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  • c# SendMessage and Skype woes

    - by Xcelled194
    I'm trying to create an add-on to Skype with C#. I don't want to use Skype4COM, as I'd like the experience with messages and such. Unfortunately, the messages are tripping me up. I've got the pumps and such set up. They all work, and my app successfully sends the "APIDiscover" message to Skype, gets a "PendingAuth" response and then the "AttachSuccess" message. However, when I try to send "ping" to Skype (to which it should reply "pong") nothing happens. The return code from SendMessage is 0 but Marshall.GetLastWin32Error is 1400 (Invalid handle). The handle was returned with the AttachSuccess method. The equivalent C++ code does work, so I'm at a loss. First is the C++ code I'm using as a guide: Here's the (cut down) message pump. You can ignore everything but where I put the //<---- static LRESULT APIENTRY SkypeAPITest_Windows_WindowProc( HWND hWindow, UINT uiMessage, WPARAM uiParam, LPARAM ulParam) { LRESULT lReturnCode; bool fIssueDefProc; lReturnCode=0; fIssueDefProc=false; switch(uiMessage) { case WM_COPYDATA: if( hGlobal_SkypeAPIWindowHandle==(HWND)uiParam ) { PCOPYDATASTRUCT poCopyData=(PCOPYDATASTRUCT)ulParam; printf( "Message from Skype(%u): %.*s\n", poCopyData->dwData, poCopyData->cbData, poCopyData->lpData); lReturnCode=1; } break; default: if( uiMessage==uiGlobal_MsgID_SkypeControlAPIAttach ) { switch(ulParam) { case SKYPECONTROLAPI_ATTACH_SUCCESS: printf("!!! Connected; to terminate issue #disconnect\n"); hGlobal_SkypeAPIWindowHandle=(HWND)uiParam;//<---- Right here is where we receive the handle from Skype. break; } if( fIssueDefProc ) lReturnCode=DefWindowProc( hWindow, uiMessage, uiParam, ulParam); return(lReturnCode); } and this is the (again dumbed down) "sending message" code void __cdecl Global_InputProcessingThread(void *) { static char acInputRow[1024]; bool fProcessed; if( SendMessageTimeout( HWND_BROADCAST, uiGlobal_MsgID_SkypeControlAPIDiscover, (WPARAM)hInit_MainWindowHandle, 0, SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG, 1000, NULL)!=0 ) { while(Global_Console_ReadRow( acInputRow, sizeof(acInputRow)-1)) { if( fProcessed==false && hGlobal_SkypeAPIWindowHandle!=NULL ) { COPYDATASTRUCT oCopyData; // send command to skype oCopyData.dwData=0; oCopyData.lpData=acInputRow; oCopyData.cbData=strlen(acInputRow)+1; if( oCopyData.cbData!=1 ) { if( SendMessage( hGlobal_SkypeAPIWindowHandle, WM_COPYDATA, (WPARAM)hInit_MainWindowHandle, (LPARAM)&oCopyData)==FALSE ) { hGlobal_SkypeAPIWindowHandle=NULL; printf("!!! Disconnected\n"); } } } } } SendMessage( hInit_MainWindowHandle, WM_CLOSE, 0, 0); SetEvent(hGlobal_ThreadShutdownEvent); fGlobal_ThreadRunning=false; } And now here's my C# public bool PreFilterMessage(ref Message m) { Console.WriteLine(m.ToString()); if (m.Msg == WM_COPYDATA && SkypeAPIWindowHandle == m.WParam) { SkypeMessage(m); return true; } if (m.Msg == MsgApiAttach) { switch (m.LParam.ToInt32()) { case (int)SkypeControlAPIAttach.SUCCESS: SkypeAPIWindowHandle = m.WParam; //Here's where we set the Skype Handle AttachSuccess(m); return true; } } return false; //Defer all other messages } And here is my DLL import and Sending code [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = false)] static extern IntPtr SendMessageA(IntPtr hWnd, UInt32 Msg, IntPtr wParam, ref MsgHelper.COPYDATASTRUCT lParam); public static void Command(string c) { if (c.Last() != '\0') c += "\0"; //Make string null terminated Console.WriteLine(); MsgHelper.COPYDATASTRUCT cda = new MsgHelper.COPYDATASTRUCT(); cda.dwData = new IntPtr(0); cda.lpData = c; cda.cbData = c.Length + 1; Marshal.GetLastWin32Error(); //Clear last error Console.WriteLine(SendMessageA(mHelper.SkypeAPIWindowHandle, MsgHelper.WM_COPYDATA, IntPtr.Zero, ref cda)); Console.WriteLine(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error()); } COPYDATASTRUCT is: public struct COPYDATASTRUCT { public IntPtr dwData; public int cbData; [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)] public string lpData; } I think that's everything. Let me know if I forgot something. Any ideas why I'm getting the 1400?

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  • Strategy and AI for the game 'Proximity'

    - by smci
    'Proximity' is a strategy game of territorial domination similar to Othello, Go and Risk. Two players, uses a 10x12 hex grid. Game invented by Brian Cable in 2007. Seems to be a worthy game for discussing a) optimal strategy then b) how to build an AI Strategies are going to be probabilistic or heuristic-based, due to the randomness factor, and the high branching factor (starts out at 120). So it will be kind of hard to compare objectively. A compute time limit of 5s per turn seems reasonable. Game: Flash version here and many copies elsewhere on the web Rules: here Object: to have control of the most armies after all tiles have been placed. Each turn you received a randomly numbered tile (value between 1 and 20 armies) to place on any vacant board space. If this tile is adjacent to any ally tiles, it will strengthen each tile's defenses +1 (up to a max value of 20). If it is adjacent to any enemy tiles, it will take control over them if its number is higher than the number on the enemy tile. Thoughts on strategy: Here are some initial thoughts; setting the computer AI to Expert will probably teach a lot: minimizing your perimeter seems to be a good strategy, to prevent flips and minimize worst-case damage like in Go, leaving holes inside your formation is lethal, only more so with the hex grid because you can lose armies on up to 6 squares in one move low-numbered tiles are a liability, so place them away from your main territory, near the board edges and scattered. You can also use low-numbered tiles to plug holes in your formation, or make small gains along the perimeter which the opponent will not tend to bother attacking. a triangle formation of three pieces is strong since they mutually reinforce, and also reduce the perimeter Each tile can be flipped at most 6 times, i.e. when its neighbor tiles are occupied. Control of a formation can flow back and forth. Sometimes you lose part of a formation and plug any holes to render that part of the board 'dead' and lock in your territory/ prevent further losses. Low-numbered tiles are obvious-but-low-valued liabilities, but high-numbered tiles can be bigger liabilities if they get flipped (which is harder). One lucky play with a 20-army tile can cause a swing of 200 (from +100 to -100 armies). So tile placement will have both offensive and defensive considerations. Comment 1,2,4 seem to resemble a minimax strategy where we minimize the maximum expected possible loss (modified by some probabilistic consideration of the value ß the opponent can get from 1..20 i.e. a structure which can only be flipped by a ß=20 tile is 'nearly impregnable'.) I'm not clear what the implications of comments 3,5,6 are for optimal strategy. Interested in comments from Go, Chess or Othello players. (The sequel ProximityHD for XBox Live, allows 4-player -cooperative or -competitive local multiplayer increases the branching factor since you now have 5 tiles in your hand at any given time, of which you can only play one. Reinforcement of ally tiles is increased to +2 per ally.)

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  • Mystery Key Value Coding Key

    - by Stephen Furlani
    Hello, I'm attempting to load data from an undocumented API (OsiriX). Getting the NSManagedObject like this: NSManagedObject *itemStudy = [[BrowserController databaseOutline] itemAtRow: [[BrowserController databaseOutline] selectedRow]]; works just fine. But getting the NSManagedObject like this: seriesArray = [_context executeFetchRequest:request error:&error]; NSManagedObject *itemSeries = [seriesArray objectAtIndex:0]; Generates an error when I call [itemSeries valueForKey:@"type"] 2010-05-27 11:04:48.178 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] Exception: [<NSManagedObject 0xd30fd0> valueForUndefinedKey:]: the entity Series is not key value coding-compliant for the key "type". This confuses me thoroughly. If I print the KVC values for itemSeries I get this list: 2010-05-27 11:04:48.167 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC comment 2010-05-27 11:04:48.168 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC date 2010-05-27 11:04:48.168 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC dateAdded 2010-05-27 11:04:48.169 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC dateOpened 2010-05-27 11:04:48.169 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC displayStyle 2010-05-27 11:04:48.170 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC id 2010-05-27 11:04:48.170 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC modality 2010-05-27 11:04:48.170 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC name 2010-05-27 11:04:48.171 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC numberOfImages 2010-05-27 11:04:48.171 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC numberOfKeyImages 2010-05-27 11:04:48.171 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC rotationAngle 2010-05-27 11:04:48.172 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC scale 2010-05-27 11:04:48.172 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC seriesDICOMUID 2010-05-27 11:04:48.173 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC seriesDescription 2010-05-27 11:04:48.173 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC seriesInstanceUID 2010-05-27 11:04:48.173 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC seriesSOPClassUID 2010-05-27 11:04:48.174 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC stateText 2010-05-27 11:04:48.174 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC thumbnail 2010-05-27 11:04:48.174 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC windowLevel 2010-05-27 11:04:48.175 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC windowWidth 2010-05-27 11:04:48.175 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC xFlipped 2010-05-27 11:04:48.176 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC xOffset 2010-05-27 11:04:48.176 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC yFlipped 2010-05-27 11:04:48.176 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC yOffset 2010-05-27 11:04:48.177 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC mountedVolume 2010-05-27 11:04:48.177 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC study 2010-05-27 11:04:48.178 rcOsirix[27712:7b03] KVC images The KVC for itemStudy is this: 2010-05-27 10:46:40.336 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC accessionNumber 2010-05-27 10:46:40.336 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC comment 2010-05-27 10:46:40.336 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC date 2010-05-27 10:46:40.336 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC dateAdded 2010-05-27 10:46:40.336 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC dateOfBirth 2010-05-27 10:46:40.336 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC dateOpened 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC dictateURL 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC expanded 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC hasDICOM 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC id 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC institutionName 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC lockedStudy 2010-05-27 10:46:40.337 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC modality 2010-05-27 10:46:40.338 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC name 2010-05-27 10:46:40.338 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC numberOfImages 2010-05-27 10:46:40.338 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC patientID 2010-05-27 10:46:40.338 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC patientSex 2010-05-27 10:46:40.338 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC patientUID 2010-05-27 10:46:40.338 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC performingPhysician 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC referringPhysician 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC reportURL 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC stateText 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC studyInstanceUID 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC studyName 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC windowsState 2010-05-27 10:46:40.339 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC albums 2010-05-27 10:46:40.340 OsiriX[27266:a0f] KVC series If I use code: NSDictionary *props = [[item entity] propertiesByName]; for (NSString *s in [props allKeys]) { NSLog(@"KVC %@", s); } Yet itemStudy throws no error if I call [itemStudy valueForKey:@"type"] when it should because there's no KVC for @"type"!!! Granted, the objects are different but neither of them contain the key @"type" and they both should throw errors, yet the Osirix code Tests for both conditions: if ([[item valueForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"Series"]) { ... } if ([[item valueForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"Study"]) { ... } And throws no errors. Yet when I load an NSManagedObject of the same exact model and entity @"Series" it throws the 'no key value' when passed into the conditions above. Am I missing something? Both the superentity and subentities of itemSeries and itemStudy are nil so they don't inherit from something that has KVC @"type". I'm totally at a loss as to explain what is going on. --- EDIT --- I know no one can explain what is going on... but maybe where to start looking? How would itemStudy have the extra KVC @"type" that doesn't show up in it's property list? Thank you for your assistance, -Stephen

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  • How to use JQuery to set the value of 2 html form select elements depending on the value of another

    - by Chris Stevenson
    My Javascript and JQuery skills are poor at best and this is ** I have the following three elements in a form : <select name="event_time_start_hours"> <option value="blank" disabled="disabled">Hours</option> <option value="blank" disabled="disabled">&nbsp;</option> <option value="01">1</option> <option value="02">2</option> <option value="03">3</option> <option value="04">4</option> <option value="05">5</option> <option value="06">6</option> <option value="07">7</option> <option value="08">8</option> <option value="09">9</option> <option value="10">10</option> <option value="11">11</option> <option value="12">12</option> <option value="midnight">Midnight</option> <option value="midday">Midday</option> </select> <select name="event_time_start_minutes"> <option value="blank" disabled="disabled">Minutes</option> <option value="blank" disabled="disabled">&nbsp;</option> <option value="00">00</option> <option value="15">15</option> <option value="30">30</option> <option value="45">45</option> </select> <select name="event_time_start_ampm"> <option value="blank" disabled="disabled">AM / PM</option> <option value="blank" disabled="disabled">&nbsp;</option> <option value="am">AM</option> <option value="pm">PM</option> </select> Quite simply, when either 'midnight' or 'midday' is selected in "event_time_start_hours", I want the values of "event_time_start_minutes" and "event_time_start_ampm" to change to "00" and "am" respectively. My VERY poor piece of Javascript says this so far : $(document).ready(function() { $('#event_time_start_hours').change(function() { if($('#event_time_start_hours').val('midnight')) { $('#event_time_start_minutes').val('00'); } }); }); ... and whilst I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't work, I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I want to do this purely for visual reasons for the user as when the form submits I ignore the "minutes" and "am/pm". I'm trying to decide whether it would be best to change the selected values, change the selected values and then disable the element or hide them altogether. However, without any success in getting anything to happen at all I haven't been able to try the different approaches to see what feels right. I've ruled out the obvious things like a duplicate element ID or simply not linking to JQuery. Thank you.

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  • Find optimal strategy and AI for the game 'Proximity'?

    - by smci
    'Proximity' is a strategy game of territorial domination similar to Othello, Go and Risk. Two players, uses a 10x12 hex grid. Game invented by Brian Cable in 2007. Seems to be a worthy game for discussing a) optimal algorithm then b) how to build an AI. Strategies are going to be probabilistic or heuristic-based, due to the randomness factor, and the insane branching factor (20^120). So it will be kind of hard to compare objectively. A compute time limit of 5s per turn seems reasonable. Game: Flash version here and many copies elsewhere on the web Rules: here Object: to have control of the most armies after all tiles have been placed. Each turn you received a randomly numbered tile (value between 1 and 20 armies) to place on any vacant board space. If this tile is adjacent to any ally tiles, it will strengthen each tile's defenses +1 (up to a max value of 20). If it is adjacent to any enemy tiles, it will take control over them if its number is higher than the number on the enemy tile. Thoughts on strategy: Here are some initial thoughts; setting the computer AI to Expert will probably teach a lot: minimizing your perimeter seems to be a good strategy, to prevent flips and minimize worst-case damage like in Go, leaving holes inside your formation is lethal, only more so with the hex grid because you can lose armies on up to 6 squares in one move low-numbered tiles are a liability, so place them away from your main territory, near the board edges and scattered. You can also use low-numbered tiles to plug holes in your formation, or make small gains along the perimeter which the opponent will not tend to bother attacking. a triangle formation of three pieces is strong since they mutually reinforce, and also reduce the perimeter Each tile can be flipped at most 6 times, i.e. when its neighbor tiles are occupied. Control of a formation can flow back and forth. Sometimes you lose part of a formation and plug any holes to render that part of the board 'dead' and lock in your territory/ prevent further losses. Low-numbered tiles are obvious-but-low-valued liabilities, but high-numbered tiles can be bigger liabilities if they get flipped (which is harder). One lucky play with a 20-army tile can cause a swing of 200 (from +100 to -100 armies). So tile placement will have both offensive and defensive considerations. Comment 1,2,4 seem to resemble a minimax strategy where we minimize the maximum expected possible loss (modified by some probabilistic consideration of the value ß the opponent can get from 1..20 i.e. a structure which can only be flipped by a ß=20 tile is 'nearly impregnable'.) I'm not clear what the implications of comments 3,5,6 are for optimal strategy. Interested in comments from Go, Chess or Othello players. (The sequel ProximityHD for XBox Live, allows 4-player -cooperative or -competitive local multiplayer increases the branching factor since you now have 5 tiles in your hand at any given time, of which you can only play one. Reinforcement of ally tiles is increased to +2 per ally.)

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  • Mercurial "hg clone" on Windows via ssh with plink issue

    - by Kyle Tolle
    I have a Windows Server 2008 machine (iis7) that has CopSSH set up on it. To connect to it, I have a Windows 7 machine with Mercurial 1.5.1 (and TortoiseHg) installed. I can connect to the server using PuTTY with a non-standard ssh port and a .ppk file just fine. So I know the server can be SSH'd into. Next, I wanted to use the CLI to connect via hg clone to get a private repo. I've seen elsewhere that you need to have ssh configured in your mercurial.ini file, so my mercurial.ini has a line: ssh = plink.exe -ssh -C -l username -P #### -i "C:/Program Files/PuTTY/Key Files/KyleKey.ppk" Note: username is filled in with the username I set up via copSSH. #### is filled in with the non-standard ssh port I've defined for copSSH. I try to do the command hg clone ssh://inthom.com but I get this error: remote: bash: inthom.com: command not found abort: no suitable response from remote hg! It looks like hg or plink parses the hostname such that it thinks that inthom.com is a command instead of the server to ssh to. That's really odd. Next, I tried to just use plink to connect by plink -P #### ssh://inthom.com, and I am then prompted for my username, and next password. I enter them both and then I get this error: bash: ssh://inthom.com: No such file or directory So now it looks like plink doesn't parse the hostname correctly. I fiddled around for a while trying to figure out how to do call hg clone with an empty ssh:// field and eventually figured out that this command allows me to reach the server and clone a test repo on the inthom.com server: hg clone ssh://!/Repos/test ! is the character I've found that let's me leave the hostname blank, but specify the repo folder to clone. What I really don't understand is how plink knows what server to ssh to at all. neither my mercurial.ini nor the command specify a server. None of the hg clone examples I've seen have a ! character. They all use an address, which makes sense, so you can connect to any repo via ssh that you want to clone. My only guess is that it somehow defaults to the last server I used PuTTY to SSH to, but I SSH'd into another server, and then tried to use plink to get to it, but plink still defaults to inthom.com (verified with the -v arg to plink). So I am at a loss as to how plink gets this server value at all. For "fun", I tried using TortoiseHg and can only clone a repo when I use ssh://!/Repos/test as the Source. Now, you can see that, since plink doesn't parse the hostname correctly, I had to specify the port number and username in the mercurial.ini file, instead of in the hostname like [email protected]:#### like you'd expect to. Trying to figure this out at first drove me insane, because I would get errors that the host couldn't be reached, which I knew shouldn't be the case. My question is how can I configure my setup so that ssh://[email protected]:####/Repos/test is parsed correctly as the username, hostname, port number, and repo to copy? Is it something wrong with the version of plink that I'm using, or is there some setting I may have messed up? If it is plink's fault, is there an alternative tool I can use? I'm going to try to get my friend set up to connect to this same repo, so I'd like to have a clean solution instead of this ! business. Especially when I have no idea how plink gets this default server, so I'm not sure if he'd even be able to get to inthom.com correctly. PS. I've had to use a ton of different tutorials to even get to this stage. Therefore, I haven't tried pushing any changes to the server yet. Hopefully I'll get this figured out and then I can try pushing changes to the repo.

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  • Find optimal/good-enough strategy and AI for the game 'Proximity'?

    - by smci
    'Proximity' is a strategy game of territorial domination similar to Othello, Go and Risk. Two players, uses a 10x12 hex grid. Game invented by Brian Cable in 2007. Seems to be a worthy game for discussing a) optimal algorithm then b) how to build an AI. Strategies are going to be probabilistic or heuristic-based, due to the randomness factor, and the insane branching factor (20^120). So it will be kind of hard to compare objectively. A compute time limit of 5s per turn seems reasonable. Game: Flash version here and many copies elsewhere on the web Rules: here Object: to have control of the most armies after all tiles have been placed. Each turn you received a randomly numbered tile (value between 1 and 20 armies) to place on any vacant board space. If this tile is adjacent to any ally tiles, it will strengthen each tile's defenses +1 (up to a max value of 20). If it is adjacent to any enemy tiles, it will take control over them if its number is higher than the number on the enemy tile. Thoughts on strategy: Here are some initial thoughts; setting the computer AI to Expert will probably teach a lot: minimizing your perimeter seems to be a good strategy, to prevent flips and minimize worst-case damage like in Go, leaving holes inside your formation is lethal, only more so with the hex grid because you can lose armies on up to 6 squares in one move low-numbered tiles are a liability, so place them away from your main territory, near the board edges and scattered. You can also use low-numbered tiles to plug holes in your formation, or make small gains along the perimeter which the opponent will not tend to bother attacking. a triangle formation of three pieces is strong since they mutually reinforce, and also reduce the perimeter Each tile can be flipped at most 6 times, i.e. when its neighbor tiles are occupied. Control of a formation can flow back and forth. Sometimes you lose part of a formation and plug any holes to render that part of the board 'dead' and lock in your territory/ prevent further losses. Low-numbered tiles are obvious-but-low-valued liabilities, but high-numbered tiles can be bigger liabilities if they get flipped (which is harder). One lucky play with a 20-army tile can cause a swing of 200 (from +100 to -100 armies). So tile placement will have both offensive and defensive considerations. Comment 1,2,4 seem to resemble a minimax strategy where we minimize the maximum expected possible loss (modified by some probabilistic consideration of the value ß the opponent can get from 1..20 i.e. a structure which can only be flipped by a ß=20 tile is 'nearly impregnable'.) I'm not clear what the implications of comments 3,5,6 are for optimal strategy. Interested in comments from Go, Chess or Othello players. (The sequel ProximityHD for XBox Live, allows 4-player -cooperative or -competitive local multiplayer increases the branching factor since you now have 5 tiles in your hand at any given time, of which you can only play one. Reinforcement of ally tiles is increased to +2 per ally.)

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  • How can I handle parameterized queries in Drupal?

    - by Anthony Gatlin
    We have a client who is currently using Lotus Notes/Domino as their content management system and web server. For many reasons, we are recommending they sunset their Notes/Domino implementation and transition onto a more modern platform--such as Drupal. The client has several web applications which would be a natural fit for Drupal. However, I am unsure of the best way to implement one of the web applications in Drupal. I am running into a knowledge barrier and wondered if any of you could fill in the gaps. Situation The client has a Lotus Domino application which serves as a front-end for querying a large DB2 data store and returning a result set (generally in table form) to a user via the web. The web application provides access to approximately 100 pre-defined queries--50 of which are public and 50 of which are secured. Most of the queries accept some set of user selected parameters as input. The output of the queries is typically returned to users in a list (table) format. A limited number of result sets allow drill-down through the HTML table into detail records. The query parameters often involve database queries themselves. For example, a single query may pull a list of company divisions into a drop-down. Once a division is selected, second drop-down with the departments from that division is populated--but perhaps only departments which meet some special criteria--such as those having taken a loss within a specific time frame. Most queries have 2-4 parameters with the average probably being 3. The application involves no data entry. None of the back-end data is ever modified by the web application. All access is purely based around querying data and viewing results. The queries change relatively infrequently, and the current system has been in place for approximately 10 years. There may be 10-20 query additions, modifications, or other changes in a given year. The client simply desires to change the presentation platform but absolutely does not want to re-do the 100 database queries. Once the project is implemented, the client wants their staff to take over and manage future changes. The client's staff have no background in Drupal or PHP but are somewhat willing to learn as necessary. How would you transition this into Drupal? My major knowledge void relates to how we would manage the query parameters and access the queries themselves. Here are a few specific questions but feel free to chime in on any issue related to this implementation. Would we have to build 100 forms by hand--with each form containing the parameters for a given query? If so, how would we do this? Approximately how long would it take to build/configure each of these forms? Is there a better way than manually building 100 forms? (I understand using CCK to enter data into custom content types but since we aren't adding any nodes, I am a little stuck as to how this might work.) Would it be possible for the internal staff to learn to create these query parameter forms--even if they are unfamiliar with Drupal today? Would they be required to do any PHP programming? How would we take the query parameters from a form and execute a query against DB2? Would this require a custom module? If so, would it require one module total or one module per query? (Note: There is apparently a DB2 driver available for Drupal. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/5511.) Note: I am not looking for CMS recommendations other than Drupal as Drupal nicely fits all of the client's other requirements, and I hope to help them standardize on a single platform. Any assistance you can provide would be helpful. Thank you in advance for your help!

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  • Architecture for Qt SIGNAL with subclass-specific, templated argument type

    - by Barry Wark
    I am developing a scientific data acquisition application using Qt. Since I'm not a deep expert in Qt, I'd like some architecture advise from the community on the following problem: The application supports several hardware acquisition interfaces but I would like to provide an common API on top of those interfaces. Each interface has a sample data type and a units for its data. So I'm representing a vector of samples from each device as a std::vector of Boost.Units quantities (i.e. std::vector<boost::units::quantity<unit,sample_type> >). I'd like to use a multi-cast style architecture, where each data source broadcasts newly received data to 1 or more interested parties. Qt's Signal/Slot mechanism is an obvious fit for this style. So, I'd like each data source to emit a signal like typedef std::vector<boost::units::quantity<unit,sample_type> > SampleVector signals: void samplesAcquired(SampleVector sampleVector); for the unit and sample_type appropriate for that device. Since tempalted QObject subclasses aren't supported by the meta-object compiler, there doesn't seem to be a way to have a (tempalted) base class for all data sources which defines the samplesAcquired Signal. In other words, the following won't work: template<T,U> //sample type and units class DataSource : public QObject { Q_OBJECT ... public: typedef std::vector<boost::units::quantity<U,T> > SampleVector signals: void samplesAcquired(SampleVector sampleVector); }; The best option I've been able to come up with is a two-layered approach: template<T,U> //sample type and units class IAcquiredSamples { public: typedef std::vector<boost::units::quantity<U,T> > SampleVector virtual shared_ptr<SampleVector> acquiredData(TimeStamp ts, unsigned long nsamples); }; class DataSource : public QObject { ... signals: void samplesAcquired(TimeStamp ts, unsigned long nsamples); }; The samplesAcquired signal now gives a timestamp and number of samples for the acquisition and clients must use the IAcquiredSamples API to retrieve those samples. Obviously data sources must subclass both DataSource and IAcquiredSamples. The disadvantage of this approach appears to be a loss of simplicity in the API... it would be much nicer if clients could get the acquired samples in the Slot connected. Being able to use Qt's queued connections would also make threading issues easier instead of having to manage them in the acquiredData method within each subclass. One other possibility, is to use a QVariant argument. This necessarily puts the onus on subclass to register their particular sample vector type with Q_REGISTER_METATYPE/qRegisterMetaType. Not really a big deal. Clients of the base class however, will have no way of knowing what type the QVariant value type is, unless a tag struct is also passed with the signal. I consider this solution at least as convoluted as the one above, as it forces clients of the abstract base class API to deal with some of the gnarlier aspects of type system. So, is there a way to achieve the templated signal parameter? Is there a better architecture than the one I've proposed?

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  • How do I display a Wicket Datatable, sorted by a specific column by default?

    - by David
    Hello everyone! I have a question regarding Wicket's Datatable. I am currently using DataTable to display a few columns of data. My table is set up as follows: DataTable<Column> dataTable = new DataTable<Column>("columnsTable", columns, provider, maxRowsPerPage) { @Override protected Item<Column> newRowItem(String id, int index, IModel<Column> model) { return new OddEvenItem<Column>(id, index, model); } }; The columns look like so: columns[0] = new PropertyColumn<Column>(new Model<String>("Description"), "description", "description"); columns[1] = new PropertyColumn<Column>(new Model<String>("Logic"), "columnLogic"); columns[2] = new PropertyColumn<Column>(new Model<String>("Type"), "dataType", "dataType"); Here is my column data provider: public class ColumnSortableDataProvider extends SortableDataProvider<Column> { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; private List<Column> list = null; public ColumnSortableDataProvider(Table table) { this.list = Arrays.asList(table.getColumns().toArray(new Column[0])); } public ColumnSortableDataProvider(List<Column> list) { this.list = list; } @Override public Iterator<? extends Column> iterator(int first, int count) { /* first - first row of data count - minimum number of elements to retrieve So this method returns an iterator capable of iterating over {first, first+count} items */ Iterator<Column> iterator = null; try { if(getSort() != null) { Collections.sort(list, new Comparator<Column>() { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; @Override public int compare(Column c1, Column c2) { int result=1; PropertyModel<Comparable> model1= new PropertyModel<Comparable>(c1, getSort().getProperty()); PropertyModel<Comparable> model2= new PropertyModel<Comparable>(c2, getSort().getProperty()); if(model1.getObject() == null && model2.getObject() == null) result = 0; else if(model1.getObject() == null) result = 1; else if(model2.getObject() == null) result = -1; else result = ((Comparable)model1.getObject()).compareTo(model2.getObject()); result = getSort().isAscending() ? result : -result; return result; } }); } if (list.size() > (first+count)) iterator = list.subList(first, first+count).iterator(); else iterator = list.iterator(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return iterator; } Sorting by clicking a column works perfectly, but I would like the table to initially be sorted, by default, by the Description column. I am at a loss to do this. If you need to see some other code, please let me know. Thank you in advance!!! - D

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  • Problem exporting NSOpenGLView pixel data to some image file formats using ImageKit & CGImageDestina

    - by walkytalky
    I am developing an application to visualise some experimental data. One of its functions is to render the data in an NSOpenGLView subclass, and allow the resulting image to be exported to a file or copied to the clipboard. The view exports the data as an NSImage, generated like this: - (NSImage*) image { NSBitmapImageRep* imageRep; NSImage* image; NSSize viewSize = [self bounds].size; int width = viewSize.width; int height = viewSize.height; [self lockFocus]; [self drawRect:[self bounds]]; [self unlockFocus]; imageRep=[[[NSBitmapImageRep alloc] initWithBitmapDataPlanes:NULL pixelsWide:width pixelsHigh:height bitsPerSample:8 samplesPerPixel:4 hasAlpha:YES isPlanar:NO colorSpaceName:NSDeviceRGBColorSpace bytesPerRow:width*4 bitsPerPixel:32] autorelease]; [[self openGLContext] makeCurrentContext]; glReadPixels(0,0,width,height,GL_RGBA,GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,[imageRep bitmapData]); image=[[[NSImage alloc] initWithSize:NSMakeSize(width,height)] autorelease]; [image addRepresentation:imageRep]; [image setFlipped:YES]; // this is deprecated in 10.6 [image lockFocusOnRepresentation:imageRep]; // this will flip the rep [image unlockFocus]; return image; } Copying uses this image very simply, like this: - (IBAction) copy:(id) sender { NSImage* img = [self image]; NSPasteboard* pb = [NSPasteboard generalPasteboard]; [pb clearContents]; NSArray* copied = [NSArray arrayWithObject:img]; [pb writeObjects:copied]; } For file writing, I use the ImageKit IKSaveOptions accessory panel to set the output file type and associated options, then use the following code to do the writing: NSImage* glImage = [glView image]; NSRect rect = [glView bounds]; rect.origin.x = rect.origin.y = 0; img = [glImage CGImageForProposedRect:&rect context:[NSGraphicsContext currentContext] hints:nil]; if (img) { NSURL* url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath: path]; CGImageDestinationRef dest = CGImageDestinationCreateWithURL((CFURLRef)url, (CFStringRef)newUTType, 1, NULL); if (dest) { CGImageDestinationAddImage(dest, img, (CFDictionaryRef)[imgSaveOptions imageProperties]); CGImageDestinationFinalize(dest); CFRelease(dest); } } (I've trimmed a bit of extraneous code here, but nothing that would affect the outcome as far as I can see. The newUTType comes from the IKSaveOptions panel.) This works fine when the file is exported as GIF, JPEG, PNG, PSD or TIFF, but exporting to PDF, BMP, TGA, ICNS and JPEG-2000 produces a red colour artefact on part of the image. Example images are below, the first exported as JPG, the second as PDF. Copy to clipboard does not exhibit this red stripe with the current implementation of image, but it did with the original implementation, which generated the imageRep using NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace rather than NSDeviceRGBColorSpace. So I'm guessing there's some issue with the colour representation in the pixels I get from OpenGL that doesn't get through the subsequent conversions properly, but I'm at a loss as to what to do about it. So, can anyone tell me (i) what is causing this, and (ii) how can I make it go away? I don't care so much about all of the formats but I'd really like at least PDF to work.

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  • calling calloc - memory leak valgrind

    - by Mike
    The following code is an example from the NCURSES menu library. I'm not sure what could be wrong with the code, but valgrind reports some problems. Any ideas... ==4803== 1,049 (72 direct, 977 indirect) bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 25 of 36 ==4803== at 0x4C24477: calloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:418) ==4803== by 0x400E93: main (in /home/gerardoj/a.out) ==4803== ==4803== LEAK SUMMARY: ==4803== definitely lost: 72 bytes in 1 blocks ==4803== indirectly lost: 977 bytes in 10 blocks ==4803== possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==4803== still reachable: 64,942 bytes in 262 blocks Source code: #include <curses.h> #include <menu.h> #define ARRAY_SIZE(a) (sizeof(a) / sizeof(a[0])) #define CTRLD 4 char *choices[] = { "Choice 1", "Choice 2", "Choice 3", "Choice 4", "Choice 5", "Choice 6", "Choice 7", "Exit", } ; int main() { ITEM **my_items; int c; MENU *my_menu; int n_choices, i; ITEM *cur_item; /* Initialize curses */ initscr(); cbreak(); noecho(); keypad(stdscr, TRUE); /* Initialize items */ n_choices = ARRAY_SIZE(choices); my_items = (ITEM **)calloc(n_choices + 1, sizeof(ITEM *)); for (i = 0; i < n_choices; ++i) { my_items[i] = new_item(choices[i], choices[i]); } my_items[n_choices] = (ITEM *)NULL; my_menu = new_menu((ITEM **)my_items); /* Make the menu multi valued */ menu_opts_off(my_menu, O_ONEVALUE); mvprintw(LINES - 3, 0, "Use <SPACE> to select or unselect an item."); mvprintw(LINES - 2, 0, "<ENTER> to see presently selected items(F1 to Exit)"); post_menu(my_menu); refresh(); while ((c = getch()) != KEY_F(1)) { switch (c) { case KEY_DOWN: menu_driver(my_menu, REQ_DOWN_ITEM); break; case KEY_UP: menu_driver(my_menu, REQ_UP_ITEM); break; case ' ': menu_driver(my_menu, REQ_TOGGLE_ITEM); break; case 10: { char temp[200]; ITEM **items; items = menu_items(my_menu); temp[0] = '\0'; for (i = 0; i < item_count(my_menu); ++i) if(item_value(items[i]) == TRUE) { strcat(temp, item_name(items[i])); strcat(temp, " "); } move(20, 0); clrtoeol(); mvprintw(20, 0, temp); refresh(); } break; } } free_item(my_items[0]); free_item(my_items[1]); free_menu(my_menu); endwin(); }

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  • ActiveRecord Logic Challenge - Smart Ways to Use AR Timestamp

    - by keruilin
    My question is somewhat specific to my app's issue, but the answer should be instructive in terms of use cases for association logic and the record timestamp. I have an NBA pick 'em game where I want to award badges for picking x number of games in a row correctly -- 10, 20, 30. Here are the models, attributes, and associations in-play: User id Pick id result # (values can be 'W', 'L', 'T', or nil. nil means hasn't resolved yet.) resolved # (values can be true, false, or nil.) game_time created_at *Note: There are cases where a pick's result field and resolved field will always be nil. Perhaps the game was cancelled. Badge id Award id user_id badge_id created_at User has many awards. User has many picks. Pick belongs to user. Badge has many awards. Award belongs to user. Award belongs to badge. One of the important rules here to capture in the code is that while a user can be awarded multiple streak badges (e.g., a user can win multiple 10-streak badges), the user CAN'T be awarded another badge for consecutive winning picks that were previously granted an award badge. One way to think of this is that all the dates of the winning picks must come after the date that the streak badge was awarded. For example, let's pretend that a user made 13 winning picks from May 5 to May 8, with the 10th winning pick occurring on May 7, and the last 3 on May 8. The user would be awarded a 10-streak badge on May 7. Now if the user makes another winning pick on May 9, the code must recognize that the user only has a streak of 4 winning picks, not 14, because the user already received an award for the first 10. Now let's assume that the user makes 6 more winning picks. In this case, the code must recognize that all winning picks since May 5 are eligible for a 20-streak badge award, and make the award. Another important rule is that when looking at a winning streak, we don't care about the game time, but rather when the pick was made (created_at). For example, let's say that Team A plays Team B on Sat. And Team C plays Team D on Sun. If the user picks Team C to beat Team D on Thurs, and Team A to beat Team C on Fri, and Team A wins on Sat, but Team C loses on Sun, then the user has a losing streak of 1. So when must the streak-check kick-in? As soon as a pick is a win. If it's a loss or tie, no point in checking. One more note: if the pick is not resolved (false) and the result is nil, that means the game was postponed and must be factored out. With all that said, what is the most efficient, effective and lean way to determine whether a user has a 10-, 20- or 30-win streak?

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  • Random Complete System Unresponsiveness Running Mathematical Functions

    - by Computer Guru
    I have a program that loads a file (anywhere from 10MB to 5GB) a chunk at a time (ReadFile), and for each chunk performs a set of mathematical operations (basically calculates the hash). After calculating the hash, it stores info about the chunk in an STL map (basically <chunkID, hash>) and then writes the chunk itself to another file (WriteFile). That's all it does. This program will cause certain PCs to choke and die. The mouse begins to stutter, the task manager takes 2 min to show, ctrl+alt+del is unresponsive, running programs are slow.... the works. I've done literally everything I can think of to optimize the program, and have triple-checked all objects. What I've done: Tried different (less intensive) hashing algorithms. Switched all allocations to nedmalloc instead of the default new operator Switched from stl::map to unordered_set, found the performance to still be abysmal, so I switched again to Google's dense_hash_map. Converted all objects to store pointers to objects instead of the objects themselves. Caching all Read and Write operations. Instead of reading a 16k chunk of the file and performing the math on it, I read 4MB into a buffer and read 16k chunks from there instead. Same for all write operations - they are coalesced into 4MB blocks before being written to disk. Run extensive profiling with Visual Studio 2010, AMD Code Analyst, and perfmon. Set the thread priority to THREAD_MODE_BACKGROUND_BEGIN Set the thread priority to THREAD_PRIORITY_IDLE Added a Sleep(100) call after every loop. Even after all this, the application still results in a system-wide hang on certain machines under certain circumstances. Perfmon and Process Explorer show minimal CPU usage (with the sleep), no constant reads/writes from disk, few hard pagefaults (and only ~30k pagefaults in the lifetime of the application on a 5GB input file), little virtual memory (never more than 150MB), no leaked handles, no memory leaks. The machines I've tested it on run Windows XP - Windows 7, x86 and x64 versions included. None have less than 2GB RAM, though the problem is always exacerbated under lower memory conditions. I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I don't know what's causing it - I'm torn between CPU or Memory as the culprit. CPU because without the sleep and under different thread priorities the system performances changes noticeably. Memory because there's a huge difference in how often the issue occurs when using unordered_set vs Google's dense_hash_map. What's really weird? Obviously, the NT kernel design is supposed to prevent this sort of behavior from ever occurring (a user-mode application driving the system to this sort of extreme poor performance!?)..... but when I compile the code and run it on OS X or Linux (it's fairly standard C++ throughout) it performs excellently even on poor machines with little RAM and weaker CPUs. What am I supposed to do next? How do I know what the hell it is that Windows is doing behind the scenes that's killing system performance, when all the indicators are that the application itself isn't doing anything extreme? Any advice would be most welcome.

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  • inserting new relationship data in core-data

    - by michael
    My app will allow users to create a personalised list of events from a large list of events. I have a table view which simply displays these events, tapping on one of them takes the user to the event details view, which has a button "add to my events". In this detailed view I own the original event object, retrieved via an NSFetchedResultsController and passed to the detailed view (via a table cell, the same as the core data recipes sample). I have no trouble retrieving/displaying information from this "event". I am then trying to add it to the list of MyEvents represented by a one to many (inverse) relationship: This code: NSManagedObjectContext *context = [event managedObjectContext]; MyEvents *myEvents = (MyEvents *)[NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"MyEvents" inManagedObjectContext:context]; [myEvents addEventObject:event];//ERROR And this code (suggested below): //would this add to or overwrite the "list" i am attempting to maintain NSManagedObjectContext *context = [event managedObjectContext]; MyEvents *myEvents = (MyEvents *)[NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"MyEvents" inManagedObjectContext:context]; NSMutableSet *myEvent = [myEvents mutableSetValueForKey:@"event"]; [myEvent addObject:event]; //ERROR Bot produce (at the line indicated by //ERROR): *** -[NSComparisonPredicate evaluateWithObject:]: message sent to deallocated instance Seems I may have missed something fundamental. I cant glean any more information through the use of debugging tools, with my knowledge of them. 1) Is this a valid way to compile and store an editable list like this? 2) Is there a better way? 3) What could possibly be the deallocated instance in error? -- I have now modified the Event entity to have a to-many relationship called "myEvents" which referrers to itself. I can add Events to this fine, and logging the object shows the correct memory addresses appearing for the relationship after a [event addMyEventObject:event];. The same failure happens right after this however. I am still at a loss to understand what is going wrong. This is the backtrace #0 0x01f753a7 in ___forwarding___ () #1 0x01f516c2 in __forwarding_prep_0___ () #2 0x01c5aa8f in -[NSFetchedResultsController(PrivateMethods) _preprocessUpdatedObjects:insertsInfo:deletesInfo:updatesInfo:sectionsWithDeletes:newSectionNames:treatAsRefreshes:] () #3 0x01c5d63b in -[NSFetchedResultsController(PrivateMethods) _managedObjectContextDidChange:] () #4 0x0002e63a in _nsnote_callback () #5 0x01f40005 in _CFXNotificationPostNotification () #6 0x0002bef0 in -[NSNotificationCenter postNotificationName:object:userInfo:] () #7 0x01bbe17d in -[NSManagedObjectContext(_NSInternalNotificationHandling) _postObjectsDidChangeNotificationWithUserInfo:] () #8 0x01c1d763 in -[NSManagedObjectContext(_NSInternalChangeProcessing) _createAndPostChangeNotification:withDeletions:withUpdates:withRefreshes:] () #9 0x01ba25ea in -[NSManagedObjectContext(_NSInternalChangeProcessing) _processRecentChanges:] () #10 0x01bdfb3a in -[NSManagedObjectContext processPendingChanges] () #11 0x01bd0957 in _performRunLoopAction () #12 0x01f4d252 in __CFRunLoopDoObservers () #13 0x01f4c65f in CFRunLoopRunSpecific () #14 0x01f4bc48 in CFRunLoopRunInMode () #15 0x0273878d in GSEventRunModal () #16 0x02738852 in GSEventRun () #17 0x002ba003 in UIApplicationMain () solution I managed to get to the bottom of this. I was fetching the event in question using a NSFetchedResultsController with a NSPredicate which I was releasing after I had the results. Retrieving values from the entities returned was no problem, but when I tried to update any of them it gave the error above. It should not have been released. oustanding part of my question What is a good way to create this sub list from a list of existing items in terms of a core data model. I don't believe its any of the ways I tried here. I need to show/edit it in another table view. Perhaps there is a better way than a boolean property on each event entity? The relationship idea above doesn't seem to work here (even though I can now create it). Cheers.

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  • piecing together a jquery form mailer

    - by Joel
    Hi guys, My newbieness is shining through here...I managed to piece together a form mailer that works great, but now I need to add two more fields, and I'm at a loss as to how to do it. Over the months, I have commented out some things I didn't need, but now I'm stuck. I borrowed from this tutorial to make the original form: http://trevordavis.net/blog/tutorial/ajax-forms-with-jquery/ But then I cannibalized it to make an email signup form for a newsletter, so the fields I need are: recipient email (me-hard coded in) senders email address subject (hardcoded in) first name and city in the body of the message For my form, I have this: <div> <?php include('verify.php'); ?> <form action="index_success.php" method="post" id="sendEmail" class="email"> <h3 class="register2">Newsletter Signup:</h3> <ul class="forms email"> <li class="name"><label for="yourName">Name: </label> <input type="text" name="yourName" class="info" id="yourName" value=" " /><br> </li> <li class="city"><label for="yourCity">City: </label> <input type="text" name="yourCity" class="info" id="yourCity" value=" " /><br> </li> <li class="email"><label for="emailFrom">Email: </label> <input type="text" name="emailFrom" class="info" id="emailFrom" value="<?= $_POST['emailFrom']; ?>" /> <?php if(isset($emailFromError)) echo '<span class="error">'.$emailFromError.'</span>'; ?> </li> <li class="buttons email"> <button type="submit" id="submit">Send</button> <input type="hidden" name="submitted" id="submitted" value="true" /> </li> </ul> </form> </div> emailcontact.js: $(document).ready(function(){ $("#submit").click(function(){ $(".error").hide(); var hasError = false; var emailReg = /^([\w-\.]+@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]{2,4})?$/; var emailFromVal = $("#emailFrom").val(); if(emailFromVal == '') { $("#emailFrom").after('<span class="error">You forgot to enter the email address to send from.</span>'); hasError = true; } else if(!emailReg.test(emailFromVal)) { $("#emailFrom").after('<span class="error">Enter a valid email address to send from.</span>'); hasError = true; } var subjectVal = $("#subject").val(); if(subjectVal == '') { $("#subject").after('<span class="error">You forgot to enter your name.</span>'); hasError = true; } var messageVal = $("#message").val(); if(messageVal == '') { $("#message").after('<span class="error">You forgot to enter your city.</span>'); hasError = true; } if(hasError == false) { $(this).hide(); $("#sendEmail li.buttons").append('<img src="/wp-content/themes/default/images/template/loading.gif" alt="Loading" id="loading" />'); $.post("/includes/sendemail.php", //emailTo: emailToVal, { emailFrom: emailFromVal, subject: subjectVal, message: messageVal }, function(data){ $("#sendEmail").slideUp("normal", function() { $("#sendEmail").before('<h3 class="register2">Success!</h3><p class="emailbox">You are on the Newsletter email list.</p>'); }); } ); } return false; }); }); sendmail.php: <?php $mailTo = $_POST['emailTo']; $mailFrom = $_POST['emailFrom']; $subject = $_POST['yourName']; $message = $_POST['yourCity']; mail('[email protected]','Rattletree Newsletter', 'Name='.$subject. ' City='.$message, "From: ".$mailFrom); ?> Thanks for any help! I'm going crosseyed trying to figure this one out.

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  • Bug Triage

    In this blog post brain dump, I'll attempt to describe the process my team tries to follow when dealing with new bug reports (specifically, code defect reports). This is not official Microsoft policy, just the way we do things… if you do things differently and want to share, you can do so at the bottom in the comments (or on your blog).Feature Triage TeamA subset of the feature crew, the triage team (which has representations from the PM, Dev and QA disciplines), looks at all unassigned bugs at regular intervals. This can be weekly or daily (or other frequency) dependent on which part of the product cycle we are in and what the untriaged bug load looks like. They discuss each bug considering the evidence and make a decision of whether the bug goes from Not Yet Assigned to Assigned (plus the name of the DEV to fix this) or whether it goes from Active to Resolved (which means it gets assigned back to the requestor for closure or further debate if they were not present at the triage meeting). Close to critical milestones, the feature triage team needs to further justify bugs they take to additional higher-level triage teams.Bug Opened = Not Yet AssignedSomeone (typically an SDET from the QA team) creates the bug item (e.g. in TFS), ensuring they populate all the relevant fields including: Title, Description, Repro Steps (including the Actual Result at the end of the steps), attachments of code and/or screenshots, Build number that they observed the issue in, regression details if applicable, how it was found, if a test case exists or needs to be created etc. They also indicate their opinion on the Priority and Severity. The bug status is left as Not Yet Assigned."Issue" versus "Fix for issue"The solution to some bugs is easy to determine, e.g. "bug: the column name is misspelled". Obviously the fix is to correct the spelling – still, the triage team should be explicit and enter the correct spelling in the bug's Description. Note that a bad bug name here would be "bug: fix the spelling of the column" (it describes the solution, rather than the problem).Other solutions are trickier to establish, e.g. "bug: the column header is not accessible (can only be clicked on with the mouse, not reached via keyboard)". What is the correct solution here? The last thing to do is leave this undetermined and just assign it to a developer. The solution has to be entered in the description. Behind this type of a bug usually hides a spec defect or a new feature request.The person opening the bug should focus on describing the issue, rather than the solution. The person indicates what the fix is in their opinion by stating the Expected Result (immediately after stating the Actual Result). If they have a complex suggested solution, that should be split out in a separate part, but the triage team has the final say before assigning it. If the solution is lengthy/complicated to describe, the bug can be assigned to the PM. Note: the strict interpretation suggests that any bug with no clear, obvious solution is always a hole in the spec and should always go to the PM. This also ensures the spec gets updated.Not Yet Assigned - Not Yet Assigned (on someone else's plate)If the bug is observed in our feature, but the cause is actually another team, we change the Area Path (which is the way we identify teams in TFS) and leave it as Not Yet Assigned. The triage team may add more comments as appropriate including potentially changing the repro steps. In some cases, we may even resolve the bug in our area path and open a new bug in the area path of the other team.Even though there is no action on a dev on the team, the bug still needs to be tracked. One way of doing this is to implement some notification system that informs the team when the tracked bug changed status; another way is to occasionally run a global query (against all area paths) for bugs that have been opened by a member of the team and follow up with the current owners for stale bugs.Not Yet Assigned - ResolvedThis state transition can only be made by the Feature Triage Team.0. Sometimes the bug description is not clear and in that case it gets Resolved as More Information Needed, so the original requestor can provide it.After understanding what the bug item is about, the first decision is to determine whether it needs to go to a dev.1. If it is a known bug, it gets resolved as "Duplicate" and linked to the existing bug.2. If it is "By Design" it gets resolved as such, indicating that the triage team does not think this is a bug.3. If the bug does not repro on latest bits, it is resolved as "No Repro"4. The most painful: If it is decided that we cannot fix it for this release it gets resolved as "Postponed" or "Won't Fix". The former is typically due to resources and time constraints, while the latter is due to deciding that it is not important enough to consume our resources in any release (yes, not all bugs must be fixed!). For both cases, there are other factors that contribute to the decision such as: existence of a reasonable workaround, frequency we expect users to encounter the issue, dependencies on other team to offer a solution, whether it breaks a core scenario, whether it prohibits customer feedback on a major feature, is it a regression from a previous release, impact of the fix on other partner teams (e.g. User Education, User Experience, Localization/Globalization), whether this is the right fix, does the fix impact performance goals, and last but not least, severity of bug (e.g. loss of customer data, security threat, crash, hang). The bar for fixing a bug goes up as the release date approaches. The triage team becomes hardnosed about which bugs to take, while the developers are busy resolving assigned bugs thus everyone drives for Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB). ZBB is when you have 0 active bugs older than 48 hours.Not Yet Assigned - AssignedIf the bug is something we decide to fix in this release and the solution is known, then it is assigned to a DEV. This is either the developer that will do the work, or a Lead that can further assign it to one of his developer team based on a load balancing algorithm of their choosing.Sometimes, the triage team needs the dev to do some investigation work before deciding whether to take the fix; similarly, the checkin for the fix may be gated on code review by the triage team. In these cases, these instructions are provided in the comments section of the bug and when the developer is done they notify the triage team for final decision.Additionally, a Priority and Severity (from 0 to 4) has to be entered, e.g. a P0 means "drop anything you are doing and fix this now" whereas a P4 is something you get to after all P0,1,2,3 bugs are fixed.From a testing perspective, if the bug was found through ad-hoc testing or an external team, the decision is made whether test cases should be added to avoid future regressions. This is communicated to the QA team.Assigned - ResolvedWhen the developer receives the bug (they should be checking daily for new bugs on their plate looking at bugs in order of priority and from older to newer) they can send it back to triage if the information is not clear. Otherwise, they investigate the bug, setting the Sub Status to "Investigating"; if they cannot make progress, they set the Sub Status to "Blocked" and discuss this with triage or whoever else can help them get unblocked. Once they are unblocked, they set the Sub Status to "Working on Solution"; once they are code complete they send a code review request, setting the Sub Status to "Fix Available". After the iterative code review process is over and everyone is happy with the fix, the developer checks it in and changes the state of the bug from Active (and Assigned to them) to Resolved (and Assigned to someone else).The developer needs to ensure that when the status is changed to Resolved that it is assigned to a QA person. For example, maybe the PM opened the bug, but it should be a QA person that will verify the fix - the developer needs to manually change the assignee in that case. Typically the QA person will send an email to the original requestor notifying them that the fix is verified.Resolved - ??In all cases above, note that the final state was Resolved. What happens after that? The final step should be Closed. The bug is closed once the QA person verifying the fix is happy with it. If the person is not happy, then they change the state from Resolved to Active, thus sending it back to the developer. If the developer and QA person cannot reach agreement, then triage can be brought into it. An easy way to do that is change the status back to Not Yet Assigned with appropriate comments so the triage team can re-review.It is important to note that only QA can close a bug. That means that if the opener of the bug was a PM, when the bug gets resolved by the dev it may land on the PM's plate and after a quick review, the PM would re-assign to an SDET, which is the only role that can close bugs. One exception to this is if the person that filed the bug is external: in that case, we leave it Resolved and assigned to them and also send them a notification that they need to verify the fix. Another exception is if specialized developer knowledge is needed for verifying the bug fix (e.g. it was a refactoring suggestion bug typically not observable by the user) in which case it is fine to have a developer verify the fix, and ideally a different developer to the one that opened the bug.Other links on bug triageA quick search reveals that others have talked about this subject, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.Your take?If you have other best practices your team uses to deal with incoming bug reports, feel free to share in the comments below or on your blog. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Advantages of SQL Backup Pro

    - by Grant Fritchey
    Getting backups of your databases in place is a fundamental issue for protection of the business. Yes, I said business, not data, not databases, but business. Because of a lack of good, tested, backups, companies have gone completely out of business or suffered traumatic financial loss. That’s just a simple fact (outlined with a few examples here). So you want to get backups right. That’s a big part of why we make Red Gate SQL Backup Pro work the way it does. Yes, you could just use native backups, but you’ll be missing a few advantages that we provide over and above what you get out of the box from Microsoft. Let’s talk about them. Guidance If you’re a hard-core DBA with 20+ years of experience on every version of SQL Server and several other data platforms besides, you may already know what you need in order to get a set of tested backups in place. But, if you’re not, maybe a little help would be a good thing. To set up backups for your servers, we supply a wizard that will step you through the entire process. It will also act to guide you down good paths. For example, if your databases are in Full Recovery, you should set up transaction log backups to run on a regular basis. When you choose a transaction log backup from the Backup Type you’ll see that only those databases that are in Full Recovery will be listed: This makes it very easy to be sure you have a log backup set up for all the databases you should and none of the databases where you won’t be able to. There are other examples of guidance throughout the product. If you have the responsibility of managing backups but very little knowledge or time, we can help you out. Throughout the software you’ll notice little green question marks. You can see two in the screen above and more in each of the screens in other topics below this one. Clicking on these will open a window with additional information about the topic in question which should help to guide you through some of the tougher decisions you may have to make while setting up your backup jobs. Here’s an example: Backup Copies As a part of the wizard you can choose to make a copy of your backup on your network. This process runs as part of the Red Gate SQL Backup engine. It will copy your backup, after completing the backup so it doesn’t cause any additional blocking or resource use within the backup process, to the network location you define. Creating a copy acts as a mechanism of protection for your backups. You can then backup that copy or do other things with it, all without affecting the original backup file. This requires either an additional backup or additional scripting to get it done within the native Microsoft backup engine. Offsite Storage Red Gate offers you the ability to immediately copy your backup to the cloud as a further, off-site, protection of your backups. It’s a service we provide and expose through the Backup wizard. Your backup will complete first, just like with the network backup copy, then an asynchronous process will copy that backup to cloud storage. Again, this is built right into the wizard or even the command line calls to SQL Backup, so it’s part a single process within your system. With native backup you would need to write additional scripts, possibly outside of T-SQL, to make this happen. Before you can use this with your backups you’ll need to do a little setup, but it’s built right into the product to get this done. You’ll be directed to the web site for our hosted storage where you can set up an account. Compression If you have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, or you’re on SQL Server 2008R2 or greater and you have a Standard or Enterprise license, then you have backup compression. It’s built right in and works well. But, if you need even more compression then you might want to consider Red Gate SQL Backup Pro. We offer four levels of compression within the product. This means you can get a little compression faster, or you can just sacrifice some CPU time and get even more compression. You decide. For just a simple example I backed up AdventureWorks2012 using both methods of compression. The resulting file from native was 53mb. Our file was 33mb. That’s a file that is smaller by 38%, not a small number when we start talking gigabytes. We even provide guidance here to help you determine which level of compression would be right for you and your system: So for this test, if you wanted maximum compression with minimum CPU use you’d probably want to go with Level 2 which gets you almost as much compression as Level 3 but will use fewer resources. And that compression is still better than the native one by 10%. Restore Testing Backups are vital. But, a backup is just a file until you restore it. How do you know that you can restore that backup? Of course, you’ll use CHECKSUM to validate that what was read from disk during the backup process is what gets written to the backup file. You’ll also use VERIFYONLY to check that the backup header and the checksums on the backup file are valid. But, this doesn’t do a complete test of the backup. The only complete test is a restore. So, what you really need is a process that tests your backups. This is something you’ll have to schedule separately from your backups, but we provide a couple of mechanisms to help you out here. First, when you create a backup schedule, all done through our wizard which gives you as much guidance as you get when running backups, you get the option of creating a reminder to create a job to test your restores. You can enable this or disable it as you choose when creating your scheduled backups. Once you’re ready to schedule test restores for your databases, we have a wizard for this as well. After you choose the databases and restores you want to test, all configurable for automation, you get to decide if you’re going to restore to a specified copy or to the original database: If you’re doing your tests on a new server (probably the best choice) you can just overwrite the original database if it’s there. If not, you may want to create a new database each time you test your restores. Another part of validating your backups is ensuring that they can pass consistency checks. So we have DBCC built right into the process. You can even decide how you want DBCC run, which error messages to include, limit or add to the checks being run. With this you could offload some DBCC checks from your production system so that you only run the physical checks on your production box, but run the full check on this backup. That makes backup testing not just a general safety process, but a performance enhancer as well: Finally, assuming the tests pass, you can delete the database, leave it in place, or delete it regardless of the tests passing. All this is automated and scheduled through the SQL Agent job on your servers. Running your databases through this process will ensure that you don’t just have backups, but that you have tested backups. Single Point of Management If you have more than one server to maintain, getting backups setup could be a tedious process. But, with Red Gate SQL Backup Pro you can connect to multiple servers and then manage all your databases and all your servers backups from a single location. You’ll be able to see what is scheduled, what has run successfully and what has failed, all from a single interface without having to connect to different servers. Log Shipping Wizard If you want to set up log shipping as part of a disaster recovery process, it can frequently be a pain to get configured correctly. We supply a wizard that will walk you through every step of the process including setting up alerts so you’ll know should your log shipping fail. Summary You want to get your backups right. As outlined above, Red Gate SQL Backup Pro will absolutely help you there. We supply a number of processes and functionalities above and beyond what you get with SQL Server native. Plus, with our guidance, hints and reminders, you will get your backups set up in a way that protects your business.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v5.5.0: Following on from our 101355 release, we bring you... v5.5.0! Resolved issues The following issues have been resolved in 5.5.0: 14634 14848 DataType Grid 14840 14842 14845 UpgradingThe best way to upgrade uComponents is to re-install via Umbraco's back-office package installer, (either from the package repository or a local package upload). Do not uninstall an existing uComponents package, as this may lead to data loss! Umbraco compatibilityThis release is compatible with Umbraco 4...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.Scryber PDF Generation: Scryber.Installer.v0.8.3: This one has tables! A significant update to the scryber library, with the inclusion of tables. There is no column span, or row span, and nested tables are not fully supported. But - they overflow nicely and are well styled. And they can be data bound. Other updates The Link element has inner components directly as a child, rather than in a Content element. The existing files will still continue to work, but are invalid wrt the schema. Databinding is now supported at the document level, r...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.2.0 ???: *???????,??????????????,?????????????? ????????* ????????(Beta) Beta????:https://goagent.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic ??????:uygw@outlook.com ????:https://goagent.codeplex.com/documentation ?????????????????。Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 2: New in this release: Show grid in editor Cut/copy/paste support Bug fixesAscend 3D: Ascend (2013-07-17): Ascend 2.1 Animation bugfixes and speed/robustness improvements Added compatibility for multiple top-level bones on armatures Ascend Blender Exporter 2.1 Removed need to create parent-child relationship between armature and skinning mesh Added support for exporting multiple top-level bones on armatures AscendViewer 1.0.4 Updated to use latest version of Ascend libraryCommunity TFS Build Extensions: July 2013: The July 2013 release contains VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 The Community TFS Build Manager can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery here where updates will first become available. A version supporting VS2010 is also available in the Gallery here.smoketestgit1: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesthg: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesttfs: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingdatajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.1.1: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.7 RC: Planning releasedTerminals: Version 3.1 - Release: Changes since version 3.0:15992 Unified usage of icons in user interface Added context menu in Organize favorites grid Fixed:34219 34210 34223 33981 34209 Install notes:No changes in database (use database from release 3.0) No upgrade of configuration, passwords, credentials or favorites See also upgrade notes for release 3.0Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.573b: XBMC Link - Let MC update your XBMC Library Fixes in place, Enjoy the XBMC Link function Well, Phil's been busy in the background, and come up with a Great new feature for Media Companion. Currently only implemented for movies. Once we're happy that's working with no issues, we'll extend the functionality to include TV shows. All the help for this is build into the application. Go to General Preferences - XBMC Link for details. Help us make it better* Currently only tested on local and ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1307.15: Fix a bug where WPP crash if 'ShowPendingUpdates' is start with wrong credentials. Fix a bug where WPP crash if ArrivalDateAfter and ArrivalDateBefore is equal in the ComputerView. Add a filter in the ComputerView. (Thanks to NorbertFe for this feature request) Add an option, when right-clicking on a computer, you can ask for display the current logon user of the remote computer. Add an option in settings to choose if WPP ping remote computers using IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 and, if fail, IP...Lab Of Things: vBeta1: Initial release of LoTVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...New Projects[C#]A Complete MySQL Manager Project: An open-source MySQL database manager oriented to multi-threading environments, supporting to create an entire database from scratch and edit it.bCal Javascript Calendar Generator: Using this simple javascript library, you can create simple navigable calendars in your website with just one line of user code.Better Network: Tools to delete network profile and network lists in Windows 8.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: 'CS-Script Intellisense' is a real C# intellisense solution based on CS-Script and ICSharpCode.NRefactory/Mono.Cecil.DARF: Dynamic Application Runtime Framework: A set of tools and libraries which help software developers create fully distributed and component-based applications. FeiXinV5: Just TestFollower Catcher: Game made for the 2012 Windows 8 Megathon. Second place in Madrid's local competition.MeeOS .NET: El primer sistema operativo GNU GPL en español.Music Vault: Music Vault is program to store your favorite music in one place, you can in any time move all your music library by moving only one file.MVC uTorrent: This is an ASP.NET MVC uTorrent front end, that utilises the uTorrent API. The main features: - Single page application - Can be hosted in IISMyTaskManager: This project Related to distribute the task to log in users OO2RDF: OO2RDF is a framework for data triplification. P(y)rotein Subcellular Location Image Database: A library that allows communication with an OMERO database, an open-source software for storage and manipulation of biological images.PE Toolbox: PE Toolbox ? ????? ?? ???????????, ????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ?? ?????. ???? ????? ??????????? ???????: - PE IFE (Importing from Excel) PeGscan: *PeGscan*ScriptZilla: ScriptZilla is an Free Editor for Windows with more Than 23 Languages.Sharepoint : Reconciliate SSRS Reports and Datasets with datasources Powershell: Powershell to link datasources to SSRS reports and datasetsSync-Moped: The idea behind the "Sync-Moped" is to synchronize two directories with backup functionality.System.Time: System.Time provides a type for .NET that allows the managing of a time in System.String, System.DateTime and System.TimeSpan form at the same time.Text Analytics: Project summary will be added later.Tibia Universal MC .NET: This tool was written as an attempt to port the [url:http://code.google.com/p/xenomc/] to the .NET Framework.VRFramework: VR Framework is a system for creating a virtual reality games using your PC, and Android smart phone, and Unity 3D.

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  • SQL SERVER – Repair a SQL Server Database Using a Transaction Log Explorer

    - by Pinal Dave
    In this blog, I’ll show how to use ApexSQL Log, a SQL Server transaction log viewer. You can download it for free, install, and play along. But first, let’s describe some disaster recovery scenarios where it’s useful. About SQL Server disaster recovery Along with database development and administration, you must work on a good recovery plan. Disasters do happen and no one’s immune. What you can do is take all actions needed to be ready for a disaster and go through it with minimal data loss and downtime. Besides creating a recovery plan, it’s necessary to have a list of steps that will be executed when a disaster occurs and to test them before a disaster. This way, you’ll know that the plan is good and viable. Testing can also be used as training for all team members, so they can all understand and execute it when the time comes. It will show how much time is needed to have your servers fully functional again and how much data you can lose in a real-life situation. If these don’t meet recovery-time and recovery-point objectives, the plan needs to be improved. Keep in mind that all major changes in environment configuration, business strategy, and recovery objectives require a new recovery plan testing, as these changes most probably induce a recovery plan changing and tweaking. What is a good SQL Server disaster recovery plan? A good SQL Server disaster recovery strategy starts with planning SQL Server database backups. An efficient strategy is to create a full database backup periodically. Between two successive full database backups, you can create differential database backups. It is essential is to create transaction log backups regularly between full database backups. Keep in mind that transaction log backups can be created only on databases in the full recovery model. In other words, a simple, but efficient backup strategy would be a full database backup every night, a transaction log backup every hour, or every 15 minutes. The frequency depends on how much data you can afford to lose and how busy the database is. Another option, instead of creating a full database backup every night, is to create a full database backup once a week (e.g. on Friday at midnight) and differential database backup every night until next Friday when you will create a full database backup again. Once you create your SQL Server database backup strategy, schedule the backups. You can do that easily using SQL Server maintenance plans. Why are transaction logs important? Transaction log backups contain transactions executed on a SQL Server database. They provide enough information to undo and redo the transactions and roll back or forward the database to a point in time. In SQL Server disaster recovery situations, transaction logs enable to repair a SQL Server database and bring it to the state before the disaster. Be aware that even with regular backups, there will be some data missing. These are the transactions made between the last transaction log backup and the time of the disaster. In some situations, to repair your SQL Server database it’s not necessary to re-create the database from its last backup. The database might still be online and all you need to do is roll back several transactions, such as wrong update, insert, or delete. The restore to a point in time feature is available in SQL Server, but for large databases, it is very time-consuming, as SQL Server first restores a full database backup, and then restores transaction log backups, one after another, up to the recovery point. During that time, the database is unavailable. This is where a SQL Server transaction log viewer can help. For optimal recovery, besides having a database in the full recovery model, it’s important that you haven’t manually truncated the online transaction log. This ensures that all transactions made after the last transaction log backup are still in the online transaction log. All you have to do is read and replay them. How to read a SQL Server transaction log? SQL Server doesn’t provide an option to read transaction logs. There are several SQL Server commands and functions that read the content of a transaction log file (fn_dblog, fn_dump_dblog, and DBCC PAGE), but they are undocumented. They require T-SQL knowledge, return a large number of not easy to read and understand columns, sometimes in binary or hexadecimal format. Another challenge is reading UPDATE statements, as it’s necessary to match it to a value in the MDF file. When you finally read the transactions executed, you have to create a script for it. How to easily repair a SQL database? The easiest solution is to use a transaction log reader that will not only read the transactions in the transaction log files, but also automatically create scripts for the read transactions. In the following example, I will show how to use ApexSQL Log to repair a SQL database after a crash. If a database has crashed and both MDF and LDF files are lost, you have to rely on the full database backup and all subsequent transaction log backups. In another scenario, the MDF file is lost, but the LDF file is available. First, restore the last full database backup on SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio. I’ll name it Restored_AW2014. Then, start ApexSQL Log It will automatically detect all local servers. If not, click the icon right to the Server drop-down list, or just type in the SQL Server instance name. Select the Windows or SQL Server authentication type and select the Restored_AW2014 database from the database drop-down list. When all options are set, click Next. ApexSQL Log will show the online transaction log file. Now, click Add and add all transaction log backups created after the full database backup I used to restore the database. In case you don’t have transaction log backups, but the LDF file hasn’t been lost during the SQL Server disaster, add it using Add.   To repair a SQL database to a point in time, ApexSQL Log needs to read and replay all the transactions in the transaction log backups (or the LDF file saved after the disaster). That’s why I selected the Whole transaction log option in the Filter setup. ApexSQL Log offers a range of various filters, which are useful when you need to read just specific transactions. You can filter transactions by the time of the transactions, operation type (e.g. to read only data inserts), table name, SQL Server login that made the transaction, etc. In this scenario, to repair a SQL database, I’ll check all filters and make sure that all transactions are included. In the Operations tab, select all schema operations (DDL). If you omit these, only the data changes will be read so if there were any schema changes, such as a new function created, or an existing table modified, they will be ignored and database will not be properly repaired. The data repair for modified tables will fail. In the Tables tab, I’ll make sure all tables are selected. I will uncheck the Show operations on dropped tables option, to reduce the number of transactions. Click Next. ApexSQL Log offers three options. Select Open results in grid, to get a user-friendly presentation of the transactions. As you can see, details are shown for every transaction, including the old and new values for updated columns, which are clearly highlighted. Now, select them all and then create a redo script by clicking the Create redo script icon in the menu.   For a large number of transactions and in a critical situation, when acting fast is a must, I recommend using the Export results to file option. It will save some time, as the transactions will be directly scripted into a redo file, without showing them in the grid first. Select Generate reconstruction (REDO) script , change the output path if you want, and click Finish. After the redo T-SQL script is created, ApexSQL Log shows the redo script summary: The third option will create a command line statement for a batch file that you can use to schedule execution, which is not really applicable when you repair a SQL database, but quite useful in daily auditing scenarios. To repair your SQL database, all you have to do is execute the generated redo script using an integrated developer environment tool such as SQL Server Management Studio or any other, against the restored database. You can find more information about how to read SQL Server transaction logs and repair a SQL database on ApexSQL Solution center. There are solutions for various situations when data needs to be recovered, restored, or transactions rolled back. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Software Engineering Practices &ndash; Different Projects should have different maturity levels

    - by Dylan Smith
    I’ve had a lot of discussions at the office lately about the drastically different sets of software engineering practices used on our various projects, if what we are doing is appropriate, and what factors should you be considering when determining what practices are most appropriate in a given context. I wanted to write up my thoughts in a little more detail on this subject, so here we go: If you compare any two software projects (specifically comparing their codebases) you’ll often see very different levels of maturity in the software engineering practices employed. By software engineering practices, I’m specifically referring to the quality of the code and the amount of technical debt present in the project. Things such as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Behavior Driven Development, proper adherence to the SOLID principles, etc. are all practices that you would expect at the mature end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum would be the quick-and-dirty solutions that are done using something like an Access Database, Excel Spreadsheet, or maybe some quick “drag-and-drop coding”. For this blog post I’m going to refer to this as the Software Engineering Maturity Spectrum (SEMS). I believe there is a time and a place for projects at every part of that SEMS. The risks and costs associated with under-engineering solutions have been written about a million times over so I won’t bother going into them again here, but there are also (unnecessary) costs with over-engineering a solution. Sometimes putting multiple layers, and IoC containers, and abstracting out the persistence, etc is complete overkill if a one-time use Access database could solve the problem perfectly well. A lot of software developers I talk to seem to automatically jump to the very right-hand side of this SEMS in everything they do. A common rationalization I hear is that it may seem like a small trivial application today, but these things always grow and stick around for many years, then you’re stuck maintaining a big ball of mud. I think this is a cop-out. Sure you can’t always anticipate how an application will be used or grow over its lifetime (can you ever??), but that doesn’t mean you can’t manage it and evolve the underlying software architecture as necessary (even if that means having to toss the code out and re-write it at some point…maybe even multiple times). My thoughts are that we should be making a conscious decision around the start of each project approximately where on the SEMS we want the project to exist. I believe this decision should be based on 3 factors: 1. Importance - How important to the business is this application? What is the impact if the application were to suddenly stop working? 2. Complexity - How complex is the application functionality? 3. Life-Expectancy - How long is this application expected to be in use? Is this a one-time use application, does it fill a short-term need, or is it more strategic and is expected to be in-use for many years to come? Of course this isn’t an exact science. You can’t say that Project X should be at the 73% mark on the SEMS and expect that to be helpful. My point is not that you need to precisely figure out what point on the SEMS the project should be at then translate that into some prescriptive set of practices and techniques you should be using. Rather my point is that we need to be aware that there is a spectrum, and that not everything is going to be (or should be) at the edges of that spectrum, indeed a large number of projects should probably fall somewhere within the middle; and different projects should adopt a different level of software engineering practices and maturity levels based on the needs of that project. To give an example of this way of thinking from my day job: Every couple of years my company plans and hosts a large event where ~400 of our customers all fly in to one location for a multi-day event with various activities. We have some staff whose job it is to organize the logistics of this event, which includes tracking which flights everybody is booked on, arranging for transportation to/from airports, arranging for hotel rooms, name tags, etc The last time we arranged this event all these various pieces of data were tracked in separate spreadsheets and reconciliation and cross-referencing of all the data was literally done by hand using printed copies of the spreadsheets and several people sitting around a table going down each list row by row. Obviously there is some room for improvement in how we are using software to manage the event’s logistics. The next time this event occurs we plan to provide the event planning staff with a more intelligent tool (either an Excel spreadsheet or probably an Access database) that can track all the information in one location and make sure that the various pieces of data are properly linked together (so for example if a person cancels you only need to delete them from one place, and not a dozen separate lists). This solution would fall at or near the very left end of the SEMS meaning that we will just quickly create something with very little attention paid to using mature software engineering practices. If we examine this project against the 3 criteria I listed above for determining it’s place within the SEMS we can see why: Importance – If this application were to stop working the business doesn’t grind to a halt, revenue doesn’t stop, and in fact our customers wouldn’t even notice since it isn’t a customer facing application. The impact would simply be more work for our event planning staff as they revert back to the previous way of doing things (assuming we don’t have any data loss). Complexity – The use cases for this project are pretty straightforward. It simply needs to manage several lists of data, and link them together appropriately. Precisely the task that access (and/or Excel) can do with minimal custom development required. Life-Expectancy – For this specific project we’re only planning to create something to be used for the one event (we only hold these events every 2 years). If it works well this may change (see below). Let’s assume we hack something out quickly and it works great when we plan the next event. We may decide that we want to make some tweaks to the tool and adopt it for planning all future events of this nature. In that case we should examine where the current application is on the SEMS, and make a conscious decision whether something needs to be done to move it further to the right based on the new objectives and goals for this application. This may mean scrapping the access database and re-writing it as an actual web or windows application. In this case, the life-expectancy changed, but let’s assume the importance and complexity didn’t change all that much. We can still probably get away with not adopting a lot of the so-called “best practices”. For example, we can probably still use some of the RAD tooling available and might have an Autonomous View style design that connects directly to the database and binds to typed datasets (we might even choose to simply leave it as an access database and continue using it; this is a decision that needs to be made on a case-by-case basis). At Anvil Digital we have aspirations to become a primarily product-based company. So let’s say we use this tool to plan a handful of events internally, and everybody loves it. Maybe a couple years down the road we decide we want to package the tool up and sell it as a product to some of our customers. In this case the project objectives/goals change quite drastically. Now the tool becomes a source of revenue, and the impact of it suddenly stopping working is significantly less acceptable. Also as we hold focus groups, and gather feedback from customers and potential customers there’s a pretty good chance the feature-set and complexity will have to grow considerably from when we were using it only internally for planning a small handful of events for one company. In this fictional scenario I would expect the target on the SEMS to jump to the far right. Depending on how we implemented the previous release we may be able to refactor and evolve the existing codebase to introduce a more layered architecture, a robust set of automated tests, introduce a proper ORM and IoC container, etc. More likely in this example the jump along the SEMS would be so large we’d probably end up scrapping the current code and re-writing. Although, if it was a slow phased roll-out to only a handful of customers, where we collected feedback, made some tweaks, and then rolled out to a couple more customers, we may be able to slowly refactor and evolve the code over time rather than tossing it out and starting from scratch. The key point I’m trying to get across is not that you should be throwing out your code and starting from scratch all the time. But rather that you should be aware of when and how the context and objectives around a project changes and periodically re-assess where the project currently falls on the SEMS and whether that needs to be adjusted based on changing needs. Note: There is also the idea of “spectrum decay”. Since our industry is rapidly evolving, what we currently accept as mature software engineering practices (the right end of the SEMS) probably won’t be the same 3 years from now. If you have a project that you were to assess at somewhere around the 80% mark on the SEMS today, but don’t touch the code for 3 years and come back and re-assess its position, it will almost certainly have changed since the right end of the SEMS will have moved farther out (maybe the project is now only around 60% due to decay). Developer Skills Another important aspect to this whole discussion is around the skill sets of your architects and lead developers. When talking about the progression of a developers skills from junior->intermediate->senior->… they generally start by only being able to write code that belongs on the left side of the SEMS and as they gain more knowledge and skill they become capable of working at a higher and higher level along the SEMS. We all realize that the learning never stops, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you can comfortably develop at the right-end of the SEMS (the exact practices and techniques that translates to is constantly changing, but that’s not the point here). A critical skill that I’d love to see more evidence of in our industry is the most senior guys not only being able to work at the right-end of the SEMS, but more importantly be able to consciously work at any point along the SEMS as project needs dictate. An even more valuable skill would be if you could make the conscious decision to move a projects code further right on the SEMS (based on changing needs) and do so in an incremental manner without having to start from scratch. An exercise that I’m planning to go through with all of our projects here at Anvil in the near future is to map out where I believe each project currently falls within this SEMS, where I believe the project *should* be on the SEMS based on the business needs, and for those that don’t match up (i.e. most of them) come up with a plan to improve the situation.

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  • Commit in SQL

    - by PRajkumar
    SQL Transaction Control Language Commands (TCL)                                           (COMMIT) Commit Transaction As a SQL language we use transaction control language very frequently. Committing a transaction means making permanent the changes performed by the SQL statements within the transaction. A transaction is a sequence of SQL statements that Oracle Database treats as a single unit. This statement also erases all save points in the transaction and releases transaction locks. Oracle Database issues an implicit COMMIT before and after any data definition language (DDL) statement. Oracle recommends that you explicitly end every transaction in your application programs with a COMMIT or ROLLBACK statement, including the last transaction, before disconnecting from Oracle Database. If you do not explicitly commit the transaction and the program terminates abnormally, then the last uncommitted transaction is automatically rolled back.   Until you commit a transaction: ·         You can see any changes you have made during the transaction by querying the modified tables, but other users cannot see the changes. After you commit the transaction, the changes are visible to other users' statements that execute after the commit ·         You can roll back (undo) any changes made during the transaction with the ROLLBACK statement   Note: Most of the people think that when we type commit data or changes of what you have made has been written to data files, but this is wrong when you type commit it means that you are saying that your job has been completed and respective verification will be done by oracle engine that means it checks whether your transaction achieved consistency when it finds ok it sends a commit message to the user from log buffer but not from data buffer, so after writing data in log buffer it insists data buffer to write data in to data files, this is how it works.   Before a transaction that modifies data is committed, the following has occurred: ·         Oracle has generated undo information. The undo information contains the old data values changed by the SQL statements of the transaction ·         Oracle has generated redo log entries in the redo log buffer of the System Global Area (SGA). The redo log record contains the change to the data block and the change to the rollback block. These changes may go to disk before a transaction is committed ·         The changes have been made to the database buffers of the SGA. These changes may go to disk before a transaction is committed   Note:   The data changes for a committed transaction, stored in the database buffers of the SGA, are not necessarily written immediately to the data files by the database writer (DBWn) background process. This writing takes place when it is most efficient for the database to do so. It can happen before the transaction commits or, alternatively, it can happen some times after the transaction commits.   When a transaction is committed, the following occurs: 1.      The internal transaction table for the associated undo table space records that the transaction has committed, and the corresponding unique system change number (SCN) of the transaction is assigned and recorded in the table 2.      The log writer process (LGWR) writes redo log entries in the SGA's redo log buffers to the redo log file. It also writes the transaction's SCN to the redo log file. This atomic event constitutes the commit of the transaction 3.      Oracle releases locks held on rows and tables 4.      Oracle marks the transaction complete   Note:   The default behavior is for LGWR to write redo to the online redo log files synchronously and for transactions to wait for the redo to go to disk before returning a commit to the user. However, for lower transaction commit latency application developers can specify that redo be written asynchronously and that transaction do not need to wait for the redo to be on disk.   The syntax of Commit Statement is   COMMIT [WORK] [COMMENT ‘your comment’]; ·         WORK is optional. The WORK keyword is supported for compliance with standard SQL. The statements COMMIT and COMMIT WORK are equivalent. Examples Committing an Insert INSERT INTO table_name VALUES (val1, val2); COMMIT WORK; ·         COMMENT Comment is also optional. This clause is supported for backward compatibility. Oracle recommends that you used named transactions instead of commit comments. Specify a comment to be associated with the current transaction. The 'text' is a quoted literal of up to 255 bytes that Oracle Database stores in the data dictionary view DBA_2PC_PENDING along with the transaction ID if a distributed transaction becomes in doubt. This comment can help you diagnose the failure of a distributed transaction. Examples The following statement commits the current transaction and associates a comment with it: COMMIT     COMMENT 'In-doubt transaction Code 36, Call (415) 555-2637'; ·         WRITE Clause Use this clause to specify the priority with which the redo information generated by the commit operation is written to the redo log. This clause can improve performance by reducing latency, thus eliminating the wait for an I/O to the redo log. Use this clause to improve response time in environments with stringent response time requirements where the following conditions apply: The volume of update transactions is large, requiring that the redo log be written to disk frequently. The application can tolerate the loss of an asynchronously committed transaction. The latency contributed by waiting for the redo log write to occur contributes significantly to overall response time. You can specify the WAIT | NOWAIT and IMMEDIATE | BATCH clauses in any order. Examples To commit the same insert operation and instruct the database to buffer the change to the redo log, without initiating disk I/O, use the following COMMIT statement: COMMIT WRITE BATCH; Note: If you omit this clause, then the behavior of the commit operation is controlled by the COMMIT_WRITE initialization parameter, if it has been set. The default value of the parameter is the same as the default for this clause. Therefore, if the parameter has not been set and you omit this clause, then commit records are written to disk before control is returned to the user. WAIT | NOWAIT Use these clauses to specify when control returns to the user. The WAIT parameter ensures that the commit will return only after the corresponding redo is persistent in the online redo log. Whether in BATCH or IMMEDIATE mode, when the client receives a successful return from this COMMIT statement, the transaction has been committed to durable media. A crash occurring after a successful write to the log can prevent the success message from returning to the client. In this case the client cannot tell whether or not the transaction committed. The NOWAIT parameter causes the commit to return to the client whether or not the write to the redo log has completed. This behavior can increase transaction throughput. With the WAIT parameter, if the commit message is received, then you can be sure that no data has been lost. Caution: With NOWAIT, a crash occurring after the commit message is received, but before the redo log record(s) are written, can falsely indicate to a transaction that its changes are persistent. If you omit this clause, then the transaction commits with the WAIT behavior. IMMEDIATE | BATCH Use these clauses to specify when the redo is written to the log. The IMMEDIATE parameter causes the log writer process (LGWR) to write the transaction's redo information to the log. This operation option forces a disk I/O, so it can reduce transaction throughput. The BATCH parameter causes the redo to be buffered to the redo log, along with other concurrently executing transactions. When sufficient redo information is collected, a disk write of the redo log is initiated. This behavior is called "group commit", as redo for multiple transactions is written to the log in a single I/O operation. If you omit this clause, then the transaction commits with the IMMEDIATE behavior. ·         FORCE Clause Use this clause to manually commit an in-doubt distributed transaction or a corrupt transaction. ·         In a distributed database system, the FORCE string [, integer] clause lets you manually commit an in-doubt distributed transaction. The transaction is identified by the 'string' containing its local or global transaction ID. To find the IDs of such transactions, query the data dictionary view DBA_2PC_PENDING. You can use integer to specifically assign the transaction a system change number (SCN). If you omit integer, then the transaction is committed using the current SCN. ·         The FORCE CORRUPT_XID 'string' clause lets you manually commit a single corrupt transaction, where string is the ID of the corrupt transaction. Query the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST data dictionary view to find the transaction IDs of corrupt transactions. You must have DBA privileges to view the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST and to specify this clause. ·         Specify FORCE CORRUPT_XID_ALL to manually commit all corrupt transactions. You must have DBA privileges to specify this clause. Examples Forcing an in doubt transaction. Example The following statement manually commits a hypothetical in-doubt distributed transaction. Query the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST data dictionary view to find the transaction IDs of corrupt transactions. You must have DBA privileges to view the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST and to issue this statement. COMMIT FORCE '22.57.53';

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  • Windows 8 Will be Here Tomorrow; but Should Silverlight be Gone Today?

    - by andrewbrust
    The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary.  IT interests intentionally live in the past.  On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it.  Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of “it takes all kinds.”  Different subcultures have different tendencies.  So be it. Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can’t take such a laissez-faire view of the world though.  Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS.  It must indulge and nourish developers’ fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users. With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later.  Meanwhile, there’s a technology that runs on today’s Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version’s codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack.  That technology is Silverlight.  And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it. But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology’s last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact some are fleeing from it.  Is this sensible?  Is it not unprecedented?  What options does it lead to?  What’s the right way to think about the situation? Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight?  We don’t know.  But Scott Guthrie, the “father” and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him.  John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely.  About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight’s demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers’ fears; but now they’ve moved on. So read into that what you will and let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight’s days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct.  Let’s assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed.  Let’s assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application’s platform needs to stay current. Is this really so different from any technology investment we make?  Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence.  What differs from project to project, is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be.  The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental.  Some of the further changes were too.  But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle.  The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka)  point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8.  And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.  But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers’ skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely.  That’s not a coincidence.  It’s not an accident.  This is a protected transition.  It’s not a slap in the face. There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others: The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see.  Instead of being ignorant of the technology’s expiration date, we believe we know it.  If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it. The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight. .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age.  That’s equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear. My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead.  I understand the logic behind that.  I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus.  But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it.  HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients.  They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved.  But they still lag.  They still feel like they’re emulating something, like they’re prototypes, like they’re not comfortable in their own skins.  They are based on compromise, and they feel compromised too. HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but they are not as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android.  HTML’s roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity.  I do not necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it’s here today. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.  Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog.  A second class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good.  Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular.  Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary?  Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development. If you’re an ISV and you’re coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it’s a different story.  You’ve likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift.  You’re deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.  Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform.  Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility.  Arguably, that’s already happened to Windows.  The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue.  The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable.  We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight.  But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal.  The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft’s internal management of products and technologies.  But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name.  Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you’ll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one.  It’s all coffee, it’s all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end.  Back on the software side, it’s all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end.  Coffee drinkers wouldn’t switch to tea.  Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?

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  • Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

    - by Randy Walker
    I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

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  • Oracle Solaris 11 ZFS Lab for Openworld 2012

    - by user12626122
    Preface This is the content from the Oracle Openworld 2012 ZFS lab. It was well attended - the feedback was that it was a little short - thats probably because in writing it I bacame very time-concious after the ASM/ACFS on Solaris extravaganza I ran last year which was almost too long for mortal man to finish in the 1 hour session. Enjoy. Table of Contents Exercise Z.1: ZFS Pools Exercise Z.2: ZFS File Systems Exercise Z.3: ZFS Compression Exercise Z.4: ZFS Deduplication Exercise Z.5: ZFS Encryption Exercise Z.6: Solaris 11 Shadow Migration Introduction This set of exercises is designed to briefly demonstrate new features in Solaris 11 ZFS file system: Deduplication, Encryption and Shadow Migration. Also included is the creation of zpools and zfs file systems - the basic building blocks of the technology, and also Compression which is the compliment of Deduplication. The exercises are just introductions - you are referred to the ZFS Adminstration Manual for further information. From Solaris 11 onward the online manual pages consist of zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) with further feature-specific information in zfs_allow(1M), zfs_encrypt(1M) and zfs_share(1M). The lab is easily carried out in a VirtualBox running Solaris 11 with 6 virtual 3 Gb disks to play with. Exercise Z.1: ZFS Pools Task: You have several disks to use for your new file system. Create a new zpool and a file system within it. Lab: You will check the status of existing zpools, create your own pool and expand it. Your Solaris 11 installation already has a root ZFS pool. It contains the root file system. Check this: root@solaris:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 15.9G 6.62G 9.25G 41% 1.00x ONLINE - root@solaris:~# zpool status pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors Note the disk device the root pool is on - c3t0d0s0 Now you will create your own ZFS pool. First you will check what disks are available: root@solaris:~# echo | format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c3t0d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 2085 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@0,0 1. c3t2d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@2,0 2. c3t3d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@3,0 3. c3t4d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@4,0 4. c3t5d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@5,0 5. c3t6d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@6,0 6. c3t7d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@7,0 Specify disk (enter its number): Specify disk (enter its number): The root disk is numbered 0. The others are free for use. Try creating a simple pool and observe the error message: root@solaris:~# zpool create mypool c3t2d0 c3t3d0 'mypool' successfully created, but with no redundancy; failure of one device will cause loss of the pool So destroy that pool and create a mirrored pool instead: root@solaris:~# zpool destroy mypool root@solaris:~# zpool create mypool mirror c3t2d0 c3t3d0 root@solaris:~# zpool status mypool pool: mypool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM mypool ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors Back to topExercise Z.2: ZFS File Systems Task: You have to create file systems for later exercises. You can see that when a pool is created, a file system of the same name is created: root@solaris:~# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 86.5K 2.94G 31K /mypool Create your filesystems and mountpoints as follows: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o mountpoint=/data1 mypool/mydata1 The -o option sets the mount point and automatically creates the necessary directory. root@solaris:~# zfs list mypool/mydata1 NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool/mydata1 31K 2.94G 31K /data1 Back to top Exercise Z.3: ZFS Compression Task:Try out different forms of compression available in ZFS Lab:Create 2nd filesystem with compression, fill both file systems with the same data, observe results You can see from the zfs(1) manual page that there are several types of compression available to you, set with the property=value syntax: compression=on | off | lzjb | gzip | gzip-N | zle Controls the compression algorithm used for this dataset. The lzjb compression algorithm is optimized for performance while providing decent data compression. Setting compression to on uses the lzjb compression algorithm. The gzip compression algorithm uses the same compression as the gzip(1) command. You can specify the gzip level by using the value gzip-N where N is an integer from 1 (fastest) to 9 (best compression ratio). Currently, gzip is equivalent to gzip-6 (which is also the default for gzip(1)). Create a second filesystem with compression turned on. Note how you set and get your values separately: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o mountpoint=/data2 mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:~# zfs set compression=gzip-9 mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:~# zfs get compression mypool/mydata1 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/mydata1 compression off default root@solaris:~# zfs get compression mypool/mydata2 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/mydata2 compression gzip-9 local Now you can copy the contents of /usr/lib into both your normal and compressing filesystem and observe the results. Don't forget the dot or period (".") in the find(1) command below: root@solaris:~# cd /usr/lib root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pdv /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pdv /data2 The copy into the compressing file system takes longer - as it has to perform the compression but the results show the effect: root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.35G 1.59G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.01G 1.59G 1.01G /data1 mypool/mydata2 341M 1.59G 341M /data2 Note that the available space in the pool is shared amongst the file systems. This behavior can be modified using quotas and reservations which are not covered in this lab but are covered extensively in the ZFS Administrators Guide. Back to top Exercise Z.4: ZFS Deduplication The deduplication property is used to remove redundant data from a ZFS file system. With the property enabled duplicate data blocks are removed synchronously. The result is that only unique data is stored and common componenents are shared. Task:See how to implement deduplication and its effects Lab: You will create a ZFS file system with deduplication turned on and see if it reduces the amount of physical storage needed when we again fill it with a copy of /usr/lib. root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs destroy mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs set dedup=on mypool/mydata1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# rm -rf /data1/* root@solaris:/usr/lib# mkdir /data1/2nd-copy root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.02M 2.94G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 43K 2.94G 43K /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pd /data1 2142768 blocks root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.02G 1.99G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.01G 1.99G 1.01G /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pd /data1/2nd-copy 2142768 blocks root@solaris:/usr/lib#zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.99G 1.96G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.98G 1.96G 1.98G /data1 You could go on creating copies for quite a while...but you get the idea. Note that deduplication and compression can be combined: the compression acts on metadata. Deduplication works across file systems in a pool and there is a zpool-wide property dedupratio: root@solaris:/usr/lib# zpool get dedupratio mypool NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool dedupratio 4.30x - Deduplication can also be checked using "zpool list": root@solaris:/usr/lib# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT mypool 2.98G 1001M 2.01G 32% 4.30x ONLINE - rpool 15.9G 6.66G 9.21G 41% 1.00x ONLINE - Before moving on to the next topic, destroy that dataset and free up some space: root@solaris:~# zfs destroy mypool/mydata1 Back to top Exercise Z.5: ZFS Encryption Task: Encrypt sensitive data. Lab: Explore basic ZFS encryption. This lab only covers the basics of ZFS Encryption. In particular it does not cover various aspects of key management. Please see the ZFS Adminastrion Manual and the zfs_encrypt(1M) manual page for more detail on this functionality. Back to top root@solaris:~# zfs create -o encryption=on mypool/data2 Enter passphrase for 'mypool/data2': ******** Enter again: ******** root@solaris:~# Creation of a descendent dataset shows that encryption is inherited from the parent: root@solaris:~# zfs create mypool/data2/data3 root@solaris:~# zfs get -r encryption,keysource,keystatus,checksum mypool/data2 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/data2 encryption on local mypool/data2 keysource passphrase,prompt local mypool/data2 keystatus available - mypool/data2 checksum sha256-mac local mypool/data2/data3 encryption on inherited from mypool/data2 mypool/data2/data3 keysource passphrase,prompt inherited from mypool/data2 mypool/data2/data3 keystatus available - mypool/data2/data3 checksum sha256-mac inherited from mypool/data2 You will find the online manual page zfs_encrypt(1M) contains examples. In particular, if time permits during this lab session you may wish to explore the changing of a key using "zfs key -c mypool/data2". Exercise Z.6: Shadow Migration Shadow Migration allows you to migrate data from an old file system to a new file system while simultaneously allowing access and modification to the new file system during the process. You can use Shadow Migration to migrate a local or remote UFS or ZFS file system to a local file system. Task: You wish to migrate data from one file system (UFS, ZFS, VxFS) to ZFS while mainaining access to it. Lab: Create the infrastructure for shadow migration and transfer one file system into another. First create the file system you want to migrate root@solaris:~# zpool create oldstuff c3t4d0 root@solaris:~# zfs create oldstuff/forgotten Then populate it with some files: root@solaris:~# cd /var/adm root@solaris:/var/adm# find . -print | cpio -pdv /oldstuff/forgotten You need the shadow-migration package installed: root@solaris:~# pkg install shadow-migration Packages to install: 1 Create boot environment: No Create backup boot environment: No Services to change: 1 DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 1/1 14/14 0.2/0.2 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 39/39 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 You then enable the shadowd service: root@solaris:~# svcadm enable shadowd root@solaris:~# svcs shadowd STATE STIME FMRI online 7:16:09 svc:/system/filesystem/shadowd:default Set the filesystem to be migrated to read-only root@solaris:~# zfs set readonly=on oldstuff/forgotten Create a new zfs file system with the shadow property set to the file system to be migrated: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o shadow=file:///oldstuff/forgotten mypool/remembered Use the shadowstat(1M) command to see the progress of the migration: root@solaris:~# shadowstat EST BYTES BYTES ELAPSED DATASET XFRD LEFT ERRORS TIME mypool/remembered 92.5M - - 00:00:59 mypool/remembered 99.1M 302M - 00:01:09 mypool/remembered 109M 260M - 00:01:19 mypool/remembered 133M 304M - 00:01:29 mypool/remembered 149M 339M - 00:01:39 mypool/remembered 156M 86.4M - 00:01:49 mypool/remembered 156M 8E 29 (completed) Note that if you had created /mypool/remembered as encrypted, this would be the preferred method of encrypting existing data. Similarly for compressing or deduplicating existing data. The procedure for migrating a file system over NFS is similar - see the ZFS Administration manual. That concludes this lab session.

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