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• From the Classroom to the Boardroom

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pens and Paper...these are the only things being a student and being a graduate / professional have in common. Walking in to the offices of Oracle South Africa as a graduate the first thing you notice is how polished and sleek all the people who work here look. 80% of the ladies wear sky-scraper heels and walk with the greatest grace. This was the first of many rude awakenings to remind me that I am no longer a student but a graduate. My first struggle was having to wake up at wee hours of the morning to prepare for work. As a student going to class was almost an optional thing, if you missed a morning class you could always attend an evening class to make up for it or simply attend with another group. But in the workplace, you HAVE to show up every single morning at the same time, with no option of coming in when it suits you and there is definitely no coming in with the evening class/shift. As a student, the earliest hour I ever woke up was 7:00am, anything earlier than that was considered inhumane torture. My reason for waking up every morning as a student was “you have a degree to go get” but as a graduate having to go to work I have to say to myself “here’s to a new day of learning and growing”. My second struggle has come in having to change my beloved wardrobe. Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about fashion and shopping. For me Shopping is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, that should not be messed with. Therefore it was with great sadness that I swopped my rippled skinny jeans for pin-striped formal pants, my long chandelier earrings for simple studs, my flat shoes for heels, my sheer blouses for crisp white shirts, even my beloved wild hair had to make way for a simple ponytail. Our looks as ladies also came under great scrutiny, we had to acquaint ourselves with some serious grooming tools: the mascara, blush, lip-gloss, blush, a touch of lipstick and a manicure set. Language was a struggle of its own as well. Being a student you learn to relate to your peers in a informal way. In the workplace you have to address everyone with the same respect, including your peers. Words like “Hey buddy” had to make way for “good morning friend”. The month long winter school holiday was one of the things I looked forward to as a student. This was a time where we got to be at home and avoid the coldest month of the year, July. It was the most amazing thing ever, just sleeping and snuggling up to all sorts of warm things but sadly it is now a thing of the past. It is currently winter in South Africa and going to work has become the most unfashionable thing with all the jackets, boots, scarves and gloves. But summer is coming and I will miss those holidays too. As a student the school holidays were like a gift for us to catch a break and not think for a while which was why it was imaginable how someone would go on for the entire year without a break, with only the promise of a mere 21 days annual leave!! Right now I am sure we are all looking forward to taking that annual leave when the time is right. The worst rude awakening I must say, has to be presenting in front of clients and managers. As a student you have the same class mates for almost four years therefore presenting in front of them becomes the norm over the years and your lecturer will always go gently on you. What they don’t tell you at University is that in the real world, time is money and clients pay money to see you present therefore there is no room for error. Clients are not there to give you a score and boost your ego, they expect nothing less than 100% and they will let you know without a second thought. For a graduate this can feel like you are being fed to the sharks, you either get eaten or you swim for your life. At the end of the day, it is all an experience that is meant to groom us into better professional and make us a part of the Red Team. All the sacrifices are worth it and they lead us to being better and more polished professionals. So if you are interested in joining the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for more information and for our latest vacancies and internships. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Key Windows Phone Development Concepts

  - by Tim Murphy

  As I am doing more development in and out of the enterprise arena for Windows Phone I decide I would study for the 70-599 test.  I generally take certification tests as a way to force me to dig deeper into a technology.  Between the development and studying I decided it would be good to put a post together of key development features in Windows Phone 7 environment.  Contrary to popular belief the launch of Windows Phone 8 will not obsolete Windows Phone 7 development.  With the launch of 7.8 coming shortly and people who will remain on 7.X for the foreseeable future there are still consumers needing these apps so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. PhoneApplicationService This is a class that every Windows Phone developer needs to become familiar with.  When it comes to application state this is your go to repository.  It also contains events that help with management of your application’s lifecycle.  You can access it like the following code sample. 1: PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["ValidUser"] = userResult; DeviceNetworkInformation This class allows you to determine the connectivity of the device and be notified when something changes with that connectivity.  If you are making web service calls you will want to check here before firing off. I have found that this class doesn’t actually work very well for determining if you have internet access.  You are better of using the following code where IsConnectedToInternet is an App level property. private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e){ // Validate user access if (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None) { IsConnectedToInternet = true; } else { IsConnectedToInternet = false; } NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged += new NetworkAddressChangedEventHandler(NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged);}void NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged(object sender, EventArgs e){ IsConnectedToInternet = (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None);} Push Notification Push notification allows your application to receive notifications in a way that reduces the application’s power needs. This MSDN article is a good place to get the basics of push notification, but you can see the essential concept in the diagram below.  There are three types of push notification: toast, Tile and raw.  The first two work regardless of the state of the application where as raw messages are discarded if your application is not running.   Live Tiles Live tiles are one of the main differentiators of the Windows Phone platform.  They allow users to find information at a glance from their start screen without navigating into individual apps.  Knowing how to implement them can be a great boost to the attractiveness of your application. The simplest step-by-step explanation for creating live tiles is here. Local Database While your application really only has Isolated Storage as a data store there are some ways of giving you database functionality to develop against.  There are a number of open source ORM style solutions.  Probably the best and most native way I have found is to use LINQ to SQL.  It does take a significant amount of setup, but the ease of use once it is configured is worth the cost.  Rather than repeat the full concepts here I will point you to a post that I wrote previously. Tasks (Bing, Email) Leveraging built in features of the Windows Phone platform is an easy way to add functionality that would be expensive to develop on your own.  The classes that you need to make yourself familiar with are BingMapsDirectionsTask and EmailComposeTask.  This will allow your application to supply directions and give the user an email path to relay information to friends and associates. Event model Because of the ability for users to switch quickly to switch to other apps or the home screen is just one reason why knowing the Windows Phone event model is important.  You need to be able to save data so that if a user gets a phone call they can come back to exactly where they were in your application.  This means that you will need to handle such events as Launching, Activated, Deactivated and Closing at an application level.  You will probably also want to get familiar with the OnNavigatedTo and OnNavigatedFrom events at the page level.  These will give you an opportunity to save data as a user navigates through your app. Summary This is just a small portion of the concepts that you will use while building Windows Phone apps, but these are some of the most critical.  With the launch of Windows Phone 8 this list will probably expand.  Take the time to investigate these topics further and try them out in your apps. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 7,Windows Phone,WP7,Software Development,70-599

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• C++ strongly typed typedef

  - by Kian

  I've been trying to think of a way of declaring strongly typed typedefs, to catch a certain class of bugs in the compilation stage. It's often the case that I'll typedef an int into several types of ids, or a vector to position or velocity: typedef int EntityID; typedef int ModelID; typedef Vector3 Position; typedef Vector3 Velocity; This can make the intent of code more clear, but after a long night of coding one might make silly mistakes like comparing different kinds of ids, or adding a position to a velocity perhaps. EntityID eID; ModelID mID; if ( eID == mID ) // <- Compiler sees nothing wrong { /*bug*/ } Position p; Velocity v; Position newP = p + v; // bug, meant p + v*s but compiler sees nothing wrong Unfortunately, suggestions I've found for strongly typed typedefs include using boost, which at least for me isn't a possibility (I do have c++11 at least). So after a bit of thinking, I came upon this idea, and wanted to run it by someone. First, you declare the base type as a template. The template parameter isn't used for anything in the definition, however: template < typename T > class IDType { unsigned int m_id; public: IDType( unsigned int const& i_id ): m_id {i_id} {}; friend bool operator==<T>( IDType<T> const& i_lhs, IDType<T> const& i_rhs ); }; Friend functions actually need to be forward declared before the class definition, which requires a forward declaration of the template class. We then define all the members for the base type, just remembering that it's a template class. Finally, when we want to use it, we typedef it as: class EntityT; typedef IDType<EntityT> EntityID; class ModelT; typedef IDType<ModelT> ModelID; The types are now entirely separate. Functions that take an EntityID will throw a compiler error if you try to feed them a ModelID instead, for example. Aside from having to declare the base types as templates, with the issues that entails, it's also fairly compact. I was hoping anyone had comments or critiques about this idea? One issue that came to mind while writing this, in the case of positions and velocities for example, would be that I can't convert between types as freely as before. Where before multiplying a vector by a scalar would give another vector, so I could do: typedef float Time; typedef Vector3 Position; typedef Vector3 Velocity; Time t = 1.0f; Position p = { 0.0f }; Velocity v = { 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f }; Position newP = p + v*t; With my strongly typed typedef I'd have to tell the compiler that multypling a Velocity by a Time results in a Position. class TimeT; typedef Float<TimeT> Time; class PositionT; typedef Vector3<PositionT> Position; class VelocityT; typedef Vector3<VelocityT> Velocity; Time t = 1.0f; Position p = { 0.0f }; Velocity v = { 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f }; Position newP = p + v*t; // Compiler error To solve this, I think I'd have to specialize every conversion explicitly, which can be kind of a bother. On the other hand, this limitation can help prevent other kinds of errors (say, multiplying a Velocity by a Distance, perhaps, which wouldn't make sense in this domain). So I'm torn, and wondering if people have any opinions on my original issue, or my approach to solving it.

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• NSArray in NSArray do not return the image I want

  - by Tibi

  Hi there, I've got a code snippet here that I can't make working. NSUInteger i; //NSMutableArray *textures = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:kNumTextures]; //NSMutableArray *texturesHighlighted = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:kNumTextures]; NSMutableArray *textures= [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for (i = 1; i <= kNumTextures; i++) { NSString *imageName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"texture%d.png", i]; NSString *imageNameHighlighted = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"texture%d_select.png", i]; UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:imageName]; UIImage *imageHighlighted = [UIImage imageNamed:imageNameHighlighted]; //NSArray *pics = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:(UIImage)image,(UIImage)imageHighlighted,nil]; NSArray *pics = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:image,imageHighlighted,nil]; [textures addObject:pics]; [pics release]; } //select randomly the position of the picture that will be represented twice on the board NSInteger randomTexture = arc4random()%([textures count]+1); //extract image corresponding to the randomly selected index //remove corresponding pictures from textures array NSArray *coupleTexture = [textures objectAtIndex:randomTexture]; [textures removeObjectAtIndex:randomTexture]; //create the image array containing 1 couple + all other pictures NSMutableArray *texturesBoard = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:kNumPotatoes]; [texturesBoard addObject:coupleTexture]; [texturesBoard addObject:coupleTexture]; [coupleTexture release]; NSArray *pics = [[NSArray alloc] init]; for (pics in textures) { [texturesBoard addObject:pics]; } [pics release]; //shuffle the textures //[texturesBoard shuffledMutableArray]; //Array with masks NSMutableArray *masks= [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for (i = 1; i <= kNumMasks; i++) { NSString *maskName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"mask%d.png", i]; UIImage *mask = [UIImage imageNamed:maskName]; //NSArray *pics = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:mask,nil]; [masks addObject:mask]; //[pics release]; [maskName release]; [mask release]; } //Now mask all images in texturesBoard NSMutableArray *list = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for (i = 0; i <= kNumMasks-1; i++) { //take on image couple from textures NSArray *imgArray = [texturesBoard objectAtIndex:i]; UIImage *mask = [masks objectAtIndex:i]; //mask it with the mask un the array at corresponding index UIImage *img1 =(UIImage *) [imgArray objectAtIndex:0]; UIImage *img2 =(UIImage *) [imgArray objectAtIndex:1]; UIImage *picsMasked = [self maskImage:(UIImage *)img1 withMask:(UIImage *)mask]; UIImage *picsHighlightedMasked = [self maskImage:(UIImage *)img2 withMask:(UIImage *)mask]; //Init image with highlighted status TapDetectingImageView *imageView = [[TapDetectingImageView alloc] initWithImage:picsMasked imageHighlighted:picsHighlightedMasked]; [list addObject:imageView]; } The problem here is that : img1 and img2, are not images but rather NSArray with multiple entries. Ican't figure why... dos any fresh spirit here could provide me with some clue to fix. maaany thanks.

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• Override `drop` for a custom sequence

  - by Bruno Reis

  In short: in Clojure, is there a way to redefine a function from the standard sequence API (which is not defined on any interface like ISeq, IndexedSeq, etc) on a custom sequence type I wrote? 1. Huge data files I have big files in the following format: A long (8 bytes) containing the number n of entries n entries, each one being composed of 3 longs (ie, 24 bytes) 2. Custom sequence I want to have a sequence on these entries. Since I cannot usually hold all the data in memory at once, and I want fast sequential access on it, I wrote a class similar to the following: (deftype DataSeq [id ^long cnt ^long i cached-seq] clojure.lang.IndexedSeq (index [_] i) (count [_] (- cnt i)) (seq [this] this) (first [_] (first cached-seq)) (more [this] (if-let [s (next this)] s '())) (next [_] (if (not= (inc i) cnt) (if (next cached-seq) (DataSeq. id cnt (inc i) (next cached-seq)) (DataSeq. id cnt (inc i) (with-open [f (open-data-file id)] ; open a memory mapped byte array on the file ; seek to the exact position to begin reading ; decide on an optimal amount of data to read ; eagerly read and return that amount of data )))))) The main idea is to read ahead a bunch of entries in a list and then consume from that list. Whenever the cache is completely consumed, if there are remaining entries, they are read from the file in a new cache list. Simple as that. To create an instance of such a sequence, I use a very simple function like: (defn ^DataSeq load-data [id] (next (DataSeq. id (count-entries id) -1 []))) ; count-entries is a trivial "open file and read a long" memoized As you can see, the format of the data allowed me to implement count in very simply and efficiently. 3. drop could be O(1) In the same spirit, I'd like to reimplement drop. The format of these data files allows me to reimplement drop in O(1) (instead of the standard O(n)), as follows: if dropping less then the remaining cached items, just drop the same amount from the cache and done; if dropping more than cnt, then just return the empty list. otherwise, just figure out the position in the data file, jump right into that position, and read data from there. My difficulty is that drop is not implemented in the same way as count, first, seq, etc. The latter functions call a similarly named static method in RT which, in turn, calls my implementation above, while the former, drop, does not check if the instance of the sequence it is being called on provides a custom implementation. Obviously, I could provide a function named anything but drop that does exactly what I want, but that would force other people (including my future self) to remember to use it instead of drop every single time, which sucks. So, the question is: is it possible to override the default behaviour of drop? 4. A workaround (I dislike) While writing this question, I've just figured out a possible workaround: make the reading even lazier. The custom sequence would just keep an index and postpone the reading operation, that would happen only when first was called. The problem is that I'd need some mutable state: the first call to first would cause some data to be read into a cache, all the subsequent calls would return data from this cache. There would be a similar logic on next: if there's a cache, just next it; otherwise, don't bother populating it -- it will be done when first is called again. This would avoid unnecessary disk reads. However, this is still less than optimal -- it is still O(n), and it could easily be O(1). Anyways, I don't like this workaround, and my question is still open. Any thoughts? Thanks.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 17, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 17, 2010Popular ReleasesVCC: Latest build, v2.1.31217.1: Automatic drop of latest buildBCrypt.Net: BCrypt.Net R4: Fixed a integer overflow at workFactor = 31LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.0: This is a working version of the LCSK for Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC 3 (using Razor View Engine). this is still provider based (with 1 provider Sql) and this is still using WebService and Windows Forms operator console. The solution is cleaner, with an installer to create tables etc. Let me know your feedbackOrchard Project: Orchard 0.9: Orchard Release Notes Build: 0.9.253 Published: 12/16/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install the Orchard tech preview using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard-Using-Web-PI.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.0.9.253.zip file. The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents of the Orch...SharpDropBox Client for .NET: WP7 SharpDropBox Client - 0.1 Technology Preview: I decided to go ahead and release this. It works well for simple browsing folder structure/downloading files (and login works). See samples for an example of how to use it. I am in progress with a couple other methods which aren't currently working.SQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 2.9: 1. automatically set sql for new query if a object is selected(table/sp/function/view)SplendidCRM: SplendidCRM 5.0 Community Edition: SplendidCRM Software has adopted the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) for its Community Edition. This release includes the full set of SQL source code in the Community Edition, something that was previously only available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions. An article on the subject of Commercial Open-Source licensing has been posted at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/splendid-guide-article6.aspx.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 12-15-2010: This release contains a few minor bug fixes and hopefully the GDAL libraries for the 3.5 x86 build actually built to the correct directory this time.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...Access Control Service Samples and Documentation (Labs): Samples-R3: Contains latest ACS samples (corresponding to R3 release) that show how to integrate ACS with web services, ASP.NET websites (Web Forms and MVC) and on how to interact with the ACS Management Service. The Readmes for these samples are available here.TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 5: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous ...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.2 ALPHA: 2.2.2 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - The spirit ...Silverlight Contrib: Silverlight Contrib 2010.1.0: 2010.1.0 New FeaturesCompatibility Release for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010FlickrNet API Library: 3.1.4000: Newest release. Now contains dedicated Windows Phone 7 DLL as well as all previous DLLs. Also contains Windows Help file documentation now as standard.mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket Drop 2: Changes: based on SuperSocket 1.3 supported sub protocol supported SSL/TLS encryption (wss) in Sync socket mode fixed some data communication bugsWii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...New ProjectsaoleFilter: This is a Filter by MagicshuiChocottone: Simple to-do listData Access Engine (DAE): Data Access Engine (DAE) is an open source and free .NET component to access all popular DBMSs such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft Access, SQLite and databases that connected by ODBC. DAE helps to connect different DBMSs at the same time. DependencyEvaluation: Programmatically sort your objects based on dependencies. Would work as a compiler framework, project planning, data binding, etc.Doc2Text Converter: A converter that can convert document files(like .doc,.ppt,and .pdf) to plain text.Dynamics AX Test Runner for Visual Studio 2010: Invoke Dynamics AX Test cases from within Visual Studio 2010 and retrieve the results.ExtensibleExtensions: Pack of extensions, firstly text utilities like pluralize, capitalize will be included.FluentHttp: .NET fluent api wrapper for creating restful web requests.K:L:O:N:K Updater Service: The K:L:O:N:K Updater Service is a deployment tool which can be used to deploy Microsoft Installer (msi ), zip or other file formats. A directory is setup to be the deployment directory. Put files into this directory and the packages are distributed and installed at clients.Keyki: my code repositoryLED Editor: Simple project for editing a LED sequence ...Maui: SchedulerMcAfee Vulnerability Manager - Delta Report: Processes two .CSV files generated by McAfee Vulnerability Manager to highlight which vulnerabilities were patched or are still outstanding.milkway Project: A java web project under Spring. Galaxy is an enterprise wiki system.Minecraft Save Wizard: Do you like minecraft ? Do you like it so much that you wish there were more worlds ? Well now you can have as many worlds as you desire. Simply move them to and from your saves folder to a backup folder using this software. It couldn't be simpler ;)Minis Manager: A manager for miniature figures to use for rpgs etc.Model2Form: An ASP.NET Control similar to GridView but it auto builds a Web From in run-time by binding a Model. OBD C# Wrapper: OBD C# Wrapper I want to help peaople to get data from an OBD system. The idea is to create a C# class with preconfigured methods for load values and for use them in a GUI. With this class people have to focalized on the GUI design and not on the interface with OBD.Opalis Extension Local Group and User Management: A Opalis Integration pack allowing for management of local computer groups and users.Opalis Integration Pack: VMWare VSphere: An integration Pack for Opalis. Extending Opalis to integrate fully with VMWare. Built using the Vmware Powershell CMDLets wrapped in C#.Opalis Utilities: An integration pack for Opalis. Extending Opalis to provide some addition UtilitiesOrchard Maps: A Maps module for OrchardOur ICProject: IC 2011 projectpatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk provides guidance and sample implementations that describe and illustrate recommended practices for building next generation web applications using web technologies like HTML5, jQuery, CSS3 and IE9. pianduan: ????pob: xna game in developmentpscommand Firefox Extension: A Firefox extension which allows user to invoke PowerShell commands on links.R.NET: R.NET enables .NET Framework to collaborate with R statistical computing. R.NET requires .NET Framework 4 and R.dll. You already have the DLL in the `bin' folder if you installed R environment, and you need no other extra installations. R.NET is developed in C#.Rough Set tool set: Rough Set Tool SetSerial Port Terminal (SPTerm): Serial Port Terminal (SPTerm) is used for basic communication using serial port (com). Sending bytes and ASCII from PC can be done using SPTerm. It is useful for micro controller projects for UART and simple transmission. Hex data can be sent out directly from text box in SPTermSLGame: NullThe Jumping Point: TJP is a 2 player sidescroller based on SFML. TJP is developed in C++ and will be available for both linux and windows.UIT CRM: Ð? án môn h?c Qu?n lý d? án CNTT c?a nhóm. (tru?ng ÐH CNTT - ÐHQG TpHCM)

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #033

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Spatial Database Definition and Research Documents Here is the definition from Wikipedia about spatial database : A spatial database is a database that is optimized to store and query data related to objects in space, including points, lines and polygons. While typical databases can understand various numeric and character types of data, additional functionality needs to be added for databases to process spatial data types. Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice A very common question which I receive is how to only get Date or Time part from datetime value. In this blog post I explain the same in very simple words. T-SQL Paging Query Technique Comparison (OVER and ROW_NUMBER()) – CTE vs. Derived Table I have received few emails and comments about my post SQL SERVER – T-SQL Paging Query Technique Comparison – SQL 2000 vs SQL 2005. The main question was is this can be done using CTE? Absolutely! What about Performance? It is identical! Please refer above mentioned article for the history of paging. SQL SERVER – Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation One of the very first error I ever encountered in my career was to resolve this conflict. I have blogged about it and I have realized that many others like me who are facing this error. LEN and DATALENGTH of NULL Simple Example Here is the question for you what is the LEN of NULL value? Well it is very easy – just read the blog. Recovery Models and Selection Very simple and easy explanation of the Database Backup Recovery Model and how to select the best option for you. Explanation SQL SERVER Hash Join Hash join gives best performance when two more join tables are joined and at-least one of them have no index or is not sorted. It is also expected that smaller of the either of table can be read in memory completely (though not necessary). Easy Sequence of SELECT FROM JOIN WHERE GROUP BY HAVING ORDER BY SELECT yourcolumns FROM tablenames JOIN tablenames WHERE condition GROUP BY yourcolumns HAVING aggregatecolumn condition ORDER BY yourcolumns NorthWind Database or AdventureWorks Database – Samples Databases In this blog post we learn how to install Northwind database. I also shared the source where one can download this database as that is used in many examples on MSDN help files. sp_HelpText for sp_HelpText – Puzzle A simple quick puzzle – do you know the answer of it? If not, go ahead and read the blog. 2008 SQL SERVER – 2008 – Step By Step Installation Guide With Images When SQL Server 2008 was newly introduced lots of people had no clue how to install SQL Server 2008 and the amount of the question which I used to receive were so much. I wrote this blog post with the spirit that this will help all the newbies to install SQL Server 2008 with the help of images. Still today this blog post has been bible for all of the people who are confused with SQL Server installation. Inline Variable Assignment I loved this feature. I have always wanted this feature to be present in SQL Server. The last time when I met developers from Microsoft SQL Server, I had talked about this feature. I think this feature saves some time but make the code more readable. Introduction to Policy Management – Enforcing Rules on SQL Server If our company policy is to create all the Stored Procedure with prefix ‘usp’ that developers should be just prevented to create Stored Procedure with any other prefix. Let us see a small tutorial how to create conditions and policy which will prevent any future SP to be created with any other prefix. 2009 Performance Counters from System Views – By Kevin Mckenna Many of you are not aware of this fact that access to performance information is readily available in SQL Server and that too without querying performance counters using a custom application or via perfmon. Till now, this fact has remained undisclosed but through this post I would like to explain you can easily access SQL Server performance counter information. Without putting much effort you will come across the system viewsys.dm_os_performance_counters. As the name suggests, this provides you easy access to the SQL Server performance counter information that is passed on to perfmon, but you can get at it via tsql. Customize Toolbar – Remove Debug Button from Toolbar I was fond of SQL Server Debugger feature in SQL Server 2000. To my utter disappointment, this feature was withdrawn from SQL Server 2005. The button of the debugger is similar to a play button and is used to run debugging commands of Visual Studio. Because of this reason, it gets very much infuriating for developers when they are developing on both – Visual Studio and SSMS. Let us now see how we can remove debugging button from SQL Server Management Studio. Effect of Normalization on Index and Performance A very interesting conversation which started from twitter. If you want to read one link this is the link I encourage you to read it. SSMS Feature – Multi-server Queries Using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) DBAs can now query multiple servers from one window. It is quite common for DBAs with large amount of servers to maintain and gather information from multiple SQL Servers and create report. This feature is a blessing for the DBAs, as they can now assemble all the information instantaneously without going anywhere. Query Optimizer Hint ROBUST PLAN – Question to You “ROBUST PLAN” is a kind of query hint which works quite differently than other hints. It does not improve join or force any indexes to use; it just makes sure that a query does not crash due to over the limit size of row. Let me elaborate upon it in the blog post. 2010 Do you really know the difference between various date functions available in SQL Server 2012? Here is a three part story where we explored the same with examples: Fastest Way to Restore the Database Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2 Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2 – WITH GETDATE Shrinking NDF and MDF Files – Readers’ Opinion Shrinking Database always creates performance degradation and increases fragmentation in the database. I suggest that you keep that in mind before you start reading the following comment. If you are going to say Shrinking Database is bad and evil, here I am saying it first and loud. Now, the comment of Imran is written while keeping in mind only the process showing how the Shrinking Database Operation works. Imran has already explained his understanding and requests further explanation. I have removed the Best Practices section from Imran’s comments, as there are a few corrections. 2011 Solution – Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*) This is very interesting question and I am very confident that not every one knows the answer to this question. Let me ask you again – Which will be faster SELECT* or SELECT COUNT (*) or do you think this is apples and oranges comparison. 2012 Service Broker and CAP_CPU_PERCENT – Limiting SQL Server Instances to CPU Usage In SQL Server 2012 there are a few enhancements with regards to SQL Server Resource Governor. One of the enhancement is how the resources are allocated. Let me explain you with examples. Let us understand the entire discussion with the help of three different examples. Finding Size of a Columnstore Index Using DMVs One of the very common question I often see is need of the list of columnstore index along with their size and corresponding table name. I quickly re-wrote a script using DMVs sys.indexes and sys.dm_db_partition_stats. This script gives the size of the columnstore index on disk only. I am sure there will be advanced script to retrieve details related to components associated with the columnstore index. However, I believe following script is sufficient to start getting an idea of columnstore index size. Developer Training Resources and Summary Roundup Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 In this part we discussed the importance of training in the real world. The most important and valuable resource any company is its employee. Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product.  An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects. I have a very high opinion about training employees and it is the most important task. Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 In this part we discussed the most crucial components of training. Often employees are expecting the company to pay for their training and the company expresses no interest in training the employee. Quite often training expenses are the real issue for both the employee and employer. Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 This part was the most difficult to write as I tried to address a few difficult questions and answers. Training is such a sensitive issue that many developers when not receiving chance for training think about leaving the organization. Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 In this part I tried to explore a few methods and options for training. The generic feedback I received on this blog post was short and I should have explored each of the subject of the training in details. I believe there are two big buckets of training 1) Instructor Lead Training and 2) Self Lead Training. Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 There is no better motivation than a personal desire to learn new technology. Honestly there is nothing more personal learning. That “change is the only constant” and “adapt & overcome” are the essential lessons of life. One cannot stop the learning and resist the change. In the IT industry “ego of knowing all” and the “resistance to change” are the most challenging issues. A Quick Look at Logging and Ideas around Logging Question: What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear the word “Logging”? Strange enough I got a different answer every single time. Let me just list what answer I got from my friends. Let us go over them one by one. Beginning Performance Tuning with SQL Server Execution Plan Solution of Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement Earlier this week I asked a question where I asked how to Swap Values of the column without using CASE Statement. Read here: SQL SERVER – A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement. I have proposed 3 different solutions in the blog posts itself. I had requested the help of the community to come up with alternate solutions and honestly I am stunned and amazed by the qualified entries. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Lightning talk: Coderetreat

  - by Michael Williamson

  In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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• Caching NHibernate Named Queries

  - by TStewartDev

  I recently started a new job and one of my first tasks was to implement a "popular products" design. The parameters were that it be done with NHibernate and be cached for 24 hours at a time because the query will be pretty taxing and the results do not need to be constantly up to date. This ended up being tougher than it sounds. The database schema meant a minimum of four joins with filtering and ordering criteria. I decided to use a stored procedure rather than letting NHibernate create the SQL for me. Here is a summary of what I learned (even if I didn't ultimately use all of it): You can't, at the time of this writing, use Fluent NHibernate to configure SQL named queries or imports You can return persistent entities from a stored procedure and there are a couple ways to do that You can populate POCOs using the results of a stored procedure, but it isn't quite as obvious You can reuse your named query result mapping other places (avoid duplication) Caching your query results is not at all obvious Testing to see if your cache is working is a pain NHibernate does a lot of things right. Having unified, up-to-date, comprehensive, and easy-to-find documentation is not one of them. By the way, if you're new to this, I'll use the terms "named query" and "stored procedure" (from NHibernate's perspective) fairly interchangeably. Technically, a named query can execute any SQL, not just a stored procedure, and a stored procedure doesn't have to be executed from a named query, but for reusability, it seems to me like the best practice. If you're here, chances are good you're looking for answers to a similar problem. You don't want to read about the path, you just want the result. So, here's how to get this thing going. The Stored Procedure NHibernate has some guidelines when using stored procedures. For Microsoft SQL Server, you have to return a result set. The scalar value that the stored procedure returns is ignored as are any result sets after the first. Other than that, it's nothing special. CREATE PROCEDURE GetPopularProducts @StartDate DATETIME, @MaxResults INT AS BEGIN SELECT [ProductId], [ProductName], [ImageUrl] FROM SomeTableWithJoinsEtc END The Result Class - PopularProduct You have two options to transport your query results to your view (or wherever is the final destination): you can populate an existing mapped entity class in your model, or you can create a new entity class. If you go with the existing model, the advantage is that the query will act as a loader and you'll get full proxied access to the domain model. However, this can be a disadvantage if you require access to the related entities that aren't loaded by your results. For example, my PopularProduct has image references. Unless I tie them into the query (thus making it even more complicated and expensive to run), they'll have to be loaded on access, requiring more trips to the database. Since we're trying to avoid trips to the database by using a second-level cache, we should use the second option, which is to create a separate entity for results. This approach is (I believe) in the spirit of the Command-Query Separation principle, and it allows us to flatten our data and optimize our report-generation process from data source to view. public class PopularProduct { public virtual int ProductId { get; set; } public virtual string ProductName { get; set; } public virtual string ImageUrl { get; set; } } The NHibernate Mappings (hbm) Next up, we need to let NHibernate know about the query and where the results will go. Below is the markup for the PopularProduct class. Notice that I'm using the <resultset> element and that it has a name attribute. The name allows us to drop this into our query map and any others, giving us reusability. Also notice the <import> element which lets NHibernate know about our entity class. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2"> <import class="PopularProduct, Infrastructure.NHibernate, Version=1.0.0.0"/> <resultset name="PopularProductResultSet"> <return-scalar column="ProductId" type="System.Int32"/> <return-scalar column="ProductName" type="System.String"/> <return-scalar column="ImageUrl" type="System.String"/> </resultset> </hibernate-mapping>  And now the PopularProductsMap: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2"> <sql-query name="GetPopularProducts" resultset-ref="PopularProductResultSet" cacheable="true" cache-mode="normal"> <query-param name="StartDate" type="System.DateTime" /> <query-param name="MaxResults" type="System.Int32" /> exec GetPopularProducts @StartDate = :StartDate, @MaxResults = :MaxResults </sql-query> </hibernate-mapping>  The two most important things to notice here are the resultset-ref attribute, which links in our resultset mapping, and the cacheable attribute. The Query Class – PopularProductsQuery So far, this has been fairly obvious if you're familiar with NHibernate. This next part, maybe not so much. You can implement your query however you want to; for me, I wanted a self-encapsulated Query class, so here's what it looks like: public class PopularProductsQuery : IPopularProductsQuery { private static readonly IResultTransformer ResultTransformer; private readonly ISessionBuilder _sessionBuilder;   static PopularProductsQuery() { ResultTransformer = Transformers.AliasToBean<PopularProduct>(); }   public PopularProductsQuery(ISessionBuilder sessionBuilder) { _sessionBuilder = sessionBuilder; }   public IList<PopularProduct> GetPopularProducts(DateTime startDate, int maxResults) { var session = _sessionBuilder.GetSession(); var popularProducts = session .GetNamedQuery("GetPopularProducts") .SetCacheable(true) .SetCacheRegion("PopularProductsCacheRegion") .SetCacheMode(CacheMode.Normal) .SetReadOnly(true) .SetResultTransformer(ResultTransformer) .SetParameter("StartDate", startDate.Date) .SetParameter("MaxResults", maxResults) .List<PopularProduct>();   return popularProducts; } }  Okay, so let's look at each line of the query execution. The first, GetNamedQuery, matches up with our NHibernate mapping for the sql-query. Next, we set it as cacheable (this is probably redundant since our mapping also specified it, but it can't hurt, right?). Then we set the cache region which we'll get to in the next section. Set the cache mode (optional, I believe), and my cache is read-only, so I set that as well. The result transformer is very important. This tells NHibernate how to transform your query results into a non-persistent entity. You can see I've defined ResultTransformer in the static constructor using the AliasToBean transformer. The name is obviously leftover from Java/Hibernate. Finally, set your parameters and then call a result method which will execute the query. Because this is set to cached, you execute this statement every time you run the query and NHibernate will know based on your parameters whether to use its cached version or a fresh version. The Configuration – hibernate.cfg.xml and Web.config You need to explicitly enable second-level caching in your hibernate configuration: <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2"> <session-factory> [...] <property name="dialect">NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2005Dialect</property> <property name="cache.provider_class">NHibernate.Caches.SysCache.SysCacheProvider,NHibernate.Caches.SysCache</property> <property name="cache.use_query_cache">true</property> <property name="cache.use_second_level_cache">true</property> [...] </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> Both properties "use_query_cache" and "use_second_level_cache" are necessary. As this is for a web deployement, we're using SysCache which relies on ASP.NET's caching. Be aware of this if you're not deploying to the web! You'll have to use a different cache provider. We also need to tell our cache provider (in this cache, SysCache) about our caching region: <syscache> <cache region="PopularProductsCacheRegion" expiration="86400" priority="5" /> </syscache> Here I've set the cache to be valid for 24 hours. This XML snippet goes in your Web.config (or in a separate file referenced by Web.config, which helps keep things tidy). The Payoff That should be it! At this point, your queries should run once against the database for a given set of parameters and then use the cache thereafter until it expires. You can, of course, adjust settings to work in your particular environment. Testing Testing your application to ensure it is using the cache is a pain, but if you're like me, you want to know that it's actually working. It's a bit involved, though, so I'll create a separate post for it if comments indicate there is interest.

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• This is the End of Business as Usual...

  - by Michael Snow

  This week, we'll be hosting our last Social Business Thought Leader Series Webcast for 2012. Our featured guest this week will be Brian Solis of Altimeter Group. As we've been going through the preparations for Brian's webcast, it became very clear that an hour's time is barely scraping the surface of the depth of Brian's insights and analysis. Accordingly, in the spirit of sharing Brian's perspective for all of our readers, we'll be featuring guest posts all this week pulled from Brian's larger collection of blog postings on his own website. If you like what you've read here this week, we highly recommend digging deeper into his tome of wisdom. Guest Post by Brian Solis, Analyst, Altimeter Group as originally featured on his site with the minor change of the video addition at the beginning of the post. This is the End of Business as Usual and the Beginning of a New Era of Relevance - Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group The Times They Are A-Changin’ Come gather ’round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you Is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’. - Bob Dylan I’m sure you are wondering why I chose lyrics to open this article. If you skimmed through them, stop here for a moment. Go back through the Dylan’s words and take your time. Carefully read, and feel, what it is he’s saying and savor the moment to connect the meaning of his words to the challenges you face today. His message is as important and true today as it was when they were first written in 1964. The tide is indeed once again turning. And even though the 60s now live in the history books, right here, right now, Dylan is telling us once again that this is our time to not only sink or swim, but to do something amazing. This is your time. This is our time. But, these times are different and what comes next is difficult to grasp. How people communicate. How people learn and share. How people make decisions. Everything is different now. Think about this…you’re reading this article because it was sent to you via email. Yet more people spend their online time in social networks than they do in email. Duh. According to Nielsen, of the total time spent online 22.5% are connecting and communicating in social networks. To put that in perspective, the time spent in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube is greater than online gaming at 9.8%, email at 7.6% and search at 4%. Imagine for a moment if you and I were connected to one another in Facebook, which just so happens to be the largest social network in the world. How big? Well, Facebook is the size today of the entire Internet in 2004. There are over 1 billion people friending, Liking, commenting, sharing, and engaging in Facebook…that’s roughly 12% of the world’s population. Twitter has over 200 million users. Ever hear of tumblr? More time is spent on this popular microblogging community than Twitter. The point is that the landscape for communication and all that’s affected by human interaction is profoundly different than how you and I learned, shared or talked to one another yesterday. This transformation is only becoming more pervasive and, it’s not going back. Survival of the Fitting But social media is just one of the channels we can use to reach people. I must be honest. I’m as much a part of tomorrow as I am of yesteryear. It’s why I spend all of my time researching the evolution of media and its impact on business and culture. Because of you, I share everything I learn in newsletters, emails, blogs, Youtube videos, and also traditional books. I’m dedicated to helping everyone not only understand, but grasp the change that’s before you. Technologies such as social, mobile, virtual, augmented, et al compel us adapt our story and value proposition and extend our reach to be part of communities we don’t realize exist. The people who will keep you in business or running tomorrow are the very people you’re not reaching today. Before you continue to read on, allow me to clarify my point of view. My inspiration for writing this is to help you augment, not necessarily replace, the programs you’re running today. We must still reach those whom matter to us in the ways they prefer to be engaged. To reach what I call the connected consumer of Geneeration-C we must too reach them in the ways they wish to be engaged. And in all of my work, how they connect, talk to one another, influence others, and make decisions are not at all like the traditional consumers of the past. Nor are they merely the kids…the Millennial. Connected consumers are representative across every age group and demographic. As you can see, use of social networks, media sharing sites, microblogs, blogs, etc. equally span across Gen Y, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. The DNA of connected customers is indiscriminant of age or any other demographic for that matter. This is more about psychographics, the linkage of people through common interests (than it is their age, gender, education, nationality or level of income. Once someone is introduced to the marvels of connectedness, the sensation becomes a contagion. It touches and affects everyone. And, that’s why this isn’t going anywhere but normalcy. Social networking isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing. Nor is it just about generic, meaningless conversation. Today’s connected consumer is incredibly influential. They’re connected to hundreds and even thousands of other like-minded people. What they experiences, what they support, it’s shared throughout these networks and as information travels, it shapes and steers impressions, decisions, and experiences of others. For example, if we revisit the Nielsen research, we get an idea of just how big this is becoming. 75% spend heavily on music. How does that translate to the arts? I’d imagine the number is equally impressive. If 53% follow their favorite brand or organization, imagine what’s possible. Just like this email list that connects us, connections in social networks are powerful. The difference is however, that people spend more time in social networks than they do in email. Everything begins with an understanding of the “5 W’s and H.E.” – Who, What, When, Where, How, and to What Extent? The data that comes back tells you which networks are important to the people you’re trying to reach, how they connect, what they share, what they value, and how to connect with them. From there, your next steps are to create a community strategy that extends your mission, vision, and value and it align it with the interests, behavior, and values of those you wish to reach and galvanize. To help, I’ve prepared an action list for you, otherwise known as the 10 Steps Toward New Relevance: 1. Answer why you should engage in social networks and why anyone would want to engage with you 2. Observe what brings them together and define how you can add value to the conversation 3. Identify the influential voices that matter to your world, recognize what’s important to them, and find a way to start a dialogue that can foster a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship 4. Study the best practices of not just organizations like yours, but also those who are successfully reaching the type of people you’re trying to reach – it’s benching marking against competitors and benchmarking against undefined opportunities 5. Translate all you’ve learned into a convincing presentation written to demonstrate tangible opportunity to your executive board, make the case through numbers, trends, data, insights – understanding they have no idea what’s going on out there and you are both the scout and the navigator (start with a recommended pilot so everyone can learn together) 6. Listen to what they’re saying and develop a process to learn from activity and adapt to interests and steer engagement based on insights 7. Recognize how they use social media and innovate based on what you observe to captivate their attention 8. Align your objectives with their objectives. If you’re unsure of what they’re looking for…ask 9. Invest in the development of content, engagement 10. Build a community, invest in values, spark meaningful dialogue, and offer tangible value…the kind of value they can’t get anywhere else. Take advantage of the medium and the opportunity! The reality is that we live and compete in a perpetual era of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than our ability to adapt. This is why it’s our time to alter our course. We must connect with those who are defining the future of engagement, commerce, business, and how the arts are appreciated and supported. Even though it is the end of business as usual, it is the beginning of a new age of opportunity. The consumer revolution is already underway, and the question is: How do you better understand the role you play in this production as a connected or social consumer as well as business professional? Again, this is your time to define a new era of engagement and relevance. Originally written for The National Arts Marketing Project Connect with Brian via: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ --- Note from Michael: If you really like this post above - check out Brian's TEDTalk and his thought process for preparing it in this post: 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} http://www.briansolis.com/2012/10/tedtalk-reinventing-consumer-capitalism-screw-business-as-usual/

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• Clean Code Developer & Certification in IT - MSCC 21.09.2013

  It was a very busy weekend this time, and quite some hectic to organise the second meetup on a Saturday for the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) but it was absolutely fun. Following, I'm writing a brief summary about the topics we spoke about and the new impulses I got. "What a meetup... I was positively impressed. At the beginning I thought that noone would actually show up but then by the time the room got filled. Lots of conversation, great dialogues and fantastic networking between fresh students, experienced students, experienced employees, and self-employed attendees. That's what community is all about!" Above quote was my first reaction shortly after the gathering. And despite being busy during the weekend and yesterday, I took my time to reflect a little bit on things happened and statements made before writing it here on my blog. Additionally, I was also very curious about possible reactions and blogs from other attendees. Reactions from other craftsmen Let me quickly give you some links and quotes from others first... "Like Jochen posted on facebook, that was indeed a 5+ hours marathon (maybe 4 hours for me but still) … Wohoo! We’re indeed a bunch of crazy geeks who did not realise how time flew as we dived into the myriad discussions that sprouted. Yet in the end everyone was happy (:" -- Ish on MSCC meetup - The marathon (: "And the 4hours spent @ Talking drums bore its fruit..I was doing something I never did before....reading the borrowed book while walking....and though I was not that familiar with things mentionned in the book...I was skimming,scanning & flipping...reading titles...short paragraphs...and I skipped pages till I reached home." -- Yannick on Mauritius Software Craftsmanship 1st Meet-up "Hi Developers, Just wanted to share with you the meetups i attended last Saturday - [...] - The second meetup is the one hosted by Jochen Kirstätter, the MSCC, where the attendees were Craftsman, no woman, this time - all sharing the same passion of being a developer - even though it is on different platforms(Windows - Windows Phone - Linux - Adobe(yes a designer) - .Net) - but we manage to sit at the same table - sharing developer views and experience in the corporate world - also talking about good practice when coding( where Jochen initiated a discussion on Clean Coding ) i could not stay till the end - but from what i have heard - the longer you stay the more fun you have till 1600. Developers in the Facebook grouping i invite you to stay tuned about the various developer communities popping up - where you can come to share and learn good practices, develop the entrepreneurial spirit, and learn and share your passion about technologies" -- Arnaud on Facebook More feedback has been posted on the event directly. So, should I really write more? Wouldn't that spoil the impressions? Starting the day with a surprise Indeed, I was very pleased to stumble over the existence of Mobile Monday Mauritius on LinkedIn, an association about any kind of mobile app development, mobile gadgets and latest smartphones on the market. Despite the Monday in their name they had scheduled their recent meeting on Saturday between 10:00 and 12:00hrs. Wow, what a coincidence! Let's grap the bull by its horns and pay them an introductory visit. As they chose the Ebene Accelerator at the Orange Tower in Ebene it was a no-brainer to leave home a bit earlier and stop by. It was quite an experience and fun to talk to the geeks over there. Really looking forward to organise something together.... Arriving at the venue As the children got a bit uneasy at the MoMo gathering and I didn't want to disturb them too much, we arrived early at Bagatelle. Well, no problems as we went for a decent breakfast at Food Lover's Market. Shortly afterwards we went to our venue location, Talking Drums, and prepared the room for the meeting. We only had to take off a repro-painting of the wall in order to have a decent area for the projector. All went very smooth and my two little ones were of great help. Just in time, our first craftsman Avinash arrived on the spot. And then the waiting started... Luckily, not too long. Bit by bit more and more IT people came to join our meeting. Meanwhile, I used the time to give a brief introduction about the MSCC in general, what we are (hm, maybe I am) trying to achieve and that the recent phase is completely focused on creating more awareness that a community like the MSCC is active here in Mauritius. As soon as we reached some 'critical mass' of about ten people I asked everyone for a short introduction and bio, just in case... Conversation between participants started to kick in and we were actually more networking than having a focus on our topics of the day. Quick updates on latest news and development around the MSCC Finally, Clean Code Developer No matter how the position is actually called, whether it is Software Engineer, Software Developer, Programmer, Architect, or Craftsman, anyone working in IT is facing almost the same obstacles. As for the process of writing software applications there are re-occurring patterns and principles combined with some common exercise and best practices on how to resolve them. Initiated by the must-read book 'Clean Code' by Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) the concept of the Clean Code Developer (CCD) was born already some years ago. CCD is much likely to traditional martial arts where you create awareness of certain principles and learn how to apply practices to improve your style. The CCD initiative recommends to indicate your level of knowledge and experience with coloured wrist bands - equivalent to the belt colours - for various reasons. Frankly speaking, I think that the biggest advantage here is provided by the obvious recognition of conceptual understanding. For example, take the situation of a team meeting... A member with a higher grade in CCD, say Green grade, sees that there are mainly Red grades to talk to, and adjusts her way of communication to their level of understanding. The choice of words might change as certain elements of CCD are not yet familiar to all team members. So instead of talking in an abstract way which only Green grades could follow the whole scenario comes down to Red grade level. Different story, better results... Similar to learning martial arts, we only covered two grades during this occasion - black and red. Most interestingly, there was quite some positive feedback and lots of questions about the principles and practices of the red grade. And we gathered real-world examples from various craftsman and discussed them. Following the Clean Code Developer Red Grade and some annotations from our meetup: CCD Red Grade - Principles Don't Repeat Yourself - DRY Keep It Simple, Stupid (and Short) - KISS Beware of Optimisations! Favour Composition over Inheritance - FCoI Interestingly most of the attendees already heard about those key words but couldn't really classify or categorize them. It's very similar to a situation in which you do not the particular for a thing and have to describe it to others... until someone tells you the actual name and suddenly all is very simple. CCD Red Grade - Practices Follow the Boy Scouts Rule Root Cause Analysis - RCA Use a Version Control System Apply Simple Refactoring Pattern Reflect Daily Introduction to the principles and practices of Clean Code Developer - here: Red Grade As for the various ToDo's we commonly agreed that the Boy Scout Rule clearly is not limited to software development or IT administration but applies to daily life in general. Same for the root cause analysis, btw. We really had good stories with surprisingly endings and conclusions. A quick check about who is using a version control system brought more drive into the conversation. Not only that we had people that aren't using any VCS at all, we also had the 'classic' approach of backup folders and naming conventions as well as the VCS 'junkie' that has to use multiple systems at a time. Just for the records: Git and GitHub seem to be in favour of some of the attendees. Regarding the daily reflection at the end of the day we came up with an easy solution: Wrap it up as a blog entry! Certifications in IT This is kind of a controversy in IT in general. Is it interesting to go for certifications or are they completely obsolete? What are the possibilities to get certified? What are the options we have in Mauritius? How would certificates stand compared to other educational tracks like Computer Science or Web Design. The ratio between craftsmen with certifications like MCP, MSTS, CCNA or LPI versus the ones without wasn't in favour for the first group but there was a high interest in the topic itself and some were really surprised to hear that exam preparations are completely free available online including temporarily voucher codes for either discounts or completely free exams. Furthermore, we discussed possible options on forming so-called study groups on a specific certificates and organising more frequent meetups in order to learn together. Taking into consideration that we have sponsored access to the video course material of Pluralsight (and now PeepCode as well as TrainSignal), we might give it a try by the end of the year. Current favourites are LPIC Level 1 and one of the Microsoft exams 40-78x. Feedback and ideas for the MSCC The closing conversations and discussions about how the MSCC is recently doing, what are the possibilities and what's (hopefully) going to happen in the future were really fertile and I made a couple of mental bullet points which I'm looking forward to tackle down together with orher craftsmen. Eventually, it might be a good option to elaborate on some issues during our weekly Code & Coffee sessions one Wednesday morning. Active discussion on various IT topics like certifications (LPI, MCP, CCNA, etc) and sharing experience Finally, we made it till the end of the planned time. Well, actually the talk was still on and we continued even after 16:00hrs. Unfortunately, we (the children and I) had to leave for evening activities. My resume of the day... It was great to have 15 craftsmen in one room. There are hundreds of IT geeks out there in Mauritius, and as Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community we still have a lot of work to do to pass on the message to some more key players and companies. Currently, it seems that we are able to attract a good number of students in Computer Science... but we have a lot more to offer, even or especially for IT people on the job. I'm already looking forward to our next Saturday meetup in the near future. PS: Meetup pictures are courtesy of Nirvan Pagooah. Thanks for sharing...

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• Of transactions and Mongo

  - by Nuri Halperin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/nuri/archive/2014/05/20/of-transactions-and-mongo-again.aspxWhat's the first thing you hear about NoSQL databases? That they lose your data? That there's no transactions? No joins? No hope for "real" applications? Well, you *should* be wondering whether a certain of database is the right one for your job. But if you do so, you should be wondering that about "traditional" databases as well! In the spirit of exploration let's take a look at a common challenge: You are a bank. You have customers with accounts. Customer A wants to pay B. You want to allow that only if A can cover the amount being transferred. Let's looks at the problem without any context of any database engine in mind. What would you do? How would you ensure that the amount transfer is done "properly"? Would you prevent a "transaction" from taking place unless A can cover the amount? There are several options: Prevent any change to A's account while the transfer is taking place. That boils down to locking. Apply the change, and allow A's balance to go below zero. Charge person A some interest on the negative balance. Not friendly, but certainly a choice. Don't do either. Options 1 and 2 are difficult to attain in the NoSQL world. Mongo won't save you headaches here either. Option 3 looks a bit harsh. But here's where this can go: ledger. See, and account doesn't need to be represented by a single row in a table of all accounts with only the current balance on it. More often than not, accounting systems use ledgers. And entries in ledgers - as it turns out – don't actually get updated. Once a ledger entry is written, it is not removed or altered. A transaction is represented by an entry in the ledger stating and amount withdrawn from A's account and an entry in the ledger stating an addition of said amount to B's account. For sake of space-saving, that entry in the ledger can happen using one entry. Think {Timestamp, FromAccountId, ToAccountId, Amount}. The implication of the original question – "how do you enforce non-negative balance rule" then boils down to: Insert entry in ledger Run validation of recent entries Insert reverse entry to roll back transaction if validation failed. What is validation? Sum up the transactions that A's account has (all deposits and debits), and ensure the balance is positive. For sake of efficiency, one can roll up transactions and "close the book" on transactions with a pseudo entry stating balance as of midnight or something. This lets you avoid doing math on the fly on too many transactions. You simply run from the latest "approved balance" marker to date. But that's an optimization, and premature optimizations are the root of (some? most?) evil.. Back to some nagging questions though: "But mongo is only eventually consistent!" Well, yes, kind of. It's not actually true that Mongo has not transactions. It would be more descriptive to say that Mongo's transaction scope is a single document in a single collection. A write to a Mongo document happens completely or not at all. So although it is true that you can't update more than one documents "at the same time" under a "transaction" umbrella as an atomic update, it is NOT true that there' is no isolation. So a competition between two concurrent updates is completely coherent and the writes will be serialized. They will not scribble on the same document at the same time. In our case - in choosing a ledger approach - we're not even trying to "update" a document, we're simply adding a document to a collection. So there goes the "no transaction" issue. Now let's turn our attention to consistency. What you should know about mongo is that at any given moment, only on member of a replica set is writable. This means that the writable instance in a set of replicated instances always has "the truth". There could be a replication lag such that a reader going to one of the replicas still sees "old" state of a collection or document. But in our ledger case, things fall nicely into place: Run your validation against the writable instance. It is guaranteed to have a ledger either with (after) or without (before) the ledger entry got written. No funky states. Again, the ledger writing *adds* a document, so there's no inconsistent document state to be had either way. Next, we might worry about data loss. Here, mongo offers several write-concerns. Write-concern in Mongo is a mode that marshals how uptight you want the db engine to be about actually persisting a document write to disk before it reports to the application that it is "done". The most volatile, is to say you don't care. In that case, mongo would just accept your write command and say back "thanks" with no guarantee of persistence. If the server loses power at the wrong moment, it may have said "ok" but actually no written the data to disk. That's kind of bad. Don't do that with data you care about. It may be good for votes on a pole regarding how cute a furry animal is, but not so good for business. There are several other write-concerns varying from flushing the write to the disk of the writable instance, flushing to disk on several members of the replica set, a majority of the replica set or all of the members of a replica set. The former choice is the quickest, as no network coordination is required besides the main writable instance. The others impose extra network and time cost. Depending on your tolerance for latency and read-lag, you will face a choice of what works for you. It's really important to understand that no data loss occurs once a document is flushed to an instance. The record is on disk at that point. From that point on, backup strategies and disaster recovery are your worry, not loss of power to the writable machine. This scenario is not different from a relational database at that point. Where does this leave us? Oh, yes. Eventual consistency. By now, we ensured that the "source of truth" instance has the correct data, persisted and coherent. But because of lag, the app may have gone to the writable instance, performed the update and then gone to a replica and looked at the ledger there before the transaction replicated. Here are 2 options to deal with this. Similar to write concerns, mongo support read preferences. An app may choose to read only from the writable instance. This is not an awesome choice to make for every ready, because it just burdens the one instance, and doesn't make use of the other read-only servers. But this choice can be made on a query by query basis. So for the app that our person A is using, we can have person A issue the transfer command to B, and then if that same app is going to immediately as "are we there yet?" we'll query that same writable instance. But B and anyone else in the world can just chill and read from the read-only instance. They have no basis to expect that the ledger has just been written to. So as far as they know, the transaction hasn't happened until they see it appear later. We can further relax the demand by creating application UI that reacts to a write command with "thank you, we will post it shortly" instead of "thank you, we just did everything and here's the new balance". This is a very powerful thing. UI design for highly scalable systems can't insist that the all databases be locked just to paint an "all done" on screen. People understand. They were trained by many online businesses already that your placing of an order does not mean that your product is already outside your door waiting (yes, I know, large retailers are working on it... but were' not there yet). The second thing we can do, is add some artificial delay to a transaction's visibility on the ledger. The way that works is simply adding some logic such that the query against the ledger never nets a transaction for customers newer than say 15 minutes and who's validation flag is not set. This buys us time 2 ways: Replication can catch up to all instances by then, and validation rules can run and determine if this transaction should be "negated" with a compensating transaction. In case we do need to "roll back" the transaction, the backend system can place the timestamp of the compensating transaction at the exact same time or 1ms after the original one. Effectively, once A or B visits their ledger, both transactions would be visible and the overall balance "as of now" would reflect no change.  The 2 transactions (attempted/ reverted) would be visible , since we do actually account for the attempt. Hold on a second. There's a hole in the story: what if several transfers from A to some accounts are registered, and 2 independent validators attempt to compute the balance concurrently? Is there a chance that both would conclude non-sufficient-funds even though rolling back transaction 100 would free up enough for transaction 117 (some random later transaction)? Yes. there is that chance. But the integrity of the business rule is not compromised, since the prime rule is don't dispense money you don't have. To minimize or eliminate this scenario, we can also assign a single validation process per origin account. This may seem non-scalable, but it can easily be done as a "sharded" distribution. Say we have 11 validation threads (or processing nodes etc.). We divide the account number space such that each validator is exclusively responsible for a certain range of account numbers. Sounds cunningly similar to Mongo's sharding strategy, doesn't it? Each validator then works in isolation. More capacity needed? Chop the account space into more chunks. So where  are we now with the nagging questions? "No joins": Huh? What are those for? "No transactions": You mean no cross-collection and no cross-document transactions? Granted - but don't always need them either. "No hope for real applications": well... There are more issues and edge cases to slog through, I'm sure. But hopefully this gives you some ideas of how to solve common problems without distributed locking and relational databases. But then again, you can choose relational databases if they suit your problem.

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• vector iterator not dereferencable at runtime on a vector<vector<vector<A*>*>*>

  - by marouanebj

  Hi, I have this destructor that create error at runtime "vector iterator not dereferencable". The gridMatrix is a std::vector<std::vector<std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T> * > * > * > * > I added the typename and also the typedef but I still have the error. I will move for this idea of vect of vect* of vect* to use boost::multi_array I think, but still I want to understand were this is wrong. /// @brief destructor ~AtomsGrid(void) { // free all the memory for all the pointers inside gridMatrix (all except the Atom<T>* ) //typedef typename ::value_type value_type; typedef std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T>* >*> std_vectorOfAtomsCell; typedef std::vector<std_vectorOfAtomsCell*> std_vectorOfVectorOfAtomsCell; std_vectorOfAtomsCell* vectorOfAtomsCell; std_vectorOfVectorOfAtomsCell* vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell; typename std_vectorOfVectorOfAtomsCell::iterator itSecond; typename std_vectorOfVectorOfAtomsCell::reverse_iterator reverseItSecond; typename std::vector<std_vectorOfVectorOfAtomsCell*>::iterator itFirst; //typename std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T>* >*>* vectorOfAtomsCell; //typename std::vector<std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T>* >*>*>* vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell; //typename std::vector<std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T>* >*>*>::iterator itSecond; //typename std::vector<std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T>* >*>*>::reverse_iterator reverseItSecond; //typename std::vector<std::vector<std::vector<AtomsCell< Atom<T>* >*>*>*>::iterator itFirst; for (itFirst = gridMatrix.begin(); itFirst != gridMatrix.end(); ++itFirst) { vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell = (*itFirst); while (!vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell->empty()) { reverseItSecond = vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell->rbegin(); itSecond = vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell->rbegin().base(); vectorOfAtomsCell = (*itSecond); // ERROR during run: "vector iterator not dereferencable" // I think the ERROR is because I need some typedef typename or template ???!!! // the error seems here event at itFirst //fr_Myit_Utils::vectorElementDeleter(*vectorOfAtomsCell); //vectorOfVecOfAtomsCell->pop_back(); } } fr_Myit_Utils::vectorElementDeleter(gridMatrix); } If someone want the full code that create the error I'm happy to give it but I do not think we can attach file in the forum. BUT still its is not very big so if you want it I can copy past it here. Thanks

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• What output and recording ports does the Java Sound API find on your computer?

  - by Dave Carpeneto

  Hi all - I'm working with the Java Sound API, and it turns out if I want to adjust recording volumes I need to model the hardware that the OS exposes to Java. Turns out there's a lot of variety in what's presented. Because of this I'm humbly asking that anyone able to help me run the following on their computer and post back the results so that I can get an idea of what's out there. A thanks in advance to anyone that can assist :-) import javax.sound.sampled.*; public class SoundAudit { public static void main(String[] args) { try { System.out.println("OS: "+System.getProperty("os.name")+" "+ System.getProperty("os.version")+"/"+ System.getProperty("os.arch")+"\nJava: "+ System.getProperty("java.version")+" ("+ System.getProperty("java.vendor")+")\n"); for (Mixer.Info thisMixerInfo : AudioSystem.getMixerInfo()) { System.out.println("Mixer: "+thisMixerInfo.getDescription()+ " ["+thisMixerInfo.getName()+"]"); Mixer thisMixer = AudioSystem.getMixer(thisMixerInfo); for (Line.Info thisLineInfo:thisMixer.getSourceLineInfo()) { if (thisLineInfo.getLineClass().getName().equals( "javax.sound.sampled.Port")) { Line thisLine = thisMixer.getLine(thisLineInfo); thisLine.open(); System.out.println(" Source Port: " +thisLineInfo.toString()); for (Control thisControl : thisLine.getControls()) { System.out.println(AnalyzeControl(thisControl));} thisLine.close();}} for (Line.Info thisLineInfo:thisMixer.getTargetLineInfo()) { if (thisLineInfo.getLineClass().getName().equals( "javax.sound.sampled.Port")) { Line thisLine = thisMixer.getLine(thisLineInfo); thisLine.open(); System.out.println(" Target Port: " +thisLineInfo.toString()); for (Control thisControl : thisLine.getControls()) { System.out.println(AnalyzeControl(thisControl));} thisLine.close();}}} } catch (Exception e) {e.printStackTrace();}} public static String AnalyzeControl(Control thisControl) { String type = thisControl.getType().toString(); if (thisControl instanceof BooleanControl) { return " Control: "+type+" (boolean)"; } if (thisControl instanceof CompoundControl) { System.out.println(" Control: "+type+ " (compound - values below)"); String toReturn = ""; for (Control children: ((CompoundControl)thisControl).getMemberControls()) { toReturn+=" "+AnalyzeControl(children)+"\n";} return toReturn.substring(0, toReturn.length()-1);} if (thisControl instanceof EnumControl) { return " Control:"+type+" (enum: "+thisControl.toString()+")";} if (thisControl instanceof FloatControl) { return " Control: "+type+" (float: from "+ ((FloatControl) thisControl).getMinimum()+" to "+ ((FloatControl) thisControl).getMaximum()+")";} return " Control: unknown type";} } All the application does is print out a line about the OS, a line about the JVM, and a few lines about the hardware found that may pertain to recording hardware. For example on my PC at work I get the following: OS: Windows XP 5.1/x86 Java: 1.6.0_07 (Sun Microsystems Inc.) Mixer: Direct Audio Device: DirectSound Playback [Primary Sound Driver] Mixer: Direct Audio Device: DirectSound Playback [SoundMAX HD Audio] Mixer: Direct Audio Device: DirectSound Capture [Primary Sound Capture Driver] Mixer: Direct Audio Device: DirectSound Capture [SoundMAX HD Audio] Mixer: Software mixer and synthesizer [Java Sound Audio Engine] Mixer: Port Mixer [Port SoundMAX HD Audio] Source Port: MICROPHONE source port Control: Microphone (compound - values below) Control: Select (boolean) Control: Microphone Boost (boolean) Control: Front panel microphone (boolean) Control: Volume (float: from 0.0 to 1.0) Source Port: LINE_IN source port Control: Line In (compound - values below) Control: Select (boolean) Control: Volume (float: from 0.0 to 1.0) Control: Balance (float: from -1.0 to 1.0)

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• C# Monte Carlo Incremental Risk Calculation optimisation, random numbers, parallel execution

  - by m3ntat

  My current task is to optimise a Monte Carlo Simulation that calculates Capital Adequacy figures by region for a set of Obligors. It is running about 10 x too slow for where it will need to be in production and number or daily runs required. Additionally the granularity of the result figures will need to be improved down to desk possibly book level at some stage, the code I've been given is basically a prototype which is used by business units in a semi production capacity. The application is currently single threaded so I'll need to make it multi-threaded, may look at System.Threading.ThreadPool or the Microsoft Parallel Extensions library but I'm constrained to .NET 2 on the server at this bank so I may have to consider this guy's port, http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/aforge_parallel.aspx. I am trying my best to get them to upgrade to .NET 3.5 SP1 but it's a major exercise in an organisation of this size and might not be possible in my contract time frames. I've profiled the application using the trial of dotTrace (http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler). What other good profilers exist? Free ones? A lot of the execution time is spent generating uniform random numbers and then translating this to a normally distributed random number. They are using a C# Mersenne twister implementation. I am not sure where they got it or if it's the best way to go about this (or best implementation) to generate the uniform random numbers. Then this is translated to a normally distributed version for use in the calculation (I haven't delved into the translation code yet). Also what is the experience using the following? http://quantlib.org http://www.qlnet.org (C# port of quantlib) or http://www.boost.org Any alternatives you know of? I'm a C# developer so would prefer C#, but a wrapper to C++ shouldn't be a problem, should it? Maybe even faster leveraging the C++ implementations. I am thinking some of these libraries will have the fastest method to directly generate normally distributed random numbers, without the translation step. Also they may have some other functions that will be helpful in the subsequent calculations. Also the computer this is on is a quad core Opteron 275, 8 GB memory but Windows Server 2003 Enterprise 32 bit. Should I advise them to upgrade to a 64 bit OS? Any links to articles supporting this decision would really be appreciated. Anyway, any advice and help you may have is really appreciated.

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• MySql multiple selects batching in .net

  - by Amith George

  I have a situation in my application. For each x-axis point in my chart, I am plotting 5 y-axis values. To calculate each of these 5 values, I need to make 4 different queries. Ie, for each x-axis point I need to fire 20 sql queries. Now, I need to plot 40 such points in the my chart. Its resulting in a pathetic performance where it takes close to a minute to get all the data back from the database. Each of 4 different queries consists of a join between 2 tables. One has only 6 rows. The other close to 10,000. Each of the 4 queries has different WHERE clauses, so they are different queries. For each point in the x-axis, only the values for the where clauses change. I have tried combining each of the 4 queries into one big string. Basically batch the four selects. These are again batched for each y-axis value. So, for each x-axis point, I am now firing one big command that consists of 20 different select statements. Technically, I should be experiencing a big performance boost, right? Instead of hitting the db 40x5x4 = 800 times, I am now hitting it just 40 times. But instead of taking 60 seconds, it taking 50-55 seconds... not much of a help. I am using MySql 5.1, and the 6.1 version of its .Net connector. What can I do to improve the performance? Edit: One of the 4 queries is as follows: SELECT SUM(TIME_TO_SEC(TIMEDIFF(T1.col2, T1.col1))* T2.col1 / (3600 *1000)) AS TotalTime FROM Table T1 JOIN Table T2 ON T1.col3 = T2.col3 WHERE T1.col4 = 'i' AND T1.col1 >= '2009-12-25 00:00:00' AND T1.col2 <= '2009-12-26 00:00:00'; The other 3 queries are similar, only the where clause changes slightly. This set of 4 queries is fired 5 times. The first 3 times against the join of table T1 and T2, passing in different values for col4. And the next two times against the join of table T3 and T2 passing in different values for col4. These 5 values are the y-axis values for a particular x-axis point. The data returned by all these queries is the same format. so, we tried doing a UNION ALL on all these queries. No substantial difference. One strange thing, however, after indexing the foreign key on the table T1 [while it contained over a lakh records], the queries were using the index, but they had become slower. At times, the queries would take double the time to return the data.

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• Sysadmin 101: How can I figure out why my server crashes and monitor performance?

  - by bflora

  I have a Drupal-powered site that seems to have neverending performance problems. It was butt-slow about 5 months ago. I brought in some guys who installed nginx for anonymous visitors, ajaxified a few queries so they wouldn't fire during page load, and helped me find a few bottlenecks in the code. For about a month, the site was significantly faster, though not "fast" by any stretch of the word. Meanwhile, I'm now shelling out $400/month to Slicehost to host a site that gets less than 5,000/uniques a day. Yes, you read that right. Go Drupal. Recently the site started crashing again and is slow again. I can't afford to hire people to come in, study my code from top to bottom, and make changes that may or may not help anymore. And I can't afford to throw more hardware at the problem. So I need to figure out what the problem is myself. Questions: When apache crashes, is it possible to find out what caused it to crash? There has to be a way, right? If so, how can I do this? Is there software I can use that will tell me which process caused my server to die? (e.g. "Apache crashed because someone visited page X." or "Apache crashed because you were importing too many RSS items from feed X.") There's got to be a way to learn this, right? What's a good, noob-friendly way to monitor my current apache performance? My developer friends tell me to "just use Top, dude," but Top shows me a bunch of numbers without any context. I have no clue what qualifies as a bad number or a good number in Top, or which processes are relevant and which aren't. Are there any noob-friendly server monitoring tools out there? Ideally, I could have a page that would give me a color-coded indicator about how apache is performing and then show me a list of processes or pages that are sucking right now. This way, I could know when performance is bad and then what's causing it to be so bad. Why does PHP memory matter? My apparently has a 30MB memory foot print. Will it run faster if I bring that number down? Thanks for any advice. I spent a year or so trying to boost my advertising income so I could hire a contractor to solve my performance woes. I didn't want to have to learn all this sysadmin voodoo. I'm now resigned to the fact that might not have a choice.

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• Segmentation fault in std function std::_Rb_tree_rebalance_for_erase ()

  - by Sarah

  I'm somewhat new to programming and am unsure how to deal with a segmentation fault that appears to be coming from a std function. I hope I'm doing something stupid (i.e., misusing a container), because I have no idea how to fix it. The precise error is Program received signal EXC_BAD_ACCESS, Could not access memory. Reason: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at address: 0x000000000000000c 0x00007fff8062b144 in std::_Rb_tree_rebalance_for_erase () (gdb) backtrace #0 0x00007fff8062b144 in std::_Rb_tree_rebalance_for_erase () #1 0x000000010000e593 in Simulation::runEpidSim (this=0x7fff5fbfcb20) at stl_tree.h:1263 #2 0x0000000100016078 in main () at main.cpp:43 The function that exits successfully just before the segmentation fault updates the contents of two containers. One is a boost::unordered_multimap called carriage; it contains one or more struct Infection objects that contain two doubles. The other container is of type std::multiset< Event, std::less< Event EventPQ called ce. It is full of Event structs. void Host::recover( int s, double recoverTime, EventPQ & ce ) { // Clearing all serotypes in carriage // and their associated recovery events in ce // and then updating susceptibility to each serotype double oldRecTime; int z; for ( InfectionMap::iterator itr = carriage.begin(); itr != carriage.end(); itr++ ) { z = itr->first; oldRecTime = (itr->second).recT; EventPQ::iterator epqItr = ce.find( Event(oldRecTime) ); assert( epqItr != ce.end() ); ce.erase( epqItr ); immune[ z ]++; } carriage.clear(); calcSusc(); // a function that edits an array cout << "Done with sync_recovery event." << endl; } The last cout << line appears immediately before the seg fault. I hope this is enough (but not too much) information. My idea so far is that the rebalancing is being attempting on ce after this function, but I am unsure why it would be failing. (It's unfortunately very hard for me to test this code by removing particular lines, since they would create logical inconsistencies and further problems, but if experienced programmers still think this is the way to go, I'll try.)

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• Can I append to a preprocessor macro?

  - by JCSalomon

  Is there any way in standard C—or with GNU extensions—to append stuff to a macro definition? E.g., given a macro defined as #define quux_list X(foo) X(bar) can I append X(bas) so that it now expands as if I’d defined it #define quux_list X(foo) X(bar) X(bas)? I’m playing with discriminated/tagged unions along these lines: struct quux_foo { int x; }; struct quux_bar { char *s; }; struct quux_bas { void *p; }; enum quux_type {quux_foo, quux_bar, quux_bas}; struct quux { enum quux_type type; union { struct quux_foo foo; struct quux_bar bar; struct quux_bas bas; } t; }; I figure this is a good place for the X-macro. If I define a macro #define quux_table X(foo) X(bar) X(bas) the enumeration & structure can be defined thus, and never get out of sync: #define X(t) quux_ ## t, enum quux_type {quux_table}; #undef X #define X(t) struct quux_ ## t t; struct quux { enum quux_type type; union {quux_table} t; }; #undef X Of course, the quux_* structures can get out of sync, so I’d like to do something like this, only legally: struct quux_foo { int x; }; #define quux_table quux_table X(foo) struct quux_bar { char *s; }; #define quux_table quux_table X(bar) struct quux_bas { void *p; }; #define quux_table quux_table X(bas) (Well, what I really want to be able to do is something like member_struct(quux, foo) { int x; }; but I’m well aware that macros cannot be (re)defined from within macros.) Anyhow, that’s my motivating example. Is there a way to accomplish this? Boost.Preprocessor examples are fine, if you can show me how to make the X-macro technique work with that library.

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• Is there any reasonable use of a function returning an anonymous struct?

  - by Akanksh

  Here is an (artificial) example of using a function that returns an anonymous struct and does "something" useful: #include <iostream> template<typename T> T* func( T* t, float a, float b ) { if(!t) { t = new T; t->a = a; t->b = b; } else { t->a += a; t->b += b; } return t; } struct { float a, b; }* foo(float a, float b) { if(a==0) return 0; return func(foo(a-1,b), a, b); } int main() { std::cout << foo(5,6)->a << std::endl; std::cout << foo(5,6)->b << std::endl; void* v = (void*)(foo(5,6)); float* f = (float*)(v); //[1] delete f now because I know struct is floats only. std::cout << f[0] << std::endl; std::cout << f[1] << std::endl; delete[] f; return 0; } There are a few points I would like to discuss: As is apparent, this code leaks, is there anyway I can NOT leak without knowing what the underlying struct definition is? see Comment [1]. I have to return a pointer to an anonymous struct so I can create an instance of the object within the templatized function func, can I do something similar without returning a pointer? I guess the most important, is there ANY (real-world) use for this at all? As the example given above leaks and is admittedly contrived. By the way, what the function foo(a,b) does is, to return a struct containing two numbers, the sum of all numbers from 1 to a and the product of a and b. EDIT: Maybe the line new T could use a boost::shared_ptr somehow to avoid leaks, but I haven't tried that. Would that work?

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• Turn class "Interfaceable"

  - by scooterman

  Hi folks, On my company system, we use a class to represent beans. It is just a holder of information using boost::variant and some serialization/deserialization stuff. It works well, but we have a problem: it is not over an interface, and since we use modularization through dlls, building an interface for it is getting very complicated, since it is used in almost every part of our app, and sadly interfaces (abstract classes ) on c++ have to be accessed through pointers, witch makes almost impossible to refactor the entire system. Our structure is: dll A: interface definition through abstract class dll B: interface implementation there is a painless way to achieve that (maybe using templates, I don't know) or I should forget about making this work and simply link everything with dll B? thanks Edit: Here is my example. this is on dll A BeanProtocol is a holder of N dataprotocol itens, wich are acessed by a index. class DataProtocol; class UTILS_EXPORT BeanProtocol { public: virtual DataProtocol& get(const unsigned int ) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual void getFields(std::list<unsigned int>&) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual DataProtocol& operator[](const unsigned int ) { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual DataProtocol& operator[](const unsigned int ) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual void fromString(const std::string&) { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual std::string toString() const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual void fromBinary(const std::string&) { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual std::string toBinary() const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual BeanProtocol& operator=(const BeanProtocol&) { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual bool operator==(const BeanProtocol&) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual bool operator!=(const BeanProtocol&) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual bool operator==(const char*) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } virtual bool hasKey(unsigned int field) const { throw std::runtime_error("Not implemented"); } }; the other class (named GenericBean) implements it. This is the only way I've found to make this work, but now I want to turn it in a truly interface and remove the UTILS_EXPORT (which is an _declspec macro), and finally remove the forced linkage of B with A.

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• Help with infrequent segmentation fault in accessing struct

  - by Sarah

  I'm having trouble debugging a segmentation fault. I'd appreciate tips on how to go about narrowing in on the problem. The error appears when an iterator tries to access an element of a struct Infection, defined as: struct Infection { public: explicit Infection( double it, double rt ) : infT( it ), recT( rt ) {} double infT; // infection start time double recT; // scheduled recovery time }; These structs are kept in a special structure, InfectionMap: typedef boost::unordered_multimap< int, Infection > InfectionMap; Every member of class Host has an InfectionMap carriage. Recovery times and associated host identifiers are kept in a priority queue. When a scheduled recovery event arises in the simulation for a particular strain s in a particular host, the program searches through carriage of that host to find the Infection whose recT matches the recovery time (double recoverTime). (For reasons that aren't worth going into, it's not as expedient for me to use recT as the key to InfectionMap; the strain s is more useful, and coinfections with the same strain are possible.) assert( carriage.size() > 0 ); pair<InfectionMap::iterator,InfectionMap::iterator> ret = carriage.equal_range( s ); InfectionMap::iterator it; for ( it = ret.first; it != ret.second; it++ ) { if ( ((*it).second).recT == recoverTime ) { // produces seg fault carriage.erase( it ); } } I get a "Program received signal EXC_BAD_ACCESS, Could not access memory. Reason: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at address..." on the line specified above. The recoverTime is fine, and the assert(...) in the code is not tripped. As I said, this seg fault appears 'randomly' after thousands of successful recovery events. How would you go about figuring out what's going on? I'd love ideas about what could be wrong and how I can further investigate the problem.

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• Function-Local Static Const variable Initialization semantics.

  - by Hassan Syed

  The questions are in bold, for those that cannot be bothered reading a question in depth. This is a followup to this question. It is to do with the initialization semantics of static variables in functions. Static variables should be initialized once, and their internal state might be altered later - as I (currently) do in the linked question. However, the code in question does not require the feature to change the state of the variable later. Let me clarrify my position, since I don't require the string object's internal state to change. The code is for a trait class for meta programming, and as such would would benifit from a const char * const ptr -- thus Ideally a local cost static const variable is needed. My educated guess is that in this case the string in question will be optimally placed in memory by the link-loader, and that the code is more secure and maps to the intended semantics. This leads to the semantics of such a variable "The C++ Programming language Third Edition -- Stroustrup" does not have anything (that I could find) to say about this matter. All that is said is that the variable is initialized once when the flow of control of the thread first reaches the code. This leads me to ponder if the following code would be sensible, and if not what are the intended semantics ?. #include <iostream> const char * const GetString(const char * x_in) { static const char * const x = x_in; return x; } int main() { const char * const temp = GetString("yahoo"); std::cout << temp << std::endl; const char * const temp2 = GetString("yahoo2"); std::cout << temp2 << std::endl; } The following compiles on GCC and prints "yahoo" twice. Which is what I want -- However it might not be standards compliant (which is why I post this question). It might be more elegant to have two functions, "SetString" and "String" where the latter forwards to the first. If it is standards compliant does someone know of a templates implementation in boost (or elsewhere) ?

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• Can GPU capabilities impact virtual machine performance?

  - by Dave White

  While this many not seem like a programming question directly, it impacts my development activities and so it seems like it belongs here. It seems that more and more developers are turning to virtual environments for development activities on their computers, SharePoint development being a prime example. Also, as a trainer, I have virtual training environments for all of the classes that I teach. I recently purchased a new Dell E6510 to travel around with. It has the i7 620M (Dual core, HyperThreaded cpu running at 2.66GHz) and 8 GB of memory. Reading the spec sheet, it sounded like it would be a great laptop to carry around and run virtual machines on. Getting the laptop though, I've been pretty disappointed with the user experience of developing in a virtual machine. Giving the Virtual Machine 4 GB of memory, it was slow and I could type complete sentences and watch the VM "catchup". My company has training laptops that we provide for our classes. They are Dell Precision M6400 Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 running at 2.54Ghz with 8 GB of memory and the experience on this laptops is night and day compared to the E6510. They are crisp and you barely aware that you are running in a virtual environment. Since the E6510 should be faster in all categories than the M6400, I couldn't understand why the new laptop was slower, so I did a component by component comparison and the only place where the E6510 is less performant than the M6400 is the graphics department. The M6400 is running a nVidia FX 2700m GPU and the E6510 is running a nVidia 3100M GPU. Looking at benchmarks of the two GPUs suggest that the FX 2700M is twice as fast as the 3100M. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html 3100M = 111th (E6510) FX 2700m = 47th (Precision M6400) Radeon HD 5870 = 8th (Alienware) The host OS is Windows 7 64bit as is the guest OS, running in Virtual Box 3.1.8 with Guest Additions installed on the guest. The IDE being used in the virtual environment is VS 2010 Premium. So after that long setup, my question is: Is the GPU significantly impacting the virtual machine's performance or are there other factors that I'm not looking at that I can use to boost the vm's performance? Do we now have to consider GPU performance when purchasing laptops where we expect to use virtualized development environments? Thanks in advance. Cheers, Dave

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• How to learn proper C++?

  - by Chris

  While reading a long series of really, really interesting threads, I've come to a realization: I don't think I really know C++. I know C, I know classes, I know inheritance, I know templates (& the STL) and I know exceptions. Not C++. To clarify, I've been writing "C++" for more than 5 years now. I know C, and I know that C and C++ share a common subset. What I've begun to realize, though, is that more times than not, I wind up treating C++ something vaguely like "C with classes," although I do practice RAII. I've never used Boost, and have only read up on TR1 and C++0x - I haven't used any of these features in practice. I don't use namespaces. I see a list of #defines, and I think - "Gracious, that's horrible! Very un-C++-like," only to go and mindlessly write class wrappers for the sake of it, and I wind up with large numbers (maybe a few per class) of static methods, and for some reason, that just doesn't seem right lately. The professional in me yells "just get the job done," the academic yells "you should write proper C++ when writing C++" and I feel like the point of balance is somewhere in between. I'd like to note that I don't want to program "pure" C++ just for the sake of it. I know several languages. I have a good feel for what "Pythonic" is. I know what clean and clear PHP is. Good C code I can read and write better than English. The issue is that I learned C by example, and picked up C++ as a "series of modifications" to C. And a lot of my early C++ work was creating class wrappers for C libraries. I feel like my own personal C-heavy background while learning C++ has sort of... clouded my acceptance of C++ in it's own right, as it's own language. Do the weathered C++ lags here have any advice for me? Good examples of clean, sharp C++ to learn from? What habits of C does my inner-C++ really need to break from? My goal here is not to go forth and trumpet "good" C++ paradigm from rooftops for the sake of it. C and C++ are two different languages, and I want to start treating them that way. How? Where to start? Thanks in advance! Cheers, -Chris

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