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  • Programmer + Drugs =? [closed]

    - by sytycs
    I just read this quote from Steve Jobs: "Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." Now I'm wondering: Has there ever been a study where programmers have been given drugs to see if they could produce "better" code? Is there a programming concept, which originated from people who where drug-users? Do you know of a piece of code, which was written by someone under the influence? EDIT So I did a little more research and it turns out Dennis R. Wier actually documented how he took LSD to wrap his head around a coding project: "At one point in the project I could not get an overall viewpoint for the operation of the entire system. It really was too much for my brain to keep all the subtle aspects and processing nuances clear so I could get a processing and design overview. After struggling with this problem for a few weeks, I decided to use a little acid to see if it would enable a breakthrough, because otherwise, I would not be able to complete the project and be certain of a consistent overall design"[1] There is also an interesting article on wired about Kevin Herbet, who used LSD to solve tough technical problems and chemist Kary Mullis even said "...that LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences." [2]

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  • No Clipboard support in Windows Phone 7 Series &ndash; iPhone points laughs

    - by Sarang
    What exactly were you taking of late MSFT? So much for a spanking new mobile OS which wants to emulate the iPhone OS so badly that it even copied and pasted the iPhone’s erstwhile lack of clipboard support as well? The reason given is so lame (shall I say differently able?) that deserves pity rather than lament. According to MSFT people don’t use the clipboard that often. Being a WinMo user for the better part of my life and having developed for the platform for worse part of it I could say with conviction that Clipboard support was one key differentiator which kept me away from “The Phone to have” of 2007-8-9. Let me try to find few use cases I for one have been using the clipboard. Copy files to and from card and phone memory. Copy images, audio files from apps/browsers/explorer to email other apps. Copy text to/from word documents, notes and emails. Copy content from network drives to memory card. Copy links between browsers (Yes i did it for the love of Opera and PIE alike). Others could definitely come up with more. So who are these so called “users” who provided feedback to MSFT that the clipboard is useless? If you are among the lucky few being asked for the “feedback” kindly chime in the comments. Would be interesting to see different views on this. Technorati Tags: Windows Phone 7 Series,Clipboard

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  • Certifications in the new Certify - March 2011 Update

    - by richard.miller
    The most up-to-date certifications are now available in Certify - New Additions March 2011! What's not yet available can still be found in Classic Certify. We think that the new search will save you a ton of time and energy, so try it out and let us know. NOTE: Not all cert information is in the new system. If you type in a product name and do not find it, send us feedback so we can find the team to add it!.Also, we have been listening to every feedback message coming in. We have plans to make some improvements based on your feedback AND add the missing data. Thanks for your help!Japanese ???Note: Oracle Fusion Middleware certifications are available via oracle.com: Fusion Middleware Certifications.Certifications viewable in the new Certify SearchEnterprise PeopleTools Release 8.50, and Release 8.51 Added March 2011!Oracle DatabaseOracle Database OptionsOracle Database Clients (they apply to both 32-bit and 64-bit)Oracle BeehiveOracle Collaboration SuiteOracle E-Business Suite, Now with Release 11i & 12!Oracle Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM)Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance ManagementOracle Financial ServicesOracle HealthcareOracle Life SciencesOracle Enterprise Taxation ManagementOracle RetailOracle UtilitiesOracle Cross ApplicationsOracle PrimaveraOracle AgileOracle Transportation Management (G-L)Oracle Value Chain PlanningOracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (NEW! Jan 2011) 8.9+ and SP23+Oracle JD Edwards World (A7.3, A8.1, A9.1, and A9.2)Certifications viewable in Classic CertifyClassic certify is the "old" user interface. Clicking the "Classic Certify" link from Certifications > QuickLinks will take you there.Enterprise PeopleTools Release 8.49 (Coming Soon)Enterprise ManagerOther ResourcesSee the Tips and Tricks for the new Certify.Watch the 4 minute introduction to the new certify.Or how to get the most out of certify with a advanced searching and features demo with the new certify.

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  • Junior developer introduction to job industry

    - by lady_killer
    I am a junior developer at my second working experience, the first one using PHP with WordPress and currently on Groovy on Grails. I like coding, I attend meetup to discuss technology etc but I still did not understand how to become a real professional with the "know how" attitude. I read Clean Coder, the author advises to spend 20 hours per week of my spare time to learn new technologies and to keep myself up to date. I do not find this realistic, if you want to have a bit of a social life, and I also noticed that learning at work, at least in the places where I worked, is not ideal. No support from seniors for new projects, no pair programming and code reviews, no company trainings, one hour a week tech meetings where seniors walk away after a bit because they already know the topic discussed and so on. Sometimes is quite hard to keep the motivation... My questions are: Is our industry supposed to be like this? Is there real team working in the sense of sharing knowledge and help juniors to get up to speed? Are we supposed to learn new technologies or technology features just in our spare time?Clean Coder says football players do not train during official matches and our working hours are like official matches, we should just perform and learn in other moments. Is it really like this? How can I improve my skills with no support? Is it enough to read books and try out the exercises and perhaps some katas? In almost 5 month of Groovy on Grails experience at work, I have never had the opportunity to create anything from scratch, just worked on existing issues where it was even really difficult to get the domain knowledge from senior devs.

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  • Reflecting on 2010 and Looking into 2011

    - by Sam Abraham
    In early 2010, I had blogged and shared my excitement as I was about to embark on a new journey relocating to South Florida.     As I settled down and adjusted to my new life, I was presented with an opportunity to get actively involved and volunteer in the local Florida .Net and Project Management communities.  I have since devoted a significant portion of my time to community initiatives, coordinating the West Palm Beach .Net User Group, volunteering as a member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau and traveling to attend/speak at .Net code camps and user groups throughout the states of Florida and New York. I have also taken on various volunteer roles at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute starting as core team member on the chapter’s mentoring initiative and ending the year as Project Manager of the chapter’s mentoring program and as Director of Electronic Communications on the chapter’s IT team. I am also serving a one year term (2010-2011) as secretary and founding board member of Florida’s first official chapter of the International Association for Software Architects (IASA).   A big thank you is due for those who afforded me the opportunity and privilege to take part of these initiatives and those who provided guidance and encouragement when I needed them the most.   Looking ahead into 2011, I hope to continue my community involvement and volunteer activities. I will start by dedicating the first 5 weekends in the New Year to teach a free comprehensive Microsoft PowerPoint class at church. My goal will be to start from scratch and slowly cover the various available PowerPoint features that can be leveraged to create captivating presentations. Starting February, I will be resuming my user group/code camp speaking engagements at our South Florida .Net Code Camp and the West Palm Beach .Net User Group.   I look forward to continuing to meet, chat and share with our technical community members and to another active year in community service.   All the best, --Sam Abraham

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  • Learn to Take a Punch, Learn to Counter, Keep Moving Forward

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/10/28/154483.aspxDuring a boxing workout a few months ago our trainer had us do something called “breadbaskets”. That’s where you hold your arms up and a partner punches you in your midsection – your breadbasket. I put my arms up, and braced for impact. The trainer came over, saw I was a bit nervous, and coached me through. I can see the fear in your eyes. Don’t be afraid to take the punch. Tighten your core, breathe through the hit. Don’t panic. Over the summer we’d do counter drills as well. This is where a partner throws a punch, you defend but also throw one back – a counter punch. You never just sit back and take a beating, you deflect the blow and come back with one more powerful. These lessons on fighting can apply to all aspects of our lives and any attempts at success that we have. I saw this image recently and agree with it 100%: Success is never a straight forward line. It’s messy, its wrought with failures, its learning over time and applying those life lessons. It’s learning how to take punches and lose your fear, its seeing a punch coming and countering it, but most of all its not giving up and continually moving forward. We do stairs at boxing, which is running up and down three flights of stairs. I’m not anywhere near incredible shape and after doing multiple stairs in a single workout you can feel gassed, tired, even discouraged after hitting the second floor and seeing everyone else running by you. I read a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that I cling to throughout my day: You want to be successful? Take the punches, but learn how to take them. Counter them. and no matter what, always move forward.

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  • Where could Distributed Version Control Systems currently be in Gartner's hype cycle?

    - by dukeofgaming
    Edit: Given the recent downvoting (+8/-6 at this point) it was made clear to me that Gartner's lifecycle is a biased metric from a programmer's perspective. This is something that is part of a paper I'm going to present to management, and management types are part of Gartner's audience. Giving DVCS exposure & enthusiasm (that "could" be deemed as hype, or at least attacked as such), think about the following question when reading this one: "how could I use Gartner's hype cycle to convince management that DVCSs are ready (or ready-enough) for us, and that it is not just hype" Just asking if DVCSs is hype wouldn't be constructive, Gartner's hype cycle is a more objective instrument than just asking that (even if this instrument is regarded as biased). If you know any other instrument please, by all means, mention it. Edit #2: I agree that Gartner's Life Cycle is not for every technology, but I consider it may have generated enough buzz to be considered hype by some, so it maybe deserves to be at least evaluated/pondered as such by using this instrument in order to prove/disprove it to whatever degree. I'm an advocate of DVCS, BTW. I'm doing research for a whitepaper I'm writing in favor of DVCS adoption at company and I stumbled upon the concept of social proof. I want to prove that the social proof of DVCS adoption is not necessarily cargo cult and doing further research I now stumbled upon Gartner's hype cycle which describes technology maturity in 5 phases. My question is: what could be an indicator of the current location of Distributed Version Control Systems (I mean git, mercurial, bazaar, etc. in general) at a particular phase in the hype cycle?... in other (less convoluted) words, would you say that currently expectations of DVCSs are a) starting, b)inflated, c)decreasing (disillusionment), d)increasing (enlightenment) or e)stabilizing (mature) and (more importantly) why? I know it is a hard question and there is subjectivity involved, but I'll grant the answer (and the traditional cookie) to the clearest argument/evidence for a particular phase.

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  • Is there any evidence that drugs can actually help programmers produce "better" code? [closed]

    - by sytycs
    I just read this quote from Steve Jobs: "Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." Also a quote from that article: He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Now I'm wondering if there's any evidence to support the theory that drugs can help make a "better" programmer. Has there ever been a study where programmers have been given drugs to see if they could produce "better" code? Is there a well-known programming concept or piece of code which originated from people who were on drugs? EDIT So I did a little more research and it turns out Dennis R. Wier actually documented how he took LSD to wrap his head around a coding project: "At one point in the project I could not get an overall viewpoint for the operation of the entire system. It really was too much for my brain to keep all the subtle aspects and processing nuances clear so I could get a processing and design overview. After struggling with this problem for a few weeks, I decided to use a little acid to see if it would enable a breakthrough, because otherwise, I would not be able to complete the project and be certain of a consistent overall design"[1] There is also an interesting article on wired about Kevin Herbet, who used LSD to solve tough technical problems and chemist Kary Mullis even said "...that LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences." [2]

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  • SharePoint Content Type Cheat Sheet

    - by Bil Simser
    PrincipleAny application or solution built in SharePoint must use a custom content type over adding columns to lists. The only exception to this is one-off solutions that have no life-cycle, proof-of-concepts, etc.Creating Content TypesWeb UI. Not portable, POC onlyC# or Declarative (XML). Must deploy these as FeaturesRuleDo not chagne the base XML for a Content Type after deploying. The only exception to this rule is that you can re-deploy a modified Content Type definition only after completely removing it from the environment (either programatically or by hand).Updating Content TypesUpdate and push down to child typesWeb UI. Manual for each environment. Document steps required for repeatability.Feature Upgrade. Preferred solution.C#. If you created the content type through code you might want to go this route. Create new modified Content Types and hide the old one. Not recommended but useful for legacy.ReferencesCreate Custom Content  Types in SharePoint 2010 (C#)Content Type Definitions  (XML)Creating Content Types (XML  and C#)Updating ApproachesUpdating Child Content TypesAgree or disagree?

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  • Google music search: a better way to listen.

    - by anirudha
    somebody who want to listen music  pay much more to some online music store for online listening. otherwise they experience bad or low quality on YouTube. who is illegal  because uploader not have a permission or right to upload the document and their is no guarantee that they not put their ads or quality as same. now forget YouTube and all other because Google music search is much better just go their search the song by movies name or song and just click and listen. the quality is much better then other but it is not Google. the result they put comes from other website. i feel a thing goes wrong in Google music  search  that if i search “sajda” they never show me result about “sadka” because the word in common life use as same both. but the song may be starting from  “sajda” or “sadka”. i thing that they put the link that Do you means “Sadka” when i search sajda that it is better thing just like many online book store show the different keyword related to your keyword when you search their. like you search for a book on online book store they show you some different keyword when they serve the result and show related product or books when you go to a product page. after thinking all it is a better option for user to feel a better quality music without search hassle.

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  • Thanks All the readers and community and Happy new year to all of you.

    - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama
    This is my first blog post for new year 2011 and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers for making my blog very successful and accepting me a community member. As year 2010 has lots of up down in IT filed it was recession period and now we almost recovered from it. Personally year 2010 has been very successful to me as I have been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for visual C#. And It was one of the greatest achievement of my life. I would like to take this opportunity to thanks Microsoft for this and thanks all friends specially Jacob Sebastian who has given me guidance any time I required it. I have been also awarded dzone most valuable blogger this year and it was a nice surprise from dzone. I would like thanks dzone for this. Once again I am wishing you happy new year and may this year will bring success to all of you. One more thing I have found that I have met lots of people who is quite intelligent and exceptional developers and IT professionals but they are not blogging their stuff. I would say please my blog post a why a developer should write blog and Start blogging immediately because unless and until you don’t blog community will not know what you are doing.  Till then happy blogging and programming ... Stay tuned for more..

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  • Should I pick up a functional programming language?

    - by Statement
    I have recently been more concerned about the way I write my code. After reading a few books on design patterns (and overzealous implementation of them, I'm sure) I have shifted my thinking greatly toward encapsulating that which change. I tend to notice that I write less interfaces and more method-oriented code, where I love to spruce life into old classes with predicates, actions and other delegate tasks. I tend to think that it's often the actions that change, so I encapsulate those. I even often, although not always, break down interfaces to a single method, and then I prefer to use a delegate for the task instead of forcing client code to create a new class. So I guess it then hit me. Should I be doing functional programming instead? Edit: I may have a misconception about functional programming. Currently my language of choice is C#, and I come from a C++ background. I work as a game developer but I am currently unemployed. I have a great passion for architecture. My virtues are clean, flexible, reusable and maintainable code. I don't know if I have been poisoned by these ways or if it is for the better. Am I having a refactoring fever or should I move on? I understand this might be a question about "use the right tool for the job", but I'd like to hear your thoughts. Should I pick up a functional language? One of my fear factors is to leave the comfort of Visual Studio.

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  • The JavaServer Faces 2.2 viewAction Component

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Life just got easier for users of JavaServer Faces. In a new article, now up on otn/java, titled “New JavaServer Faces 2.2 Feature: The viewAction Component,” Tom McGinn, Oracle’s Principal Curriculum Developer for Oracle Server Technologies, explores the advantages offered by the JavaServer Faces 2.2 view action feature, which, according to McGinn, “simplifies the process for performing conditional checks on initial and postback requests, enables control over which phase of the lifecycle an action is performed in, and enables both implicit and declarative navigation.”As McGinn observes: “A view action operates like a button command (UICommand) component. By default, it is executed during the Invoke Application phase in response to an initial request. However, as you'll see, view actions can be invoked during any phase of the lifecycle and, optionally, during postback, making view actions well suited to performing preview checks.”McGinn explains that the JavaServer Faces 2.2 view action feature offers several advantages over the previous method of performing evaluations before a page is rendered:   * View actions can be triggered early on, before a full component tree is built, resulting in a lighter weight call.   * View action timing can be controlled.   * View actions can be used in the same context as the GET request.   * View actions support both implicit and explicit navigation.   * View actions support both non-faces (initial) and faces (postback) requests.Read the complete article here.

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  • Language parsing to find important words

    - by Matt Huggins
    I'm looking for some input and theory on how to approach a lexical topic. Let's say I have a collection of strings, which may just be one sentence or potentially multiple sentences. I'd like to parse these strings to and rip out the most important words, perhaps with a score that denotes how likely the word is to be important. Let's look at a few examples of what I mean. Example #1: "I really want a Keurig, but I can't afford one!" This is a very basic example, just one sentence. As a human, I can easily see that "Keurig" is the most important word here. Also, "afford" is relatively important, though it's clearly not the primary point of the sentence. The word "I" appears twice, but it is not important at all since it doesn't really tell us any information. I might expect to see a hash of word/scores something like this: "Keurig" => 0.9 "afford" => 0.4 "want" => 0.2 "really" => 0.1 etc... Example #2: "Just had one of the best swimming practices of my life. Hopefully I can maintain my times come the competition. If only I had remembered to take of my non-waterproof watch." This example has multiple sentences, so there will be more important words throughout. Without repeating the point exercise from example #1, I would probably expect to see two or three really important words come out of this: "swimming" (or "swimming practice"), "competition", & "watch" (or "waterproof watch" or "non-waterproof watch" depending on how the hyphen is handled). Given a couple examples like this, how would you go about doing something similar? Are there any existing (open source) libraries or algorithms in programming that already do this?

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  • What's the ethos of the programming profession?

    - by mac
    I am one of those people who became professional programmer by chance, rather than by choice: I moved to a country whose main language I couldn't speak, I knew how to code... and here I am a few years later. Because of this I never really gave much a thought about the ethos of being a programmer, and working as a freelance I neither had many occasions to discuss this with fellow colleagues. Among others, Dictionary.com define the word ethos as follows: The fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period. So my question is: How would you describe the ethos of being a programmer, and why would you say so? Please note that: my question is different than this and this other ones (although you might have chosen to become a programmer because of the programmer'ethos or you might think that part of the programmer ethos is about "programming being a meaningful profession"). beside the "how/what" part of the question, there is a "why" part too! :) I would appreciate if the answer could be based not only on the idealised vision of the hero-programmer, but also on real working and life experience. Thank you in advance for your time and contributions!

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  • Google Programmers

    - by seth
    As a soon-to-be software engineer, I have studied some languages during my time in college. I can name C, C++, Java, Scheme, Ruby, PHP, for example. However, one of the main principles in my college (recognized by many as the best in my country) is to teach us how to learn for ourselves and how to search the web when we have a doubt. This leads to a proactive attitude, when I need something, I go get it and this has worked so far for me. Recently, I started wondering though, how much development would I be able to do without internet access. The answer bugged me quite a bit. I know the concept of the languages, mostly I know what to do, but I was amazed by how "slow" things were without having the google to help in the development. The problem was mostly related to specific syntax but it was not without some effort that i solved some of the SPOJ problems in C++. Is this normal? Should I be worried and try to change something in my programming behaviour? UPDATE: I'll give a concrete example. Reading and writing to a file in java. I have done this about a dozen times in my life, yet every time I need to do it, I end up googling "read file java" and refreshing my memory. I completely understand the code, i fully understand what it does. But I am sure, that without google, it would take me a few tries to read and write correctly (if I had to sit in front of the screen with a blank page and write this without consulting any source whatsoever).

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  • Is what someone publishes on the Internet fair game when considering them for employment as a programmer?

    - by Jon Hopkins
    (Originally posted on Stack Overflow but closed there and more relevant for here) So we first interviewed a guy for a technical role and he was pretty good. Before the second interview we googled him and found his MySpace page which could, to put it mildly, be regarded as inappropriate. Just to be clear there was no doubt that it was his page (name, photos, matching biographical information and so on). The content was entirely personal and in no way related to his professional abilities or attitude. Is it fair to consider this when thinking about whether to offer them a job? In most situations my response would be what goes on in someone's private life is their own doing. However for anyone technical who professes (implicitly or explicitly) to understand the Internet and the possibilities it offers, is posting things in a way which can so obviously be discovered a significant error of judgement? EDIT: Clarification - essentially it was a fairly graphic commentary on porn (but of, shall we say, a non-academic nature). I'm actually more interested in the general concept than the specific incident as it's something we're likely to see more in the future as people put more and more of themselves on-line. My concerns are not primarily about him and how he feels about such things (he's white, straight, male and about the last possible victim of discrimination on the planet in that sense), more how it reflects on the company that a very simple search (basically his name) returns these things and that clients may also do it. We work in a relatively conservative industry.

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  • How broad should a computer science/engineering student go?

    - by AskQuestions
    I have less than 2 years of college left and I still don't know what to focus on. But this is not about me, this is about being a future developer. I realize that questions like "Which language should I learn next?" are not really popular, but I think my question is broader than that. I often see people write things like "You have to learn many different things. Being a developer is not about learning one programming language / technology and then doing that for the rest of your life". Well, sure, but it's impossible to really learn everything thoroughly. Does that mean that one should just learn the basics of everything and then learn some things more thoroughly AFTER getting a particular job? I mean, the best way to learn programming is by actually programming stuff... But projects take time. Does an average developer really switch between (for example) being a web developer, doing artificial intelligence and machine learning related stuff and programming close to the hardware? I mean, I know a lot of different things, but I don't feel proficient in any of those things. If I want to find a job as a web developer (that's just an example) after I finish college, shouldn't I do some web related project (maybe using something I still don't know) rather than try to learn functional programming? So, the question is: How broad should a computer science student's field of focus be? One programming language is surely far too narrow, but what is too broad?

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  • Can I become a Game Designer? [on hold]

    - by user32721
    This is my first time posting something on a forum in 4 years. I am posting this because I want to adjust my expectations and goals regarding game design. I am in college in Morocco (Al Akhawayn university). just started my junior year. I am a communications major (school of humanities) and a gender studies minor. I want to become a video game designer. It is the only career that I am interested in. I have been playing ever since I was 5 and haven't stopped yet. Currently I don't have any noteworthy skills to become a designer. I don't know how to program (don't really have the patience for it) and I can't draw to save my life. I haven't tried visual software like MAYA or MAX so I can't comment on graphic design. So I basically want to know whether my current education is capable of helping me reach my goal. If not then should I take a master's in game design (in the U.S?) or switch my minor to computer science? I am sorry that this post is long! I look forward to hearing your advice!

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  • Akka react vs receive

    - by Will I Am
    I am reading my way through Akka tutorials, but I'd like to get my feet wet with a real-life scenario. I'd like to write both a connectionless UDP server (an echo/ping-pong service) and a TCP server (also an echo service, but it keeps the connection open after it replies). My first question is, is this a good experimental use case for Akka, or am I better served with more common paradigms like IOCP? Would you do something like this with Akka in production? Although I understand conceptually the difference between react() and receive(), I struggle to choose one or the other for the two models. In the UDP model, there is no concept of who the sender is on the server, once the pong is sent, so should I use receive()? In the TCP model, the connection is maintained on the server after the pong, so should I use react()? If someone could give me some guidance, and maybe an opinion on how you'd design these two use cases, it would take me a long way. I have found a number of examples, but they didn't have explanations as to why they chose the paradigms they did.

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  • Can I run into legal issues with random names?

    - by Nathan Sabruka
    I'm currently building a game whose NPC's are going to be assigned a random gender and a random name for the right gender. To do this I will be using a "database" of names (actually a text file with tuples). There would also be a list of last names, which will be added to the first name also randomly. My question is the following. Suppose one such random name is "George Bush", and this person has been randomly assigned the job of president. As you can see, this could easily be seen as having been "copied" from a real-life person. The main issue is this. Names will be randomly-generated, yes, but the seed for random-number generation will be constant. In other words, the name of an NPC would be randomly-generated, i.e. I wouldn't choose it, but it would be the same for every player. Could this get me in trouble? We cannot verify all possible names, since the generated number of NPC's could be potentially limitless (new NPC's are being created whenever needed).

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  • 50% off ASP.NET hosting

    - by Fabrice Marguerie
    I haven't blogged for a long time because I'm busy working on an exciting new project. It's too early to tell you more. I'll provide details in a few months. Meanwhile, I wanted to write a quick post to share an excellent offer with you. It's that time of the year when you can get deals on many things, including web hosting. I'd like to remind you about Arvixe, a great web hosting provider for Windows (for ASP.NET) and Linux. For 48 hours, between Thursday November 24th at 00:00 PST (08:00 GMT/UTC) and Friday November 25th, Arvixe will be offering 50% off all of their shared hosting products. This will be for all new accounts, for life (as long as you continue to renew the account)!I've been using Arvixe for my websites for more than one year and a half now, and I highly recommend them. Here is an overview of what I get for a very good price:Unlimited diskspaceUnlimited data transferUnlimited domainsUnlimited POP3 and IMAP mailboxesUnlimited SQL Server 2008 databasesUnlimited MySQL databases.NET 1.1, 2, 3.5 and 4Dedicated application poolsFull trustIIS 7Daily backupsand more... And now, you can get that too for half the price. Just go to Arvixe.com and secure your own hosting account now by using the coupon code "Black Friday" during checkout.Disclaimer: the links to Arvixe are affiliate links that may bring me some money home if you sign up. Still, I recommend Arvixe because I use them and I'm very happy with what they offer.

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  • Defunct website taken over by spammer. How to stop them?

    - by Robert
    A friend of mine used to publish a small literary fiction magazine, both in print and on the web. In 2011 she announced that she was quitting, put a note on the website, and carefully unwound the subscriptions. She continued hosting the site (with all the back-issues available for free) until the beginning of this year, when she let the hosting lapse and the domain name expire. Today she discovered that some unknown person has purchased her former domain name and put up a modified version of her entire site. The design is different but all the content is the same, including all of the back-issues of the magazine (and the stories by diverse authors contained within), their cover art, news posts, and even her contact information. All the content would have been available from Archive.org, so it's no mystery how they got it. The only thing noticeably changed is a column added to the front page titled "Favorite Videos", with around 35 links to Youtube videos. The links are named things like "Video (Worry)" and "Video (Squirting)" and the videos all feature a man named Leo giving dubious advice and promoting his life-coaching website. Here's one of the suspect videos. There does not appear to be any connection between the content of the videos and my friend or her magazine. I also posted to the Security StackExchange to ask why someone would do this and what the security risks are to her. What I want to know here is, what can she do to stop them? To be clear she doesn't want the domain name back. She just doesn't want her name and copyrighted material used deceptively. Also, what (if anything) could she have done when shutting down her website to avoid this happening?

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  • Welcome to EMACS! - the Enterprise Manager Blog from Advanced Customer Services

    - by Rajat Nigam
    Advanced Customer Services(ACS) is the specialist group within Oracle which has helped countless customers become successful with Enterprise Manager as a System Management Product of their choice. ACS has a dedicated "Center of Excellence for Enterprise Manager" with a charter to make customers successful with Enterprise Manager. ACS helps customers right from setting up Enterprise Manager Grid Control to manage enterprise class highly available application deployments, to on-going housekeeping, to evaluation and adoption of new features and solutions, migration and upgrades,  to customizations and extensions of Enterprise Manager and more. 'Emacs' is possibly the best title for this yet another blog on Enterprise Manager. Emacs is going to talk about the real life experiences that Oracle ACS and Oracle Pre-sales team has with Oracle Enterprise Manager in real customer environments from different industry verticals like Banking, Telecom, Defence, Manufacturing, Public Utlities, etc. It discusses best practices, common blue-prints, links to interesting collateral, ACS authored tools and utlitlies. Feel free to ask questions influencing business/architectural decisions to something which is very technical in nature and very specific to the tool. We absolutely welcome any comments and feedback that you can provide. Thanks for visiting our blog!    

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  • ASMLib

    - by wcoekaer
    Oracle ASMlib on Linux has been a topic of discussion a number of times since it was released way back when in 2004. There is a lot of confusion around it and certainly a lot of misinformation out there for no good reason. Let me try to give a bit of history around Oracle ASMLib. Oracle ASMLib was introduced at the time Oracle released Oracle Database 10g R1. 10gR1 introduced a very cool important new features called Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). A very simplistic description would be that this is a very sophisticated volume manager for Oracle data. Give your devices directly to the ASM instance and we manage the storage for you, clustered, highly available, redundant, performance, etc, etc... We recommend using Oracle ASM for all database deployments, single instance or clustered (RAC). The ASM instance manages the storage and every Oracle server process opens and operates on the storage devices like it would open and operate on regular datafiles or raw devices. So by default since 10gR1 up to today, we do not interact differently with ASM managed block devices than we did before with a datafile being mapped to a raw device. All of this is without ASMLib, so ignore that one for now. Standard Oracle on any platform that we support (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, ...) does it the exact same way. You start an ASM instance, it handles storage management, all the database instances use and open that storage and read/write from/to it. There are no extra pieces of software needed, including on Linux. ASM is fully functional and selfcontained without any other components. In order for the admin to provide a raw device to ASM or to the database, it has to have persistent device naming. If you booted up a server where a raw disk was named /dev/sdf and you give it to ASM (or even just creating a tablespace without asm on that device with datafile '/dev/sdf') and next time you boot up and that device is now /dev/sdg, you end up with an error. Just like you can't just change datafile names, you can't change device filenames without telling the database, or ASM. persistent device naming on Linux, especially back in those days ways to say it bluntly, a nightmare. In fact there were a number of issues (dating back to 2004) : Linux async IO wasn't pretty persistent device naming including permissions (had to be owned by oracle and the dba group) was very, very difficult to manage system resource usage in terms of open file descriptors So given the above, we tried to find a way to make this easier on the admins, in many ways, similar to why we started working on OCFS a few years earlier - how can we make life easier for the admins on Linux. A feature of Oracle ASM is the ability for third parties to write an extension using what's called ASMLib. It is possible for any third party OS or storage vendor to write a library using a specific Oracle defined interface that gets used by the ASM instance and by the database instance when available. This interface offered 2 components : Define an IO interface - allow any IO to the devices to go through ASMLib Define device discovery - implement an external way of discovering, labeling devices to provide to ASM and the Oracle database instance This is similar to a library that a number of companies have implemented over many years called libODM (Oracle Disk Manager). ODM was specified many years before we introduced ASM and allowed third party vendors to implement their own IO routines so that the database would use this library if installed and make use of the library open/read/write/close,.. routines instead of the standard OS interfaces. PolyServe back in the day used this to optimize their storage solution, Veritas used (and I believe still uses) this for their filesystem. It basically allowed, in particular, filesystem vendors to write libraries that could optimize access to their storage or filesystem.. so ASMLib was not something new, it was basically based on the same model. You have libodm for just database access, you have libasm for asm/database access. Since this library interface existed, we decided to do a reference implementation on Linux. We wrote an ASMLib for Linux that could be used on any Linux platform and other vendors could see how this worked and potentially implement their own solution. As I mentioned earlier, ASMLib and ODMLib are libraries for third party extensions. ASMLib for Linux, since it was a reference implementation implemented both interfaces, the storage discovery part and the IO part. There are 2 components : Oracle ASMLib - the userspace library with config tools (a shared object and some scripts) oracleasm.ko - a kernel module that implements the asm device for /dev/oracleasm/* The userspace library is a binary-only module since it links with and contains Oracle header files but is generic, we only have one asm library for the various Linux platforms. This library is opened by Oracle ASM and by Oracle database processes and this library interacts with the OS through the asm device (/dev/asm). It can install on Oracle Linux, on SuSE SLES, on Red Hat RHEL,.. The library itself doesn't actually care much about the OS version, the kernel module and device cares. The support tools are simple scripts that allow the admin to label devices and scan for disks and devices. This way you can say create an ASM disk label foo on, currently /dev/sdf... So if /dev/sdf disappears and next time is /dev/sdg, we just scan for the label foo and we discover it as /dev/sdg and life goes on without any worry. Also, when the database needs access to the device, we don't have to worry about file permissions or anything it will be taken care of. So it's a convenience thing. The kernel module oracleasm.ko is a Linux kernel module/device driver. It implements a device /dev/oracleasm/* and any and all IO goes through ASMLib - /dev/oracleasm. This kernel module is obviously a very specific Oracle related device driver but it was released under the GPL v2 so anyone could easily build it for their Linux distribution kernels. Advantages for using ASMLib : A good async IO interface for the database, the entire IO interface is based on an optimal ASYNC model for performance A single file descriptor per Oracle process, not one per device or datafile per process reducing # of open filehandles overhead Device scanning and labeling built-in so you do not have to worry about messing with udev or devlabel, permissions or the likes which can be very complex and error prone. Just like with OCFS and OCFS2, each kernel version (major or minor) has to get a new version of the device drivers. We started out building the oracleasm kernel module rpms for many distributions, SLES (in fact in the early days still even for this thing called United Linux) and RHEL. The driver didn't make sense to get pushed into upstream Linux because it's unique and specific to the Oracle database. As it takes a huge effort in terms of build infrastructure and QA and release management to build kernel modules for every architecture, every linux distribution and every major and minor version we worked with the vendors to get them to add this tiny kernel module to their infrastructure. (60k source code file). The folks at SuSE understood this was good for them and their customers and us and added it to SLES. So every build coming from SuSE for SLES contains the oracleasm.ko module. We weren't as successful with other vendors so for quite some time we continued to build it for RHEL and of course as we introduced Oracle Linux end of 2006 also for Oracle Linux. With Oracle Linux it became easy for us because we just added the code to our build system and as we churned out Oracle Linux kernels whether it was for a public release or for customers that needed a one off fix where they also used asmlib, we didn't have to do any extra work it was just all nicely integrated. With the introduction of Oracle Linux's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and our interest in being able to exploit ASMLib more, we started working on a very exciting project called Data Integrity. Oracle (Martin Petersen in particular) worked for many years with the T10 standards committee and storage vendors and implemented Linux kernel support for DIF/DIX, data protection in the Linux kernel, note to those that wonder, yes it's all in mainline Linux and under the GPL. This basically gave us all the features in the Linux kernel to checksum a data block, send it to the storage adapter, which can then validate that block and checksum in firmware before it sends it over the wire to the storage array, which can then do another checksum and to the actual DISK which does a final validation before writing the block to the physical media. So what was missing was the ability for a userspace application (read: Oracle RDBMS) to write a block which then has a checksum and validation all the way down to the disk. application to disk. Because we have ASMLib we had an entry into the Linux kernel and Martin added support in ASMLib (kernel driver + userspace) for this functionality. Now, this is all based on relatively current Linux kernels, the oracleasm kernel module depends on the main kernel to have support for it so we can make use of it. Thanks to UEK and us having the ability to ship a more modern, current version of the Linux kernel we were able to introduce this feature into ASMLib for Linux from Oracle. This combined with the fact that we build the asm kernel module when we build every single UEK kernel allowed us to continue improving ASMLib and provide it to our customers. So today, we (Oracle) provide Oracle ASMLib for Oracle Linux and in particular on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. We did the build/testing/delivery of ASMLib for RHEL until RHEL5 but since RHEL6 decided that it was too much effort for us to also maintain all the build and test environments for RHEL and we did not have the ability to use the latest kernel features to introduce the Data Integrity features and we didn't want to end up with multiple versions of asmlib as maintained by us. SuSE SLES still builds and comes with the oracleasm module and they do all the work and RHAT it certainly welcome to do the same. They don't have to rebuild the userspace library, it's really about the kernel module. And finally to re-iterate a few important things : Oracle ASM does not in any way require ASMLib to function completely. ASMlib is a small set of extensions, in particular to make device management easier but there are no extra features exposed through Oracle ASM with ASMLib enabled or disabled. Often customers confuse ASMLib with ASM. again, ASM exists on every Oracle supported OS and on every supported Linux OS, SLES, RHEL, OL withoutASMLib Oracle ASMLib userspace is available for OTN and the kernel module is shipped along with OL/UEK for every build and by SuSE for SLES for every of their builds ASMLib kernel module was built by us for RHEL4 and RHEL5 but we do not build it for RHEL6, nor for the OL6 RHCK kernel. Only for UEK ASMLib for Linux is/was a reference implementation for any third party vendor to be able to offer, if they want to, their own version for their own OS or storage ASMLib as provided by Oracle for Linux continues to be enhanced and evolve and for the kernel module we use UEK as the base OS kernel hope this helps.

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