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• VS 2012 Code Review &ndash; Before Check In OR After Check In?

  - by Tarun Arora

  “Is Code Review Important and Effective?” There is a consensus across the industry that code review is an effective and practical way to collar code inconsistency and possible defects early in the software development life cycle. Among others some of the advantages of code reviews are, Bugs are found faster Forces developers to write readable code (code that can be read without explanation or introduction!) Optimization methods/tricks/productive programs spread faster Programmers as specialists "evolve" faster It's fun “Code review is systematic examination (often known as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills. Reviews are done in various forms such as pair programming, informal walkthroughs, and formal inspections.” Wikipedia No where does the definition mention whether its better to review code before the code has been committed to version control or after the commit has been performed. No matter which side you favour, Visual Studio 2012 allows you to request for a code review both before check in and also request for a review after check in. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of the approaches independently. Code Review Before Check In or Code Review After Check In? Approach 1 – Code Review before Check in Developer completes the code and feels the code quality is appropriate for check in to TFS. The developer raises a code review request to have a second pair of eyes validate if the code abides to the recommended best practices, will not result in any defects due to common coding mistakes and whether any optimizations can be made to improve the code quality.                                             Image 1 – code review before check in Pros Everything that gets committed to source control is reviewed. Minimizes the chances of smelly code making its way into the code base. Decreases the cost of fixing bugs, remember, the earlier you find them, the lesser the pain in fixing them. Cons Development Code Freeze – Since the changes aren’t in the source control yet. Further development can only be done off-line. The changes have not been through a CI build, hard to say whether the code abides to all build quality standards. Inconsistent! Cumbersome to track the actual code review process.  Not every change to the code base is worth reviewing, a lot of effort is invested for very little gain. Approach 2 – Code Review after Check in Developer checks in, random code reviews are performed on the checked in code.                                                      Image 2 – Code review after check in Pros The code has already passed the CI build and run through any code analysis plug ins you may have running on the build server. Instruct the developer to ensure ZERO fx cop, style cop and static code analysis before check in. Code is cleaner and smell free even before the code review. No Offline development, developers can continue to develop against the source control. Cons Bad code can easily make its way into the code base. Since the review take place much later in the cycle, the cost of fixing issues can prove to be much higher. Approach 3 – Hybrid Approach The community advocates a more hybrid approach, a blend of tooling and human accountability quotient.                                                               Image 3 – Hybrid Approach 1. Code review high impact check ins. It is not possible to review everything, by setting up code review check in policies you can end up slowing your team. More over, the code that you are reviewing before check in hasn't even been through a green CI build either. 2. Tooling. Let the tooling work for you. By running static analysis, fx cop, style cop and other plug ins on the build agent, you can identify the real issues that in my opinion can't possibly be identified using human reviews. Configure the tooling to report back top 10 issues every day. Mandate the manual code review of individuals who keep making it to this list of shame more often. 3. During Merge. I would prefer eliminating some of the other code issues during merge from Main branch to the release branch. In a scrum project this is still easier because cheery picking the merges is a possibility and the size of code being reviewed is still limited. Let the tooling work for you, if some one breaks the CI build often, put them on a gated check in build course until you see improvement. If some one appears on the top 10 list of shame generated via the build then ensure that all their code is reviewed till you see improvement. At the end of the day, the goal is to ensure that the code being delivered is top quality. By enforcing a code review before any check in, you force the developer to work offline or stay put till the review is complete. What do the experts say? So I asked a few expects what they thought of “Code Review quality gate before Checking in code?" Terje Sandstrom | Microsoft ALM MVP You mean a review quality gate BEFORE checking in code????? That would mean a lot of code staying either local or in shelvesets, and not even been through a CI build, and a green CI build being the main criteria for going further, f.e. to the review state. I would not like code laying around with no checkin’s. Having a requirement that code is checked in small pieces, 4-8 hours work max, and AT LEAST daily checkins, a manual code review comes second down the lane. I would expect review quality gates to happen before merging back to main, or before merging to release.  But that would all be on checked-in code.  Branching is absolutely one way to ease the pain.   Another way we are using is automatic quality builds, running metrics, coverage, static code analysis.  Unfortunately it takes some time, would be great to be on CI’s – but…., so it’s done scheduled every night. Based on this we get, among other stuff,  top 10 lists of suspicious code, which is then subjected to reviews.  If a person seems to be very popular on these top 10 lists, we subject every check in from that person to a review for a period. That normally helps.   None of the clients I have can afford to have every checkin reviewed, so we need to find ways around it. I don’t disagree with the nicety of having all the code reviewed, but I find it hard to find those resources in today’s enterprises. David V. Corbin | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I tend to agree with both sides. I hate having code that is not checked in, but at the same time hate having “bad” code in the repository. I have found that branching is one approach to solving this dilemma. Code is checked into the private/feature branch before the review, but is not merged over to the “official” branch until after the review. I advocate both, depending on circumstance (especially team dynamics)   - The “pre-checkin” is usually for elements that may impact the project as a whole. Think of it as another “gate” along with passing unit tests. - The “post-checkin” may very well not be at the changeset level, but correlates to a review at the “user story” level.   Again, this depends on team dynamics in play…. Robert MacLean | Microsoft ALM MVP I do not think there is no right answer for the industry as a whole. In short the question is why do you do reviews? Your question implies risk mitigation, so in low risk areas you can get away with it after check in while in high risk you need to do it before check in. An example is those new to a team or juniors need it much earlier (maybe that is before checkin, maybe that is soon after) than seniors who have shipped twenty sprints on the team. Abhimanyu Singhal | Visual Studio ALM Ranger Depends on per scenario basis. We recommend post check-in reviews when: 1. We don't want to block other checks and processes on manual code reviews. Manual reviews take time, and some pieces may not require manual reviews at all. 2. We need to trace all changes and track history. 3. We have a code promotion strategy/process in place. For risk mitigation, post checkin code can be promoted to Accepted branches. Or can be rejected. Pre Checkin Reviews are used when 1. There is a high risk factor associated 2. Reviewers are generally (most of times) have immediate availability. 3. Team does not have strict tracking needs. Simply speaking, no single process fits all scenarios. You need to select what works best for your team/project. Thomas Schissler | Visual Studio ALM Ranger This is an interesting discussion, I’m right now discussing details about executing code reviews with my teams. I see and understand the aspects you brought in, but there is another side as well, I’d like to point out. 1.) If you do reviews per check in this is not very practical as a hard rule because this will disturb the flow of the team very often or it will lead to reduce the checkin frequency of the devs which I would not accept. 2.) If you do later reviews, for example if you review PBIs, it is not easy to find out which code you should review. Either you review all changesets associate with the PBI, but then you might review code which has been changed with a later checkin and the dev maybe has already fixed the issue. Or you review the diff of the latest changeset of the PBI with the first but then you might also review changes of other PBIs. Jakob Leander | Sr. Director, Avanade In my experience, manual code review: 1. Does not get done and at the very least does not get redone after changes (regardless of intentions at start of project) 2. When a project actually do it, they often do not do it right away = errors pile up 3. Requires a lot of time discussing/defining the standard and for the team to learn it However code review is very important since e.g. even small memory leaks in a high volume web solution have big consequences In the last years I have advocated following approach for code review - Architects up front do “at least one best practice example” of each type of component and tell the team. Copy from this one. This should include error handling, logging, security etc. - Dev lead on project continuously browse code to validate that the best practices are used. Especially that patterns etc. are not broken. You can do this formally after each sprint/iteration if you want. Once this is validated it is unlikely to “go bad” even during later code changes Agree with customer to rely on static code analysis from Visual Studio as the one and only coding standard. This has HUUGE benefits - You can easily tweak to reach the level you desire together with customer - It is easy to measure for both developers/management - It is 100% consistent across code base - It gets validated all the time so you never end up getting hammered by a customer review in the end - It is easy to tell the developer that you do not want code back unless it has zero errors = minimize communication You need to track this at least during nightly builds and make sure team sees total # issues. Do not allow #issues it to grow uncontrolled. On the project I run I require code analysis to have run on code before checkin (checkin rule). This means -  You have to have clean compile (or CA wont run) so this is extra benefit = very few broken builds - You can change a few of the rules to compile as errors instead of warnings. I often do this for “missing dispose” issues which you REALLY do not want in your app Tip: Place your custom CA rules files as part of solution. That  way it works when you do branching etc. (path to CA file is relative in VS) Some may argue that CA is not as good as manual inspection. But since manual inspection in reality suffers from the 3 issues in start it is IMO a MUCH better (and much cheaper) approach from helicopter perspective Tirthankar Dutta | Director, Avanade I think code review should be run both before and after check ins. There are some code metrics that are meant to be run on the entire codebase … Also, especially on multi-site projects, one should strive to architect in a way that lets men manage the framework while boys write the repetitive code… scales very well with the need to review less by containment and imposing architectural restrictions to emphasise the design. Bruno Capuano | Microsoft ALM MVP For code reviews (means peer reviews) in distributed team I use http://www.vsanywhere.com/default.aspx  David Jobling | Global Sr. Director, Avanade Peer review is the only way to scale and its a great practice for all in the team to learn to perform and accept. In my experience you soon learn who's code to watch more than others and tune the attention. Mikkel Toudal Kristiansen | Manager, Avanade If you have several branches in your code base, you will need to merge often. This requires manual merging, when a file has been changed in both branches. It offers a good opportunity to actually review to changed code. So my advice is: Merging between branches should be done as often as possible, it should be done by a senior developer, and he/she should perform a full code review of the code being merged. As for detecting architectural smells and code smells creeping into the code base, one really good third party tools exist: Ndepend (http://www.ndepend.com/, for static code analysis of the current state of the code base). You could also consider adding StyleCop to the solution. Jesse Houwing | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I gave a presentation on this subject on the TechDays conference in NL last year. See my presentation and slides here (talk in Dutch, but English presentation): http://blog.jessehouwing.nl/2012/03/did-you-miss-my-techdaysnl-talk-on-code.html  I’d like to add a few more points: - Before/After checking is mostly a trust issue. If you have a team that does diligent peer reviews and regularly talk/sit together or peer review, there’s no need to enforce a before-checkin policy. The peer peer-programming and regular feedback during development can take care of most of the review requirements as long as the team isn’t under stress. - Under stress, enforce pre-checkin reviews, it might sound strange, if you’re already under time or budgetary constraints, but it is under such conditions most real issues start to be created or pile up. - Use tools to catch most common errors, Code Analysis/FxCop was already mentioned. HP Fortify, Resharper, Coderush etc can help you there. There are also a lot of 3rd party rules you can add to Code Analysis. I’ve written a few myself (http://fccopcontrib.codeplex.com) and various teams from Microsoft have added their own rules (MSOCAF for SharePoint, WSSF for WCF). For common errors that keep cropping up, see if you can define a rule. It’s much easier. But more importantly make sure you have a good help page explaining *WHY* it's wrong. If you have small feature or developer branches/shelvesets, you might want to review pre-merge. It’s still better to do peer reviews and peer programming, but the most important thing is that bad quality code doesn’t make it into the important branch. So my philosophy: - Use tooling as much as possible. - Make sure the team understands the tooling and the importance of the things it flags. It’s too easy to just click suppress all to ignore the warnings. - Under stress, tighten process, it’s under stress that the problems of late reviews will really surface - Most importantly if you do reviews do them as early as possible, but never later than needed. In other words, pre-checkin/post checking doesn’t really matter, as long as the review is done before the code is released. It’ll just be much more expensive to fix any review outcomes the later you find them. --- I would love to hear what you think!

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• Generating EF Code First model classes from an existing database

  - by Jon Galloway

  Entity Framework Code First is a lightweight way to "turn on" data access for a simple CLR class. As the name implies, the intended use is that you're writing the code first and thinking about the database later. However, I really like the Entity Framework Code First works, and I want to use it in existing projects and projects with pre-existing databases. For example, MVC Music Store comes with a SQL Express database that's pre-loaded with a catalog of music (including genres, artists, and songs), and while it may eventually make sense to load that seed data from a different source, for the MVC 3 release we wanted to keep using the existing database. While I'm not getting the full benefit of Code First - writing code which drives the database schema - I can still benefit from the simplicity of the lightweight code approach. Scott Guthrie blogged about how to use entity framework with an existing database, looking at how you can override the Entity Framework Code First conventions so that it can work with a database which was created following other conventions. That gives you the information you need to create the model classes manually. However, it turns out that with Entity Framework 4 CTP 5, there's a way to generate the model classes from the database schema. Once the grunt work is done, of course, you can go in and modify the model classes as you'd like, but you can save the time and frustration of figuring out things like mapping SQL database types to .NET types. Note that this template requires Entity Framework 4 CTP 5 or later. You can install EF 4 CTP 5 here. Step One: Generate an EF Model from your existing database The code generation system in Entity Framework works from a model. You can add a model to your existing project and delete it when you're done, but I think it's simpler to just spin up a separate project to generate the model classes. When you're done, you can delete the project without affecting your application, or you may choose to keep it around in case you have other database schema updates which require model changes. I chose to add the Model classes to the Models folder of a new MVC 3 application. Right-click the folder and select "Add / New Item..."   Next, select ADO.NET Entity Data Model from the Data Templates list, and name it whatever you want (the name is unimportant).   Next, select "Generate from database." This is important - it's what kicks off the next few steps, which read your database's schema.   Now it's time to point the Entity Data Model Wizard at your existing database. I'll assume you know how to find your database - if not, I covered that a bit in the MVC Music Store tutorial section on Models and Data. Select your database, uncheck the "Save entity connection settings in Web.config" (since we won't be using them within the application), and click Next.   Now you can select the database objects you'd like modeled. I just selected all tables and clicked Finish.   And there's your model. If you want, you can make additional changes here before going on to generate the code.   Step Two: Add the DbContext Generator Like most code generation systems in Visual Studio lately, Entity Framework uses T4 templates which allow for some control over how the code is generated. K Scott Allen wrote a detailed article on T4 Templates and the Entity Framework on MSDN recently, if you'd like to know more. Fortunately for us, there's already a template that does just what we need without any customization. Right-click a blank space in the Entity Framework model surface and select "Add Code Generation Item..." Select the Code groupt in the Installed Templates section and pick the ADO.NET DbContext Generator. If you don't see this listed, make sure you've got EF 4 CTP 5 installed and that you're looking at the Code templates group. Note that the DbContext Generator template is similar to the EF POCO template which came out last year, but with "fix up" code (unnecessary in EF Code First) removed.   As soon as you do this, you'll two terrifying Security Warnings - unless you click the "Do not show this message again" checkbox the first time. It will also be displayed (twice) every time you rebuild the project, so I checked the box and no immediate harm befell my computer (fingers crossed!).   Here's the payoff: two templates (filenames ending with .tt) have been added to the project, and they've generated the code I needed.   The "MusicStoreEntities.Context.tt" template built a DbContext class which holds the entity collections, and the "MusicStoreEntities.tt" template build a separate class for each table I selected earlier. We'll customize them in the next step. I recommend copying all the generated .cs files into your application at this point, since accidentally rebuilding the generation project will overwrite your changes if you leave them there. Step Three: Modify and use your POCO entity classes Note: I made a bunch of tweaks to my POCO classes after they were generated. You don't have to do any of this, but I think it's important that you can - they're your classes, and EF Code First respects that. Modify them as you need for your application, or don't. The Context class derives from DbContext, which is what turns on the EF Code First features. It holds a DbSet for each entity. Think of DbSet as a simple List, but with Entity Framework features turned on.   //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace EF_CodeFirst_From_Existing_Database.Models { using System; using System.Data.Entity; public partial class Entities : DbContext { public Entities() : base("name=Entities") { } public DbSet<Album> Albums { get; set; } public DbSet<Artist> Artists { get; set; } public DbSet<Cart> Carts { get; set; } public DbSet<Genre> Genres { get; set; } public DbSet<OrderDetail> OrderDetails { get; set; } public DbSet<Order> Orders { get; set; } } } It's a pretty lightweight class as generated, so I just took out the comments, set the namespace, removed the constructor, and formatted it a bit. Done. If I wanted, though, I could have added or removed DbSets, overridden conventions, etc. using System.Data.Entity; namespace MvcMusicStore.Models { public class MusicStoreEntities : DbContext { public DbSet Albums { get; set; } public DbSet Genres { get; set; } public DbSet Artists { get; set; } public DbSet Carts { get; set; } public DbSet Orders { get; set; } public DbSet OrderDetails { get; set; } } } Next, it's time to look at the individual classes. Some of mine were pretty simple - for the Cart class, I just need to remove the header and clean up the namespace. //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace EF_CodeFirst_From_Existing_Database.Models { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; public partial class Cart { // Primitive properties public int RecordId { get; set; } public string CartId { get; set; } public int AlbumId { get; set; } public int Count { get; set; } public System.DateTime DateCreated { get; set; } // Navigation properties public virtual Album Album { get; set; } } } I did a bit more customization on the Album class. Here's what was generated: //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace EF_CodeFirst_From_Existing_Database.Models { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; public partial class Album { public Album() { this.Carts = new HashSet(); this.OrderDetails = new HashSet(); } // Primitive properties public int AlbumId { get; set; } public int GenreId { get; set; } public int ArtistId { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; } public string AlbumArtUrl { get; set; } // Navigation properties public virtual Artist Artist { get; set; } public virtual Genre Genre { get; set; } public virtual ICollection Carts { get; set; } public virtual ICollection OrderDetails { get; set; } } } I removed the header, changed the namespace, and removed some of the navigation properties. One nice thing about EF Code First is that you don't have to have a property for each database column or foreign key. In the Music Store sample, for instance, we build the app up using code first and start with just a few columns, adding in fields and navigation properties as the application needs them. EF Code First handles the columsn we've told it about and doesn't complain about the others. Here's the basic class: using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace MvcMusicStore.Models { public class Album { public int AlbumId { get; set; } public int GenreId { get; set; } public int ArtistId { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; } public string AlbumArtUrl { get; set; } public virtual Genre Genre { get; set; } public virtual Artist Artist { get; set; } public virtual List OrderDetails { get; set; } } } It's my class, not Entity Framework's, so I'm free to do what I want with it. I added a bunch of MVC 3 annotations for scaffolding and validation support, as shown below: using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace MvcMusicStore.Models { [Bind(Exclude = "AlbumId")] public class Album { [ScaffoldColumn(false)] public int AlbumId { get; set; } [DisplayName("Genre")] public int GenreId { get; set; } [DisplayName("Artist")] public int ArtistId { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "An Album Title is required")] [StringLength(160)] public string Title { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Price is required")] [Range(0.01, 100.00, ErrorMessage = "Price must be between 0.01 and 100.00")] public decimal Price { get; set; } [DisplayName("Album Art URL")] [StringLength(1024)] public string AlbumArtUrl { get; set; } public virtual Genre Genre { get; set; } public virtual Artist Artist { get; set; } public virtual List<OrderDetail> OrderDetails { get; set; } } } The end result was that I had working EF Code First model code for the finished application. You can follow along through the tutorial to see how I built up to the finished model classes, starting with simple 2-3 property classes and building up to the full working schema. Thanks to Diego Vega (on the Entity Framework team) for pointing me to the DbContext template.

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• Unable to connect to Samba printer

  - by user127236

  I have a headless Ubuntu 12.04 server for files and printers. It shares files via Samba just fine. However, the HP PSC-750xi connected to the server via USB is not accessible from my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop. I can browse for it in the Printing control panel, but any attempt to authenticate my ID to the printer with my user credentials results in the error "This print share is not accessible". I have included the Samba smb.conf file below. Any help appreciated. Thanks... JGB # # Sample configuration file for the Samba suite for Debian GNU/Linux. # # # This is the main Samba configuration file. You should read the # smb.conf(5) manual page in order to understand the options listed # here. Samba has a huge number of configurable options most of which # are not shown in this example # # Some options that are often worth tuning have been included as # commented-out examples in this file. # - When such options are commented with ";", the proposed setting # differs from the default Samba behaviour # - When commented with "#", the proposed setting is the default # behaviour of Samba but the option is considered important # enough to be mentioned here # # NOTE: Whenever you modify this file you should run the command # "testparm" to check that you have not made any basic syntactic # errors. # A well-established practice is to name the original file # "smb.conf.master" and create the "real" config file with # testparm -s smb.conf.master >smb.conf # This minimizes the size of the really used smb.conf file # which, according to the Samba Team, impacts performance # However, use this with caution if your smb.conf file contains nested # "include" statements. See Debian bug #483187 for a case # where using a master file is not a good idea. # #======================= Global Settings ======================= [global] log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* . obey pam restrictions = yes map to guest = bad user encrypt passwords = true passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u passdb backend = tdbsam dns proxy = no writeable = yes server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu) unix password sync = yes workgroup = WORKGROUP syslog = 0 panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d usershare allow guests = yes max log size = 1000 pam password change = yes ## Browsing/Identification ### # Change this to the workgroup/NT-domain name your Samba server will part of # server string is the equivalent of the NT Description field # Windows Internet Name Serving Support Section: # WINS Support - Tells the NMBD component of Samba to enable its WINS Server # wins support = no # WINS Server - Tells the NMBD components of Samba to be a WINS Client # Note: Samba can be either a WINS Server, or a WINS Client, but NOT both ; wins server = w.x.y.z # This will prevent nmbd to search for NetBIOS names through DNS. # What naming service and in what order should we use to resolve host names # to IP addresses ; name resolve order = lmhosts host wins bcast #### Networking #### # The specific set of interfaces / networks to bind to # This can be either the interface name or an IP address/netmask; # interface names are normally preferred ; interfaces = 127.0.0.0/8 eth0 # Only bind to the named interfaces and/or networks; you must use the # 'interfaces' option above to use this. # It is recommended that you enable this feature if your Samba machine is # not protected by a firewall or is a firewall itself. However, this # option cannot handle dynamic or non-broadcast interfaces correctly. ; bind interfaces only = yes #### Debugging/Accounting #### # This tells Samba to use a separate log file for each machine # that connects # Cap the size of the individual log files (in KiB). # If you want Samba to only log through syslog then set the following # parameter to 'yes'. # syslog only = no # We want Samba to log a minimum amount of information to syslog. Everything # should go to /var/log/samba/log.{smbd,nmbd} instead. If you want to log # through syslog you should set the following parameter to something higher. # Do something sensible when Samba crashes: mail the admin a backtrace ####### Authentication ####### # "security = user" is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account # in this server for every user accessing the server. See # /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba3-HOWTO/ServerType.html # in the samba-doc package for details. # security = user # You may wish to use password encryption. See the section on # 'encrypt passwords' in the smb.conf(5) manpage before enabling. # If you are using encrypted passwords, Samba will need to know what # password database type you are using. # This boolean parameter controls whether Samba attempts to sync the Unix # password with the SMB password when the encrypted SMB password in the # passdb is changed. # For Unix password sync to work on a Debian GNU/Linux system, the following # parameters must be set (thanks to Ian Kahan <<[email protected]> for # sending the correct chat script for the passwd program in Debian Sarge). # This boolean controls whether PAM will be used for password changes # when requested by an SMB client instead of the program listed in # 'passwd program'. The default is 'no'. # This option controls how unsuccessful authentication attempts are mapped # to anonymous connections ########## Domains ########### # Is this machine able to authenticate users. Both PDC and BDC # must have this setting enabled. If you are the BDC you must # change the 'domain master' setting to no # ; domain logons = yes # # The following setting only takes effect if 'domain logons' is set # It specifies the location of the user's profile directory # from the client point of view) # The following required a [profiles] share to be setup on the # samba server (see below) ; logon path = \\%N\profiles\%U # Another common choice is storing the profile in the user's home directory # (this is Samba's default) # logon path = \\%N\%U\profile # The following setting only takes effect if 'domain logons' is set # It specifies the location of a user's home directory (from the client # point of view) ; logon drive = H: # logon home = \\%N\%U # The following setting only takes effect if 'domain logons' is set # It specifies the script to run during logon. The script must be stored # in the [netlogon] share # NOTE: Must be store in 'DOS' file format convention ; logon script = logon.cmd # This allows Unix users to be created on the domain controller via the SAMR # RPC pipe. The example command creates a user account with a disabled Unix # password; please adapt to your needs ; add user script = /usr/sbin/adduser --quiet --disabled-password --gecos "" %u # This allows machine accounts to be created on the domain controller via the # SAMR RPC pipe. # The following assumes a "machines" group exists on the system ; add machine script = /usr/sbin/useradd -g machines -c "%u machine account" -d /var/lib/samba -s /bin/false %u # This allows Unix groups to be created on the domain controller via the SAMR # RPC pipe. ; add group script = /usr/sbin/addgroup --force-badname %g ########## Printing ########## # If you want to automatically load your printer list rather # than setting them up individually then you'll need this # load printers = yes # lpr(ng) printing. You may wish to override the location of the # printcap file ; printing = bsd ; printcap name = /etc/printcap # CUPS printing. See also the cupsaddsmb(8) manpage in the # cupsys-client package. ; printing = cups ; printcap name = cups ############ Misc ############ # Using the following line enables you to customise your configuration # on a per machine basis. The %m gets replaced with the netbios name # of the machine that is connecting ; include = /home/samba/etc/smb.conf.%m # Most people will find that this option gives better performance. # See smb.conf(5) and /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba3-HOWTO/speed.html # for details # You may want to add the following on a Linux system: # SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 # socket options = TCP_NODELAY # The following parameter is useful only if you have the linpopup package # installed. The samba maintainer and the linpopup maintainer are # working to ease installation and configuration of linpopup and samba. ; message command = /bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/linpopup "%f" "%m" %s; rm %s' & # Domain Master specifies Samba to be the Domain Master Browser. If this # machine will be configured as a BDC (a secondary logon server), you # must set this to 'no'; otherwise, the default behavior is recommended. # domain master = auto # Some defaults for winbind (make sure you're not using the ranges # for something else.) ; idmap uid = 10000-20000 ; idmap gid = 10000-20000 ; template shell = /bin/bash # The following was the default behaviour in sarge, # but samba upstream reverted the default because it might induce # performance issues in large organizations. # See Debian bug #368251 for some of the consequences of *not* # having this setting and smb.conf(5) for details. ; winbind enum groups = yes ; winbind enum users = yes # Setup usershare options to enable non-root users to share folders # with the net usershare command. # Maximum number of usershare. 0 (default) means that usershare is disabled. ; usershare max shares = 100 # Allow users who've been granted usershare privileges to create # public shares, not just authenticated ones #======================= Share Definitions ======================= # Un-comment the following (and tweak the other settings below to suit) # to enable the default home directory shares. This will share each # user's home director as \\server\username ;[homes] ; comment = Home Directories ; browseable = no # By default, the home directories are exported read-only. Change the # next parameter to 'no' if you want to be able to write to them. ; read only = yes # File creation mask is set to 0700 for security reasons. If you want to # create files with group=rw permissions, set next parameter to 0775. ; create mask = 0700 # Directory creation mask is set to 0700 for security reasons. If you want to # create dirs. with group=rw permissions, set next parameter to 0775. ; directory mask = 0700 # By default, \\server\username shares can be connected to by anyone # with access to the samba server. Un-comment the following parameter # to make sure that only "username" can connect to \\server\username # The following parameter makes sure that only "username" can connect # # This might need tweaking when using external authentication schemes ; valid users = %S # Un-comment the following and create the netlogon directory for Domain Logons # (you need to configure Samba to act as a domain controller too.) ;[netlogon] ; comment = Network Logon Service ; path = /home/samba/netlogon ; guest ok = yes ; read only = yes # Un-comment the following and create the profiles directory to store # users profiles (see the "logon path" option above) # (you need to configure Samba to act as a domain controller too.) # The path below should be writable by all users so that their # profile directory may be created the first time they log on ;[profiles] ; comment = Users profiles ; path = /home/samba/profiles ; guest ok = no ; browseable = no ; create mask = 0600 ; directory mask = 0700 [printers] comment = All Printers browseable = no path = /var/spool/samba printable = yes guest ok = no read only = yes create mask = 0700 # Windows clients look for this share name as a source of downloadable # printer drivers [print$] comment = Printer Drivers browseable = yes writeable = no path = /var/lib/samba/printers # Uncomment to allow remote administration of Windows print drivers. # You may need to replace 'lpadmin' with the name of the group your # admin users are members of. # Please note that you also need to set appropriate Unix permissions # to the drivers directory for these users to have write rights in it ; write list = root, @lpadmin # A sample share for sharing your CD-ROM with others. ;[cdrom] ; comment = Samba server's CD-ROM ; read only = yes ; locking = no ; path = /cdrom ; guest ok = yes # The next two parameters show how to auto-mount a CD-ROM when the # cdrom share is accesed. For this to work /etc/fstab must contain # an entry like this: # # /dev/scd0 /cdrom iso9660 defaults,noauto,ro,user 0 0 # # The CD-ROM gets unmounted automatically after the connection to the # # If you don't want to use auto-mounting/unmounting make sure the CD # is mounted on /cdrom # ; preexec = /bin/mount /cdrom ; postexec = /bin/umount /cdrom [mediafiles] path = /media/multimedia/

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• 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

  - by Alan Smith

  For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 10, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 10, 2012Popular ReleasesMOBZcript: MOBZcript 0.9.1: First fix - typo in mobzystems.com-url!Media Companion: MediaCompanion3.511b release: Two more bug fixes: - General Preferences were not getting restored - Fanart and poster image files were being locked, preventing changes to themVodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.5: The following enhancements and fixes are included in Vodigi 5.5. Vodigi Administrator - Manage Music Files - Add Music Files to Image Slide Shows - Manage System Messages - Display System Messages to Users During Login - Ported to Visual Studio 2012 and MVC 4 - Added New Vodigi Administrator User Guide Vodigi Player - Improved Login/Schedule Startup Procedure - Startup Using Last Known Schedule when Disconnected on Startup - Improved Check for Schedule Changes - Now Every 15 Minutes - Pla...Secretary Tool: Secretary Tool v1.1.0: I'm still considering this version a beta version because, while it seems to work well for me, I haven't received any feedback and I certainly don't want anyone relying solely on this tool for calculations and such until its correct functioning is verified by someone. This version includes several bug fixes, including a rather major one with Emergency Contact Information not saving. Also, reporting is completed. There may be some tweaking to the reporting engine, but it is good enough to rel...VidCoder: 1.4.10 Beta: Added progress percent to the title bar/task bar icon. Added MPLS information to Blu-ray titles. Fixed the following display issues in Windows 8: Uncentered text in textbox controls Disabled controls not having gray text making them hard to identify as disabled Drop-down menus having hard-to distinguish white on light-blue text Added more logging to proxy disconnect issues and increased timeout on initial call to help prevent timeouts. Fixed encoding window showing the built-in pre...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.400: Version 2.5.0.400 (Release): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Update the documentation. InfoMan: Write the documentation. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewHome Access Plus+: v8.5: v8.5.1208.1500 This is a point release, for the other parts of HAP+ see the v8.3 release. Fixed: #me#me issue with the Edit Profile Link Updated: 8.5.1208 release Updated: Documentation with hidden booking system feature Added: Room Drop Down to the Booking System (no control panel interface), can be Resource Specific Fixed: Recursive AD Group Membership Lookup Fixed: User.IsInRole with recursive lookup Added: Group Searches to hidefrom and showto for the booking system Added: DFS Targeting ...Ynote Classic: Ynote Classic version 1.0: Ynote Classic is a text editor made by SS Corporation. It can help you write code by providing you with different codes for creation of html or batch files. You can also create C/C++ /Java files with SS Ynote Classic. Author of Ynote Classic is Samarjeet Singh. Ynote Classic is available with different themes and skins. It can also compile *.bat files into an executable file. It also has a calculator built within it. 1st version released of 6-12-12 by Samarjeet Singh. Please contact on http:...Http Explorer: httpExplorer-1.1: httpExplorer now has the ability to connect to http server via web proxies. The proxy may be explicitly specified by hostname or IP address. Or it may be specified via the Internet Options settings of Windows. You may also specify credentials to pass to the proxy if the proxy requires them. These credentials may be NTLM or basic authentication (clear text username and password).Bee OPOA Platform: Bee OPOA Demo V1.0.001: Initial version.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.78: Fix for issue #18924 - using -pretty option left in ///#DEBUG blocks. Fix for issue #18980 - bad += optimization caused bug in resulting code. Optimization has been removed pending further review.XNA GPU Particles Tool: Multi-Effect Release 20525: This version allows creating multiple effects with multiple emitters. Load, change and save particle effects. Display them in various ways to help design the effect. There are also some help pages to explain what the main settings do. This includes some preset emitter settings and a camera position for a First Person view. Source code only for XNA 4 and Visual Studio express 2010.Implementing Google Protocol Buffers using C#: Console Application: Compiled Version of the Application. The application is developed using MS.NET 4.0 run time.MB Tools: WDSMulticastMonitor V2.0: Updated version of WDSMulticast Monitor: Uses WdsTransportManger Comobject instead of WdsManager, this means that it works on servers that only have the transport role installed. Old version required the full WDS role to be installed to work. Some minor bugfixes and extra errorchecks added Added Transfererate to output, although this seems to work only sporadic. Its not a limitation of this script though, when not outputing anything in script niether is the normal wds tools.Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.2.0.0 - Epee: New : Web Optimization package! Cleaned up the nuget packages BugFix: minifying lots of files will now be faster because of a recent regression in some code. (We were instantiating something far too many times).DtPad - .NET Framework text editor: DtPad 2.9.0.40: http://dtpad.diariotraduttore.com/files/images/flag-eng.png English + A new built-in editor for the management of CSV files, including the edit of cells, deleting and adding new rows, replacement of delimiter character and much more (issue #1137) + The limit of rows allowed before the decommissioning of their side panel has been raised (new default: 1.000) (issue #1155, only partially solved) + Pressing CTRL+TAB now DtPad opens a screen that shows the list of opened tabs (issue #1143) + Note...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.1746: Welcome to the new release of AvalonDock 2.0 This release contains a lot (lot) of bug fixes and some great improvements: Views Caching: Content of Documents and Anchorables is no more recreated everytime user move it. Autohide pane opens really fast now. Two new themes Expression (Dark and Light) and Metro (both of them still in experimental stage). If you already use AD 2.0 or plan to integrate it in your future projects, I'm interested in your ideas for new features: http://avalondock...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ?? v4.3.2?? ?????????????????? ??Acfun??????? ??Bilibili?????? ??Bilibili???????????? ??Bilibili????????? ??????????????? ???? ??Bilibili??????? ????32??64? Windows XP/...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.2: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ ???? +2012-12-03 v3.2.2 -?????????????，?????button/button_menu.aspx（????）。 +?Window????Plain??；?ToolbarPosition??Footer??；?????FooterBarAlign??。 -????win...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows Phone 8: This is a brand new version of the Player Framework for Windows Phone, available exclusively for Windows Phone 8, and now based upon the Player Framework for Windows 8. While this new version is not backward compatible with Windows Phone 7 (get that http://smf.codeplex.com/releases/view/88970), it does offer the same great feature set plus dozens of new features such as advertising, localization support, and improved skinning. Click here for more information about what's new in the Windows P...New ProjectsConfigMgrUI: UI for System Center Configuration Manager 2007 & 2012, System Center Orchestrator 2012 and MDT. cvn demo poject: just a test projectDelicious Notify Plugin: Lets you push a blog post straight to Delicious from Live WriterInsert Acronym Tags: Lets you insert <acronym> and <abbr> tags into your blog entry more easily.Insert File(s): Allows you to include up to three files for publishing in a post using Windows Live Writer.Insert Quick Link: Allows you to paste a link into the Writer window and have the a window similar to the one in Writer where you can change what text is to appear, open in new window, etc.ISD training tasks: ISD training examples and tasksjack1209132501: tesingjack12091327: tesingKata: Just a couple of solutions to katas found over around the web.KJFramework????(Mono Version): KJFramework????(Mono Version)Liber: The Dynamic library manager Managing Ebook and derivatives under different Tags & Properties Share Libers under PUBLIC TAGS in the LIBER Community... Libro Visual Basic 2012 spiegato a mia nonna: Tutti gli esempi del libro "Visual Basic 2012 spiegato a mia nonna". Work in progress...log4net SharePoint 2013 Appender: log4net SharePoint 2013 AppenderMethodSerializer: .NET Method Serializer DeserializerMGR.VSSolutionManager: MGR.VSSolutionManager is a tool to help to manage (update, compare, merge) Visual Studio's solution files.MIAGE IHM: BlablaPCV_Tutorial: PCV_TutorialRoll Manager: Roll Manager is a client/server application that makes it easy to create scripts with many actions that run against groups of servers. No more DOS batch scripts. It's developed in C# .NET 3.5.RootFinder: Comprehensive implementation of a 1D RootFinder framework solution - implements the full suite of bracketing and open methods, and their primitives/compoundSGF Editor: SGF Editor reads/writes .sgf files, edits Go game trees, etc. It has several useful commands for reviewing games. For searching purposes: goban, baduk, weiqi.SharePoint 365 Utilities: SharePoint 365 aims helping SharePoint developers improve the delivery time of SharePoint solutions by offering a set of utilities for DEV/Deploy/Maintenance.SNMP: ????windwos api ? WinSNMP API ??????Stock Analitator: Stock Analyzer using Relative Strength IndexTPV: TPVTrending Topic Component: This component is a final assignment of Component Based Programming in Duta Wacana Christian Univerity, Yogyakarta, IndonesiaVisual .NET RogueLike: A basic roguelike hacked out in Visual .NET. I'm unsure where I want to go with the project, so I'm just putting it out there for now.YooYoo: Personal DevelopingYou are here (for Windows Mobile): This sample shows you how to play a *.wav file on your device with Compact Framework 2.0. There is better support for playing music on Compact Framework 3.5. The idea of this sample is from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMcSNfrT-4MZoom.PE: PE read/write libraryZX AAA Workshop: ????????? ZX AAA Workshop ????????????? ??? ????????? ???????? ? ???? ?????????? ?????????? ZX Spectrum. ?????????????? ?????????: Specaculator, Unreal, Fuse. ??????????? ?????????? ????????? ?????? ?????????? ?????????????. ?????????? ?????? ? ??????? png, gif, bmp, tiff, jpeg.???????? ??????? ?????????? ? Visual Studio: ???????? ??????? ?????????? ? Visual Studio

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• How to install Oracle Weblogic Server using OS-specific Package installer?(Windows)

  - by PratikS -- Oracle

  Note: OS-specific Package installer As the name suggests the installer is platform specific. It is meant for installation with a 32bit JVM only. Both SUN and JROCKIT 32 bit JDKs come bundled with "OS-specific Package installer", so no need to install the JDK in advance. There are three different ways of installing Oracle Weblogic Server: Graphical mode Console mode Silent mode For Windows: 1) Graphical mode:Installer: wls_<version>_win32.exe (E.g. wls1036_win32.exe)Steps to Install:1) Log in to the Windows system.2) Go to the directory that contains the installation program.3) Double-click the installation file.(wls1036_win32.exe)As soon as you double-click on the installation file you wold see the following screens: Once the installation preparation is complete you will see the welcome screen:  Click Next If there are existing Middleware Home Directories it will list all of them. You may either select an  existing Middleware Home Directory or create a new one. Note: It is always recommended to have one Middleware Home Directory per installation, so I'll select "Create a new Middleware Home" Click Next If you want to register for Security updates enter  your My Oracle Support credentials or else un-check the box, it will prompt to bypass click Yes and then click Next.  Click Next Again Click Next Click Next to All Users to access the Oracle Weblogic Server Installation.  Click Next ( Make sure the more then 1289.8 MB of space is available in the Middleware Home) Wait for the installation to complete. Click Done. And the installation is complete. 2) Console mode: Log in to the target Windows system. Open a command prompt window. Go to the directory that contains the installation program. Launch the installation by entering the name of the installation program.  C:\Documents and Settings\username>d:D:\>cd D:\WLS-InstallerD:\WLS-Installer>dir Volume in drive D is Data Volume Serial Number is 123A-4567 Directory of D:\WLS-Installer07/04/2012  08:02 AM    <DIR>          .07/04/2012  08:02 AM    <DIR>          ..07/04/2012  08:02 AM       859,548,533 wls1036_win32.exe               1 File(s)    859,548,533 bytes               2 Dir(s)  34,745,683,968 bytes freeD:\WLS-Installer>wls1036_win32.exe -mode=console A new prompt will open and you may continue with the installation as follows:  Extracting .................................................................................................... Done<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Welcome:--------This installer will guide you through the installation of WebLogic 10.3.6.0.Type "Next" or enter to proceed to the next prompt.  If you want to change dataentered previously, type "Previous".  You may quit the installer at any time bytyping "Exit".Enter [Exit][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Middleware Home Directory:--------------------------------- ->1¦* Create a new Middleware Home   2¦D:\WLS\bea816   3¦D:\WLS\bea923   4¦D:\WLS\bea1033   5¦D:\WLS\bea1032 Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Middleware Home Directory:---------------------------------    "Middleware Home" = [Enter new value or use default "C:\Oracle\Middleware"]Enter new Middleware Home OR [Exit][Previous][Next]> D:\WLS1036<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Middleware Home Directory:---------------------------------    "Middleware Home" = [D:\WLS1036]Use above value or select another option:    1 - Enter new Middleware Home    2 - Change to default [C:\Oracle\Middleware]Enter option number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Register for Security Updates:------------------------------Provide your email address for security updates and  to initiate configuration manager.   1¦Email:[]   2¦Support Password:[]   3¦Receive Security Update:[Yes]Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]> 3<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Register for Security Updates:------------------------------Provide your email address for security updates and  to initiate configuration manager.    "Receive Security Update:" = [Enter new value or use default "Yes"]Enter [Yes][No]? No<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Register for Security Updates:------------------------------Provide your email address for security updates and  to initiate configuration manager.    "Receive Security Update:" = [Enter new value or use default "Yes"]    ** Do you wish to bypass initiation of the configuration manager and    **  remain uninformed of critical security issues in your configuration?Enter [Yes][No]? Yes<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Register for Security Updates:------------------------------Provide your email address for security updates and  to initiate configuration manager.   1¦Email:[]   2¦Support Password:[]   3¦Receive Security Update:[No]Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Register for Security Updates:------------------------------Provide your email address for security updates and  to initiate configuration manager.   1¦Email:[]   2¦Support Password:[]   3¦Receive Security Update:[No]Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Install Type:--------------------Select the type of installation you wish to perform. ->1¦Typical    ¦  Install the following product(s) and component(s):    ¦ - WebLogic Server    ¦ - Oracle Coherence   2¦Custom    ¦  Choose software products and components to install and perform optional    ¦configuration.Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Product Installation Directories:----------------------------------------Middleware Home Directory: [D:\WLS1036]Product Installation Directories:   1¦WebLogic Server: [D:\WLS1036\wlserver_10.3]   2¦Oracle Coherence: [D:\WLS1036\coherence_3.7]Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Shortcut Location:-------------------------    *The installer creates shortcuts to Oracle components, samples, and tools.    *As a user with administrative privileges, you can specify where these    *shortcuts are created. ->1¦"All Users" Start Menu folder (recommended)    ¦For some installations, this setting may limit the automatic creation of    ¦server shortcuts for users without administrative privileges. Refer to the    ¦documentation for more information.   2¦Local user's Start Menu folder    ¦Select this option if you need to ensure that other profiles registered on    ¦this machine will not have access to these shortcuts.Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Choose Shortcut Location:-------------------------    *Are you sure you wish to create the shortcuts in the selected location?    *    *"All Users" Start Menu folder (recommended)    *For some installations, this setting may limit the automatic creation of    *server shortcuts for users without administrative privileges. Refer to the    *documentation for more information. ->1¦Yes.   2¦No, Go back to the previous screen and make another choice.Enter index number to select OR [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->The following Products and JDKs will be installed:--------------------------------------------------    WebLogic Platform 10.3.6.0    +----WebLogic Server    ¦    +----Core Application Server    ¦    +----Administration Console    ¦    +----Configuration Wizard and Upgrade Framework    ¦    +----Web 2.0 HTTP Pub-Sub Server    ¦    +----WebLogic SCA    ¦    +----WebLogic JDBC Drivers    ¦    +----Third Party JDBC Drivers    ¦    +----WebLogic Server Clients    ¦    +----WebLogic Web Server Plugins    ¦    +----UDDI and Xquery Support    ¦    +----Evaluation Database    +----Oracle Coherence    ¦    +----Coherence Product Files    +----JDKs         +----SUN SDK 1.6.0_29         +----Oracle JRockit 1.6.0_29 SDK    *Estimated size of installation: 1,289.8 MBEnter [Exit][Previous][Next]>Next<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Installing files..0%          25%          50%          75%          100%[------------|------------|------------|------------][***************************************************]<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Installing JDK....0%          25%          50%          75%          100%[------------|------------|------------|------------][***************************************************]Performing String Substitutions...<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Configuring OCM...0%          25%          50%          75%          100%[------------|------------|------------|------------][***************************************************]Creating Domains...<-------------------- Oracle Installer - WebLogic 10.3.6.0 ------------------->Installation CompleteCongratulations! Installation is complete.Press [Enter] to continue or type [Exit]>...Finish installation. Press any key to close this window... Note: All the inputs are in Bold 3) Silent mode: Coming soon...

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• Problem installing build-essential and upgrading g++ on Ubuntu 8.04

  - by ehsanul

  I'm having some trouble with dependencies it seems, but myself don't really know how to resolve the issue. Here's the output: ~:) sudo apt-get install build-essential Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: build-essential: Depends: g++ (>= 4:4.3.1) but 4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 is to be installed E: Broken packages ~:) sudo apt-get install g++ Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: g++: Depends: cpp (>= 4:4.3.1-1ubuntu2) but 4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 is to be installed Depends: gcc (>= 4:4.3.1-1ubuntu2) but 4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 is to be installed Depends: g++-4.3 (>= 4.3.1-1) but it is not going to be installed Depends: gcc-4.3 (>= 4.3.1-1) but it is not installable E: Broken packages ~:) Edit: I just tried aptitude instead of apt-get, as suggested. Doesn't work, had other problems: ~:) sudo aptitude install build-essential [sudo] password for ehsanul: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Building tag database... Done The following packages are BROKEN: g++ g++-4.3 libstdc++6-4.3-dev The following packages have been automatically kept back: dpkg-dev fakeroot libdns35 libisc35 linux-libc-dev patch The following NEW packages will be automatically installed: libgmp3c2 libmpfr1ldbl The following packages have been kept back: adobe-flashplugin bind9-host dnsutils gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-fuse libatm1 libbind9-30 libgvfscommon0 libisccc30 libisccfg30 liblwres30 libnautilus-extension1 linux-headers-2.6.24-24 linux-headers-2.6.24-24-generic linux-image-2.6.24-24-generic nautilus nautilus-data The following NEW packages will be installed: libgmp3c2 libmpfr1ldbl The following packages will be upgraded: build-essential The following partially installed packages will be configured: timidity 2 packages upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 24 not upgraded. Need to get 775kB/6265kB of archives. After unpacking 20.3MB will be used. The following packages have unmet dependencies: libstdc++6-4.3-dev: Depends: gcc-4.3-base (= 4.3.2-1ubuntu11) which is a virtual package. Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.3.2-1ubuntu11) but 4.2.4-1ubuntu4 is installed. g++-4.3: Depends: gcc-4.3-base (= 4.3.2-1ubuntu11) which is a virtual package. Depends: gcc-4.3 (= 4.3.2-1ubuntu11) which is a virtual package. Depends: libc6 (>= 2.8~20080505) but 2.7-10ubuntu4 is installed. g++: Depends: cpp (>= 4:4.3.1-1ubuntu2) but 4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 is installed. Depends: gcc (>= 4:4.3.1-1ubuntu2) but 4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 is installed. Depends: gcc-4.3 (>= 4.3.1-1) which is a virtual package. Resolving dependencies... The following actions will resolve these dependencies: Keep the following packages at their current version: build-essential [11.3ubuntu1 (hardy, now)] g++ [4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 (hardy-updates, now)] g++-4.3 [Not Installed] libstdc++6-4.3-dev [Not Installed] Score is -9852 Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]

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• This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited. Limitation to both Nintex and SPD workflow

  - by ybbest

  Note, this post is from Nintex Forum here. These limitations apply to both SharePoint designer Workflow and Nintex Workflow as Nintex using the SharePoint workflow engine. The common cause that I experience is that ‘parent’ workflow is generating more than one task at once. This is common as you can have multiple approvers for certain approval process. You could also have workflow running when the task is created, one of the common scenario is you would like to set a custom column value in your approval task. For me this is huge limitation, as Nintex lover I really hope Nintex could solve this problem with Microsoft going forward. Introduction “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited” is a common message that is seen when an error occurs while the SharePoint workflow engine is processing a task item associated with a workflow. When a workflow processes a task normally, the following sequence of events is expected to occur: 1.       The process begins. 2.       The workflow places a ‘lock’ on the task so nothing else can change the values while the workflow is processing. 3.       The workflow processes the task. 4.       The lock is released when the task processing is finished. When the message is encountered, it usually indicates that an error occurred between step 2 and 4. As a result, the lock is never released. Therefore, the ‘task locked’ message is not an error itself, rather a symptom of another error – the ‘task locked’ message does not indicate what went wrong. In most cases, once this message is encountered, the workflow cannot be made to continue and must be terminated and started again. The following is a guide that can help troubleshoot the cause of these messages.  Some initial observations to narrow down the potential causes are: Is the error consistent or intermittent? When the error is consistent, it will happen every time the workflow is run. When it is intermittent, it may happen regularly, but not every time. Does the error occur the first time the user tries to respond to a task, or do they respond and notice the workflow does not continue, and when they respond again the error occurs? If the message is present when the user first responds to the task, the issue would have occurred when the task was created. Otherwise, it would have occurred when the user attempted to respond to the task. Causes Modifying the task list A cause of this error appearing consistently the first time a user tries to respond to a task is a modification to the default task list schema. For example, changing the ‘Assigned to’ field in a task list to be a multiple selection will cause the behaviour. Deleting the workflow task then restoring it from the Recycle bin If you start a workflow, delete the workflow task then restore it from the Recycle Bin in SharePoint, the workflow will fail with the ‘task locked’ error.  This is confirmed behaviour whether using a SharePoint Designer or a Nintex workflow.  You will need to terminate the workflow and start it again. Parallel simultaneous responses A cause of this error appearing inconsistently is multiple users responding to tasks in parallel at the same time. In this scenario, one task will complete correctly and the other will not process. When the user tries again, the ‘task locked’ message will display. Nintex included a workaround for this issue in build 11000. In build 11000 and later, one of the users will receive a message on the task form when they attempt to respond, stating that they need to try again in a few moments. Additional processing on the task A cause of this error appearing consistently and inconsistently is having an additional system running on the items in the task list. Some examples include: a workflow running on the task list, an event receiver running on the task list or another automated process querying and updating workflow tasks. Note: This Microsoft help article (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102376561033.aspx#5) explains creating a workflow that runs on the task list to update a field on the task. Our experience shows that this causes the ‘Task Locked’ issues when the ‘parent’ workflow is generating more than one task at once. Isolated system error If the error is a rare event, or a ‘one off’ event, then an isolated system error may have occurred. For example, if there is a database connectivity issue while the workflow is processing the task response, the task will lock. In this case, the user will respond to a task but the workflow will not continue. When they respond again, the ‘task locked’ message will display. In this case, there will be an error in the SharePoint ULS Logs at the time that the user originally responded. Temporary delay while workflow processes If the workflow is taking a long time to process after a user submits a task, they may notice and try to respond to the task again. They will see the task locked error, but after a number of attempts (or after waiting some time) the task response page eventually indicates the task has been responded to. In this case, nothing actually went wrong, and the error message gives an accurate indication of what is happening – the workflow temporarily locked the task while it was processing. This scenario may occur in a very large workflow, or after the SharePoint application pool has just started. Modifying the task via a web service with an invalid url If the Nintex Workflow web service is used to respond to or delegate a task, the site context part of the url must be a valid alternative access mapping url. For example, if you access the web service via the IP address of the SharePoint server, and the IP address is not a valid AAM, the task can become locked. The workflow has become stuck without any apparent errors This behaviour can occur as a result of a bug in the SharePoint 2010 workflow engine.  If you do not have the August 2010 Cumulative Update (or later) for SharePoint, and your workflow uses delays, “Flexi-task”, State machine”, “Task Reminder” actions or variables, you could be affected. Check the SharePoint 2010 Updates site here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.  The October CU is recommended http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553031.   The fix is described as “Consider the following scenario. You add a Delay activity to a workflow. Then, you set the duration for the Delay activity. You deploy the workflow in SharePoint Foundation 2010. In this scenario, the workflow is not resumed after the duration of the Delay activity”. If you find this is occurring in your environment, install the October CU, terminate all the running workflows affected and run them afresh. Investigative steps The first step to isolate the issue is to create a new task list on the site and configure the workflow to use it.  Any customizations that were made to the original task list should not be made to the new task list. If the new task list eliminates the issue, then the cause can be attributed to the original task list or a change that was made to it. To change the task list that the workflow uses: In Workflow Designer select Settings -> Startup Options Then configure the task list as required If any of the scenarios above do not help, check the SharePoint logs for any messages with a category of ‘Workflow Infrastructure’. Conclusion The information in this article has been gathered from observations and investigations by Nintex. The sources of these issues are the underlying SharePoint workflow engine. This article will be updated if further causes are discovered. From <http://connect.nintex.com/forums/thread/6503.aspx>

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• Behind ASP.NET MVC Mock Objects

  - by imran_ku07

     Introduction:           I think this sentence now become very familiar to ASP.NET MVC developers that "ASP.NET MVC is designed with testability in mind". But what ASP.NET MVC team did for making applications build with ASP.NET MVC become easily testable? Understanding this is also very important because it gives you some help when designing custom classes. So in this article i will discuss some abstract classes provided by ASP.NET MVC team for the various ASP.NET intrinsic objects, including HttpContext, HttpRequest, and HttpResponse for making these objects as testable. I will also discuss that why it is hard and difficult to test ASP.NET Web Forms.      Description:           Starting from Classic ASP to ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Intrinsic objects is extensively used in all form of web application. They provide information about Request, Response, Server, Application and so on. But ASP.NET MVC uses these intrinsic objects in some abstract manner. The reason for this abstraction is to make your application testable. So let see the abstraction.           As we know that ASP.NET MVC uses the same runtime engine as ASP.NET Web Form uses, therefore the first receiver of the request after IIS and aspnet_filter.dll is aspnet_isapi.dll. This will start the application domain. With the application domain up and running, ASP.NET does some initialization and after some initialization it will call Application_Start if it is defined. Then the normal HTTP pipeline event handlers will be executed including both HTTP Modules and global.asax event handlers. One of the HTTP Module is registered by ASP.NET MVC is UrlRoutingModule. The purpose of this module is to match a route defined in global.asax. Every matched route must have IRouteHandler. In default case this is MvcRouteHandler which is responsible for determining the HTTP Handler which returns MvcHandler (which is derived from IHttpHandler). In simple words, Route has MvcRouteHandler which returns MvcHandler which is the IHttpHandler of current request. In between HTTP pipeline events the handler of ASP.NET MVC, MvcHandler.ProcessRequest will be executed and shown as given below,          void IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)          {                    this.ProcessRequest(context);          }          protected virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)          {                    // HttpContextWrapper inherits from HttpContextBase                    HttpContextBase ctxBase = new HttpContextWrapper(context);                    this.ProcessRequest(ctxBase);          }          protected internal virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContextBase ctxBase)          {                    . . .          }             HttpContextBase is the base class. HttpContextWrapper inherits from HttpContextBase, which is the parent class that include information about a single HTTP request. This is what ASP.NET MVC team did, just wrap old instrinsic HttpContext into HttpContextWrapper object and provide opportunity for other framework to provide their own implementation of HttpContextBase. For example           public class MockHttpContext : HttpContextBase          {                    . . .          }                     As you can see, it is very easy to create your own HttpContext. That's what did the third party mock frameworks like TypeMock, Moq, RhinoMocks, or NMock2 to provide their own implementation of ASP.NET instrinsic objects classes.           The key point to note here is the types of ASP.NET instrinsic objects. In ASP.NET Web Form and ASP.NET MVC. For example in ASP.NET Web Form the type of Request object is HttpRequest (which is sealed) and in ASP.NET MVC the type of Request object is HttpRequestBase. This is one of the reason that makes test in ASP.NET WebForm is difficult. because their is no base class and the HttpRequest class is sealed, therefore it cannot act as a base class to others. On the other side ASP.NET MVC always uses a base class to give a chance to third parties and unit test frameworks to create thier own implementation ASP.NET instrinsic object.           Therefore we can say that in ASP.NET MVC, instrinsic objects are of type base classes (for example HttpContextBase) .Actually these base classes had it's own implementation of same interface as the intrinsic objects it abstracts. It includes only virtual members which simply throws an exception. ASP.NET MVC also provides the corresponding wrapper classes (for example, HttpRequestWrapper) which provides a concrete implementation of the base classes in the form of ASP.NET intrinsic object. Other wrapper classes may be defined by third parties in the form of a mock object for testing purpose.           So we can say that a Request object in ASP.NET MVC may be HttpRequestWrapper or may be MockRequestWrapper(assuming that MockRequestWrapper class is used for testing purpose). Here is list of ASP.NET instrinsic and their implementation in ASP.NET MVC in the form of base and wrapper classes. Base Class Wrapper Class ASP.NET Intrinsic Object Description HttpApplicationStateBase HttpApplicationStateWrapper Application HttpApplicationStateBase abstracts the intrinsic Application object HttpBrowserCapabilitiesBase HttpBrowserCapabilitiesWrapper HttpBrowserCapabilities HttpBrowserCapabilitiesBase abstracts the HttpBrowserCapabilities class HttpCachePolicyBase HttpCachePolicyWrapper HttpCachePolicy HttpCachePolicyBase abstracts the HttpCachePolicy class HttpContextBase HttpContextWrapper HttpContext HttpContextBase abstracts the intrinsic HttpContext object HttpFileCollectionBase HttpFileCollectionWrapper HttpFileCollection HttpFileCollectionBase abstracts the HttpFileCollection class HttpPostedFileBase HttpPostedFileWrapper HttpPostedFile HttpPostedFileBase abstracts the HttpPostedFile class HttpRequestBase HttpRequestWrapper Request HttpRequestBase abstracts the intrinsic Request object HttpResponseBase HttpResponseWrapper Response HttpResponseBase abstracts the intrinsic Response object HttpServerUtilityBase HttpServerUtilityWrapper Server HttpServerUtilityBase abstracts the intrinsic Server object HttpSessionStateBase HttpSessionStateWrapper Session HttpSessionStateBase abstracts the intrinsic Session object HttpStaticObjectsCollectionBase HttpStaticObjectsCollectionWrapper HttpStaticObjectsCollection HttpStaticObjectsCollectionBase abstracts the HttpStaticObjectsCollection class      Summary:           ASP.NET MVC provides a set of abstract classes for ASP.NET instrinsic objects in the form of base classes, allowing someone to create their own implementation. In addition, ASP.NET MVC also provide set of concrete classes in the form of wrapper classes. This design really makes application easier to test and even application may replace concrete implementation with thier own implementation, which makes ASP.NET MVC very flexable.

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• Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1&ndash;Step by step guide

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed.  Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade.  Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive.  You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition.  It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8.  You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it.  You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU).  Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one.  I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it.  Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD.  It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option.  Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view.  It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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• Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library

  - by Sky Sanders

  Soapi.CS for .Net / Silverlight / Windows Phone 7 / Mono as easy as breathing...: var context = new ApiContext(apiKey).Initialize(false); Question thisPost = context.Official .StackApps .Questions.ById(386) .WithComments(true) .First(); Console.WriteLine(thisPost.Title); thisPost .Owner .Questions .PageSize(5) .Sort(PostSort.Votes) .ToList() .ForEach(q=> { Console.WriteLine("\t" + q.Score + "\t" + q.Title); q.Timeline.ToList().ForEach(t=> Console.WriteLine("\t\t" + t.TimelineType + "\t" + t.Owner.DisplayName)); Console.WriteLine(); }); // if you can think it, you can get it. Output Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library 21 Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Answer code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet 14 SOAPI-WATCH: A realtime service that notifies subscribers via twitter when the API changes in any way. Votes code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Votes lfoust Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Comment lfoust Votes code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes lfoust Votes code poet Revision code poet Comment Dave DeLong Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment lfoust Comment Dave DeLong Comment lfoust Comment lfoust Comment Dave DeLong Revision code poet 11 SOAPI-EXPLORE: Self-updating single page JavaSript API test harness Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Question code poet Votes code poet 11 Soapi.JS V1.0: fluent JavaScript wrapper for the StackOverflow API Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Answer George Edison Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Answer code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet 9 SOAPI-DIFF: Your app broke? Check SOAPI-DIFF to find out what changed in the API Votes code poet Revision code poet Comment Dennis Williamson Answer Dennis Williamson Votes code poet Votes Dennis Williamson Comment code poet Question code poet Votes code poet About A robust, fully relational, easy to use, strongly typed, end-to-end StackOverflow API Client Library. Out of the box, Soapi provides you with a robust client library that abstracts away most all of the messy details of consuming the API and lets you concentrate on implementing your ideas. A few features include: A fully relational model of the API data set exposed via a fully 'dot navigable' IEnumerable (LINQ) implementation. Simply tell Soapi what you want and it will get it for you. e.g. "On my first question, from the author of the first comment, get the first page of comments by that person on any post" my.Questions.First().Comments.First().Owner.Comments.ToList(); (yes this is a real expression that returns the data as expressed!) Full coverage of the API, all routes and all parameters with an intuitive syntax. Strongly typed Domain Data Objects for all API data structures. Eager and Lazy Loading of 'stub' objects. Eager\Lazy loading may be disabled. When finer grained control of requests is desired, the core RouteMap objects may be leveraged to request data from any of the API paths using all available parameters as documented on the help pages. A rich Asynchronous implementation. A configurable request cache to reduce unnecessary network traffic and to simplify your usage logic. There is no need to go out of your way to be frugal. You may set a distinct cache duration for any particular route. A configurable request throttle to ensure compliance with the api terms of usage and to simplify your code in that you do not have to worry about and respond to 50X errors. The RequestCache and Throttled Queue are thread-safe, so can make as many requests as you like from as many threads as you like as fast as you like and not worry about abusing the api or having to write reams of management/compensation code. Configurable retry threshold that will, by default, make up to 3 attempts to retrieve a request before failing. Every request made by Soapi is properly formed and directed so most any http error will be the result of a timeout or other network infrastructure. A retry buffer provides a level of fault tolerance that you can rely on. An almost identical javascript library, Soapi.JS, and it's full figured big brother, Soapi.JS2, that will enable you to leverage your server cycles and bandwidth for only those tasks that require it and offload things like status updates to the client's browser. License Licensed GPL Version 2 license. Why is Soapi.CS GPL? Can I get an LGPL license for Soapi.CS? (hint: probably) Platforms .NET 3.5 .NET 4.0 Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone 7 Mono Download Source code lives @ http://soapics.codeplex.com. Binary releases are forthcoming. codeplex is acting up again. get the source and binaries @ http://bitbucket.org/bitpusher/soapi.cs/downloads The source is C# 3.5. and includes projects and solutions for the following IDEs Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio 2010 ModoDevelop 2.4 Documentation Full documentation is available at http://soapi.info/help/cs/index.aspx Sample Code / Usage Examples Sample code and usage examples will be added as answers to this question. Full API Coverage all API routes are covered Full Parameter Parity If the API exposes it, Soapi giftwraps it for you. Building a simple app with Soapi.CS - a simple app that gathers all traces of a user in the whole stackiverse. Fluent Configuration - Setting up a Soapi.ApiContext could not be easier Bulk Data Import - A tiny app that quickly loads a SQLite data file with all users in the stackiverse. Paged Results - Soapi.CS transparently handles multi-page operations. Asynchronous Requests - Soapi.CS provides a rich asynchronous model that is especially useful when writing api apps in Silverlight or Windows Phone 7. Caching and Throttling - how and why Apps that use Soapi.CS Soapi.FindUser - .net utility for locating a user anywhere in the stackiverse Soapi.Explore - The entire API at your command Soapi.LastSeen - List users by last access time Add your app/site here - I know you are out there ;-) if you are not comfortable editing this post, simply add a comment and I will add it. The CS/SL/WP7/MONO libraries all compile the same code and with the exception of environmental considerations of Silverlight, the code samples are valid for all libraries. You may also find guidance in the test suites. More information on the SOAPI eco-system. Contact This library is currently the effort of me, Sky Sanders (code poet) and can be reached at gmail - sky.sanders Any who are interested in improving this library are welcome. Support Soapi You can help support this project by voting for Soapi's Open Source Ad post For more information about the origins of Soapi.CS and the rest of the Soapi eco-system see What is Soapi and why should I care?

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• How to Manage Your Movies in Boxee

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Boxee is a free cross platform HTPC application that plays media locally and via the Internet. Today we’ll take a look at how to manage your local movie collection in Boxee. Note: We are using the most recent version of Boxee running on Windows 7. Your experience on an earlier version or a Mac or Linux build may vary slightly. If you are using an earlier version of Boxee, we recommend you update to the current version (0.9.21.11487). The latest update features significant improvements in file and media identification. Naming your Movie Files Proper file naming is important for Boxee to correctly identify your movie files. Before you get started you may want to take some time to name your files properly. Boxee supports the following naming conventions: Lawrence of Arabia.avi Lawrence.of.Arabia.avi Lawrence of Arabia (1962).avi Lawrence.of.Arabia(1962).avi For multi-part movies, you can use .part or .cd to identify first and second parts of the movie. Gettysburg.part1.avi Gettysburg.part2.avi If you are unsure of the correct title of the movie, check with IMDB.com. Supported File Types Boxee supports the following video file types and codecs: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support) CDs, DVDs, VCD/SVCD MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP, including DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263), MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak Adding Movie Files to Boxee Boxee will automatically scan your default media folders and add any movie files to My Movies. Boxee will attempt to identify the media and check sources on the web to get data like cover art and other metadata. You can add as many sources to Boxee as you like from your local hard drive, external hard drives or from your network. You will need to make sure you have access to shared folders on the networked computer hosting the media you want to share. You can browse for other folders to scan by selecting Scan Media Folders.   You can also add media files by selecting Settings from the Home screen… Then select Media… and then selecting Add Sources. Browse for your directory and select Add source. Next, you’ll need to select the media type and the type of scanning. You can also change the share name if you’d like. When finished, select Add. You should see a quick notification at the top of the screen that the source was added.   Select Scan source to have Boxee to begin scanning your media files and attempt to properly identify them. Your movies may not show up instantly in My Movies. It will take Boxee some time to fully scan your sources, especially if you have a large collection. Eventually you should see My Movies begin to populate with cover art and metadata.   You can see the progress and find unidentified files by clicking on the yellow arrow to the left, or navigating to the left with your keyboard or remote and selecting Manage Sources.   Here you can see how many files (if any) Boxee failed to identify. To see which titles are unresolved, select Unidentified Files.   Here you’ll find your unresolved files. Select one of the unidentified files to search for the proper movie information. Next, select the Indentify Video icon. Boxee will fill in the title of the file or you edit the title yourself in the text box. Click Search. The results of your search will be displayed. Scroll through and select the title that fits your movie. Check the details of the film to make sure you have the correct title and select Done.   Fixing Incorrectly Indentified Files If you find a movie has been incorrectly identified you can correct it manually. Select the movie. Then search for the correct movie title from the list and select it. When you’re sure you found the correct movie, click Done. Filtering your Movies You can filter your movie collection by genre, or by whether it has been marked as watched or unwatched. When you’ve finished watching a movie, Boxee will mark it as watched.   You can also manually mark a title as watched.   Boxee also features a wide variety of genres by which you can filter the titles in your library. Playing your Movie When you’re ready to start watching a movie, simply select your title.   From here, you can select the “i” icon to read more information about the movie, add it to your queue, or add a shortcut. Click Local File to begin playing.   Now you’re ready to enjoy your movie. If you don’t have a large movie collection or just need more selection, you may want to check out the Netflix App for Boxee. Looking for a Boxee remote? Check out the iPhone App for Boxee. Links Download Boxee IMDB.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Watch Netflix Instant Movies in BoxeeIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Customize the Background in BoxeeUse your iPhone or iPod Touch as a Boxee RemoteGetting Started with Boxee TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free

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• Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study

  - by charlie.berger

  There is a complete and detailed Telco Churn case study "How to" Blog Series just posted by Ari Mozes, ODM Dev. Manager.  In it, Ari provides detailed guidance in how to leverage various strengths of Oracle Data Mining including the ability to: mine Star Schemas and join tables and views together to obtain a complete 360 degree view of a customer combine transactional data e.g. call record detail (CDR) data, etc. define complex data transformation, model build and model deploy analytical methodologies inside the Database  His blog is posted in a multi-part series.  Below are some opening excerpts for the first 3 blog entries.  This is an excellent resource for any novice to skilled data miner who wants to gain competitive advantage by mining their data inside the Oracle Database.  Many thanks Ari! Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (1 of 3) One of the strengths of Oracle Data Mining is the ability to mine star schemas with minimal effort.  Star schemas are commonly used in relational databases, and they often contain rich data with interesting patterns.  While dimension tables may contain interesting demographics, fact tables will often contain user behavior, such as phone usage or purchase patterns.  Both of these aspects - demographics and usage patterns - can provide insight into behavior.Churn is a critical problem in the telecommunications industry, and companies go to great lengths to reduce the churn of their customer base.  One case study1 describes a telecommunications scenario involving understanding, and identification of, churn, where the underlying data is present in a star schema.  That case study is a good example for demonstrating just how natural it is for Oracle Data Mining to analyze a star schema, so it will be used as the basis for this series of posts...... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (2 of 3) This post will follow the transformation steps as described in the case study, but will use Oracle SQL as the means for preparing data.  Please see the previous post for background material, including links to the case study and to scripts that can be used to replicate the stages in these posts.1) Handling missing values for call data recordsThe CDR_T table records the number of phone minutes used by a customer per month and per call type (tariff).  For example, the table may contain one record corresponding to the number of peak (call type) minutes in January for a specific customer, and another record associated with international calls in March for the same customer.  This table is likely to be fairly dense (most type-month combinations for a given customer will be present) due to the coarse level of aggregation, but there may be some missing values.  Missing entries may occur for a number of reasons: the customer made no calls of a particular type in a particular month, the customer switched providers during the timeframe, or perhaps there is a data entry problem.  In the first situation, the correct interpretation of a missing entry would be to assume that the number of minutes for the type-month combination is zero.  In the other situations, it is not appropriate to assume zero, but rather derive some representative value to replace the missing entries.  The referenced case study takes the latter approach.  The data is segmented by customer and call type, and within a given customer-call type combination, an average number of minutes is computed and used as a replacement value.In SQL, we need to generate additional rows for the missing entries and populate those rows with appropriate values.  To generate the missing rows, Oracle's partition outer join feature is a perfect fit.  select cust_id, cdre.tariff, cdre.month, minsfrom cdr_t cdr partition by (cust_id) right outer join     (select distinct tariff, month from cdr_t) cdre     on (cdr.month = cdre.month and cdr.tariff = cdre.tariff);   ....... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (3 of 3) Now that the "difficult" work is complete - preparing the data - we can move to building a predictive model to help identify and understand churn.The case study suggests that separate models be built for different customer segments (high, medium, low, and very low value customer groups).  To reduce the data to a single segment, a filter can be applied: create or replace view churn_data_high asselect * from churn_prep where value_band = 'HIGH'; It is simple to take a quick look at the predictive aspects of the data on a univariate basis.  While this does not capture the more complex multi-variate effects as would occur with the full-blown data mining algorithms, it can give a quick feel as to the predictive aspects of the data as well as validate the data preparation steps.  Oracle Data Mining includes a predictive analytics package which enables quick analysis. begin  dbms_predictive_analytics.explain(   'churn_data_high','churn_m6','expl_churn_tab'); end; /select * from expl_churn_tab where rank <= 5 order by rank; ATTRIBUTE_NAME       ATTRIBUTE_SUBNAME EXPLANATORY_VALUE RANK-------------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------LOS_BAND                                      .069167052          1MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON  PEAK-5                   .034881648          2REV_PER_MON          REV-5                    .034527798          3DROPPED_CALLS                                 .028110322          4MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON  PEAK-4                   .024698149          5From the above results, it is clear that some predictors do contain information to help identify churn (explanatory value > 0).  The strongest uni-variate predictor of churn appears to be the customer's (binned) length of service.  The second strongest churn indicator appears to be the number of peak minutes used in the most recent month.  The subname column contains the interior piece of the DM_NESTED_NUMERICALS column described in the previous post.  By using the object relational approach, many related predictors are included within a single top-level column. .....   NOTE:  These are just EXCERPTS.  Click here to start reading the Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study from the beginning.    

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• T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 proje

  - by CodeSniper

  I ran into the following error recently in Visual Studio 2010 while trying to port Phil Haack’s excellent T4CSS template which was originally built for Visual Studio 2008.   The Problem Error Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'dotless.Core' could not be found In “T4 speak”, this simply means that you have an Assembly directive in your T4 template but the T4 engine was not able to locate or load the referenced assembly. In the case of the T4CSS Template, this was a showstopper for making it work in Visual Studio 2010. On a side note: The T4CSS template is a sweet little wrapper to allow you to use DotLessCss to generate static .css files from .less files rather than using their default HttpHandler or command-line tool.    If you haven't tried DotLessCSS yet, go check it out now!  In short, it is a tool that allows you to templatize and program your CSS files so that you can use variables, expressions, and mixins within your CSS which enables rapid changes and a lot of developer-flexibility as you evolve your CSS and UI. Back to our regularly scheduled program… Anyhow, this post isn't about DotLessCss, its about the T4 Templates and the errors I ran into when converting them from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. In VS2010, there were quite a few changes to the T4 Template Engine; most were excellent changes, but this one bit me with T4CSS: “Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.” In VS2008, if you wanted to reference a custom assembly in your T4 Template (.tt file) you would simply right click on your project, choose Add Reference and select that assembly.  Afterwards you were allowed to use the following syntax in your T4 template to tell it to look at the local references: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core.dll" #> This told the engine to look in the “usual place” for the assembly, which is your project references. However, this is exactly what they changed in VS2010.  They now basically sandbox the T4 Engine to keep your T4 assemblies separate from your project assemblies.  This can come in handy if you want to support different versions of an assembly referenced both by your T4 templates and your project. Who broke the build?  Oh, Microsoft Did! In our case, this change causes a problem since the templates are no longer compatible when upgrading to VS 2010 – thus its a breaking change.  So, how do we make this work in VS 2010? Luckily, Microsoft now offers several options for referencing assemblies from T4 Templates: GAC your assemblies and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name Use a hard-coded Fully Qualified UNC path Copy assembly to Visual Studio "Public Assemblies Folder" and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name.  Use or Define a Windows Environment Variable to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Use a Visual Studio Macro to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Option #1 & 2 were already supported in Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to keep your templates compatible with both Visual Studio versions, then you would have to adopt one of these approaches. Yakkety Yak, use the GAC! Option #1 requires an additional pre-build step to GAC the referenced assembly, which could be a pain.  But, if you go that route, then after you GAC, all you need is a simple type name or namespace reference such as: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Hard Coding aint that hard! The other option of using hard-coded paths in Option #2 is pretty impractical in most situations since each developer would have to use the same local project folder paths, or modify this setting each time for their local machines as well as for production deployment.  However, if you want to go that route, simply use the following assembly directive style: <#@ assembly name="C:\Code\Lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> Lets go Public! Option #3, the Visual Studio Public Assemblies Folder, is the recommended place to put commonly used tools and libraries that are only needed for Visual Studio.  Think of it like a VS-only GAC.  This is likely the best place for something like dotLessCSS and is my preferred solution.  However, you will need to either use an installer or a pre-build action to copy the assembly to the right folder location.   Normally this is located at:  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies Once you have copied your assembly there, you use the type name or namespace syntax again: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Save the Environment! Option #4, using a Windows Environment Variable, is interesting for enterprise use where you may have standard locations for files, but less useful for demo-code, frameworks, and products where you don't have control over the local system.  The syntax for including a environment variable in your assembly directive looks like the following, just as you would expect: <#@ assembly name="%mypath%\dotless.Core.dll" #> “mypath” is a Windows environment variable you setup that points to some fully qualified UNC path on your system.  In the right situation this can be a great solution such as one where you use a msi installer for deployment, or where you have a pre-existing environment variable you can re-use. OMG Macros! Finally, Option #5 is a very nice option if you want to keep your T4 template’s assembly reference local and relative to the project or solution without muddying-up your dev environment or GAC with extra deployments.  An example looks like this: <#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> In this example, I’m using the “SolutionDir” VS macro so I can reference an assembly in a “/lib” folder at the root of the solution.   This is just one of the many macros you can use.  If you are familiar with creating Pre/Post-build Event scripts, you can use its dialog to look at all of the different VS macros available. This option gives the best solution for local assemblies without the hassle of extra installers or other setup before the build.   However, its still not compatible with Visual Studio 2008, so if you have a T4 Template you want to use with both, then you may have to create multiple .tt files, one for each IDE version, or require the developer to set a value in the .tt file manually.   I’m not sure if T4 Templates support any form of compiler switches like “#if (VS2010)”  statements, but it would definitely be nice in this case to switch between this option and one of the ones more compatible with VS 2008. Conclusion As you can see, we went from 3 options with Visual Studio 2008, to 5 options (plus one problem) with Visual Studio 2010.  As a whole, I think the changes are great, but the short-term growing pains during the migration may be annoying until we get used to our new found power. Hopefully this all made sense and was helpful to you.  If nothing else, I’ll just use it as a reference the next time I need to port a T4 template to Visual Studio 2010.  Happy T4 templating, and “May the fourth be with you!”

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• ODI 12c - Parallel Table Load

  - by David Allan

  In this post we will look at the ODI 12c capability of parallel table load from the aspect of the mapping developer and the knowledge module developer - two quite different viewpoints. This is about parallel table loading which isn't to be confused with loading multiple targets per se. It supports the ability for ODI mappings to be executed concurrently especially if there is an overlap of the datastores that they access, so any temporary resources created may be uniquely constructed by ODI. Temporary objects can be anything basically - common examples are staging tables, indexes, views, directories - anything in the ETL to help the data integration flow do its job. In ODI 11g users found a few workarounds (such as changing the technology prefixes - see here) to build unique temporary names but it was more of a challenge in error cases. ODI 12c mappings by default operate exactly as they did in ODI 11g with respect to these temporary names (this is also true for upgraded interfaces and scenarios) but can be configured to support the uniqueness capabilities. We will look at this feature from two aspects; that of a mapping developer and that of a developer (of procedures or KMs). 1. Firstly as a Mapping Developer..... 1.1 Control when uniqueness is enabled A new property is available to set unique name generation on/off. When unique names have been enabled for a mapping, all temporary names used by the collection and integration objects will be generated using unique names. This property is presented as a check-box in the Property Inspector for a deployment specification. 1.2 Handle cleanup after successful execution Provided that all temporary objects that are created have a corresponding drop statement then all of the temporary objects should be removed during a successful execution. This should be the case with the KMs developed by Oracle. 1.3 Handle cleanup after unsuccessful execution If an execution failed in ODI 11g then temporary tables would have been left around and cleaned up in the subsequent run. In ODI 12c, KM tasks can now have a cleanup-type task which is executed even after a failure in the main tasks. These cleanup tasks will be executed even on failure if the property 'Remove Temporary Objects on Error' is set. If the agent was to crash and not be able to execute this task, then there is an ODI tool (OdiRemoveTemporaryObjects here) you can invoke to cleanup the tables - it supports date ranges and the like. That's all there is to it from the aspect of the mapping developer it's much, much simpler and straightforward. You can now execute the same mapping concurrently or execute many mappings using the same resource concurrently without worrying about conflict.  2. Secondly as a Procedure or KM Developer..... In the ODI Operator the executed code shows the actual name that is generated - you can also see the runtime code prior to execution (introduced in 11.1.1.7), for example below in the code type I selected 'Pre-executed Code' this lets you see the code about to be processed and you can also see the executed code (which is the default view). References to the collection (C$) and integration (I$) names will be automatically made unique by using the odiRef APIs - these objects will have unique names whenever concurrency has been enabled for a particular mapping deployment specification. It's also possible to use name uniqueness functions in procedures and your own KMs. 2.1 New uniqueness tags  You can also make your own temporary objects have unique names by explicitly including either %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG in the name passed to calls to the odiRef APIs. Such names would always include the unique tag regardless of the concurrency setting. To illustrate, let's look at the getObjectName() method. At <% expansion time, this API will append %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG to the object name for collection and integration tables. The name parameter passed to this API may contain  %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. This API always generates to the <? version of getObjectName() At execution time this API will replace the unique tag macros with a string that is unique to the current execution scope. The returned name will conform to the name-length restriction for the target technology, and its pattern for the unique tag. Any necessary truncation will be performed against the initial name for the object and any other fixed text that may have been specified. Examples are:- <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "%COL_PRFEMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG", "D")?> SCOTT.C$_EABH7QI1BR1EQI3M76PG9SIMBQQ <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "EMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "D")?> SCOTT.EMPAO96Q2JEKO0FTHQP77TMSAIOSR_ Methods which have this kind of support include getFrom, getTableName, getTable, getObjectShortName and getTemporaryIndex. There are APIs for retrieving this tag info also, the getInfo API has been extended with the following properties (the UNIQUE* properties can also be used in ODI procedures); UNIQUE_STEP_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current step scope, e.g. 5rvmd8hOIy7OU2o1FhsF61 Note that this will be a different value for each loop-iteration when the step is in a loop. UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current session scope, e.g. 6N38vXLrgjwUwT5MseHHY9 IS_CONCURRENT - Returns info about the current mapping, will return 0 or 1 (only in % phase) GUID_SRC_SET - Returns the UUID for the current source set/execution unit (only in % phase) The getPop API has been extended with the IS_CONCURRENT property which returns info about an mapping, will return 0 or 1.  2.2 Additional APIs Some new APIs are provided including getFormattedName which will allow KM developers to construct a name from fixed-text or ODI symbols that can be optionally truncate to a max length and use a specific encoding for the unique tag. It has syntax getFormattedName(String pName[, String pTechnologyCode]) This API is available at both the % and the ? phase.  The format string can contain the ODI prefixes that are available for getObjectName(), e.g. %INT_PRF, %COL_PRF, %ERR_PRF, %IDX_PRF alongwith %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. The latter tags will be expanded into a unique string according to the specified technology. Calls to this API within the same execution context are guaranteed to return the same unique name provided that the same parameters are passed to the call. e.g. <%=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")%> <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")?> C$_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB_AE <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG.log", "FILE")?> C2_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB.log 2.3 Name length generation  As part of name generation, the length of the generated name will be compared with the maximum length for the target technology and truncation may need to be applied. When a unique tag is included in the generated string it is important that uniqueness is not compromised by truncation of the unique tag. When a unique tag is NOT part of the generated name, the name will be truncated by removing characters from the end - this is the existing 11g algorithm. When a unique tag is included, the algorithm will first truncate the <postfix> and if necessary  the <prefix>. It is recommended that users will ensure there is sufficient uniqueness in the <prefix> section to ensure uniqueness of the final resultant name. SUMMARY To summarize, ODI 12c make it much simpler to utilize mappings in concurrent cases and provides APIs for helping developing any procedures or custom knowledge modules in such a way they can be used in highly concurrent, parallel scenarios. 

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• Load application context problem in Maven managed spring-test TestNg

  - by joejax

  I try to setup a project with spring-test using TestNg in Maven. The code is like: @ContextConfiguration(locations={"test-context.xml"}) public class AppTest extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests { @Test public void testApp() { assert true; } } A test-context.xml simply defined a bean: <bean id="app" class="org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.App"/> I got error for Failed to load ApplicationContext when running mvn test from command line, seems it cannot find the test-context.xml file; however, I can get it run correctly inside Eclipse (with TestNg plugin). So, test-context.xml is under src/test/resources/, how do I indicate this in the pom.xml so that 'mvn test' command will work? Thanks, UPDATE: Thanks for the reply. Cannot load context file error was caused by I moved the file arround in different location since I though the classpath was the problem. Now I found the context file seems loaded from the Maven output, but the test is failed: Running TestSuite May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader loadBeanDefinitions INFO: Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [test-context.xml] May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext prepareRefresh INFO: Refreshing org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext@171bbc9: display name [org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext@171bbc9]; startup date [Tue May 25 09:55:13 PDT 2010]; root of context hierarchy May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext obtainFreshBeanFactory INFO: Bean factory for application context [org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext@171bbc9]: org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@1df8b99 May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory preInstantiateSingletons INFO: Pre-instantiating singletons in org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@1df8b99: defining beans [app,org.springframework.context.annotation.internalCommonAnnotationProcessor,org.springframework.context.annotation.internalAutowiredAnnotationProcessor,org.springframework.context.annotation.internalRequiredAnnotationProcessor]; root of factory hierarchy Tests run: 3, Failures: 2, Errors: 0, Skipped: 1, Time elapsed: 0.63 sec If I use spring-test version 3.0.2.RELEASE, the error becomes: org.springframework.test.context.testng.AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests.springTestContextPrepareTestInstance() is depending on nonexistent method null Here is the structure of the project: simple |-- pom.xml `-- src |-- main | `-- java `-- test |-- java `-- resources |-- test-context.xml `-- testng.xml testng.xml: <suite name="Suite" parallel="false"> <test name="Test"> <classes> <class name="org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.AppTest"/> </classes> </test> </suite> test-context.xml: <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd" default-lazy-init="true"> <bean id="app" class="org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.App"/> </beans> In the pom.xml, I add testng, spring, and spring-test artifacts, and plugin: <dependency> <groupId>org.testng</groupId> <artifactId>testng</artifactId> <version>5.1</version> <classifier>jdk15</classifier> <scope>test</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring</artifactId> <version>2.5.6</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId> <version>2.5.6</version> <scope>test</scope> </dependency> <build> <finalName>simple</finalName> <plugins> <plugin> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <source>1.6</source> <target>1.6</target> </configuration> </plugin> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <suiteXmlFiles> <suiteXmlFile>src/test/resources/testng.xml</suiteXmlFile> </suiteXmlFiles> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> Basically, I replaced 'A Simple Maven Project' Junit with TestNg, hope it works.

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• A Guided Tour of Complexity

  - by JoshReuben

  I just re-read Complexity – A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell , protégé of Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”) http://www.amazon.com/Complexity-Guided-Tour-Melanie-Mitchell/dp/0199798109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339744329&sr=8-1 here are some notes and links:   Evolved from Cybernetics, General Systems Theory, Synergetics some interesting transdisciplinary fields to investigate: Chaos Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory – small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible. System Dynamics / Cybernetics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Dynamics – study of how feedback changes system behavior Network Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory – leverage Graph Theory to analyze symmetric  / asymmetric relations between discrete objects Algebraic Topology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_topology – leverage abstract algebra to analyze topological spaces There are limits to deterministic systems & to computation. Chaos Theory definitely applies to training an ANN (artificial neural network) – different weights will emerge depending upon the random selection of the training set. In recursive Non-Linear systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_system – output is not directly inferable from input. E.g. a Logistic map: Xt+1 = R Xt(1-Xt) Different types of bifurcations, attractor states and oscillations may occur – e.g. a Lorenz Attractor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system Feigenbaum Constants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constants express ratios in a bifurcation diagram for a non-linear map – the convergent limit of R (the rate of period-doubling bifurcations) is 4.6692016 Maxwell’s Demon - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon - the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty – the universe (and thus information) tends towards entropy. While any computation can theoretically be done without expending energy, with finite memory, the act of erasing memory is permanent and increases entropy. Life & thought is a counter-example to the universe’s tendency towards entropy. Leo Szilard and later Claude Shannon came up with the Information Theory of Entropy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) whereby Shannon entropy quantifies the expected value of a message’s information in bits in order to determine channel capacity and leverage Coding Theory (compression analysis). Ludwig Boltzmann came up with Statistical Mechanics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics – whereby our Newtonian perception of continuous reality is a probabilistic and statistical aggregate of many discrete quantum microstates. This is relevant for Quantum Information Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information and the Physics of Information - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information. Hilbert’s Problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_problems pondered whether mathematics is complete, consistent, and decidable (the Decision Problem – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem – is there always an algorithm that can determine whether a statement is true).  Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems  proved that mathematics cannot be both complete and consistent (e.g. “This statement is not provable”). Turing through the use of Turing Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine symbol processors that can prove mathematical statements) and Universal Turing Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine Turing Machines that can emulate other any Turing Machine via accepting programs as well as data as input symbols) that computation is limited by demonstrating the Halting Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem (is is not possible to know when a program will complete – you cannot build an infinite loop detector). You may be used to thinking of 1 / 2 / 3 dimensional systems, but Fractal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal systems are defined by self-similarity & have non-integer Hausdorff Dimensions !!!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension – the fractal dimension quantifies the number of copies of a self similar object at each level of detail – eg Koch Snowflake - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake Definitions of complexity: size, Shannon entropy, Algorithmic Information Content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory - size of shortest program that can generate a description of an object) Logical depth (amount of info processed), thermodynamic depth (resources required). Complexity is statistical and fractal. John Von Neumann’s other machine was the Self-Reproducing Automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine  . Cellular Automata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton are alternative form of Universal Turing machine to traditional Von Neumann machines where grid cells are locally synchronized with their neighbors according to a rule. Conway’s Game of Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life demonstrates various emergent constructs such as “Glider Guns” and “Spaceships”. Cellular Automatons are not practical because logical ops require a large number of cells – wasteful & inefficient. There are no compilers or general program languages available for Cellular Automatons (as far as I am aware). Random Boolean Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_network are extensions of cellular automata where nodes are connected at random (not to spatial neighbors) and each node has its own rule –> they demonstrate the emergence of complex  & self organized behavior. Stephen Wolfram’s (creator of Mathematica, so give him the benefit of the doubt) New Kind of Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science proposes the universe may be a discrete Finite State Automata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine whereby reality emerges from simple rules. I am 2/3 through this book. It is feasible that the universe is quantum discrete at the plank scale and that it computes itself – Digital Physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics – a simulated reality? Anyway, all behavior is supposedly derived from simple algorithmic rules & falls into 4 patterns: uniform , nested / cyclical, random (Rule 30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30) & mixed (Rule 110 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 localized structures – it is this that is interesting). interaction between colliding propagating signal inputs is then information processing. Wolfram proposes the Principle of Computational Equivalence - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquivalence.html - all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication. Meaning in information may emerge from analogy & conceptual slippages – see the CopyCat program: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/courses/concepts/copycat.pdf Scale Free Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network have a distribution governed by a Power Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law - much more common than Normal Distribution). They are characterized by hubs (resilience to random deletion of nodes), heterogeneity of degree values, self similarity, & small world structure. They grow via preferential attachment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment – tipping points triggered by positive feedback loops. 2 theories of cascading system failures in complex systems are Self-Organized Criticality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality and Highly Optimized Tolerance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_optimized_tolerance. Computational Mechanics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_mechanics – use of computational methods to study phenomena governed by the principles of mechanics. This book is a great intuition pump, but does not cover the more mathematical subject of Computational Complexity Theory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory I am currently reading this book on this subject: http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Complexity-Christos-H-Papadimitriou/dp/0201530821/ref=pd_sim_b_1   stay tuned for that review!

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• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

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• Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Accidentally deleting a file is a terrible feeling. Not being able to boot into Windows and undelete that file makes that even worse. Fortunately, you can recover deleted files on NTFS hard drives from an Ubuntu Live CD. To show this process, we created four files on the desktop of a Windows XP machine, and then deleted them. We then booted up the same machine with the bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive that we created last week. Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open a terminal by clicking Applications in the top left of the screen, and then selecting Accessories > Terminal. To undelete our files, we first need to identify the hard drive that we want to undelete from. In the terminal window, type in: sudo fdisk –l and press enter. What you’re looking for is a line that ends with HPSF/NTFS (under the heading System). In our case, the device is “/dev/sda1”. This may be slightly different for you, but it will still begin with /dev/. Note this device name. If you have more than one hard drive partition formatted as NTFS, then you may be able to identify the correct partition by the size. If you look at the second line of text in the screenshot above, it reads “Disk /dev/sda: 136.4 GB, …” This means that the hard drive that Ubuntu has named /dev/sda is 136.4 GB large. If your hard drives are of different size, then this information can help you track down the right device name to use. Alternatively, you can just try them all, though this can be time consuming for large hard drives. Now that you know the name Ubuntu has assigned to your hard drive, we’ll scan it to see what files we can uncover. In the terminal window, type: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> and hit enter. In our case, the command is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 The names of files that can recovered show up in the far right column. The percentage in the third column tells us how much of that file can be recovered. Three of the four files that we originally deleted are showing up in this list, even though we shut down the computer right after deleting the four files – so even in ideal cases, your files may not be recoverable. Nevertheless, we have three files that we can recover – two JPGs and an MPG. Note: ntfsundelete is immediately available in the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD. If you are in a different version of Ubuntu, or for some other reason get an error when trying to use ntfsundelete, you can install it by entering “sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs” in a terminal window. To quickly recover the two JPGs, we will use the * wildcard to recover all of the files that end with .jpg. In the terminal window, enter sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –m *.jpg which is, in our case, sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –m *.jpg The two files are recovered from the NTFS hard drive and saved in the current working directory of the terminal. By default, this is the home directory of the current user, though we are working in the Desktop folder. Note that the ntfsundelete program does not make any changes to the original NTFS hard drive. If you want to take those files and put them back in the NTFS hard drive, you will have to move them there after they are undeleted with ntfsundelete. Of course, you can also put them on your flash drive or open Firefox and email them to yourself – the sky’s the limit! We have one more file to undelete – our MPG. Note the first column on the far left. It contains a number, its Inode. Think of this as the file’s unique identifier. Note this number. To undelete a file by its Inode, enter the following in the terminal: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –i <Inode> In our case, this is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –i 14159 This recovers the file, along with an identifier that we don’t really care about. All three of our recoverable files are now recovered. However, Ubuntu lets us know visually that we can’t use these files yet. That’s because the ntfsundelete program saves the files as the “root” user, not the “ubuntu” user. We can verify this by typing the following in our terminal window: ls –l We want these three files to be owned by ubuntu, not root. To do this, enter the following in the terminal window: sudo chown ubuntu <Files> If the current folder has other files in it, you may not want to change their owner to ubuntu. However, in our case, we only have these three files in this folder, so we will use the * wildcard to change the owner of all three files. sudo chown ubuntu * The files now look normal, and we can do whatever we want with them. Hopefully you won’t need to use this tip, but if you do, ntfsundelete is a nice command-line utility. It doesn’t have a fancy GUI like many of the similar Windows programs, but it is a powerful tool that can recover your files quickly. See ntfsundelete’s manual page for more detailed usage information Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDUse Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows ComputerCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayGuide to Using Check Disk in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? 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• Using a "white list" for extracting terms for Text Mining

  - by [email protected]

  In Part 1 of my post on "Generating cluster names from a document clustering model" (part 1, part 2, part 3), I showed how to build a clustering model from text documents using Oracle Data Miner, which automates preparing data for text mining. In this process we specified a custom stoplist and lexer and relied on Oracle Text to identify important terms.  However, there is an alternative approach, the white list, which uses a thesaurus object with the Oracle Text CTXRULE index to allow you to specify the important terms. INTRODUCTIONA stoplist is used to exclude, i.e., black list, specific words in your documents from being indexed. For example, words like a, if, and, or, and but normally add no value when text mining. Other words can also be excluded if they do not help to differentiate documents, e.g., the word Oracle is ubiquitous in the Oracle product literature. One problem with stoplists is determining which words to specify. This usually requires inspecting the terms that are extracted, manually identifying which ones you don't want, and then re-indexing the documents to determine if you missed any. Since a corpus of documents could contain thousands of words, this could be a tedious exercise. Moreover, since every word is considered as an individual token, a term excluded in one context may be needed to help identify a term in another context. For example, in our Oracle product literature example, the words "Oracle Data Mining" taken individually are not particular helpful. The term "Oracle" may be found in nearly all documents, as with the term "Data." The term "Mining" is more unique, but could also refer to the Mining industry. If we exclude "Oracle" and "Data" by specifying them in the stoplist, we lose valuable information. But it we include them, they may introduce too much noise. Still, when you have a broad vocabulary or don't have a list of specific terms of interest, you rely on the text engine to identify important terms, often by computing the term frequency - inverse document frequency metric. (This is effectively a weight associated with each term indicating its relative importance in a document within a collection of documents. We'll revisit this later.) The results using this technique is often quite valuable. As noted above, an alternative to the subtractive nature of the stoplist is to specify a white list, or a list of terms--perhaps multi-word--that we want to extract and use for data mining. The obvious downside to this approach is the need to specify the set of terms of interest. However, this may not be as daunting a task as it seems. For example, in a given domain (Oracle product literature), there is often a recognized glossary, or a list of keywords and phrases (Oracle product names, industry names, product categories, etc.). Being able to identify multi-word terms, e.g., "Oracle Data Mining" or "Customer Relationship Management" as a single token can greatly increase the quality of the data mining results. The remainder of this post and subsequent posts will focus on how to produce a dataset that contains white list terms, suitable for mining. CREATING A WHITE LIST We'll leverage the thesaurus capability of Oracle Text. Using a thesaurus, we create a set of rules that are in effect our mapping from single and multi-word terms to the tokens used to represent those terms. For example, "Oracle Data Mining" becomes "ORACLEDATAMINING." First, we'll create and populate a mapping table called my_term_token_map. All text has been converted to upper case and values in the TERM column are intended to be mapped to the token in the TOKEN column. TERM                                TOKEN DATA MINING                         DATAMINING ORACLE DATA MINING                  ORACLEDATAMINING 11G                                 ORACLE11G JAVA                                JAVA CRM                                 CRM CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT    CRM ... Next, we'll create a thesaurus object my_thesaurus and a rules table my_thesaurus_rules: CTX_THES.CREATE_THESAURUS('my_thesaurus', FALSE); CREATE TABLE my_thesaurus_rules (main_term     VARCHAR2(100),                                  query_string  VARCHAR2(400)); We next populate the thesaurus object and rules table using the term token map. A cursor is defined over my_term_token_map. As we iterate over  the rows, we insert a synonym relationship 'SYN' into the thesaurus. We also insert into the table my_thesaurus_rules the main term, and the corresponding query string, which specifies synonyms for the token in the thesaurus. DECLARE   cursor c2 is     select token, term     from my_term_token_map; BEGIN   for r_c2 in c2 loop     CTX_THES.CREATE_RELATION('my_thesaurus',r_c2.token,'SYN',r_c2.term);     EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'insert into my_thesaurus_rules values                        (:1,''SYN(' || r_c2.token || ', my_thesaurus)'')'     using r_c2.token;   end loop; END; We are effectively inserting the token to return and the corresponding query that will look up synonyms in our thesaurus into the my_thesaurus_rules table, for example:     'ORACLEDATAMINING'        SYN ('ORACLEDATAMINING', my_thesaurus)At this point, we create a CTXRULE index on the my_thesaurus_rules table: create index my_thesaurus_rules_idx on        my_thesaurus_rules(query_string)        indextype is ctxsys.ctxrule; In my next post, this index will be used to extract the tokens that match each of the rules specified. We'll then compute the tf-idf weights for each of the terms and create a nested table suitable for mining.

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• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: The Dangers of Casting Boxed Values

  - by James Michael Hare

  Starting a new series to parallel the Little Wonders series.  In this series, I will examine some of the small pitfalls that can occasionally trip up developers. Introduction: Of Casts and Conversions What happens when we try to assign from an int and a double and vice-versa? 1: double pi = 3.14; 2: int theAnswer = 42; 3:  4: // implicit widening conversion, compiles! 5: double doubleAnswer = theAnswer; 6:  7: // implicit narrowing conversion, compiler error! 8: int intPi = pi; As you can see from the comments above, a conversion from a value type where there is no potential data loss is can be done with an implicit conversion.  However, when converting from one value type to another may result in a loss of data, you must make the conversion explicit so the compiler knows you accept this risk.  That is why the conversion from double to int will not compile with an implicit conversion, we can make the conversion explicit by adding a cast: 1: // explicit narrowing conversion using a cast, compiler 2: // succeeds, but results may have data loss: 3: int intPi = (int)pi; So for value types, the conversions (implicit and explicit) both convert the original value to a new value of the given type.  With widening and narrowing references, however, this is not the case.  Converting reference types is a bit different from converting value types.  First of all when you perform a widening or narrowing you don’t really convert the instance of the object, you just convert the reference itself to the wider or narrower reference type, but both the original and new reference type both refer back to the same object. Secondly, widening and narrowing for reference types refers the going down and up the class hierarchy instead of referring to precision as in value types.  That is, a narrowing conversion for a reference type means you are going down the class hierarchy (for example from Shape to Square) whereas a widening conversion means you are going up the class hierarchy (from Square to Shape).  1: var square = new Square(); 2:  3: // implicitly convers because all squares are shapes 4: // (that is, all subclasses can be referenced by a superclass reference) 5: Shape myShape = square; 6:  7: // implicit conversion not possible, not all shapes are squares! 8: // (that is, not all superclasses can be referenced by a subclass reference) 9: Square mySquare = (Square) myShape; So we had to cast the Shape back to Square because at that point the compiler has no way of knowing until runtime whether the Shape in question is truly a Square.  But, because the compiler knows that it’s possible for a Shape to be a Square, it will compile.  However, if the object referenced by myShape is not truly a Square at runtime, you will get an invalid cast exception. Of course, there are other forms of conversions as well such as user-specified conversions and helper class conversions which are beyond the scope of this post.  The main thing we want to focus on is this seemingly innocuous casting method of widening and narrowing conversions that we come to depend on every day and, in some cases, can bite us if we don’t fully understand what is going on!  The Pitfall: Conversions on Boxed Value Types Can Fail What if you saw the following code and – knowing nothing else – you were asked if it was legal or not, what would you think: 1: // assuming x is defined above this and this 2: // assignment is syntactically legal. 3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: // convert 3.14 to int. 6: int truncated = (int)x; You may think that since x is obviously a double (can’t be a float) because 3.14 is a double literal, but this is inaccurate.  Our x could also be dynamic and this would work as well, or there could be user-defined conversions in play.  But there is another, even simpler option that can often bite us: what if x is object? 1: object x; 2:  3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: int truncated = (int) x; On the surface, this seems fine.  We have a double and we place it into an object which can be done implicitly through boxing (no cast) because all types inherit from object.  Then we cast it to int.  This theoretically should be possible because we know we can explicitly convert a double to an int through a conversion process which involves truncation. But here’s the pitfall: when casting an object to another type, we are casting a reference type, not a value type!  This means that it will attempt to see at runtime if the value boxed and referred to by x is of type int or derived from type int.  Since it obviously isn’t (it’s a double after all) we get an invalid cast exception! Now, you may say this looks awfully contrived, but in truth we can run into this a lot if we’re not careful.  Consider using an IDataReader to read from a database, and then attempting to select a result row of a particular column type: 1: using (var connection = new SqlConnection("some connection string")) 2: using (var command = new SqlCommand("select * from employee", connection)) 3: using (var reader = command.ExecuteReader()) 4: { 5: while (reader.Read()) 6: { 7: // if the salary is not an int32 in the SQL database, this is an error! 8: // doesn't matter if short, long, double, float, reader [] returns object! 9: total += (int) reader["annual_salary"]; 10: } 11: } Notice that since the reader indexer returns object, if we attempt to convert using a cast to a type, we have to make darn sure we use the true, actual type or this will fail!  If the SQL database column is a double, float, short, etc this will fail at runtime with an invalid cast exception because it attempts to convert the object reference! So, how do you get around this?  There are two ways, you could first cast the object to its actual type (double), and then do a narrowing cast to on the value to int.  Or you could use a helper class like Convert which analyzes the actual run-time type and will perform a conversion as long as the type implements IConvertible. 1: object x; 2:  3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: // if you want to cast, must cast out of object to double, then 6: // cast convert. 7: int truncated = (int)(double) x; 8:  9: // or you can call a helper class like Convert which examines runtime 10: // type of the value being converted 11: int anotherTruncated = Convert.ToInt32(x); Summary You should always be careful when performing a conversion cast from values boxed in object that you are actually casting to the true type (or a sub-type). Since casting from object is a widening of the reference, be careful that you either know the exact, explicit type you expect to be held in the object, or instead avoid the cast and use a helper class to perform a safe conversion to the type you desire. Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Pitfalls,Little Pitfalls,BlackRabbitCoder

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• Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

  - by KeithMayer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry!  This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros.  Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future.  And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used.  "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned.  These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses.  This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state.  Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity.  Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below.  Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources.  Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal  When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.  TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs.  Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network.  As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running.  As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved.  If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs.  However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal.  When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module.  So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE!  Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY!  Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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• How can a code editor effectively hint at code nesting level - without using indentation?

  - by pgfearo

  I've written an XML text editor that provides 2 view options for the same XML text, one indented (virtually), the other left-justified. The motivation for the left-justified view is to help users 'see' the whitespace characters they're using for indentation of plain-text or XPath code without interference from indentation that is an automated side-effect of the XML context. I want to provide visual clues (in the non-editable part of the editor) for the left-justified mode that will help the user, but without getting too elaborate. I tried just using connecting lines, but that seemed too busy. The best I've come up with so far is shown in a mocked up screenshot of the editor below, but I'm seeking better/simpler alternatives (that don't require too much code). [Edit] Taking the heatmap idea (from: @jimp) I get this and 3 alternatives - labelled a, b and c: The following section describes the accepted answer as a proposal, bringing together ideas from a number of other answers and comments. As this question is now community wiki, please feel free to update this. NestView The name for this idea which provides a visual method to improve the readability of nested code without using indentation. Contour Lines The name for the differently shaded lines within the NestView The image above shows the NestView used to help visualise an XML snippet. Though XML is used for this illustration, any other code syntax that uses nesting could have been used for this illustration. An Overview: The contour lines are shaded (as in a heatmap) to convey nesting level The contour lines are angled to show when a nesting level is being either opened or closed. A contour line links the start of a nesting level to the corresponding end. The combined width of contour lines give a visual impression of nesting level, in addition to the heatmap. The width of the NestView may be manually resizable, but should not change as the code changes. Contour lines can either be compressed or truncated to keep acheive this. Blank lines are sometimes used code to break up text into more digestable chunks. Such lines could trigger special behaviour in the NestView. For example the heatmap could be reset or a background color contour line used, or both. One or more contour lines associated with the currently selected code can be highlighted. The contour line associated with the selected code level would be emphasized the most, but other contour lines could also 'light up' in addition to help highlight the containing nested group Different behaviors (such as code folding or code selection) can be associated with clicking/double-clicking on a Contour Line. Different parts of a contour line (leading, middle or trailing edge) may have different dynamic behaviors associated. Tooltips can be shown on a mouse hover event over a contour line The NestView is updated continously as the code is edited. Where nesting is not well-balanced assumptions can be made where the nesting level should end, but the associated temporary contour lines must be highlighted in some way as a warning. Drag and drop behaviors of Contour Lines can be supported. Behaviour may vary according to the part of the contour line being dragged. Features commonly found in the left margin such as line numbering and colour highlighting for errors and change state could overlay the NestView. Additional Functionality The proposal addresses a range of additional issues - many are outside the scope of the original question, but a useful side-effect. Visually linking the start and end of a nested region The contour lines connect the start and end of each nested level Highlighting the context of the currently selected line As code is selected, the associated nest-level in the NestView can be highlighted Differentiating between code regions at the same nesting level In the case of XML different hues could be used for different namespaces. Programming languages (such as c#) support named regions that could be used in a similar way. Dividing areas within a nesting area into different visual blocks Extra lines are often inserted into code to aid readability. Such empty lines could be used to reset the saturation level of the NestView's contour lines. Multi-Column Code View Code without indentation makes the use of a multi-column view more effective because word-wrap or horizontal scrolling is less likely to be required. In this view, once code has reach the bottom of one column, it flows into the next one: Usage beyond merely providing a visual aid As proposed in the overview, the NestView could provide a range of editing and selection features which would be broadly in line with what is expected from a TreeView control. The key difference is that a typical TreeView node has 2 parts: an expander and the node icon. A NestView contour line can have as many as 3 parts: an opener (sloping), a connector (vertical) and a close (sloping). On Indentation The NestView presented alongside non-indented code complements, but is unlikely to replace, the conventional indented code view. It's likely that any solutions adopting a NestView, will provide a method to switch seamlessly between indented and non-indented code views without affecting any of the code text itself - including whitespace characters. One technique for the indented view would be 'Virtual Formatting' - where a dynamic left-margin is used in lieu of tab or space characters. The same nesting-level data used to dynamically render the NestView could also used for the more conventional-looking indented view. Printing Indentation will be important for the readability of printed code. Here, the absence of tab/space characters and a dynamic left-margin means that the text can wrap at the right-margin and still maintain the integrity of the indented view. Line numbers can be used as visual markers that indicate where code is word-wrapped and also the exact position of indentation: Screen Real-Estate: Flat Vs Indented Addressing the question of whether the NestView uses up valuable screen real-estate: Contour lines work well with a width the same as the code editor's character width. A NestView width of 12 character widths can therefore accommodate 12 levels of nesting before contour lines are truncated/compressed. If an indented view uses 3 character-widths for each nesting level then space is saved until nesting reaches 4 levels of nesting, after this nesting level the flat view has a space-saving advantage that increases with each nesting level. Note: A minimum indentation of 4 character widths is often recommended for code, however XML often manages with less. Also, Virtual Formatting permits less indentation to be used because there's no risk of alignment issues A comparison of the 2 views is shown below: Based on the above, its probably fair to conclude that view style choice will be based on factors other than screen real-estate. The one exception is where screen space is at a premium, for example on a Netbook/Tablet or when multiple code windows are open. In these cases, the resizable NestView would seem to be a clear winner. Use Cases Examples of real-world examples where NestView may be a useful option: Where screen real-estate is at a premium a. On devices such as tablets, notepads and smartphones b. When showing code on websites c. When multiple code windows need to be visible on the desktop simultaneously Where consistent whitespace indentation of text within code is a priority For reviewing deeply nested code. For example where sub-languages (e.g. Linq in C# or XPath in XSLT) might cause high levels of nesting. Accessibility Resizing and color options must be provided to aid those with visual impairments, and also to suit environmental conditions and personal preferences: Compatability of edited code with other systems A solution incorporating a NestView option should ideally be capable of stripping leading tab and space characters (identified as only having a formatting role) from imported code. Then, once stripped, the code could be rendered neatly in both the left-justified and indented views without change. For many users relying on systems such as merging and diff tools that are not whitespace-aware this will be a major concern (if not a complete show-stopper). Other Works: Visualisation of Overlapping Markup Published research by Wendell Piez, dated from 2004, addresses the issue of the visualisation of overlapping markup, specifically LMNL. This includes SVG graphics with significant similarities to the NestView proposal, as such, they are acknowledged here. The visual differences are clear in the images (below), the key functional distinction is that NestView is intended only for well-nested XML or code, whereas Wendell Piez's graphics are designed to represent overlapped nesting. The graphics above were reproduced - with kind permission - from http://www.piez.org Sources: Towards Hermenutic Markup Half-steps toward LMNL

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• General monitoring for SQL Server Analysis Services using Performance Monitor

  - by Testas

  A recent customer engagement required a setup of a monitoring solution for SSAS, due to the time restrictions placed upon this, native Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) and SQL Server Profiler Monitoring Tools was used as using a third party tool would have meant the customer providing an additional monitoring server that was not available.I wanted to outline the performance monitoring counters that was used to monitor the system on which SSAS was running. Due to the slow query performance that was occurring during certain scenarios, perfmon was used to establish if any pressure was being placed on the Disk, CPU or Memory subsystem when concurrent connections access the same query, and Profiler to pinpoint how the query was being managed within SSAS, profiler I will leave for another blogThis guide is not designed to provide a definitive list of what should be used when monitoring SSAS, different situations may require the addition or removal of counters as presented by the situation. However I hope that it serves as a good basis for starting your monitoring of SSAS. I would also like to acknowledge Chris Webb’s awesome chapters from “Expert Cube Development” that also helped shape my monitoring strategy:http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!6657.entrySimulating ConnectionsTo simulate the additional connections to the SSAS server whilst monitoring, I used ascmd to simulate multiple connections to the typical and worse performing queries that were identified by the customer. A similar sript can be downloaded from codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/SQLSrvAnalysisSrvcs.     File name: ASCMD_StressTestingScripts.zip. Performance MonitorWithin performance monitor,  a counter log was created that contained the list of counters below. The important point to note when running the counter log is that the RUN AS property within the counter log properties should be changed to an account that has rights to the SSAS instance when monitoring MSAS counters. Failure to do so means that the counter log runs under the system account, no errors or warning are given while running the counter log, and it is not until you need to view the MSAS counters that they will not be displayed if run under the default account that has no right to SSAS. If your connection simulation takes hours, this could prove quite frustrating if not done beforehand JThe counters used……  Object Counter Instance Justification System Processor Queue legnth N/A Indicates how many threads are waiting for execution against the processor. If this counter is consistently higher than around 5 when processor utilization approaches 100%, then this is a good indication that there is more work (active threads) available (ready for execution) than the machine's processors are able to handle. System Context Switches/sec N/A Measures how frequently the processor has to switch from user- to kernel-mode to handle a request from a thread running in user mode. The heavier the workload running on your machine, the higher this counter will generally be, but over long term the value of this counter should remain fairly constant. If this counter suddenly starts increasing however, it may be an indicating of a malfunctioning device, especially if the Processor\Interrupts/sec\(_Total) counter on your machine shows a similar unexplained increase Process % Processor Time sqlservr Definately should be used if Processor\% Processor Time\(_Total) is maxing at 100% to assess the effect of the SQL Server process on the processor Process % Processor Time msmdsrv Definately should be used if Processor\% Processor Time\(_Total) is maxing at 100% to assess the effect of the SQL Server process on the processor Process Working Set sqlservr If the Memory\Available bytes counter is decreaing this counter can be run to indicate if the process is consuming larger and larger amounts of RAM. Process(instance)\Working Set measures the size of the working set for each process, which indicates the number of allocated pages the process can address without generating a page fault. Process Working Set msmdsrv If the Memory\Available bytes counter is decreaing this counter can be run to indicate if the process is consuming larger and larger amounts of RAM. Process(instance)\Working Set measures the size of the working set for each process, which indicates the number of allocated pages the process can address without generating a page fault. Processor % Processor Time _Total and individual cores measures the total utilization of your processor by all running processes. If multi-proc then be mindful only an average is provided Processor % Privileged Time _Total To see how the OS is handling basic IO requests. If kernel mode utilization is high, your machine is likely underpowered as it's too busy handling basic OS housekeeping functions to be able to effectively run other applications. Processor % User Time _Total To see how the applications is interacting from a processor perspective, a high percentage utilisation determine that the server is dealing with too many apps and may require increasing thje hardware or scaling out Processor Interrupts/sec _Total  The average rate, in incidents per second, at which the processor received and serviced hardware interrupts. Shoulr be consistant over time but a sudden unexplained increase could indicate a device malfunction which can be confirmed using the System\Context Switches/sec counter Memory Pages/sec N/A Indicates the rate at which pages are read from or written to disk to resolve hard page faults. This counter is a primary indicator of the kinds of faults that cause system-wide delays, this is the primary counter to watch for indication of possible insufficient RAM to meet your server's needs. A good idea here is to configure a perfmon alert that triggers when the number of pages per second exceeds 50 per paging disk on your system. May also want to see the configuration of the page file on the Server Memory Available Mbytes N/A is the amount of physical memory, in bytes, available to processes running on the computer. if this counter is greater than 10% of the actual RAM in your machine then you probably have more than enough RAM. monitor it regularly to see if any downward trend develops, and set an alert to trigger if it drops below 2% of the installed RAM. Physical Disk Disk Transfers/sec for each physical disk If it goes above 10 disk I/Os per second then you've got poor response time for your disk. Physical Disk Idle Time _total If Disk Transfers/sec is above  25 disk I/Os per second use this counter. which measures the percent time that your hard disk is idle during the measurement interval, and if you see this counter fall below 20% then you've likely got read/write requests queuing up for your disk which is unable to service these requests in a timely fashion. Physical Disk Disk queue legnth For the OLAP and SQL physical disk A value that is consistently less than 2 means that the disk system is handling the IO requests against the physical disk Network Interface Bytes Total/sec For the NIC Should be monitored over a period of time to see if there is anb increase/decrease in network utilisation Network Interface Current Bandwidth For the NIC is an estimate of the current bandwidth of the network interface in bits per second (BPS). MSAS 2005: Memory Memory Limit High KB N/A Shows (as a percentage) the high memory limit configured for SSAS in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSAS10.MSSQLSERVER\OLAP\Config\msmdsrv.ini MSAS 2005: Memory Memory Limit Low KB N/A Shows (as a percentage) the low memory limit configured for SSAS in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSAS10.MSSQLSERVER\OLAP\Config\msmdsrv.ini MSAS 2005: Memory Memory Usage KB N/A Displays the memory usage of the server process. MSAS 2005: Memory File Store KB N/A Displays the amount of memory that is reserved for the Cache. Note if total memory limit in the msmdsrv.ini is set to 0, no memory is reserved for the cache MSAS 2005: Storage Engine Query Queries from Cache Direct / sec N/A Displays the rate of queries answered from the cache directly MSAS 2005: Storage Engine Query Queries from Cache Filtered / Sec N/A Displays the Rate of queries answered by filtering existing cache entry. MSAS 2005: Storage Engine Query Queries from File / Sec N/A Displays the Rate of queries answered from files. MSAS 2005: Storage Engine Query Average time /query N/A Displays the average time of a query MSAS 2005: Connection Current connections N/A Displays the number of connections against the SSAS instance MSAS 2005: Connection Requests / sec N/A Displays the rate of query requests per second MSAS 2005: Locks Current Lock Waits N/A Displays thhe number of connections waiting on a lock MSAS 2005: Threads Query Pool job queue Length N/A The number of queries in the job queue MSAS 2005:Proc Aggregations Temp file bytes written/sec N/A Shows the number of bytes of data processed in a temporary file MSAS 2005:Proc Aggregations Temp file rows written/sec N/A Shows the number of bytes of data processed in a temporary file 

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• springTestContextBeforeTestMethod failed in Maven spring-test

  - by joejax

  I try to setup a project with spring-test using TestNg in Maven. The code is like: @ContextConfiguration(locations={"test-context.xml"}) public class AppTest extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests { @Test public void testApp() { assert true; } } A test-context.xml simply defined a bean: <bean id="app" class="org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.App"/> I got error for Failed to load ApplicationContext when running mvn test from command line, seems it cannot find the test-context.xml file; however, I can get it run correctly inside Eclipse (with TestNg plugin). So, test-context.xml is under src/test/resources/, how do I indicate this in the pom.xml so that 'mvn test' command will work? Thanks, UPDATE: Thanks for the reply. Cannot load context file error was caused by I moved the file arround in different location since I though the classpath was the problem. Now I found the context file seems loaded from the Maven output, but the test is failed: Running TestSuite May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader loadBeanDefinitions INFO: Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [test-context.xml] May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext prepareRefresh INFO: Refreshing org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext@171bbc9: display name [org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext@171bbc9]; startup date [Tue May 25 09:55:13 PDT 2010]; root of context hierarchy May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext obtainFreshBeanFactory INFO: Bean factory for application context [org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext@171bbc9]: org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@1df8b99 May 25, 2010 9:55:13 AM org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory preInstantiateSingletons INFO: Pre-instantiating singletons in org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@1df8b99: defining beans [app,org.springframework.context.annotation.internalCommonAnnotationProcessor,org.springframework.context.annotation.internalAutowiredAnnotationProcessor,org.springframework.context.annotation.internalRequiredAnnotationProcessor]; root of factory hierarchy Tests run: 3, Failures: 2, Errors: 0, Skipped: 1, Time elapsed: 0.63 sec <<< FAILURE! Results : Failed tests: springTestContextBeforeTestMethod(org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.AppTest) springTestContextAfterTestMethod(org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.AppTest) Tests run: 3, Failures: 2, Errors: 0, Skipped: 1 If I use spring-test version 3.0.2.RELEASE, the error becomes: org.springframework.test.context.testng.AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests.springTestContextPrepareTestInstance() is depending on nonexistent method null Here is the structure of the project: simple |-- pom.xml `-- src |-- main | `-- java `-- test |-- java `-- resources |-- test-context.xml `-- testng.xml testng.xml: <suite name="Suite" parallel="false"> <test name="Test"> <classes> <class name="org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.AppTest"/> </classes> </test> </suite> test-context.xml: <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd" default-lazy-init="true"> <bean id="app" class="org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.App"/> </beans> In the pom.xml, I add testng, spring, and spring-test artifacts, and plugin: <dependency> <groupId>org.testng</groupId> <artifactId>testng</artifactId> <version>5.1</version> <classifier>jdk15</classifier> <scope>test</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring</artifactId> <version>2.5.6</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId> <version>2.5.6</version> <scope>test</scope> </dependency> <build> <finalName>simple</finalName> <plugins> <plugin> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <source>1.6</source> <target>1.6</target> </configuration> </plugin> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <suiteXmlFiles> <suiteXmlFile>src/test/resources/testng.xml</suiteXmlFile> </suiteXmlFiles> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> Basically, I replaced 'A Simple Maven Project' Junit with TestNg, hope it works. UPDATE: I think I got the problem (still don't know why) - Whenever I extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests or AbstractTransactionalTestNGSpringContextTests, the test will failed with this error: Failed tests: springTestContextBeforeTestMethod(org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.AppTest) springTestContextAfterTestMethod(org.sonatype.mavenbook.simple.AppTest) So, eventually the error went away when I override the two methods. I don't think this is the right way, didn't find much info from spring-test doc. If you know spring test framework, please shred some light on this.

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