list and return the position to put word. * @param word is the word to be put into output list. * @return position in the output list to insert the word. */ public int dobsearch(String word){ int cmp, high = outputlist.size(), low = -1, next; // Binary search the array to find the key while (high - low > 1) { next = (high + low) / 2; // all in upper case cmp = word.compareTo((outputlist.get(next)).getWord()); if (cmp == 0) return next; else if (cmp < 0) high = next; else low = next; } return high; } public static void main(String args[]){ // handle input if (args.length == 0){ System.out.println("USAGE: WordCount <filename> [Top # of results to display]\n"); System.exit(1); } String filename = args[0]; int dispnum; try{ dispnum = Integer.parseInt(args[1]); }catch(Exception e){ dispnum = 10; } long start_time = Calendar.getInstance().getTimeInMillis(); WordCount wordcount = new WordCount(); System.out.println("Wordcount: Running..."); // read file char[] input = null; try { input = wordcount.readFile(filename); } catch (Exception e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); System.exit(1); } // count all word ArrayList<WordCountNode> result = wordcount.countWords(input); long end_time = Calendar.getInstance().getTimeInMillis(); System.out.println("wordcount: completed " + (end_time - start_time)/1000000 + "." + (end_time - start_time)%1000000 + "(s)"); System.out.println("wordsort: running ..."); start_time = Calendar.getInstance().getTimeInMillis(); Collections.sort(result); end_time = Calendar.getInstance().getTimeInMillis(); System.out.println("wordsort: completed " + (end_time - start_time)/1000000 + "." + (end_time - start_time)%1000000 + "(s)"); Collections.reverse(result); System.out.println("\nresults (TOP "+ dispnum +" from "+ result.size() +"):\n" ); // print out result String str ; for (int i = 0; i < result.size() && i < dispnum; i++){ if(result.get(i).getWord().length() > 15) str = result.get(i).getWord().substring(0, 14); else str = result.get(i).getWord(); System.out.println(str + " - " + result.get(i).getCount()); } } public class WordCountNode implements Comparable{ private String word; private long count; public WordCountNode(long count, String word){ this.count = count; this.word = word; } public String getWord() { return word; } public void setWord(String word) { this.word = word; } public long getCount() { return count; } public void setCount(long count) { this.count = count; } public int compareTo(Object arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub WordCountNode obj = (WordCountNode)arg0; if( count - obj.getCount() < 0) return -1; else if( count - obj.getCount() == 0) return 0; else return 1; } } } Here's my attempt (so far) in C: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdbool.h> #include <string.h> // Read in a file FILE *readFile (char filename[]) { FILE *inputFile; inputFile = fopen (filename, "r"); if (inputFile == NULL) { printf ("File could not be opened.\n"); exit (EXIT_FAILURE); } return inputFile; } // Return number of words in an array int wordCount (FILE *filePointer, char filename[]) {//, char *words[]) { // count words int count = 0; char temp; while ((temp = getc(filePointer)) != EOF) { //printf ("%c", temp); if ((temp == ' ' || temp == '\n') && (temp != '\'')) count++; } count += 1; // counting method uses space AFTER last character in word - the last space // of the last character isn't counted - off by one error // close file fclose (filePointer); return count; } // Print out the frequencies of the 10 most frequent words in the console int main (int argc, char *argv[]) { /* Step 1: Read in file and check for errors */ FILE *filePointer; filePointer = readFile (argv[1]); /* Step 2: Do a word count to prep for array size */ int count = wordCount (filePointer, argv[1]); printf ("Number of words is: %i\n", count); /* Step 3: Create a 2D array to store words in the file */ // open file to reset marker to beginning of file filePointer = fopen (argv[1], "r"); // store words in character array (each element in array = consecutive word) char allWords[count][100]; // 100 is an arbitrary size - max length of word int i,j; char temp; for (i = 0; i < count; i++) { for (j = 0; j < 100; j++) { // labels are used with goto statements, not loops in C temp = getc(filePointer); if ((temp == ' ' || temp == '\n' || temp == EOF) && (temp != '\'') ) { allWords[i][j] = '\0'; break; } else { allWords[i][j] = temp; } printf ("%c", allWords[i][j]); } printf ("\n"); } // close file fclose (filePointer); /* Step 4: Use a simple selection sort algorithm to sort 2D char array */ // PStep 1: Compare two char arrays, and if // (a) c1 > c2, return 2 // (b) c1 == c2, return 1 // (c) c1 < c2, return 0 qsort(allWords, count, sizeof(char[][]), pstrcmp); /* int k = 0, l = 0, m = 0; char currentMax, comparedElement; int max; // the largest element in the current 2D array int elementToSort = 0; // elementToSort determines the element to swap with starting from the left // Outer a iterates through number of swaps needed for (k = 0; k < count - 1; k++) { // times of swaps max = k; // max element set to k // Inner b iterates through successive elements to fish out the largest element for (m = k + 1; m < count - k; m++) { currentMax = allWords[k][l]; comparedElement = allWords[m][l]; // Inner c iterates through successive chars to set the max vars to the largest for (l = 0; (currentMax != '\0' || comparedElement != '\0'); l++) { if (currentMax > comparedElement) break; else if (currentMax < comparedElement) { max = m; currentMax = allWords[m][l]; break; } else if (currentMax == comparedElement) continue; } } // After max (count and string) is determined, perform swap with temp variable char swapTemp[1][20]; int y = 0; do { swapTemp[0][y] = allWords[elementToSort][y]; allWords[elementToSort][y] = allWords[max][y]; allWords[max][y] = swapTemp[0][y]; } while (swapTemp[0][y++] != '\0'); elementToSort++; } */ int a, b; for (a = 0; a < count; a++) { for (b = 0; (temp = allWords[a][b]) != '\0'; b++) { printf ("%c", temp); } printf ("\n"); } // Copy rows to different array and print results /* char arrayCopy [count][20]; int ac, ad; char tempa; for (ac = 0; ac < count; ac++) { for (ad = 0; (tempa = allWords[ac][ad]) != '\0'; ad++) { arrayCopy[ac][ad] = tempa; printf("%c", arrayCopy[ac][ad]); } printf("\n"); } */ /* Step 5: Create two additional arrays: (a) One in which each element contains unique words from char array (b) One which holds the count for the corresponding word in the other array */ /* Step 6: Sort the count array in decreasing order, and print the corresponding array element as well as word count in the console */ return 0; } // Perform housekeeping tasks like freeing up memory and closing file I'm really stuck on the selection sort algorithm. I'm currently using 2D arrays to represent strings, and that worked out fine, but when it came to sorting, using three level nested loops didn't seem to work, I tried to use qsort instead, but I don't fully understand that function as well. Constructive feedback and criticism greatly welcome (...and needed)!

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• Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization

  - by Mark Virtue

  Is your desk a paragon of neatness, or does it look like a paper-bomb has gone off? If you’ve been putting off getting organized because the task is too huge or daunting, or you don’t know where to start, we’ve got 40 tips to get you on the path to zen mastery of your filing system. For all those readers who would like to get their files and folders organized, or, if they’re already organized, better organized—we have compiled a complete guide to getting organized and staying organized, a comprehensive article that will hopefully cover every possible tip you could want. Signs that Your Computer is Poorly Organized If your computer is a mess, you’re probably already aware of it.  But just in case you’re not, here are some tell-tale signs: Your Desktop has over 40 icons on it “My Documents” contains over 300 files and 60 folders, including MP3s and digital photos You use the Windows’ built-in search facility whenever you need to find a file You can’t find programs in the out-of-control list of programs in your Start Menu You save all your Word documents in one folder, all your spreadsheets in a second folder, etc Any given file that you’re looking for may be in any one of four different sets of folders But before we start, here are some quick notes: We’re going to assume you know what files and folders are, and how to create, save, rename, copy and delete them The organization principles described in this article apply equally to all computer systems.  However, the screenshots here will reflect how things look on Windows (usually Windows 7).  We will also mention some useful features of Windows that can help you get organized. Everyone has their own favorite methodology of organizing and filing, and it’s all too easy to get into “My Way is Better than Your Way” arguments.  The reality is that there is no perfect way of getting things organized.  When I wrote this article, I tried to keep a generalist and objective viewpoint.  I consider myself to be unusually well organized (to the point of obsession, truth be told), and I’ve had 25 years experience in collecting and organizing files on computers.  So I’ve got a lot to say on the subject.  But the tips I have described here are only one way of doing it.  Hopefully some of these tips will work for you too, but please don’t read this as any sort of “right” way to do it. At the end of the article we’ll be asking you, the reader, for your own organization tips. Why Bother Organizing At All? For some, the answer to this question is self-evident. And yet, in this era of powerful desktop search software (the search capabilities built into the Windows Vista and Windows 7 Start Menus, and third-party programs like Google Desktop Search), the question does need to be asked, and answered. I have a friend who puts every file he ever creates, receives or downloads into his My Documents folder and doesn’t bother filing them into subfolders at all.  He relies on the search functionality built into his Windows operating system to help him find whatever he’s looking for.  And he always finds it.  He’s a Search Samurai.  For him, filing is a waste of valuable time that could be spent enjoying life! It’s tempting to follow suit.  On the face of it, why would anyone bother to take the time to organize their hard disk when such excellent search software is available?  Well, if all you ever want to do with the files you own is to locate and open them individually (for listening, editing, etc), then there’s no reason to ever bother doing one scrap of organization.  But consider these common tasks that are not achievable with desktop search software: Find files manually.  Often it’s not convenient, speedy or even possible to utilize your desktop search software to find what you want.  It doesn’t work 100% of the time, or you may not even have it installed.  Sometimes its just plain faster to go straight to the file you want, if you know it’s in a particular sub-folder, rather than trawling through hundreds of search results. Find groups of similar files (e.g. all your “work” files, all the photos of your Europe holiday in 2008, all your music videos, all the MP3s from Dark Side of the Moon, all your letters you wrote to your wife, all your tax returns).  Clever naming of the files will only get you so far.  Sometimes it’s the date the file was created that’s important, other times it’s the file format, and other times it’s the purpose of the file.  How do you name a collection of files so that they’re easy to isolate based on any of the above criteria?  Short answer, you can’t. Move files to a new computer.  It’s time to upgrade your computer.  How do you quickly grab all the files that are important to you?  Or you decide to have two computers now – one for home and one for work.  How do you quickly isolate only the work-related files to move them to the work computer? Synchronize files to other computers.  If you have more than one computer, and you need to mirror some of your files onto the other computer (e.g. your music collection), then you need a way to quickly determine which files are to be synced and which are not.  Surely you don’t want to synchronize everything? Choose which files to back up.  If your backup regime calls for multiple backups, or requires speedy backups, then you’ll need to be able to specify which files are to be backed up, and which are not.  This is not possible if they’re all in the same folder. Finally, if you’re simply someone who takes pleasure in being organized, tidy and ordered (me! me!), then you don’t even need a reason.  Being disorganized is simply unthinkable. Tips on Getting Organized Here we present our 40 best tips on how to get organized.  Or, if you’re already organized, to get better organized. Tip #1.  Choose Your Organization System Carefully The reason that most people are not organized is that it takes time.  And the first thing that takes time is deciding upon a system of organization.  This is always a matter of personal preference, and is not something that a geek on a website can tell you.  You should always choose your own system, based on how your own brain is organized (which makes the assumption that your brain is, in fact, organized). We can’t instruct you, but we can make suggestions: You may want to start off with a system based on the users of the computer.  i.e. “My Files”, “My Wife’s Files”, My Son’s Files”, etc.  Inside “My Files”, you might then break it down into “Personal” and “Business”.  You may then realize that there are overlaps.  For example, everyone may want to share access to the music library, or the photos from the school play.  So you may create another folder called “Family”, for the “common” files. You may decide that the highest-level breakdown of your files is based on the “source” of each file.  In other words, who created the files.  You could have “Files created by ME (business or personal)”, “Files created by people I know (family, friends, etc)”, and finally “Files created by the rest of the world (MP3 music files, downloaded or ripped movies or TV shows, software installation files, gorgeous desktop wallpaper images you’ve collected, etc).”  This system happens to be the one I use myself.  See below:  Mark is for files created by meVC is for files created by my company (Virtual Creations)Others is for files created by my friends and familyData is the rest of the worldAlso, Settings is where I store the configuration files and other program data files for my installed software (more on this in tip #34, below). Each folder will present its own particular set of requirements for further sub-organization.  For example, you may decide to organize your music collection into sub-folders based on the artist’s name, while your digital photos might get organized based on the date they were taken.  It can be different for every sub-folder! Another strategy would be based on “currentness”.  Files you have yet to open and look at live in one folder.  Ones that have been looked at but not yet filed live in another place.  Current, active projects live in yet another place.  All other files (your “archive”, if you like) would live in a fourth folder. (And of course, within that last folder you’d need to create a further sub-system based on one of the previous bullet points). Put some thought into this – changing it when it proves incomplete can be a big hassle!  Before you go to the trouble of implementing any system you come up with, examine a wide cross-section of the files you own and see if they will all be able to find a nice logical place to sit within your system. Tip #2.  When You Decide on Your System, Stick to It! There’s nothing more pointless than going to all the trouble of creating a system and filing all your files, and then whenever you create, receive or download a new file, you simply dump it onto your Desktop.  You need to be disciplined – forever!  Every new file you get, spend those extra few seconds to file it where it belongs!  Otherwise, in just a month or two, you’ll be worse off than before – half your files will be organized and half will be disorganized – and you won’t know which is which! Tip #3.  Choose the Root Folder of Your Structure Carefully Every data file (document, photo, music file, etc) that you create, own or is important to you, no matter where it came from, should be found within one single folder, and that one single folder should be located at the root of your C: drive (as a sub-folder of C:\).  In other words, do not base your folder structure in standard folders like “My Documents”.  If you do, then you’re leaving it up to the operating system engineers to decide what folder structure is best for you.  And every operating system has a different system!  In Windows 7 your files are found in C:\Users\YourName, whilst on Windows XP it was C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents.  In UNIX systems it’s often /home/YourName. These standard default folders tend to fill up with junk files and folders that are not at all important to you.  “My Documents” is the worst offender.  Every second piece of software you install, it seems, likes to create its own folder in the “My Documents” folder.  These folders usually don’t fit within your organizational structure, so don’t use them!  In fact, don’t even use the “My Documents” folder at all.  Allow it to fill up with junk, and then simply ignore it.  It sounds heretical, but: Don’t ever visit your “My Documents” folder!  Remove your icons/links to “My Documents” and replace them with links to the folders you created and you care about! Create your own file system from scratch!  Probably the best place to put it would be on your D: drive – if you have one.  This way, all your files live on one drive, while all the operating system and software component files live on the C: drive – simply and elegantly separated.  The benefits of that are profound.  Not only are there obvious organizational benefits (see tip #10, below), but when it comes to migrate your data to a new computer, you can (sometimes) simply unplug your D: drive and plug it in as the D: drive of your new computer (this implies that the D: drive is actually a separate physical disk, and not a partition on the same disk as C:).  You also get a slight speed improvement (again, only if your C: and D: drives are on separate physical disks). Warning:  From tip #12, below, you will see that it’s actually a good idea to have exactly the same file system structure – including the drive it’s filed on – on all of the computers you own.  So if you decide to use the D: drive as the storage system for your own files, make sure you are able to use the D: drive on all the computers you own.  If you can’t ensure that, then you can still use a clever geeky trick to store your files on the D: drive, but still access them all via the C: drive (see tip #17, below). If you only have one hard disk (C:), then create a dedicated folder that will contain all your files – something like C:\Files.  The name of the folder is not important, but make it a single, brief word. There are several reasons for this: When creating a backup regime, it’s easy to decide what files should be backed up – they’re all in the one folder! If you ever decide to trade in your computer for a new one, you know exactly which files to migrate You will always know where to begin a search for any file If you synchronize files with other computers, it makes your synchronization routines very simple.   It also causes all your shortcuts to continue to work on the other machines (more about this in tip #24, below). Once you’ve decided where your files should go, then put all your files in there – Everything!  Completely disregard the standard, default folders that are created for you by the operating system (“My Music”, “My Pictures”, etc).  In fact, you can actually relocate many of those folders into your own structure (more about that below, in tip #6). The more completely you get all your data files (documents, photos, music, etc) and all your configuration settings into that one folder, then the easier it will be to perform all of the above tasks. Once this has been done, and all your files live in one folder, all the other folders in C:\ can be thought of as “operating system” folders, and therefore of little day-to-day interest for us. Here’s a screenshot of a nicely organized C: drive, where all user files are located within the \Files folder:   Tip #4.  Use Sub-Folders This would be our simplest and most obvious tip.  It almost goes without saying.  Any organizational system you decide upon (see tip #1) will require that you create sub-folders for your files.  Get used to creating folders on a regular basis. Tip #5.  Don’t be Shy About Depth Create as many levels of sub-folders as you need.  Don’t be scared to do so.  Every time you notice an opportunity to group a set of related files into a sub-folder, do so.  Examples might include:  All the MP3s from one music CD, all the photos from one holiday, or all the documents from one client. It’s perfectly okay to put files into a folder called C:\Files\Me\From Others\Services\WestCo Bank\Statements\2009.  That’s only seven levels deep.  Ten levels is not uncommon.  Of course, it’s possible to take this too far.  If you notice yourself creating a sub-folder to hold only one file, then you’ve probably become a little over-zealous.  On the other hand, if you simply create a structure with only two levels (for example C:\Files\Work) then you really haven’t achieved any level of organization at all (unless you own only six files!).  Your “Work” folder will have become a dumping ground, just like your Desktop was, with most likely hundreds of files in it. Tip #6.  Move the Standard User Folders into Your Own Folder Structure Most operating systems, including Windows, create a set of standard folders for each of its users.  These folders then become the default location for files such as documents, music files, digital photos and downloaded Internet files.  In Windows 7, the full list is shown below: Some of these folders you may never use nor care about (for example, the Favorites folder, if you’re not using Internet Explorer as your browser).  Those ones you can leave where they are.  But you may be using some of the other folders to store files that are important to you.  Even if you’re not using them, Windows will still often treat them as the default storage location for many types of files.  When you go to save a standard file type, it can become annoying to be automatically prompted to save it in a folder that’s not part of your own file structure. But there’s a simple solution:  Move the folders you care about into your own folder structure!  If you do, then the next time you go to save a file of the corresponding type, Windows will prompt you to save it in the new, moved location. Moving the folders is easy.  Simply drag-and-drop them to the new location.  Here’s a screenshot of the default My Music folder being moved to my custom personal folder (Mark): Tip #7.  Name Files and Folders Intelligently This is another one that almost goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway:  Do not allow files to be created that have meaningless names like Document1.doc, or folders called New Folder (2).  Take that extra 20 seconds and come up with a meaningful name for the file/folder – one that accurately divulges its contents without repeating the entire contents in the name. Tip #8.  Watch Out for Long Filenames Another way to tell if you have not yet created enough depth to your folder hierarchy is that your files often require really long names.  If you need to call a file Johnson Sales Figures March 2009.xls (which might happen to live in the same folder as Abercrombie Budget Report 2008.xls), then you might want to create some sub-folders so that the first file could be simply called March.xls, and living in the Clients\Johnson\Sales Figures\2009 folder. A well-placed file needs only a brief filename! Tip #9.  Use Shortcuts!  Everywhere! This is probably the single most useful and important tip we can offer.  A shortcut allows a file to be in two places at once. Why would you want that?  Well, the file and folder structure of every popular operating system on the market today is hierarchical.  This means that all objects (files and folders) always live within exactly one parent folder.  It’s a bit like a tree.  A tree has branches (folders) and leaves (files).  Each leaf, and each branch, is supported by exactly one parent branch, all the way back to the root of the tree (which, incidentally, is exactly why C:\ is called the “root folder” of the C: drive). That hard disks are structured this way may seem obvious and even necessary, but it’s only one way of organizing data.  There are others:  Relational databases, for example, organize structured data entirely differently.  The main limitation of hierarchical filing structures is that a file can only ever be in one branch of the tree – in only one folder – at a time.  Why is this a problem?  Well, there are two main reasons why this limitation is a problem for computer users: The “correct” place for a file, according to our organizational rationale, is very often a very inconvenient place for that file to be located.  Just because it’s correctly filed doesn’t mean it’s easy to get to.  Your file may be “correctly” buried six levels deep in your sub-folder structure, but you may need regular and speedy access to this file every day.  You could always move it to a more convenient location, but that would mean that you would need to re-file back to its “correct” location it every time you’d finished working on it.  Most unsatisfactory. A file may simply “belong” in two or more different locations within your file structure.  For example, say you’re an accountant and you have just completed the 2009 tax return for John Smith.  It might make sense to you to call this file 2009 Tax Return.doc and file it under Clients\John Smith.  But it may also be important to you to have the 2009 tax returns from all your clients together in the one place.  So you might also want to call the file John Smith.doc and file it under Tax Returns\2009.  The problem is, in a purely hierarchical filing system, you can’t put it in both places.  Grrrrr! Fortunately, Windows (and most other operating systems) offers a way for you to do exactly that:  It’s called a “shortcut” (also known as an “alias” on Macs and a “symbolic link” on UNIX systems).  Shortcuts allow a file to exist in one place, and an icon that represents the file to be created and put anywhere else you please.  In fact, you can create a dozen such icons and scatter them all over your hard disk.  Double-clicking on one of these icons/shortcuts opens up the original file, just as if you had double-clicked on the original file itself. Consider the following two icons: The one on the left is the actual Word document, while the one on the right is a shortcut that represents the Word document.  Double-clicking on either icon will open the same file.  There are two main visual differences between the icons: The shortcut will have a small arrow in the lower-left-hand corner (on Windows, anyway) The shortcut is allowed to have a name that does not include the file extension (the “.docx” part, in this case) You can delete the shortcut at any time without losing any actual data.  The original is still intact.  All you lose is the ability to get to that data from wherever the shortcut was. So why are shortcuts so great?  Because they allow us to easily overcome the main limitation of hierarchical file systems, and put a file in two (or more) places at the same time.  You will always have files that don’t play nice with your organizational rationale, and can’t be filed in only one place.  They demand to exist in two places.  Shortcuts allow this!  Furthermore, they allow you to collect your most often-opened files and folders together in one spot for convenient access.  The cool part is that the original files stay where they are, safe forever in their perfectly organized location. So your collection of most often-opened files can – and should – become a collection of shortcuts! If you’re still not convinced of the utility of shortcuts, consider the following well-known areas of a typical Windows computer: The Start Menu (and all the programs that live within it) The Quick Launch bar (or the Superbar in Windows 7) The “Favorite folders” area in the top-left corner of the Windows Explorer window (in Windows Vista or Windows 7) Your Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox Bookmarks Each item in each of these areas is a shortcut!  Each of those areas exist for one purpose only:  For convenience – to provide you with a collection of the files and folders you access most often. It should be easy to see by now that shortcuts are designed for one single purpose:  To make accessing your files more convenient.  Each time you double-click on a shortcut, you are saved the hassle of locating the file (or folder, or program, or drive, or control panel icon) that it represents. Shortcuts allow us to invent a golden rule of file and folder organization: “Only ever have one copy of a file – never have two copies of the same file.  Use a shortcut instead” (this rule doesn’t apply to copies created for backup purposes, of course!) There are also lesser rules, like “don’t move a file into your work area – create a shortcut there instead”, and “any time you find yourself frustrated with how long it takes to locate a file, create a shortcut to it and place that shortcut in a convenient location.” So how to we create these massively useful shortcuts?  There are two main ways: “Copy” the original file or folder (click on it and type Ctrl-C, or right-click on it and select Copy):  Then right-click in an empty area of the destination folder (the place where you want the shortcut to go) and select Paste shortcut: Right-drag (drag with the right mouse button) the file from the source folder to the destination folder.  When you let go of the mouse button at the destination folder, a menu pops up: Select Create shortcuts here. Note that when shortcuts are created, they are often named something like Shortcut to Budget Detail.doc (windows XP) or Budget Detail – Shortcut.doc (Windows 7).   If you don’t like those extra words, you can easily rename the shortcuts after they’re created, or you can configure Windows to never insert the extra words in the first place (see our article on how to do this). And of course, you can create shortcuts to folders too, not just to files! Bottom line: Whenever you have a file that you’d like to access from somewhere else (whether it’s convenience you’re after, or because the file simply belongs in two places), create a shortcut to the original file in the new location. Tip #10.  Separate Application Files from Data Files Any digital organization guru will drum this rule into you.  Application files are the components of the software you’ve installed (e.g. Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop or Internet Explorer).  Data files are the files that you’ve created for yourself using that software (e.g. Word Documents, digital photos, emails or playlists). Software gets installed, uninstalled and upgraded all the time.  Hopefully you always have the original installation media (or downloaded set-up file) kept somewhere safe, and can thus reinstall your software at any time.  This means that the software component files are of little importance.  Whereas the files you have created with that software is, by definition, important.  It’s a good rule to always separate unimportant files from important files. So when your software prompts you to save a file you’ve just created, take a moment and check out where it’s suggesting that you save the file.  If it’s suggesting that you save the file into the same folder as the software itself, then definitely don’t follow that suggestion.  File it in your own folder!  In fact, see if you can find the program’s configuration option that determines where files are saved by default (if it has one), and change it. Tip #11.  Organize Files Based on Purpose, Not on File Type If you have, for example a folder called Work\Clients\Johnson, and within that folder you have two sub-folders, Word Documents and Spreadsheets (in other words, you’re separating “.doc” files from “.xls” files), then chances are that you’re not optimally organized.  It makes little sense to organize your files based on the program that created them.  Instead, create your sub-folders based on the purpose of the file.  For example, it would make more sense to create sub-folders called Correspondence and Financials.  It may well be that all the files in a given sub-folder are of the same file-type, but this should be more of a coincidence and less of a design feature of your organization system. Tip #12.  Maintain the Same Folder Structure on All Your Computers In other words, whatever organizational system you create, apply it to every computer that you can.  There are several benefits to this: There’s less to remember.  No matter where you are, you always know where to look for your files If you copy or synchronize files from one computer to another, then setting up the synchronization job becomes very simple Shortcuts can be copied or moved from one computer to another with ease (assuming the original files are also copied/moved).  There’s no need to find the target of the shortcut all over again on the second computer Ditto for linked files (e.g Word documents that link to data in a separate Excel file), playlists, and any files that reference the exact file locations of other files. This applies even to the drive that your files are stored on.  If your files are stored on C: on one computer, make sure they’re stored on C: on all your computers.  Otherwise all your shortcuts, playlists and linked files will stop working! Tip #13.  Create an “Inbox” Folder Create yourself a folder where you store all files that you’re currently working on, or that you haven’t gotten around to filing yet.  You can think of this folder as your “to-do” list.  You can call it “Inbox” (making it the same metaphor as your email system), or “Work”, or “To-Do”, or “Scratch”, or whatever name makes sense to you.  It doesn’t matter what you call it – just make sure you have one! Once you have finished working on a file, you then move it from the “Inbox” to its correct location within your organizational structure. You may want to use your Desktop as this “Inbox” folder.  Rightly or wrongly, most people do.  It’s not a bad place to put such files, but be careful:  If you do decide that your Desktop represents your “to-do” list, then make sure that no other files find their way there.  In other words, make sure that your “Inbox”, wherever it is, Desktop or otherwise, is kept free of junk – stray files that don’t belong there. So where should you put this folder, which, almost by definition, lives outside the structure of the rest of your filing system?  Well, first and foremost, it has to be somewhere handy.  This will be one of your most-visited folders, so convenience is key.  Putting it on the Desktop is a great option – especially if you don’t have any other folders on your Desktop:  the folder then becomes supremely easy to find in Windows Explorer: You would then create shortcuts to this folder in convenient spots all over your computer (“Favorite Links”, “Quick Launch”, etc). Tip #14.  Ensure You have Only One “Inbox” Folder Once you’ve created your “Inbox” folder, don’t use any other folder location as your “to-do list”.  Throw every incoming or created file into the Inbox folder as you create/receive it.  This keeps the rest of your computer pristine and free of randomly created or downloaded junk.  The last thing you want to be doing is checking multiple folders to see all your current tasks and projects.  Gather them all together into one folder. Here are some tips to help ensure you only have one Inbox: Set the default “save” location of all your programs to this folder. Set the default “download” location for your browser to this folder. If this folder is not your desktop (recommended) then also see if you can make a point of not putting “to-do” files on your desktop.  This keeps your desktop uncluttered and Zen-like: (the Inbox folder is in the bottom-right corner) Tip #15.  Be Vigilant about Clearing Your “Inbox” Folder This is one of the keys to staying organized.  If you let your “Inbox” overflow (i.e. allow there to be more than, say, 30 files or folders in there), then you’re probably going to start feeling like you’re overwhelmed:  You’re not keeping up with your to-do list.  Once your Inbox gets beyond a certain point (around 30 files, studies have shown), then you’ll simply start to avoid it.  You may continue to put files in there, but you’ll be scared to look at it, fearing the “out of control” feeling that all overworked, chaotic or just plain disorganized people regularly feel. So, here’s what you can do: Visit your Inbox/to-do folder regularly (at least five times per day). Scan the folder regularly for files that you have completed working on and are ready for filing.  File them immediately. Make it a source of pride to keep the number of files in this folder as small as possible.  If you value peace of mind, then make the emptiness of this folder one of your highest (computer) priorities If you know that a particular file has been in the folder for more than, say, six weeks, then admit that you’re not actually going to get around to processing it, and move it to its final resting place. Tip #16.  File Everything Immediately, and Use Shortcuts for Your Active Projects As soon as you create, receive or download a new file, store it away in its “correct” folder immediately.  Then, whenever you need to work on it (possibly straight away), create a shortcut to it in your “Inbox” (“to-do”) folder or your desktop.  That way, all your files are always in their “correct” locations, yet you still have immediate, convenient access to your current, active files.  When you finish working on a file, simply delete the shortcut. Ideally, your “Inbox” folder – and your Desktop – should contain no actual files or folders.  They should simply contain shortcuts. Tip #17.  Use Directory Symbolic Links (or Junctions) to Maintain One Unified Folder Structure Using this tip, we can get around a potential hiccup that we can run into when creating our organizational structure – the issue of having more than one drive on our computer (C:, D:, etc).  We might have files we need to store on the D: drive for space reasons, and yet want to base our organized folder structure on the C: drive (or vice-versa). Your chosen organizational structure may dictate that all your files must be accessed from the C: drive (for example, the root folder of all your files may be something like C:\Files).  And yet you may still have a D: drive and wish to take advantage of the hundreds of spare Gigabytes that it offers.  Did you know that it’s actually possible to store your files on the D: drive and yet access them as if they were on the C: drive?  And no, we’re not talking about shortcuts here (although the concept is very similar). By using the shell command mklink, you can essentially take a folder that lives on one drive and create an alias for it on a different drive (you can do lots more than that with mklink – for a full rundown on this programs capabilities, see our dedicated article).  These aliases are called directory symbolic links (and used to be known as junctions).  You can think of them as “virtual” folders.  They function exactly like regular folders, except they’re physically located somewhere else. For example, you may decide that your entire D: drive contains your complete organizational file structure, but that you need to reference all those files as if they were on the C: drive, under C:\Files.  If that was the case you could create C:\Files as a directory symbolic link – a link to D:, as follows: mklink /d c:\files d:\ Or it may be that the only files you wish to store on the D: drive are your movie collection.  You could locate all your movie files in the root of your D: drive, and then link it to C:\Files\Media\Movies, as follows: mklink /d c:\files\media\movies d:\ (Needless to say, you must run these commands from a command prompt – click the Start button, type cmd and press Enter) Tip #18. Customize Your Folder Icons This is not strictly speaking an organizational tip, but having unique icons for each folder does allow you to more quickly visually identify which folder is which, and thus saves you time when you’re finding files.  An example is below (from my folder that contains all files downloaded from the Internet): To learn how to change your folder icons, please refer to our dedicated article on the subject. Tip #19.  Tidy Your Start Menu The Windows Start Menu is usually one of the messiest parts of any Windows computer.  Every program you install seems to adopt a completely different approach to placing icons in this menu.  Some simply put a single program icon.  Others create a folder based on the name of the software.  And others create a folder based on the name of the software manufacturer.  It’s chaos, and can make it hard to find the software you want to run. Thankfully we can avoid this chaos with useful operating system features like Quick Launch, the Superbar or pinned start menu items. Even so, it would make a lot of sense to get into the guts of the Start Menu itself and give it a good once-over.  All you really need to decide is how you’re going to organize your applications.  A structure based on the purpose of the application is an obvious candidate.  Below is an example of one such structure: In this structure, Utilities means software whose job it is to keep the computer itself running smoothly (configuration tools, backup software, Zip programs, etc).  Applications refers to any productivity software that doesn’t fit under the headings Multimedia, Graphics, Internet, etc. In case you’re not aware, every icon in your Start Menu is a shortcut and can be manipulated like any other shortcut (copied, moved, deleted, etc). With the Windows Start Menu (all version of Windows), Microsoft has decided that there be two parallel folder structures to store your Start Menu shortcuts.  One for you (the logged-in user of the computer) and one for all users of the computer.  Having two parallel structures can often be redundant:  If you are the only user of the computer, then having two parallel structures is totally redundant.  Even if you have several users that regularly log into the computer, most of your installed software will need to be made available to all users, and should thus be moved out of the “just you” version of the Start Menu and into the “all users” area. To take control of your Start Menu, so you can start organizing it, you’ll need to know how to access the actual folders and shortcut files that make up the Start Menu (both versions of it).  To find these folders and files, click the Start button and then right-click on the All Programs text (Windows XP users should right-click on the Start button itself): The Open option refers to the “just you” version of the Start Menu, while the Open All Users option refers to the “all users” version.  Click on the one you want to organize. A Windows Explorer window then opens with your chosen version of the Start Menu selected.  From there it’s easy.  Double-click on the Programs folder and you’ll see all your folders and shortcuts.  Now you can delete/rename/move until it’s just the way you want it. Note:  When you’re reorganizing your Start Menu, you may want to have two Explorer windows open at the same time – one showing the “just you” version and one showing the “all users” version.  You can drag-and-drop between the windows. Tip #20.  Keep Your Start Menu Tidy Once you have a perfectly organized Start Menu, try to be a little vigilant about keeping it that way.  Every time you install a new piece of software, the icons that get created will almost certainly violate your organizational structure. So to keep your Start Menu pristine and organized, make sure you do the following whenever you install a new piece of software: Check whether the software was installed into the “just you” area of the Start Menu, or the “all users” area, and then move it to the correct area. Remove all the unnecessary icons (like the “Read me” icon, the “Help” icon (you can always open the help from within the software itself when it’s running), the “Uninstall” icon, the link(s)to the manufacturer’s website, etc) Rename the main icon(s) of the software to something brief that makes sense to you.  For example, you might like to rename Microsoft Office Word 2010 to simply Word Move the icon(s) into the correct folder based on your Start Menu organizational structure And don’t forget:  when you uninstall a piece of software, the software’s uninstall routine is no longer going to be able to remove the software’s icon from the Start Menu (because you moved and/or renamed it), so you’ll need to remove that icon manually. Tip #21.  Tidy C:\ The root of your C: drive (C:\) is a common dumping ground for files and folders – both by the users of your computer and by the software that you install on your computer.  It can become a mess. There’s almost no software these days that requires itself to be installed in C:\.  99% of the time it can and should be installed into C:\Program Files.  And as for your own files, well, it’s clear that they can (and almost always should) be stored somewhere else. In an ideal world, your C:\ folder should look like this (on Windows 7): Note that there are some system files and folders in C:\ that are usually and deliberately “hidden” (such as the Windows virtual memory file pagefile.sys, the boot loader file bootmgr, and the System Volume Information folder).  Hiding these files and folders is a good idea, as they need to stay where they are and are almost never needed to be opened or even seen by you, the user.  Hiding them prevents you from accidentally messing with them, and enhances your sense of order and well-being when you look at your C: drive folder. Tip #22.  Tidy Your Desktop The Desktop is probably the most abused part of a Windows computer (from an organization point of view).  It usually serves as a dumping ground for all incoming files, as well as holding icons to oft-used applications, plus some regularly opened files and folders.  It often ends up becoming an uncontrolled mess.  See if you can avoid this.  Here’s why… Application icons (Word, Internet Explorer, etc) are often found on the Desktop, but it’s unlikely that this is the optimum place for them.  The “Quick Launch” bar (or the Superbar in Windows 7) is always visible and so represents a perfect location to put your icons.  You’ll only be able to see the icons on your Desktop when all your programs are minimized.  It might be time to get your application icons off your desktop… You may have decided that the Inbox/To-do folder on your computer (see tip #13, above) should be your Desktop.  If so, then enough said.  Simply be vigilant about clearing it and preventing it from being polluted by junk files (see tip #15, above).  On the other hand, if your Desktop is not acting as your “Inbox” folder, then there’s no reason for it to have any data files or folders on it at all, except perhaps a couple of shortcuts to often-opened files and folders (either ongoing or current projects).  Everything else should be moved to your “Inbox” folder. In an ideal world, it might look like this: Tip #23.  Move Permanent Items on Your Desktop Away from the Top-Left Corner When files/folders are dragged onto your desktop in a Windows Explorer window, or when shortcuts are created on your Desktop from Internet Explorer, those icons are always placed in the top-left corner – or as close as they can get.  If you have other files, folders or shortcuts that you keep on the Desktop permanently, then it’s a good idea to separate these permanent icons from the transient ones, so that you can quickly identify which ones the transients are.  An easy way to do this is to move all your permanent icons to the right-hand side of your Desktop.  That should keep them separated from incoming items. Tip #24.  Synchronize If you have more than one computer, you’ll almost certainly want to share files between them.  If the computers are permanently attached to the same local network, then there’s no need to store multiple copies of any one file or folder – shortcuts will suffice.  However, if the computers are not always on the same network, then you will at some point need to copy files between them.  For files that need to permanently live on both computers, the ideal way to do this is to synchronize the files, as opposed to simply copying them. We only have room here to write a brief summary of synchronization, not a full article.  In short, there are several different types of synchronization: Where the contents of one folder are accessible anywhere, such as with Dropbox Where the contents of any number of folders are accessible anywhere, such as with Windows Live Mesh Where any files or folders from anywhere on your computer are synchronized with exactly one other computer, such as with the Windows “Briefcase”, Microsoft SyncToy, or (much more powerful, yet still free) SyncBack from 2BrightSparks.  This only works when both computers are on the same local network, at least temporarily. A great advantage of synchronization solutions is that once you’ve got it configured the way you want it, then the sync process happens automatically, every time.  Click a button (or schedule it to happen automatically) and all your files are automagically put where they’re supposed to be. If you maintain the same file and folder structure on both computers, then you can also sync files depend upon the correct location of other files, like shortcuts, playlists and office documents that link to other office documents, and the synchronized files still work on the other computer! Tip #25.  Hide Files You Never Need to See If you have your files well organized, you will often be able to tell if a file is out of place just by glancing at the contents of a folder (for example, it should be pretty obvious if you look in a folder that contains all the MP3s from one music CD and see a Word document in there).  This is a good thing – it allows you to determine if there are files out of place with a quick glance.  Yet sometimes there are files in a folder that seem out of place but actually need to be there, such as the “folder art” JPEGs in music folders, and various files in the root of the C: drive.  If such files never need to be opened by you, then a good idea is to simply hide them.  Then, the next time you glance at the folder, you won’t have to remember whether that file was supposed to be there or not, because you won’t see it at all! To hide a file, simply right-click on it and choose Properties: Then simply tick the Hidden tick-box:   Tip #26.  Keep Every Setup File These days most software is downloaded from the Internet.  Whenever you download a piece of software, keep it.  You’ll never know when you need to reinstall the software. Further, keep with it an Internet shortcut that links back to the website where you originally downloaded it, in case you ever need to check for updates. See tip #33 below for a full description of the excellence of organizing your setup files. Tip #27.  Try to Minimize the Number of Folders that Contain Both Files and Sub-folders Some of the folders in your organizational structure will contain only files.  Others will contain only sub-folders.  And you will also have some folders that contain both files and sub-folders.  You will notice slight improvements in how long it takes you to locate a file if you try to avoid this third type of folder.  It’s not always possible, of course – you’ll always have some of these folders, but see if you can avoid it. One way of doing this is to take all the leftover files that didn’t end up getting stored in a sub-folder and create a special “Miscellaneous” or “Other” folder for them. Tip #28.  Starting a Filename with an Underscore Brings it to the Top of a List Further to the previous tip, if you name that “Miscellaneous” or “Other” folder in such a way that its name begins with an underscore “_”, then it will appear at the top of the list of files/folders. The screenshot below is an example of this.  Each folder in the list contains a set of digital photos.  The folder at the top of the list, _Misc, contains random photos that didn’t deserve their own dedicated folder: Tip #29.  Clean Up those CD-ROMs and (shudder!) Floppy Disks Have you got a pile of CD-ROMs stacked on a shelf of your office?  Old photos, or files you archived off onto CD-ROM (or even worse, floppy disks!) because you didn’t have enough disk space at the time?  In the meantime have you upgraded your computer and now have 500 Gigabytes of space you don’t know what to do with?  If so, isn’t it time you tidied up that stack of disks and filed them into your gorgeous new folder structure? So what are you waiting for?  Bite the bullet, copy them all back onto your computer, file them in their appropriate folders, and then back the whole lot up onto a shiny new 1000Gig external hard drive! Useful Folders to Create This next section suggests some useful folders that you might want to create within your folder structure.  I’ve personally found them to be indispensable. The first three are all about convenience – handy folders to create and then put somewhere that you can always access instantly.  For each one, it’s not so important where the actual folder is located, but it’s very important where you put the shortcut(s) to the folder.  You might want to locate the shortcuts: On your Desktop In your “Quick Launch” area (or pinned to your Windows 7 Superbar) In your Windows Explorer “Favorite Links” area Tip #30.  Create an “Inbox” (“To-Do”) Folder This has already been mentioned in depth (see tip #13), but we wanted to reiterate its importance here.  This folder contains all the recently created, received or downloaded files that you have not yet had a chance to file away properly, and it also may contain files that you have yet to process.  In effect, it becomes a sort of “to-do list”.  It doesn’t have to be called “Inbox” – you can call it whatever you want. Tip #31.  Create a Folder where Your Current Projects are Collected Rather than going hunting for them all the time, or dumping them all on your desktop, create a special folder where you put links (or work folders) for each of the projects you’re currently working on. You can locate this folder in your “Inbox” folder, on your desktop, or anywhere at all – just so long as there’s a way of getting to it quickly, such as putting a link to it in Windows Explorer’s “Favorite Links” area: Tip #32.  Create a Folder for Files and Folders that You Regularly Open You will always have a few files that you open regularly, whether it be a spreadsheet of your current accounts, or a favorite playlist.  These are not necessarily “current projects”, rather they’re simply files that you always find yourself opening.  Typically such files would be located on your desktop (or even better, shortcuts to those files).  Why not collect all such shortcuts together and put them in their own special folder? As with the “Current Projects” folder (above), you would want to locate that folder somewhere convenient.  Below is an example of a folder called “Quick links”, with about seven files (shortcuts) in it, that is accessible through the Windows Quick Launch bar: See tip #37 below for a full explanation of the power of the Quick Launch bar. Tip #33.  Create a “Set-ups” Folder A typical computer has dozens of applications installed on it.  For each piece of software, there are often many different pieces of information you need to keep track of, including: The original installation setup file(s).  This can be anything from a simple 100Kb setup.exe file you downloaded from a website, all the way up to a 4Gig ISO file that you copied from a DVD-ROM that you purchased. The home page of the software manufacturer (in case you need to look up something on their support pages, their forum or their online help) The page containing the download link for your actual file (in case you need to re-download it, or download an upgraded version) The serial number Your proof-of-purchase documentation Any other template files, plug-ins, themes, etc that also need to get installed For each piece of software, it’s a great idea to gather all of these files together and put them in a single folder.  The folder can be the name of the software (plus possibly a very brief description of what it’s for – in case you can’t remember what the software does based in its name).  Then you would gather all of these folders together into one place, and call it something like “Software” or “Setups”. If you have enough of these folders (I have several hundred, being a geek, collected over 20 years), then you may want to further categorize them.  My own categorization structure is based on “platform” (operating system): The last seven folders each represents one platform/operating system, while _Operating Systems contains set-up files for installing the operating systems themselves.  _Hardware contains ROMs for hardware I own, such as routers. Within the Windows folder (above), you can see the beginnings of the vast library of software I’ve compiled over the years: An example of a typical application folder looks like this: Tip #34.  Have a “Settings” Folder We all know that our documents are important.  So are our photos and music files.  We save all of these files into folders, and then locate them afterwards and double-click on them to open them.  But there are many files that are important to us that can’t be saved into folders, and then searched for and double-clicked later on.  These files certainly contain important information that we need, but are often created internally by an application, and saved wherever that application feels is appropriate. A good example of this is the “PST” file that Outlook creates for us and uses to store all our emails, contacts, appointments and so forth.  Another example would be the collection of Bookmarks that Firefox stores on your behalf. And yet another example would be the customized settings and configuration files of our all our software.  Granted, most Windows programs store their configuration in the Registry, but there are still many programs that use configuration files to store their settings. Imagine if you lost all of the above files!  And yet, when people are backing up their computers, they typically only back up the files they know about – those that are stored in the “My Documents” folder, etc.  If they had a hard disk failure or their computer was lost or stolen, their backup files would not include some of the most vital files they owned.  Also, when migrating to a new computer, it’s vital to ensure that these files make the journey. It can be a very useful idea to create yourself a folder to store all your “settings” – files that are important to you but which you never actually search for by name and double-click on to open them.  Otherwise, next time you go to set up a new computer just the way you want it, you’ll need to spend hours recreating the configuration of your previous computer! So how to we get our important files into this folder?  Well, we have a few options: Some programs (such as Outlook and its PST files) allow you to place these files wherever you want.  If you delve into the program’s options, you will find a setting somewhere that controls the location of the important settings files (or “personal storage” – PST – when it comes to Outlook) Some programs do not allow you to change such locations in any easy way, but if you get into the Registry, you can sometimes find a registry key that refers to the location of the file(s).  Simply move the file into your Settings folder and adjust the registry key to refer to the new location. Some programs stubbornly refuse to allow their settings files to be placed anywhere other then where they stipulate.  When faced with programs like these, you have three choices:  (1) You can ignore those files, (2) You can copy the files into your Settings folder (let’s face it – settings don’t change very often), or (3) you can use synchronization software, such as the Windows Briefcase, to make synchronized copies of all your files in your Settings folder.  All you then have to do is to remember to run your sync software periodically (perhaps just before you run your backup software!). There are some other things you may decide to locate inside this new “Settings” folder: Exports of registry keys (from the many applications that store their configurations in the Registry).  This is useful for backup purposes or for migrating to a new computer Notes you’ve made about all the specific customizations you have made to a particular piece of software (so that you’ll know how to do it all again on your next computer) Shortcuts to webpages that detail how to tweak certain aspects of your operating system or applications so they are just the way you like them (such as how to remove the words “Shortcut to” from the beginning of newly created shortcuts).  In other words, you’d want to create shortcuts to half the pages on the How-To Geek website! Here’s an example of a “Settings” folder: Windows Features that Help with Organization This section details some of the features of Microsoft Windows that are a boon to anyone hoping to stay optimally organized. Tip #35.  Use the “Favorite Links” Area to Access Oft-Used Folders Once you’ve created your great new filing system, work out which folders you access most regularly, or which serve as great starting points for locating the rest of the files in your folder structure, and then put links to those folders in your “Favorite Links” area of the left-hand side of the Windows Explorer window (simply called “Favorites” in Windows 7):   Some ideas for folders you might want to add there include: Your “Inbox” folder (or whatever you’ve called it) – most important! The base of your filing structure (e.g. C:\Files) A folder containing shortcuts to often-accessed folders on other computers around the network (shown above as Network Folders) A folder containing shortcuts to your current projects (unless that folder is in your “Inbox” folder) Getting folders into this area is very simple – just locate the folder you’re interested in and drag it there! Tip #36.  Customize the Places Bar in the File/Open and File/Save Boxes Consider the screenshot below: The highlighted icons (collectively known as the “Places Bar”) can be customized to refer to any folder location you want, allowing instant access to any part of your organizational structure. Note:  These File/Open and File/Save boxes have been superseded by new versions that use the Windows Vista/Windows 7 “Favorite Links”, but the older versions (shown above) are still used by a surprisingly large number of applications. The easiest way to customize these icons is to use the Group Policy Editor, but not everyone has access to this program.  If you do, open it up and navigate to: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Common Open File Dialog If you don’t have access to the Group Policy Editor, then you’ll need to get into the Registry.  Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft  \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ comdlg32 \ Placesbar It should then be easy to make the desired changes.  Log off and log on again to allow the changes to take effect. Tip #37.  Use the Quick Launch Bar as a Application and File Launcher That Quick Launch bar (to the right of the Start button) is a lot more useful than people give it credit for.  Most people simply have half a dozen icons in it, and use it to start just those programs.  But it can actually be used to instantly access just about anything in your filing system: For complete instructions on how to set this up, visit our dedicated article on this topic. Tip #38.  Put a Shortcut to Windows Explorer into Your Quick Launch Bar This is only necessary in Windows Vista and Windows XP.  The Microsoft boffins finally got wise and added it to the Windows 7 Superbar by default. Windows Explorer – the program used for managing your files and folders – is one of the most useful programs in Windows.  Anyone who considers themselves serious about being organized needs instant access to this program at any time.  A great place to create a shortcut to this program is in the Windows XP and Windows Vista “Quick Launch” bar: To get it there, locate it in your Start Menu (usually under “Accessories”) and then right-drag it down into your Quick Launch bar (and create a copy). Tip #39.  Customize the Starting Folder for Your Windows 7 Explorer Superbar Icon If you’re on Windows 7, your Superbar will include a Windows Explorer icon.  Clicking on the icon will launch Windows Explorer (of course), and will start you off in your “Libraries” folder.  Libraries may be fine as a starting point, but if you have created yourself an “Inbox” folder, then it would probably make more sense to start off in this folder every time you launch Windows Explorer. To change this default/starting folder location, then first right-click the Explorer icon in the Superbar, and then right-click Properties:Then, in Target field of the Windows Explorer Properties box that appears, type %windir%\explorer.exe followed by the path of the folder you wish to start in.  For example: %windir%\explorer.exe C:\Files If that folder happened to be on the Desktop (and called, say, “Inbox”), then you would use the following cleverness: %windir%\explorer.exe shell:desktop\Inbox Then click OK and test it out. Tip #40.  Ummmmm…. No, that’s it.  I can’t think of another one.  That’s all of the tips I can come up with.  I only created this one because 40 is such a nice round number… Case Study – An Organized PC To finish off the article, I have included a few screenshots of my (main) computer (running Vista).  The aim here is twofold: To give you a sense of what it looks like when the above, sometimes abstract, tips are applied to a real-life computer, and To offer some ideas about folders and structure that you may want to steal to use on your own PC. Let’s start with the C: drive itself.  Very minimal.  All my files are contained within C:\Files.  I’ll confine the rest of the case study to this folder: That folder contains the following: Mark: My personal files VC: My business (Virtual Creations, Australia) Others contains files created by friends and family Data contains files from the rest of the world (can be thought of as “public” files, usually downloaded from the Net) Settings is described above in tip #34 The Data folder contains the following sub-folders: Audio:  Radio plays, audio books, podcasts, etc Development:  Programmer and developer resources, sample source code, etc (see below) Humour:  Jokes, funnies (those emails that we all receive) Movies:  Downloaded and ripped movies (all legal, of course!), their scripts, DVD covers, etc. Music:  (see below) Setups:  Installation files for software (explained in full in tip #33) System:  (see below) TV:  Downloaded TV shows Writings:  Books, instruction manuals, etc (see below) The Music folder contains the following sub-folders: Album covers:  JPEG scans Guitar tabs:  Text files of guitar sheet music Lists:  e.g. “Top 1000 songs of all time” Lyrics:  Text files MIDI:  Electronic music files MP3 (representing 99% of the Music folder):  MP3s, either ripped from CDs or downloaded, sorted by artist/album name Music Video:  Video clips Sheet Music:  usually PDFs The Data\Writings folder contains the following sub-folders: (all pretty self-explanatory) The Data\Development folder contains the following sub-folders: Again, all pretty self-explanatory (if you’re a geek) The Data\System folder contains the following sub-folders: These are usually themes, plug-ins and other downloadable program-specific resources. The Mark folder contains the following sub-folders: From Others:  Usually letters that other people (friends, family, etc) have written to me For Others:  Letters and other things I have created for other people Green Book:  None of your business Playlists:  M3U files that I have compiled of my favorite songs (plus one M3U playlist file for every album I own) Writing:  Fiction, philosophy and other musings of mine Mark Docs:  Shortcut to C:\Users\Mark Settings:  Shortcut to C:\Files\Settings\Mark The Others folder contains the following sub-folders: The VC (Virtual Creations, my business – I develop websites) folder contains the following sub-folders: And again, all of those are pretty self-explanatory. Conclusion These tips have saved my sanity and helped keep me a productive geek, but what about you? What tips and tricks do you have to keep your files organized?  Please share them with us in the comments.  Come on, don’t be shy… Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Print or Create a Text File List of the Contents in a Directory the Easy WayCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuAdd Copy To / Move To on Windows 7 or Vista Right-Click Menu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics

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