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• TDD vs. Productivity

  - by Nairou

  In my current project (a game, in C++), I decided that I would use Test Driven Development 100% during development. In terms of code quality, this has been great. My code has never been so well designed or so bug-free. I don't cringe when viewing code I wrote a year ago at the start of the project, and I have gained a much better sense for how to structure things, not only to be more easily testable, but to be simpler to implement and use. However... it has been a year since I started the project. Granted, I can only work on it in my spare time, but TDD is still slowing me down considerably compared to what I'm used to. I read that the slower development speed gets better over time, and I definitely do think up tests a lot more easily than I used to, but I've been at it for a year now and I'm still working at a snail's pace. Each time I think about the next step that needs work, I have to stop every time and think about how I would write a test for it, to allow me to write the actual code. I'll sometimes get stuck for hours, knowing exactly what code I want to write, but not knowing how to break it down finely enough to fully cover it with tests. Other times, I'll quickly think up a dozen tests, and spend an hour writing tests to cover a tiny piece of real code that would have otherwise taken a few minutes to write. Or, after finishing the 50th test to cover a particular entity in the game and all aspects of it's creation and usage, I look at my to-do list and see the next entity to be coded, and cringe in horror at the thought of writing another 50 similar tests to get it implemented. It's gotten to the point that, looking over the progress of the last year, I'm considering abandoning TDD for the sake of "getting the damn project finished". However, giving up the code quality that came with it is not something I'm looking forward to. I'm afraid that if I stop writing tests, then I'll slip out of the habit of making the code so modular and testable. Am I perhaps doing something wrong to still be so slow at this? Are there alternatives that speed up productivity without completely losing the benefits? TAD? Less test coverage? How do other people survive TDD without killing all productivity and motivation?

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• BizTalk 2009 - SQL Server Job Configuration

  - by StuartBrierley

  Following the installation of Biztalk Server 2009 on my development laptop I used the BizTalk Server Best Practice Analyser which highlighted the fact that two of the SQL Server Agent jobs that BizTalk relies on were not running successfully.  Upon investigation it turned out that these jobs needed to be configured before they would run successfully. To configure these jobs open SQL Server Management Studio, expand SQL Server Agent > Jobs and double click on the appropriate job.  Select Steps and then edit the appropriate entries. Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb) This job is comprised of three steps BackupFull, MarkAndBackupLog and ClearBackupHistory. BackupFull exec [dbo].[sp_BackupAllFull_Schedule] ‘d’ /* Frequency */,‘BTS’ /* Name */,‘<destination path>’ /* location of backup files */ The frequency here is set/left as daily The name is left as BTS You must provide a full destination path for the backup files to be stored. There are also two optional parameters: A flag that controls if the job forces a full backup if a partial backup fails A parameter to control the time of day to run the full backup; the default is midnight UTC time For example: exec [dbo].[sp_BackupAllFull_Schedule] ‘d’ /* Frequency */,‘BTS’ /* Name */,‘<destination path>’ /* location of backup files */ , 0, 22 MarkAndBackUpLog exec [dbo].[sp_MarkAll] ‘BTS’ /* Log mark name */,’<destination path>’  /*location of backup files */ You must provide a destination path for the log backups. Optionally you can also add an extra parameter that tells the procedure to use local time: exec [dbo].[sp_MarkAll] ‘BTS’ /* Log mark name */,’<destination path>’  /*location of backup files */ ,1 Clear Backup History exec [dbo].[sp_DeleteBackupHistory] @DaysToKeep=7 This will clear out the instances in the MarkLog table older than 7 days.    DTA Purge and Archive (BizTalkDTADb) This job is comprised of a single step. Archive and Purge exec dtasp_BackupAndPurgeTrackingDatabase 0, --@nLiveHours tinyint, 1, --@nLiveDays tinyint = 0, 30, --@nHardDeleteDays tinyint = 0, null, --@nvcFolder nvarchar(1024) = null, null, --@nvcValidatingServer sysname = null, 0 --@fForceBackup int = 0 Any completed instance that is older than the live days plus live hours will be deleted, as will any associated data. Any data older than the HardDeleteDays will be deleted - this means that those long running orchestration instances that would otherwise never be purged will at some point have their data cleared down while allowing the instance to continue, thus preventing the DTA databse from growing indefinitely.  This should always be greater than the soft purge window. The NVC folder is the path for the backup files, if this is null the job will not run failing with the error : DTA Purge and Archive (BizTalkDTADb) Job failed SQL Server Management Studio, job activity monitor, view history The @nvcFolder parameter cannot be null. Archive and Purge step How long you choose to keep instances in the Tracking Database is really up to you. For development I have set this up as: exec dtasp_BackupAndPurgeTrackingDatabase 0, 1, 30, ’<destination path>’, null, 0 On a live server you may want to adjust these figures: exec dtasp_BackupAndPurgeTrackingDatabase 0, 15, 20, ’<destination path>’, null, 0

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• SQL SERVER – Get 2 of My Books FREE at Koenig Tech Day – Where Technologies Converge!

  - by pinaldave

  As a regular reader of my blog – you must be aware of that I love to write books and talk about various subjects of my book. The founders of Koenig Solutions are my very old friends, I know them for many years. They have been my biggest supporter of my books. Coming weekend they have a technology event at their Bangalore Location. Every attendee of the technology event will get a set of two books worth Rs. 450 – ‘SQL Server Interview Questions And Answers‘ and ‘SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros‘. I am going to cover a couple of topics of the books and present  as well. I am very confident that every attendee will be having a great time. I will be covering following subjects: SQL Server Tricks and Tips for Blazing Fast Performance Slow Running Queries (SQL) are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how SQL Server has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Servers, and tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. After the session is over – I will point to what exact location in the book where you can continue for the further learning. I am pretty excited, this is more like book reading but in entire different format. The one day event will cover four technologies in four separate interactive sessions on: Microsoft SQL Server Security VMware/Virtualization ASP.NET MVC Date of the event: Dec 15, 2012 9 AM to 6PM. Location of the event:  Koenig Solutions Ltd. # 47, 4th Block, 100 feet Road, 3rd Floor, Opp to Shanthi Sagar, Koramangala, Bangalore- 560034 Mobile : 09008096122 Office : 080- 41127140 Organizers have informed me that there are very limited seats for this event and technical session based on my book will start at Sharp 9 AM. If you show up late there are chances that you will not get any seats. Registration for the event is a MUST. Please visit this link for further information. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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• How To: Spell Check InfoPath web form in SharePoint 2010

  - by Jeremy Ramos

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JeremyRamos/archive/2013/11/07/how-to-spell-check-infopath-web-form-in-sharepoint-2010.aspxThis is a sequel to my 2011 post about How To: Spell Check InfoPath Web Form in SharePoint. This time I will share how I managed to achieve Spell Checking in SharePoint 2010. This time round, we have changed our Online Forms strategy to use Custom lists instead of Form Libraries. I thought everything will be smooth sailing as we are using all OOTB features. So, we customised a Custom list form using InfoPath and added a few Rich Text Boxes (Spell Check is a requirement for this specific project). All is good in the InfoPath client including the Spell Checker so, happy days, I published straight away.Here comes the surprises now. I browsed to my Custom List and clicked Add New Item. This launched my Form in a modal dialog format. I went to my Rich Text Boxes to check the spell checker, and voila, it's disabled!I tried hacking the FormServer.aspx and the CustomSpellCheckEntirePage.js again but the new FormServer.aspx behaves differently than of MOSS 2007's. I searched for answers in many blogs to no avail. Often ending up being linked to my old blog post. I also tried placing the spell check javascript into a Content Editor Webpart of the Item's New Form and Edit form. It is launching the Spell Check dialog but it's not spellchecking the page correctly.At this point, I decided I needed to get my project across ASAP so enough with experimentations and logged a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support.On a call with the Support Engineer, I browsed through the Custom List and to the item to demonstrate my problem. Suddenly, the Spell Check tab in the toolbar is now Enabled! Surprised? Not much, it's Microsoft!Anyway, to cut my story short, here is a summary of my solution:Navigate to your Custom ListIn the Ribbon Toolbar, navigate to List > Customize List > Form Web Parts > Content Type Forms > (Item) New Form. This will display the newifs.aspx which is the page displayed when Add New Item is clicked. This page, just like any other SharePoint page, contains webparts. In this case, we have the InfoPath Form Web Part.Add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) on top of the InfoPath Form Web Part. (A blank CEWP would do for this example)Navigate to Page and click Stop EditingClick Add New Item again and navigate to a Rich Text box. Tadah! The Spell Check tab is now enabled!Do the same steps for the (Item) Edit Form to enable Spell Checks when editing an item.This "no code" solution discovered purely by accident!

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• Get to Know a Candidate (2 of 25): Merlin Miller&ndash;American Third Position Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Meet Merlin Miller of American Third Position Party In addition to being American Third Position Party nominee, Miller is an independent film maker.  He is a graduate of West Point and has commanded two units in the United States Army.  After military service he worked as an industrial engineering manager for Michelin Tire.  He learned about film making by earning an MFA from the University of Southern California. Mr. Miller is on the ballot in: CO, NJ, and TN. In the 2000’s, Miller began taking an increasingly paleoconservative political stance.  He claimed that Hollywood “ surreptitiously seeks to destroy our European-American heritage and our Christian-based traditional values, and replace them with values that debase these traditional values and elevate minorities as paragons of virtue and wisdom....Today’s motion pictures, in concert with other forms of mass media entertainment, are the greatest enemies to the well-being of our progeny and the future of our country.” Miller states that he "doesn't like" interracial marriage; however, he does not support outlawing interracial marriage, either.  Miller has denied being anti-Semitic, instead claiming that he merely opposes "favoritism" granted to Jews in the film industry.  He also opposes illegal immigration and what he refers to as "wide open borders" in the United States. The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a third positionist American political party which promotes white supremacy.  It was officially launched in January 2010 (although in November 2009 it filed papers to get on a ballot in California) partially to channel the right-wing populist resentment engendered by the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the policies of the Obama administration and defines its principal mission as representing the political interests of white Americans. The party takes a strong stand against immigration and globalization, and strongly supports an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Although the party does not support labor unions, they do strongly support the labor rights of the American working class on a platform of placing American workers first over illegal immigrant workers and banning of overseas corporate relocation of American industry and technology Third Position or Third Alternative refers to a revolutionary nationalist political position that emphasizes its opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right", instead claiming to syncretize radical ideas from both ends of the political spectrum Learn more about Merlin Miller and American Third Position Party on Wikipedia.

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• Why wearing Jeans is considered unprofessional?

  - by Gopinath

  When I started my career 9 years ago I use to wear casual wear to office – Jeans & T-Shirts all the 5 days. The environment at workplace during those days encouraged me to be casual and many of my colleagues use to come in Jeans. We just started our career those days it was perfectly fine to be in casual. As I grow up in the ladder, I started feeling the discomfort of wearing Jeans at work. During clients visits, senior managers meetings and consultations I was an odd man in the crowd as the rest of them are in formals. In order to be one among the professionals I’m forced change my dressing style and start wearing formals. But  the question of “Why wearing jeans to workplace is considered as unprofessional?” use in linger in my mind till today. I got the answer to my question from a discussion thread on Quora When they were invented, jeans were associated with blue-collar work. They were meant to get muddy and gross and take lots of abuse without falling apart, even if you wore the same pair every day. The people who bought them were the ones whose lives required durable clothing. And another commenter says… A professional image is critical to cementing business relationships, and part of that is, for right or wrong, how you dress. Jeans are typically associated with "kicking back", relaxation, leisure, informality,  and even a slightly rebellious flavor. The style and condition of the jeans are a consideration, as we often wear jeans into advanced states of being worn down, with tearing, etc.. that we generally do not do with other clothing items. I agree with this theory even though it may be centuries old. If you want to look like a professional and treated like a professional it’s better to be dress up in formals. These days I make a point to be in formals at workplace. Not everyone is Steve Jobs to wear a Jean & Turtle Neck T-shirt  right? CC Image credit flickr/exey

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• Ubuntu Dual Screen Using Virtual Machine - AMD GPU

  - by Chris

  I've been searching online and reading tutorials and etc about how to make my ubuntu VM dual screen(x86_64). I have first tried to run these commands: sudo aticonfig --initial -f which gave me the ouput of: sudo: aitconfig: command not found I then googled the output and followed these instructions that I tells me to install my ATI drivers onto my ubuntu. wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-5-x86.x86_64.run sudo sh ati-driver-installer-11-5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/natty sudo dpkg -i *.deb sudo apt-get -f install sudo aticonfig -f --initial --adapter=all sudo reboot It all works well until I input sudo apt-get -f install which gives me the following output: sudo apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 25 not upgraded. 3 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up fglrx (2:8.850-0ubuntu1) ... update-alternatives: error: alternative link /usr/bin/aticonfig is already managed by x86_64-linux-gnu_gl_conf. dpkg: error processing fglrx (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-amdcccle: fglrx-amdcccle depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-amdcccle (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-dev: fglrx-dev depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-dev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) At this point, I don't know what to do since running: gksudo amdcccle For the record, I have 3D acceleration turned on. The following is my GPU for my VM lspci | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Graphics Adapter Any Help on how I can make my VM dual screen with Ubuntu would be great. Thank you in advance.

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• Connect Team Foundation Service/TFS 2012 with Visual Studio 2010 &amp; Visual Studio 2008

  - by Vishal

  Hello, Microsoft finally released the Team Foundation Service in late October 2012 after its long time in the preview phase. I was already using the TFS Preview which was free but I was happy to see Microsoft releasing the Team Foundation Service also FREE for upto 5 users. Isn't that great news? I know there are bunch of other free source control repositories (Github, Bitbucket, SVN etc.) out there but I somehow like TFS better. Also the other good thing about the final release was that I didn’t had to do any kind of migration of my code from preview to final release version. Just changed the TFS connection URL and it worked like a charm. Anyways, if you are a startup with small team and need some awesome Source Control along with all the good Project Management, Continuous Integration (Build, Test, Deploy), Team Collaboration, Agile/Scrum planning etc. features than Team Foundation Service is your answer. Microsoft has not yet released their pricing for more than 5 users and will be releasing it sometime in early 2013. What if as of now you have a team more than 5 users and you want to use Team Foundation Service, the good news is you can use it for FREE but when they release the final pricing, you will have to transition to the paid plan. Lot of story, getting to the point, connecting to Team Foundation Service with Visual Studio 2012 is straight forward and would work out of the box but it wont for previous versions of Visual Studio. You will have to upgrade to the latest service pack first and than install the forward compatibility pack. (1st : Service Packs & 2nd: Forward Compatibility packs) For Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1. Visual Studio 2010 forward compatibility for TFS 2012 and Team Foundation Service.         For Visual Studio 2008: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. Visual Studio 2008 forward compatibility for TFS 2012 & Team Foundation Service. Restart your system. Visual Studio 2008 will not work if you only put https://xxx.visualstudio.com. You will have to put your collection name too as shown below.       By the way, it doesn’t matter if you are an Apple Application Developer or Android App Developer, you can still use Team Foundation Service as your source control. Below are few links to connect to Team Foundation Service with other IDEs: Connect Eclipse to Team Foundation Service. Connect XCode to Team Foundation Service. Happy coding. Vishal Mody

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• HighPoint RocketRAID 62x Controller

  - by TeXnewbie

  I have the subject card recently installed in Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-31-generic x86_64). See partial lspci -vv listing below (complete listing played havoc with pre tags): 03:00.0 RAID bus controller: HighPoint Technologies, Inc. Device 0622 (rev 01) Subsystem: HighPoint Technologies, Inc. Device 0001 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 32 bytes Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11 Region 0: I/O ports at 9c00 [size=8] Region 1: I/O ports at 9800 [size=4] Region 2: I/O ports at 9400 [size=8] Region 3: I/O ports at 9000 [size=4] Region 4: I/O ports at 8c00 [size=16] Region 5: Memory at fdbff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K] Expansion ROM at fdbe0000 [disabled] [size=64K] Capabilities: I followed instructions I found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RocketRaid to compile the drivers for it, and although performing the process described there seemed to work fine with no noticeable errors, when I rebooted after performing that procedure I could not boot. During dkms steps, I noticed messages indicating that (If next boot fails, revert to initrd.img-3.2.0-31-generic.old-dkms image) update-initramfs................ so I booted using a Ubuntu 12.10 LiveDVD and reverted to the old-dkms initrd.img as suggested above, but this failed to repair the boot problem. Ultimately, I used https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair in Ubuntu-Secure-Remix to fix the boot problem and was able to boot normally again, but now with the newly generated initrd.img in place again (which now boots normally), when I modprobe the rr62x kernel module, I immediately get a hard crash with messages to console about a kernel paging request that seems to have caused the problem. I've tried on multiple occasions now to use the newly built kernel module so as to allow me to use an eSATA port multiplier plugged into the card, but to no avail. Any suggestions on fixes or workarounds (I've read that some of the HighPoint cards (2720SGL) seem to work as a host bus adapter and thus may not need a custom driver, but that seems not to be the case for mine) would be most appreciated. My goal is to use the card as described here and with software RAID mdadm utilities. If necessary, I can hand-copy the console messages after the hard crash into a follow-up message, but I obviously can't do a cut/paste. I'll gladly provide any other details that are needed, but not sure what those would be at this point, so I'll refrain from adding other details for now. Thanks in advance for any help.

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• Organizing Git repositories with common nested sub-modules

  - by André Caron

  I'm a big fan of Git sub-modules. I like to be able to track a dependency along with its version, so that you can roll-back to a previous version of your project and have the corresponding version of the dependency to build safely and cleanly. Moreover, it's easier to release our libraries as open source projects as the history for libraries is separate from that of the applications that depend on them (and which are not going to be open sourced). I'm setting up workflow for multiple projects at work, and I was wondering how it would be if we took this approach a bit of an extreme instead of having a single monolithic project. I quickly realized there is a potential can of worms in really using sub-modules. Supposing a pair of applications: studio and player, and dependent libraries core, graph and network, where dependencies are as follows: core is standalone graph depends on core (sub-module at ./libs/core) network depdends on core (sub-module at ./libs/core) studio depends on graph and network (sub-modules at ./libs/graph and ./libs/network) player depends on graph and network (sub-modules at ./libs/graph and ./libs/network) Suppose that we're using CMake and that each of these projects has unit tests and all the works. Each project (including studio and player) must be able to be compiled standalone to perform code metrics, unit testing, etc. The thing is, a recursive git submodule fetch, then you get the following directory structure: studio/ studio/libs/ (sub-module depth: 1) studio/libs/graph/ studio/libs/graph/libs/ (sub-module depth: 2) studio/libs/graph/libs/core/ studio/libs/network/ studio/libs/network/libs/ (sub-module depth: 2) studio/libs/network/libs/core/ Notice that core is cloned twice in the studio project. Aside from this wasting disk space, I have a build system problem because I'm building core twice and I potentially get two different versions of core. Question How do I organize sub-modules so that I get the versioned dependency and standalone build without getting multiple copies of common nested sub-modules? Possible solution If the the library dependency is somewhat of a suggestion (i.e. in a "known to work with version X" or "only version X is officially supported" fashion) and potential dependent applications or libraries are responsible for building with whatever version they like, then I could imagine the following scenario: Have the build system for graph and network tell them where to find core (e.g. via a compiler include path). Define two build targets, "standalone" and "dependency", where "standalone" is based on "dependency" and adds the include path to point to the local core sub-module. Introduce an extra dependency: studio on core. Then, studio builds core, sets the include path to its own copy of the core sub-module, then builds graph and network in "dependency" mode. The resulting folder structure looks like: studio/ studio/libs/ (sub-module depth: 1) studio/libs/core/ studio/libs/graph/ studio/libs/graph/libs/ (empty folder, sub-modules not fetched) studio/libs/network/ studio/libs/network/libs/ (empty folder, sub-modules not fetched) However, this requires some build system magic (I'm pretty confident this can be done with CMake) and a bit of manual work on the part of version updates (updating graph might also require updating core and network to get a compatible version of core in all projects). Any thoughts on this?

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• What if you could work on anything you wanted?

  - by red@work

  This week we've downed our tools and organised ourselves into small project teams or struck out alone. We're working on whatever we like, with whoever we like, wherever we like. We've called it Down Tools week and so far it's a blast. It all started a few months ago with an idea from Neil, our CEO. Neil wanted to capture the excitement, innovation, and productivity of Coding by the Sea and extend this to all Red Gaters working in Product Development. A brainstorm is always a good place to start for an "anything goes" project. Half of Red Gate piled into our largest meeting room (it's pretty big) armed with flip charts, post its and a heightened sense of possibility. An hour or so later our SQL Servery walls were covered in project ideas. So what would you do, if you could work on anything you wanted? Many projects are related to tools we already make, others are for internal product development use and some are, well, just something completely different. Someone suggested we point a web cam at the SQL Servery lunch queue so we can check it before heading to lunch. That one couldn't wait for Down Tools Week. It was up and running within a few days and even better, it captures the table tennis table too. Thursday is the Show and Tell - I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has come up with. Some of the projects will turn into new products or features so this probably isn't the time or place to go into detail of what is being worked on. Rest assured, you'll hear all about it! We're making a video as we go along too which will be up on our website as soon. In the meantime, all meetings are cancelled, we've got plenty of food in and people are being very creative with the £500 expenses budget (Richard, do you really need an iPad?). It's brilliant to see it all coming together from the idea stage to reality. Catch up with our progress by following #downtoolsweek on Twitter. Who knows, maybe a future Red Gate flagship tool is coming to life right now? By the way, it's business as usual for our customer facing and internal operations teams. Hmm, maybe we can all down tools for a week and ask Product Development to hold the fort? Post by: Alice Chapman

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• Wordpress Installation (on IIS and SQL Server)

  - by Davide Mauri

  To proceed with the installation of Wordpress on SQL Server and IIS, first of all, you need to do the following steps Create a database on SQL Server that will be used by Wordpress Create login that can access to the just created database and put the user into ddladmin, db_datareader, db_datawriter roles Download and unpack Wordpress 3.3.2 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) zip file into a directory of your choice Download the wp-db-abstraction 1.1.4 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) plugin from wordpress.org website Now that the basic action has been done, you can start to setup and configure your Wordpress installation. Unpack and follow the instructions in the README.TXT file to install the Database Abstraction Layer. Mainly you have to: Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins.  This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory.  If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it. Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php Now you can create an application pool in IIS like the following one Create a website, using the above Application Pool, that points to the folder where you unpacked Wordpress files. Be sure to give the “Write” permission to the IIS account, as pointed out in this (old, but still quite valid) installation manual: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#iis Now you’re ready to go. Point your browser to the configured website and the Wordpress installation screen will be there for you. When you’re requested to enter information to connect to MySQL database, simply skip that page, leaving the default values. If you have installed the Database Abstraction Layer, another database installation screen will appear after the one used by MySQL, and here you can enter the configuration information needed to connect to SQL Server. After having finished the installation steps, you should be able to access and navigate your wordpress site.  A final touch, and it’s done: just add the needed rewrite rules http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#urlrewrite and that’s it! Well. Not really. Unfortunately the current (as of 27 May 2012) version of the Database Abstraction Layer (1.1.4) has some bugs. Luckily they can be quickly fixed: Backslash Fix http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-db-abstraction-fix-problems-with-backslash-usage Select Top 0 Fix Make the change to the file “.\wp-content\mu-plugins\wp-db-abstraction\translations\sqlsrv\translations.php” suggested by “debettap”   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3485384&group_id=315685&atid=1328061 And now you have a 100% working Wordpress installation on SQL Server! Since I also wanted to take advantage of SQL Server Full Text Search, I’ve created a very simple wordpress plugin to setup full-text search and to use it as website search engine: http://wpfts.codeplex.com/ Enjoy!

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• Code review recommendations and Code Smells

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago Twitter told that I am similar to Boris Lipschitz . Indeed he is also .Net programmer from Russia living in Australia. I‘ve read his list of Code Review points and found them quite comprehensive. A few points  were not clear for me, and it forced me for a further reading.In particular the statement “Exception should not be used to return a status or an error code.” wasn’t fully clear for me, because sometimes we store an exception as an object with all error details and I believe it’s a valid approach. However I agree that throwing exceptions should be avoided, if you expect to return error as a part of a normal flow. Related link: http://codeutopia.net/blog/2010/03/11/should-a-failed-function-return-a-value-or-throw-an-exception/ Another point slightly puzzled me“If Thread.Sleep() is used, can it be replaced with something else, ei Timer, AutoResetEvent, etc” . I believe, that there are very rare cases, when anyone using Thread.Sleep in any production code. Usually it is used in mocks and prototypes.I had to look further to clarify “Dependency injection is used instead of Service Location pattern”.Even most of articles has some preferences to Dependency injection, there are also advantages to use Service Location. E.g see http://geekswithblogs.net/KyleBurns/archive/2012/04/27/dependency-injection-vs.-service-locator.aspx. http://www.cookcomputing.com/blog/archives/000587.html  refers to Concluding Thoughts of Martin Fowler The choice between Service Locator and Dependency Injection is less important than the principle of separating service configuration from the use of services within an applicationThe post had a link to excellent article Code Smells of Jeff Atwood, but the statement, that “code should not pass a review if it violates any of the  code smells” sound too strict for my environment. In particular, I disagree with “Dead Code” recommendation “Ruthlessly delete code that isn't being used. That's why we have source control systems!”. If there is a chance that not used code will be required in a future, it is convenient to keep it as commented or #if/#endif blocks with appropriate explanation, why it could be required in the future. TFS is a good source control system, but context search in source code of current solution is much easier than finding something in the previous versions of the code.I also found a link to a good book “Clean Code.A.Handbook.of.Agile.Software”

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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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• How to do geometric projection shadows?

  - by John Murdoch

  I have decided that since my game world is mostly flat I don't need better shadows than geometric projections - at least for now. The only problem is I don't even know how to do those properly - that is to produce a 4x4 matrix which would render shadows for my objects (that is, I guess, project them on a horizontal XZ plane). I would like a light source at infinity (e.g., the sun at some point in the sky) and thus parallel projection. My current code does something that looks almost right for small flying objects, but actually is a very rude approximation, as it doesn't project the objects onto the ground, but simply moves them there (I think). Also it always wrongly assumes the sun is always on the zenith (projecting straight down). Gdx.gl20.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); Gdx.gl20.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); //shells shellTexture.bind(); shader.begin(); for (ShellState state : shellStates.values()) { transform.set(camera.combined); transform.mul(state.transform); shader.setUniformMatrix("u_worldView", transform); shader.setUniformi("u_texture", 0); shellMesh.render(shader, GL10.GL_TRIANGLES); } shader.end(); // shadows shader.begin(); for (ShellState state : shellStates.values()) { transform.set(camera.combined); m4.set(state.transform); state.transform.getTranslation(v3); m4.translate(0, -v3.y + 0.5f, 0); // TODO HACK: + 0.5f is a hack to ensure the shadow appears above the ground; this is overall a hack as we are just moving the shell to the surface instead of projecting it on the surface! transform.mul(m4); shader.setUniformMatrix("u_worldView", transform); shader.setUniformi("u_texture", 0); // TODO: make shadow black somehow shellMesh.render(shader, GL10.GL_TRIANGLES); } shader.end(); Gdx.gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_BLEND); So my questions are: a) What is the proper way to produce a Matrix4 to pass to openGL which would render the shadows for my objects? b) I am supposed to use another fragment shader for the shadows which would paint them in semi-transparent grey, correct? c) The limitation of this simplistic approach is that whenever there is some object on the ground (it is not flat) the shadows will not be drawn, correct? d) Do I need to add something very small to the y (up) coordinate to avoid z-fighting with ground textures? Or is the fact they will be semi-transparent enough to resolve that problem?

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• Will polishing my current project be a better learning experience than starting a new one?

  - by Alejandro Cámara

  I started programming many years ago. Now I'm trying to make games. I have read many recommendations to start cloning some well known games like galaga, tetris, arkanoid, etc. I have also read that I should go for the whole game (including menus, sound, score, etc.). Yesterday I finished the first complete version of my arkanoid clone. But it is far from over. I can still work on it for months (I program as a hobby in my free time) implementing a screen resolution switcher, remap of the control keys, power-ups falling from broken bricks, and a huge etc. But I do not want to be forever learning how to clone ONE game. I have the urge to get to the next clone in order to apply some design ideas I have come upon while developing this arkanoid clone (at the same time I am reading the GoF book and much source code from Ludum Dare 21 game contest). So the question is: Should I keep improving the arkanoid clone until it has all the features the original game had? or should I move to the next clone (there are almost infinite games to clone) and start mending the things I did wrong with the previous clone? This can be a very subjective question, so please restrain the answers to the most effective way to learn how to make my own games (not cloning someone ideas). Thank you! CLARIFICATION In order to clarify what I have implemented I make this list: Features implemented: Bouncing capabilities (the ball bounces on walls, on bricks, and on the bar). Sounds when bouncing on bricks and the bar, and when the player wins or loses. Basic title menu (new game and exit only). Also in-game menu and win/lose menus. Only three levels, but the map system is so easy I do not think it will teach me much (am I wrong?). Features not-implemented: Power-ups when breaking the bricks. Complex bricks (with more than one "hit point" and invincible). Better graphics (I am not really good at it). Programming polishing (use more intensively the design patterns). Here's a link to its (minimal) webpage: http://blog.acamara.es/piperine/ I kind of feel ashamed to show it, so please do not hit me too hard :-) My question was related to the not-implemented features. I wondered what was the fastest (optimal) path to learn. 1) implement the not-implemented features in this project which is getting big, or 2) make a new game which probably will teach me those lessons and new ones. ANSWER I choose @ashes999 answer because, in my case, I think I should polish more and try to "ship" the game. I think all the other answers are also important to bear in mind, so if you came here having the same question, before taking a rush decision read all the discussion. Thank you all!

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• Cannot get Virtualbox to install properly on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by lopac1029

  I cannot get Virtualbox to install properly on my 12.04. I first went with a manual install for the .deb from the old builds section of the Virtualbox page. That .deb opened up the Software Center and installed. Then I got the error coming up of VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. which I can only assume was due to my Ubuntu version being 32-bit (System Details - Overview - OC type: 32-bit, right?) So I followed these instructions to remove the .deb manually, restarted my laptop, and then FOUND the actual Virtualbox install in the Software Center and installed from that (assuming it would give me the correct version I need for my system) So after all that (and then some), I'm still getting the same error when I connect to my new job's project in Virtualbox. Can anyone point me in the right direction of what to do here? This is the first time I've ever worked with Virtualbox, and no one at this company is using Ubuntu, so I'm on my own here. EDIT: Here is the direct info from running the 2 suggested commands Inspiron-1750-brick:~ $lscpu Architecture: i686 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 2 On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel CPU family: 6 Model: 23 Stepping: 10 CPU MHz: 2100.000 BogoMIPS: 4189.45 L1d cache: 32K L1i cache: 32K L2 cache: 2048K Inspiron-1750-brick:~ $cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz stepping : 10 microcode : 0xa07 cpu MHz : 1200.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm bogomips : 4189.80 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz stepping : 10 microcode : 0xa07 cpu MHz : 1200.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm bogomips : 4189.45 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:

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• How can I solve this SAT edge case?

  - by ssb

  I have an SAT implementation that basically works, and the fact that it works is what's giving me a few headaches. Basically there are some situations where using the SAT doesn't quite give me my intended result. One of these involves movement across multiple collision objects. Or to put it another way, if I have several collision boxes lined up next to each other such as to create something like a wall or a floor, movement along that surface while constantly applying force into that surface sometimes causes hangups, i.e. the player stops moving. This illustration shows what I mean: The 2 boxes on the bottom represent a floor, and the box on top/in the middle represents what my player is doing. There are several squares lined up as world obstacles to create some kind of wall, and if I move to the left across this surface while holding the down key then the issue arises. It only happens at the exact dividing point between two blocks. It only happens when moving to the left. At any rate I think I know why it happens, but I don't know how to solve it. Basically when I update my player movement I consider which directions are pressed, naturally, so if down is pressed I will add the speed to the Y component, and so on. But due to the way my SAT is implemented, when the penetration into the shape is the same from both sides it just goes with the smallest axis that it finds first, and it checks collisions against objects in the order that they were created because it goes through a foreach loop on the list of collidable objects. So this all adds up to the effect of if I'm moving to the left over a series of boxes while holding down, it will resolve me back to the right out of the first box and then up out of the box to the right of it, and this continues as long as the penetration is the same. The odd part is that this doesn't happen every time, which I am going to attribute to some oddity regarding multiplying velocity by the game time and causing some minor discrepancies between the lengths. Ultimately what this boils down to is that it will keep resolving me to the right and up, but this is technically expected behavior. All the solutions I can think of only address the symptoms of this problem and not the actual cause, such as not using many blocks to create walls or shapes, which is an option I'd like to keep open. I could also change which axis my algorithm defaults to, but that would just cause problems when going up/down along the walls. What can I do to fix this?

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• How to fix 'grub error file not found' when installing 12.04?

  - by Tomasz Grabowski

  i'm trying to install Ubuntu. I don't know if it is important, but i'm trying to install it on external HDD. In the end i have external bootable HDD which only displays: error: file not found grub recovery> From the beginning: I've downloaded ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso I've used LiLi USB Creator (LinuxLive) to create bootable pendrive from that image I've bootet from it, it works I've clicked "Try ubuntu", it works too. I've used GParted to look over drivers (disks) My primary embedded disk is seen as /dev/sda My attached external disk as /dev/sdb My PenDrive as /dev/sdc I've created partitions on /dev/sdb Fist partition for system (over 200GiB) Second was there already (it's xsf, and i don't want to touch it :P) Third is extended partition, with 1 locital partiton (10GiB) for swap I've started installation i've choose "somethin else" in ... i belive secound screeb then is selected /dev/sdb as boot disk for first partiton of /dev/sdb i set i want ext3 file system, i've check "formattin" checkbox, and mount path set to "/" firs logical partiton set as swap partition After installation finished, i restarted my computer. When i boot from my primary disc it's work ok, my previous operating system - vista - works ok. When i set my BIOS to boot from my external disc, i only get that message: error: file not found grub recovery> I've try to reinstall it, but didn't help... In desperation, i've try to read a bit about that "grub recovery" command-line and experiment a bit... I'm not sure if this has had any point, or if it give you some information (notice, that i don't know what i'm doing :P ) when i've type command: insmod (hd1,1)/boot/grub/linux.mod i've get message: unknown filesystem the same with: insmod (hd1,msdos1)/boot/grub/linux.mod the same with: insmod ext3 but i get no message after command: insmod ext2 ... notice that i really don't know what this command exactly do, but than i thought that maybe if i reinstall ubuntu with ext2 filesystem, it will work. I've done that, but symptoms are the same. I've go back to that Live version of ubuntu, filesystem and basics directories seems to be present on /dev/sdb1 ... i'm completely unfamiliar with GRUB. I'm also don't know which wersion of GRUB it is, i hope there is only one version on ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso Any help? Thax

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• GPU hung when switching graphic card

  - by Lie Ryan

  I have a laptop (Dell Inspiron N4110) with a switchable graphic. $ lspci | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc NI Whistler [AMD Radeon HD 6600M Series] (rev ff) Normally, my laptop starts with both graphic cards enabled, which caused the laptop to turn very hot and the fan to become very noisy. I have been using a small script to disable the Radeon card. For some time, I'm quite happy with this arrangement. However, I have been having some issues with the Intel card (IGD), the Intel card often randomly hang when running OpenGL apps; and so I want to give the Radeon card (DIS) another chance. I have never been able to switch to the Radeon card, but recently, I found out that if I do a "delayed switching" (DDIS): # echo "DDIS" > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch root@lieryan-dell-ubuntu:/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo# cat switch 0:IGD:+:Pwr:0000:00:02.0 1:DIS: :Pwr:0000:01:00.0 then I logoff (i.e. to restart X), the screen switch to pseudo-tty and then it stuck there freezing. At this situation, mouse and keyboard stops working so I can't switch to another ptty. I tried ssh-ing from another computer to salvage logs (dmesg at that point) and whatnot; I found out that when freezing, the active graphic card is the AMD card: -- this is from ssh -- # cat switch 0:IGD: :Off:0000:00:02.0 1:DIS:+:Pwr:0000:01:00.0 but the GPU is apparently hung, looking at dmesg gives: ... [ 1411.649974] vga_switcheroo: client 0 refused switch [ 1411.649985] vga_switcheroo: setting delayed switch to client 1 [ 1423.911759] vga_switcheroo: processing delayed switch to 1 [ 1424.006564] fbcon: Remapping primary device, fb1, to tty 1-63 [ 1424.006799] i915: switched off [ 1424.840351] [drm:drm_mode_getfb] *ERROR* invalid framebuffer id [ 1425.718088] [drm:drm_mode_getfb] *ERROR* invalid framebuffer id [ 1426.622377] [drm:drm_mode_getfb] *ERROR* invalid framebuffer id [ 1427.355683] [drm:drm_mode_getfb] *ERROR* invalid framebuffer id [ 1428.193549] [drm:drm_mode_getfb] *ERROR* invalid framebuffer id ... the invalid framebuffer id error is repeated for many times over ... I were able to successfully recover by switching back to the Intel card and restarting X from ssh; indicating that only the Radeon card has problems switching. System info: $ uname -a Linux lieryan-dell-ubuntu 3.0.0-14-generic #23-Ubuntu SMP Mon Nov 21 20:28:43 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 11.10 Release: 11.10 Codename: oneiric The laptop also do not have the option to set graphic card at BIOS and the proprietary driver, fglrx, also have never worked; when I installed it through jockey ("Additional Drivers"), glxinfo showed that it still being rendered by Mesa, the /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo directory has gone missing, and the driver crashes with a traceback if I use xorg.conf to tell X to use fglrx. Anyone had any idea if it is possible to use this AMD card either with the radeon or the fglrx driver? logs: dmesg

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• SharePoint 2010, Cloud, and the Constitution

  - by Michael Van Cleave

  The other evening an article on the Red Tap Chronicles caught my eye. The article written by Bob Sullivan titled "The Constitutional Issues of Cloud Computing" was very interesting in regards to the direction most of the technical world is going. We all have been inundated about utilizing cloud computing for reasons of price, availability, or even scalability; but what Bob brings up is a whole separate view of why a business might not want to move toward the cloud for services or applications. The overall point to the article was pretty simple. It all boiled down to the summation that hosting "Things" in the cloud (Email, Documents, etc…) are interpreted differently under the law regarding constitutional search and seizure than say a document or item that is kept in physical form at a business or home. Where if you physically have it stored someone would have to get a warrant to search for it or seize it, but if it is stored off in the cloud and the ISV or provider is subpoenaed for the item then they will usually give access to the information. Obviously this is a big difference in interpretation of the law and the constitution due to technology. So you might ask "Where does this fit in with SharePoint? Well the overall push for this next version of SharePoint is one that gives a business ultimate flexibility to utilize the Cloud. In one example this upcoming version gracefully lends itself to Multi Tenancy so that online or "Cloud" hosting would be possible by Service Providers. Another aspect to the upcoming version is that it has updated its ability to store content outside of the database and in a cheaper commoditized storage facility. This is called Remote Blob Storage (or RBS) which is the next evolution of External Blob Storage (or EBS). With this new functionality that business might look forward to it is extremely important for them to understand that they might be opening themselves up to laws that do not need a warrant to search or seize their information that is stored in the cloud. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the next few months. Usually the laws change slowly in comparison to technology so it might be a while until we see if it is actually constitutional to treat someone's content on the cloud differently as it would be in their possession, however until there is some type of parity that happens or more concrete laws regarding the differences be very careful about what you put in the cloud. Michael

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• How do I prevent having to log in on 3 separate prompts every time I start my machine?

  - by JC

  Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu Classic desktop Each time I start my machine, I have to log in 3 times. I spent a week in IRCFreenode#ubuntu and got nothing but condescension. I've searched on the official Ubuntu fora for similar problems, tried every recommendation, and still get 3 login screens. As a workaround, I have reset login such that I get a login screen at startup, which I'd prefer not to get since this machine is accessible by no one but me, physically. I have gone into System Preferences Passwords and Encryption Keys, set first 'Passwords: default' to 'Default' and unlocked it, and unlocked the 'Passwords: login' key, too. Next, since that changed nothing, I set 'Passwords: login' to 'Default', and checked to make sure it was still unlocked. Again, no change, still get 3 login prompts at startup. I've checked twice to insure that I am the owner of the files; I am. At the suggestion of several people in #ubuntu, I've deleted first one, then the other password key in 'Passwords and Encryption Keys'. Still get 3 login prompts. I changed from the Unity desktop to Ubuntu Classic. While that didn't fix the above problem, it is a much more elegant desktop than Unity, and I'll keep it. From what I've read, this seems to be a Seahorse issue, but beyond that, no one seems to have a solution that works. I'm lost. This shouldn't be this difficult or annoying. I'm trying to help our local Old Time music collective get their machines switched over to Ubuntu in order to save them some money which they can use to promote their DRM-free music. But from what I've seen of Ubuntu so far on my own machine, I can't really recommend that they make this switch. I hope to be proved wrong on that point. But as it stands, if I was out of town or out of country and they ran into a problem, they'd have no way of fixing it as they're all less experienced than even I am. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on Ubuntu or Linux, but it seems pretty clear that KNOWLEDGEABLE, HELPFUL support for Ubuntu is lacking barring any desire on the problem-experiencing-user's part to avoid condescension. Having worked with, and run, several non-profits over the past 20 years, I know that getting volunteers to act professionally can be like herding cats. But an organization's reputation can be denigrated by sarcastic behaviors on the part of those who serve, effectively, as its public face. Thank you all for your help and support. Now...does anyone have a solution to my problem?

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• CIO's Corner: Achieving a Balance

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Rick Beers Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware All too often, a CIO is unfairly characterized as either technology-focused or business-focused; as more concerned with either infrastructure performance or business excellence. It seems to me that this completely misses the point. I have long thought that a CIO has probably the most complex C-level position in an enterprise, one that requires an artful balance among four entirely different constituencies, often with competing values and needs. How a CIO balances these is the single largest determinant of success. I was reminded of this while reading the excellent interview of Mark Hurd by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in a recent issue of USATODAY (Bartiromo: Oracle's Hurd is in tech sweet spot). The interview covers topics such as Big Data, Leadership and Oracle’s growth strategy. But the topic that really got my interest, and reminded me of the need for balance, was on IT spending trends, in which Mark Hurd observed, “…budgets are tight. What most of our customers have today is both an austerity plan to save money and at the same time a plan to reapply that money to innovation. There isn't a customer we have that doesn't have an austerity plan and an innovation plan.” In an era of economic uncertainty, and an accelerating pace of business change, this is probably the toughest balance a CIO must achieve. Yet for far too many IT organizations, operating costs consume over 75% of their budgets, leaving precious little for innovation and investment in business-critical technology programs. I have found that many CIO’s are trapped by their enterprise systems platforms, which were originally architected for Standardization, Compliance and tightly integrated linear Workflows. Yes, these traits are still required for specific reasons and cannot be compromised. But they are no longer enough. New demands are emerging: the explosion in the volume and diversity of Data, the Consumerization of IT, the rise of Social Media, and the need for continual Business Process Reengineering. These were simply not the design criteria for Enterprise 1.0 and attempting to leverage them with current systems platforms results in an escalation in complexity and a resulting increase in operating costs for many IT organizations. This is the cost vs investment trap and what most constrains CIO’s from achieving the balance they need. But there is a way out of this trap. Enterprise 2.0 represents an entirely new enterprise systems architecture, one that is ‘Business-Centric’ rather than ‘ERP Centric’, which defined the architecture of Enterprise 1.0. Oracle’s best in class suite of Fusion Middleware Products enables a layered approach to enterprise systems architectures that provides the balance that an enterprise needs. The most exciting part of all this? The bottom two layers are focused upon reducing costs and the upper two layers provide business value and innovation. Finally, the Balance a CIO needs.  Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• State / Screen management in Entity Component Systems

  - by David Lively

  My entity/component system is happily humming along and, despite some performance concerns I initially had, everything is working fine. However, I've realized that I missed a crucial point when starting this thing: how do you handle different screens? At the moment, I have a GameManager class which owns a component manager and entity manager. When I create an entity, the entity manager assigns it an ID and makes sure it's tracked. When I modify the components that are assigned to an entity. an UpdateEntity method is called, which alerts each of the systems that they may need to add or remove the entity from their respective entity lists. A problem with this is that the collection of entities operated on by each system is determined solely by the individual Systems, typically based on a "required component" filter. (An entity has to have a Renderable component to be rendered, for instance.) In this situation, I can't just keep collections of entities per screen and only Update/Draw those collections. They'd have to either be added and removed depending on their applicability to the current screen, which would cause their associated components to be removed, or enable/disable entities in a group per screen to hide what's not supposed to be visible. These approaches seem like really, really crappy kludges. What's a good way to handle this? A pretty straightforward way that comes to mind is to create a separate GameManager (which in my implementation owns all of the systems, entities, etc.) per screen, which means that everything outside of the device context would be duplicated. That's bothersome because some things are always visible, or I might want to continue to display the game under a translucent menu window. Another option would be to add a "layer" key to the GameManager class, which could be checked against a displayable layer stack held by the game manager. *System.Draw() would be called for each active layer, in the required order as determined by the stack. When the systems request an iterator for their respective entity collections, it would be pre-filtered to a (cached) set of those entities that participate in the active layer. Those collections could be updated from the same UpdateEntity event that's already used to maintain each system's entity collections. Still, kinda feels like a hack. If I've coded myself into a corner, feel free to throw tomatoes as long as they're labeled with a helpful suggestion. Hooray for learning curves.

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