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  • Error data: line 2 column 1 when using pycurl with gzip stream

    - by Sagar Hatekar
    Thanks for reading. Background: I am trying to read a streaming API feed that returns data in JSON format, and then storing this data to a pymongo collection. The streaming API requires a "Accept-Encoding" : "Gzip" header. What's happening: Code fails on json.loads and outputs - Extra data: line 2 column 1 - line 4 column 1 (char 1891 - 5597) (Refer Error Log below) This does NOT happen while parsing every JSON object - it happens at random. My guess is I am encountering some weird JSON object after every "x" proper JSON objects. I did reference how to use pycurl if requested data is sometimes gzipped, sometimes not? and Encoding error while deserializing a json object from Google but so far have been unsuccessful at resolving this error. Could someone please help me out here? Error Log: Note: The raw dump of the JSON object below is basically using the repr() method. '{"id":"tag:search.twitter.com,2005:207958320747782146","objectType":"activity","actor":{"objectType":"person","id":"id:twitter.com:493653150","link":"http://www.twitter.com/Deathnews_7_24","displayName":"Death News 7/24","postedTime":"2012-02-16T01:30:12.000Z","image":"http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1834408513/deathnewstwittersquare_normal.jpg","summary":"Crashes, Murders, Suicides, Accidents, Crime and Naturals Death News From All Around World","links":[{"href":"http://www.facebook.com/DeathNews724","rel":"me"}],"friendsCount":56,"followersCount":14,"listedCount":1,"statusesCount":1029,"twitterTimeZone":null,"utcOffset":null,"preferredUsername":"Deathnews_7_24","languages":["tr"]},"verb":"post","postedTime":"2012-05-30T22:15:02.000Z","generator":{"displayName":"web","link":"http://twitter.com"},"provider":{"objectType":"service","displayName":"Twitter","link":"http://www.twitter.com"},"link":"http://twitter.com/Deathnews_7_24/statuses/207958320747782146","body":"Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Writers\xe2\x80\x99 Catalyst, Dies at 63 http://t.co/WBsNlNtA","object":{"objectType":"note","id":"object:search.twitter.com,2005:207958320747782146","summary":"Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Writers\xe2\x80\x99 Catalyst, Dies at 63 http://t.co/WBsNlNtA","link":"http://twitter.com/Deathnews_7_24/statuses/207958320747782146","postedTime":"2012-05-30T22:15:02.000Z"},"twitter_entities":{"urls":[{"display_url":"nytimes.com/2012/05/30/boo\xe2\x80\xa6","indices":[52,72],"expanded_url":"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/books/kathi-kamen-goldmark-writers-catalyst-dies-at-63.html","url":"http://t.co/WBsNlNtA"}],"hashtags":[],"user_mentions":[]},"gnip":{"language":{"value":"en"},"matching_rules":[{"value":"url_contains: nytimes.com","tag":null}],"klout_score":11,"urls":[{"url":"http://t.co/WBsNlNtA","expanded_url":"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/books/kathi-kamen-goldmark-writers-catalyst-dies-at-63.html?_r=1"}]}}\r\n{"id":"tag:search.twitter.com,2005:207958321003638785","objectType":"activity","actor":{"objectType":"person","id":"id:twitter.com:178760897","link":"http://www.twitter.com/Mobanu","displayName":"Donald Ochs","postedTime":"2010-08-15T16:33:56.000Z","image":"http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1493224811/small_mobany_Logo_normal.jpg","summary":"","links":[{"href":"http://www.mobanuweightloss.com","rel":"me"}],"friendsCount":10272,"followersCount":9698,"listedCount":30,"statusesCount":725,"twitterTimeZone":"Mountain Time (US & Canada)","utcOffset":"-25200","preferredUsername":"Mobanu","languages":["en"],"location":{"objectType":"place","displayName":"Crested Butte, Colorado"}},"verb":"post","postedTime":"2012-05-30T22:15:02.000Z","generator":{"displayName":"twitterfeed","link":"http://twitterfeed.com"},"provider":{"objectType":"service","displayName":"Twitter","link":"http://www.twitter.com"},"link":"http://twitter.com/Mobanu/statuses/207958321003638785","body":"Mobanu: Can Exercise Be Bad for You?: Researchers have found evidence that some people who exercise do worse on ... http://t.co/mTsQlNQO","object":{"objectType":"note","id":"object:search.twitter.com,2005:207958321003638785","summary":"Mobanu: Can Exercise Be Bad for You?: Researchers have found evidence that some people who exercise do worse on ... http://t.co/mTsQlNQO","link":"http://twitter.com/Mobanu/statuses/207958321003638785","postedTime":"2012-05-30T22:15:02.000Z"},"twitter_entities":{"urls":[{"display_url":"nyti.ms/KUmmMa","indices":[116,136],"expanded_url":"http://nyti.ms/KUmmMa","url":"http://t.co/mTsQlNQO"}],"hashtags":[],"user_mentions":[]},"gnip":{"language":{"value":"en"},"matching_rules":[{"value":"url_contains: nytimes.com","tag":null}],"klout_score":12,"urls":[{"url":"http://t.co/mTsQlNQO","expanded_url":"http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/can-exercise-be-bad-for-you/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed"}]}}\r\n' json exception: Extra data: line 2 column 1 - line 4 column 1 (char 1891 - 5597) Header Output: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8 Vary: Accept-Encoding Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 22:14:48 UTC Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Encoding: gzip get_stream.py: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys import pycurl import json import pymongo STREAM_URL = "https://stream.test.com:443/accounts/publishers/twitter/streams/track/Dev.json" AUTH = "userid:passwd" DB_HOST = "127.0.0.1" DB_NAME = "stream_test" class StreamReader: def __init__(self): try: self.count = 0 self.buff = "" self.mongo = pymongo.Connection(DB_HOST) self.db = self.mongo[DB_NAME] self.raw_tweets = self.db["raw_tweets_gnip"] self.conn = pycurl.Curl() self.conn.setopt(pycurl.ENCODING, 'gzip') self.conn.setopt(pycurl.URL, STREAM_URL) self.conn.setopt(pycurl.USERPWD, AUTH) self.conn.setopt(pycurl.WRITEFUNCTION, self.on_receive) self.conn.setopt(pycurl.HEADERFUNCTION, self.header_rcvd) while True: self.conn.perform() except Exception as ex: print "error ocurred : %s" % str(ex) def header_rcvd(self, header_data): print header_data def on_receive(self, data): temp_data = data self.buff += data if data.endswith("\r\n") and self.buff.strip(): try: tweet = json.loads(self.buff, encoding = 'UTF-8') self.buff = "" if tweet: try: self.raw_tweets.insert(tweet) except Exception as insert_ex: print "Error inserting tweet: %s" % str(insert_ex) self.count += 1 if self.count % 10 == 0: print "inserted "+str(self.count)+" tweets" except Exception as json_ex: print "json exception: %s" % str(json_ex) print repr(temp_data) stream = StreamReader()

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  • Java (or possibly other languages) learning path

    - by bgo
    I am familiar (as a self-learner) with C, python and php such that i can solve some problems involving simple steps (for example, i easily do calculations for physics lab reports with python which normally would take 4x-5x times longer with a calculator). The point here is, as doing such things, i learnt the idea / concepts of programming language and problem solving along with oop or fuctional programming etc. Recently i have started Java and, with the familiarity of other languages, i am doing well for starters but i need guidence. -I am thinking of learning syntax from sun java tutorials and then practicing with codingbat.com or similar sites. I need a reference book that i can study deeper aspects of the topics i am learning. What do you suggest about these? -The problem is (and always have been) the lack of practice. I need coding and problem-solving practices sources. I stuck at the point where i can't figure out what to do next. Can you suggest any source (possibly like codingbat)? If i could plan a learning trail, i can progress faster and efficiently. So i need ideas, comments, suggestions. Thanks in advance.

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  • keep HTMLformat after replace some text (using PHP and JS)

    - by Sadi
    I would like modify HTML like I am <b>Sadi, novice</b> programmer. to I am <b>Sadi, learner</b> programmer. To do it I will search using a string "novice programmer". How can I do it please? Any idea? Thank you Sadi More clarification: I get some nice reply with possible solution. But please keep posting if you have any idea in mind. I would like to more clarify the problem just in case anyone missed it. Main post shows the problem as an example scenario. 1) Now the problem is find and replace some string without considering the tags. The tags may shows up within a single word. String may contain multiple word. Tag only appear in the content string or the document. The search phrase never contain any tags. We can easily remove all tags and do some text operation. But here the another problem shows up. 2) The tags must be preserve, even after replacing the text. That is what the example shows. Thank you Again for helping

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  • What's the next steps for moving from appengine to full django?

    - by tomcritchlow
    Hey guys, I'm super new to programming and I've been using appengine to help me learn python and general coding. I'm getting better quickly and I'm loving it all the way :) Appengine was awesome for allowing me to just dive into writing my app and getting something live that works (see http://www.7bks.com/). But I'm realising that the longer I continue to learn on appengine the more I'm constraining myself and locking myself into a single system. I'd like to move to developing on full django (since django looks super cool!). What are my next steps? To give you a feel for my level of knowledge: I'm not a unix user I'm not familiar with command line controls (I still use appengine/python completely via the appengine SDK) I've never programmed in anything other than python, anywhere other than appengine I know the word SQL, but don't know what MySQL is really or how to use it. So, specifically: What are the skills I need to learn to get up and running with full django/python? If I'm going to host somewhere else I suppose I'll need to learn some sysadmin type skills (maybe even unix?). Is there anywhere that offers easy hosting (like appengine) but that supports django? I hear such great things about heroku I'm considering switching to RoR and going there I appreciate that I'm likely not quite ready to move away from appengine just yet but I'm a fiercely passionate learner (http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001) and would love it if I knew all the steps I needed to learn so I could set about learning them. At the moment, I don't even know what the steps are I need to learn! Thank you very much. Sorry this isn't a specific programming question but I've looked around and haven't found a good how-to for someone of my level of experience and I think others would appreciate a good roadmap for the things we need to learn to get up and running. Thanks, Tom PS - if anyone is in London and fancies showing me the ropes in person that would be super awesome :)

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  • This is a great job opportunity!!! [closed]

    - by Stuart Gordon
    ASP.NET MVC Web Developer / London / £450pd / £25-£50,000pa / Interested contact [email protected] ! As a web developer within the engineering department, you will work with a team of enthusiastic developers building a new ASP.NET MVC platform for online products utilising exciting cutting edge technologies and methodologies (elements of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban and XP) as well as developing new stand-alone web products that conform to W3C standards. Key Responsibilities and Objectives: Develop ASP.NET MVC websites utilising Frameworks and enterprise search technology. Develop and expand content management and delivery solutions. Help maintain and extend existing products. Formulate ideas and visions for new products and services. Be a proactive part of the development team and provide support and assistance to others when required. Qualification/Experience Required: The ideal candidate will have a web development background and be educated to degree level in a Computer Science/IT related course plus ASP.NET MVC experience. The successful candidate needs to be able to demonstrate commercial experience in all or most of the following skills: Essential: ASP.NET MVC with C# (Visual Studio), Castle, nHibernate, XHTML and JavaScript. Experience of Test Driven Development (TDD) using tools such as NUnit. Preferable: Experience of Continuous Integration (TeamCity and MSBuild), SQL Server (T-SQL), experience of source control such as Subversion (plus TortioseSVN), JQuery. Learn: Fluent NHibernate, S#arp Architecture, Spark (View engine), Behaviour Driven Design (BDD) using MSpec. Furthermore, you will possess good working knowledge of W3C web standards, web usability, web accessibility and understand the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO). You will also be a quick learner, have good communication skills and be a self-motivated and organised individual.

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  • How do I create a simple Windows form to access a SQL Server database?

    - by NoCatharsis
    I believe this is a very novice question, and if I'm using the wrong forum to ask, please advise. I have a basic understanding of databasing with MS SQL Server, and programming with C++ and C#. I'm trying to teach myself more by setting up my own database with MS SQL Server Express 2008 R2 and accessing it via Windows forms created in C# Express 2010. At this point, I just want to keep it to free or Express dev tools (not necessarily Microsoft though). Anyway, I created a database using the instructions provided here and I set the data types appropriately for each column (no errors in setup at least). Now I'm designing the GUI in C# Express but I've kind of hit a wall as far as the database connection. Is there a simple way to access the database I created locally using C# Express? Can anyone suggest a guide that has all this spelled out already? I am a self-learner so I look forward to teaching myself how to use these applications, but any pointers to start me off in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

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  • can JockerSoft.Media read/get video file from remote location?

    - by Lynx
    here is the code for JockerSoft.Media // Path of the video and frame storing path string _videopath = "http://www.test.com/Video/test.avi"; //"C:\\test.avi"; string _imagepath = "C:\\test.jpg" Bitmap bmp = FrameGrabber.GetFrameFromVideo(_videopath, 0.1d); bmp.Save(_imagepath, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Gif); // Save directly frame on specified location FrameGrabber.SaveFrameFromVideo(_videopath, 0.1d, _imagepath); it work perfectly is the video file is from my own computer, but when i try to get video file from remote location it not getting the frame. well, all the example is for windwos form app and i trying to use this for web-application. is there maybe an additional coding that enable me to use jockersoft to grab a video frame from remote location? here is the error that i got: Attempted to access an unloaded appdomain. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131014) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.AppDomainUnloadedException: Attempted to access an unloaded appdomain. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131014) New Learner, please guide me..

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  • C# Linq to SQL connection string (newbie)

    - by Chris'o
    i am a new linq to sql learner and this is my very first attempt to create a data viewer program. The idea is simple, i'd like to create a software that is able to view content of a table in a database. That's it. I got an early problem here already and i have seen many tutes and articles online but I still cant fix the bug. Here is my code: static void Main(string[] args) { string cs = "Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=somedb;Integrated Security=SSPI;"; var db = new DataClasses1DataContext(cs); db.Connection.Open(); foreach (var b in db.Mapping.GetTables()) Console.WriteLine(b.TableName); Console.ReadKey(true); } When I tried to check db.connection.equals(null); it returns false, so i thought i have connected successfully to the database since there is no error at all. But the code above doesn't print anything out to the screen. I kind of lost and don't know what's going on here. Does anyone know what is going wrong here?

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  • PHP transfer files from server to server in LAN

    - by cheapez
    So, I have 5-6 pages of requirements. I'm trying to build this application in PHP based on the requirements. I want to transfer files from one server to the other server in LAN, and then send a shell command to the other server to find out if the file has been transferred successfully. In php, I can transfer files using FTP, and send shell commands using SSH. Using the methods above, I will need to open connection to the server first, but I don't know the ftp server name, domain name, ip address, or anything like that. I only know the the server ID (I'm not sure what this ID is, but I guess it is like the computer's name). An example of the server ID is: "c23bap234" How do I open a connection with just that server ID? These servers are in the same building, have LAN connection, don't have connection to the outside world. These machines have PHP, Apache, ... installed. If my post doesn't make sense to you, it's because I'm a learner. I hope someone can help me on this. Thanks in advance.

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  • What is the proper way to wait a script loaded completely before another

    - by FatDogMark
    I am making a website that is divided by several sections <div id='section-1' class='section'>web content</div> <div id='section-2' class='section'>web content</div> I have like ten sections on my webpage ,each sections height is set to the user window height when document is ready by javascript $('.section').height($(window).height()); Some effects like slideshows on my webpage require the calculated height of the section in order to work properly. Therefore I always use something like this at document ready as a solution. setTimeout(startslideshow,1000); setTimeout(startanimations,1000); ...etc To make sure the section height is the user window height before the slideshow's code start because the sections cannot change to user window height instantly once the webpage loaded will generate serious problems in my slideshow code,like wrong calculated positions. Therefore there will be a situation that's after the page loaded, there will be about a second everything is messed up,before everything can works properly, how could I avoid that being seen by the user? I tried to $(document).hide(),or $('html,body').hide(), then fade in after a second,but I get other weird problems, especially on ipad,my fixed position top navigation bar will always become 'not fixed' while user is scrolling. As I am a self-learner, I afraid my method is not typical. I want to know what is the common ways of real web programmers usually do when they have to divide his webpage into different sections and set its height to window height , then make sure the other effects that's depends on the section height works properly and avoid to wait the height change for a second?

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  • Day 2 - Game Design Documentation

    - by dapostolov
    So yesterday I didn't cut any code for my game but I was able to do a tiny bit of research on the XNA Game Development Technology and the communities out there and do you know what? I feel I'm a bit closer to my goal. The bad news is today I didn't cut code either. However, not all is lost because I wanted to get my ideas on paper and today I just did that.  Today, I began to jot down notes about the game and how I felt the visual elements would interact with each other. Unlike my workplace, my personal level of documentation is nothing more than a task list or a mind map of my ideas; it helps me streamline my solutions quiet effectively and circumvent the long process of articulating each thought to the n-th degree. I truly dislike documentation (because I have an extremely hard time articulating my thought and solutions); however, because I tend to do a really good job with documentation I tend to get stuck writing the buggers. But as a generalist remark: 'No Developer likes documentation.' For now let's stick with my basic notes and call this post a living document. Here are my notes, fresh, from after watching the new first episode of Merlin second season! Actually, a quick recommendation to anyone who is reading this (if anyone is): I truly recommend you envelope yourself in the medium or task you're trying to tackle. Be one with moment and feel it! For instance: Are you writing a fantasy script / game? What would the music of the genre sound like? For me the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is frackin awesome. There are many other good CD's out there, which I listen to (some who even use medival instruments, but Conan I keep returning to. It's a creative trigger for me. Ask yourself what would the imagery look like? Time to surf google for artist renditions of fantasy! What would the game feel like? Start playing some of your favorite games that inspire you, be wary though, have some self control and don't let it absorb your time. Anyhow, onto the documentation... Screens, Scenes, and Sprites. Oh My! (groan...) The first thing that came to mind were the screens, I thought the following would suffice: Menu Screen Character Customisation Screen Loading Screen? Battle Ground The Menu Screen Ok. So, the thought here is when the game loads a huge title is displayed: Wizard Wars. The player is prompted with 3 menu items: 1 Player Game, 2 Player Game, and Exit. Since I'm targetting the PC platform, as a non-networked game to start, I picture myself running my mouse over each menu option and the visual element of the menu item changes, along with a sound to indicate that I am over a curent menu item. And as I move my mouse away, it changes back, and possibly an exit mouse sound. Maybe on the screen somewhere is a brazier alit with a magical tome open right beside it, OR, maybe the tome is the menu! I hear the menu music as mellow, not obtrusive or piercing. On a menu item select, a confirmation sound bellows to indicate the players selection. The Esc key will always return me to the previous screens or desktop. The menu screen must feel...dark, like a really important ritual is about to happen and thus the music should build up. 1 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) 2 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) Exit - > Back to Windows Notes: So the first thing I pick up here are a couple things: First and foremost, my artistic abilities suck crap, so I may have to hire an artist (now that i've said that, lets get techy) graphical objects will be positioned within a scene on each screen / window. Menu items will be represented grapically, possibly animated, and have sound / animation effects triggered by user input or a time line. I have an animated scene involving a brazier or fire on a stick IF I was to move this game to the xbox, I'd have to track which menu item is currently selected (unless I do a mouse pointer type thing.) WindowObject has a scene A Scene has many GameObjects GameObject has a position graphic or animation MenuObject is a GameObject which has a mouse in, mouse out, and click event which either does something graphically (animation), does something with sound, or moves to another screen.  Character Customisation Screen With either the 1 or 2 player option selected, both selections will come to this screen; a wizard requires a name, powers, and vestements of course! Player one will configure his character first and then player two. I considered a split screen for PC but to have two people fighting over a keyboard would probably suck. For XBox, a split screen could work; maybe when I get into the networking portion (phase 2 blog?) of this game I will remove the 2 player option for PC and provide only multiplayer and I will leave 2 player for xbox...hmm... Anyhow...I picture the creation process as follows: Name: (textbox / keyboard entry) - for xbox, this would have to be different. Robe Color: (color box, or something) Stats: Speed, Oomph, and Health. (as sliders) 1 as minimum and 10 as maximum. Ok, Back, and Cancel buttons / options. Each stat has a benefit which are listed below. The idea is the player decides if he wants his wizard to run fast, be a tank and ... hit with a purse.Regardless, the player will have a pool of 12 points to use. Ideally, A balanced wizard will have 5 in each attribute. Spells? The only spell of choice is a ball of fire which comes without question. The music and screen should still feel like a ritual. The Character Speed Basically, how fast your character moves and casts. Oomph (Best Monster Truck Voice): PURE POWAH!!! The damage output of your fireball. Health How much damage you can take. Notes: I realise the game dynamics may sound uninteresting at the moment; but I think after a couple releases, we could have some other grand ideas such as: saved profiles, gold to upgrade arsenal of spells, talents, etc...but for now...a vanilla fireball thrower mage will suffice for this experiment. OK. So... a MenuObject  may need to be loosely coupled to allow future items such as networking? may be a button? a CharacterObject has a name speed oomph health and a funky robe color. cap on the three stats (1-10) an arsenal of 1 spell (possibly could expand this) The Loading Screen As is. The Battleground Screen For now, I'm keeping the screen as max resolution for the PC. The screen isn't going to move or even be a split screen. I'm not aiming high here because I want to see what level of change is involved when new features / concepts are added to game content. I'm interested to find out if we could apply techniques such as MVC or MVVM to this type of development or is it too tightly coupled? This reminds me when when my best friend and I were brainstorming our game idea (this is going back a while...1994, 6?) and he cringed at the thought of bringing business technology into games, especially when I suggested a database to store character information and COM / DCOM as the medium, but it seems I wasn't far off (reflecting); just like his implementation of a xml "config file" for dynamic direct-x menus back before .net in 1999...anyhow...i digress... The Battle One screen, two characters lobing balls of fire at each other...It doesn't get better than that. Every so often a scroll appears...and the fireballs bounce off walls, or the wizard has rapid fire, or even scrolls of healing! The scroll options are endless. Two bars at the top, each the color of the wizard (with their name beside the bar) indicate how much health they have. Possibly the appearance of the scrolls means the battle is taking too long? I'm thinking 1 player controls: up, down, left, right and space to fire the button. Or even possibly, mouse click and shift - mouse button to fire a spell in the direction they are facing. Two player controls: a, s, d, f and space AND arrows (up, down, left, right) and Del key or Crtl. The game ends when a player has 0 health and a dialog box appears asking for a rematch / reconfigure / exit. Health goes down when a fireball (friendly or not), connects with a wizard. When a wizard connects with a scroll, a countdown clock / icon appears near the health bar and the wizard begins to glow. For the most part, a wizard can have only scroll 1 effect on him at a time. Notes: Ok, there's alot to cover here. a CharacterObject is a GameObject it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has sounds (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, whistling, other?) it has animations (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, idle, other?) it has a lifespan (determined by health) it is alive or dead it has a position a ScrollObject is a GameObject it carries a transferance of points "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it carries a transferance of "other" it is stationary it has a sound on impact it has a stationary animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by game) it is alive or dead it has a position a WallObject is a GameObject it has a sound on fireball impact? it is a still image / stationary it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it is dead it has a position A FireBall is a GameObject it carries a transferance of poinst "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has a sound it has a travel animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by caster) it is alive or dead it has a position As I look at this, I can see some common attributes in each object that I can carry up to the GameObject. I think I'm going to end the documentation here, it's taken me a bit of time to type this all out, tomorrow. I'll load up my IDE and my paint studio to get some good old fashioned cowboy hacking going!   D.

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  • Craftsmanship is ALL that Matters

    - by Wayne Molina
    Today, I'm going to talk about a touchy subject: the notion of working in a company that doesn't use the prescribed "best practices" in its software development endeavours.  Over the years I have, using a variety of pseudonyms, asked this question on popular programming forums.  Although I always add in some minor variation of the story to avoid suspicion that it's the same person posting, the crux of the tale remains the same: A Programmer’s Tale A junior software developer has just started a new job at an average company, creating average line-of-business applications for internal use (the most typical scenario programmers find themselves in).  This hypothetical newbie has spent a lot of time reading up on the "theory" of software development, devouring books, blogs and screencasts from well-known and respected software developers in the community in order to broaden his knowledge and "do what the pros do".  He begins his new job, eager to apply what he's learned on a real-world project only to discover that his new teammates doesn't use any of those concepts and techniques.  They hack their way through development, or in a best-case scenario use some homebrew, thrown-together semblance of a framework for their applications that follows not one of the best practices suggested by the “elite” in the software community - things like TDD (TDD as a "best practice" is the only subjective part of this post, but it's included here due to a very large following of respected developers who consider it one), the SOLID principles, well-known and venerable tools, even version control in a worst case and truly nightmarish scenario.  Our protagonist is frustrated that he isn't doing things the "proper" way - a way he's spent personal time digesting and learning about and, more importantly, a way that some of the top developers in the industry advocate - and turns to a forum to ask the advice of his peers. Invariably the answer I, in the guise of the concerned newbie, will receive is that A) I don't know anything and should just shut my mouth and sling code the bad way like everybody else on the team, and B) These "best practices" are fade or a joke, and the only thing that matters is shipping software to your customers. I am here today to say that anyone who says this, or anything like it, is not only full of crap but indicative of exactly the type of “developer” that has helped to give our industry a bad name.  Here is why: One Who Knows Nothing, Understands Nothing On one hand, you have the cognoscenti of the .NET development world.  Guys like James Avery, Jeremy Miller, Ayende Rahien and Rob Conery; all well-respected and noted programmers that are pretty much our version of celebrities.  These guys write blogs, books, and post videos outlining the "correct" way of writing software to make sure it not only works but is maintainable and extensible and a joy to work with.  They tout the virtues of the SOLID principles, or of using TDD/BDD, or using a mature ORM like NHibernate, Subsonic or even Entity Framework. On the other hand, you have Joe Everyman, Lead Software Developer at Initrode Corporation - in our hypothetical story Joe is the junior developer's new boss.  Joe's been with Initrode for 10 years, starting as the company’s very first programmer and over the years building up a little fiefdom of his own until at the present he’s in charge of all Initrode’s software development.  Joe writes code the same way he always has, without bothering to learn much, if anything.  He looked at NHibernate once and found it was "too hard", so he uses a primitive implementation of the TableDataGateway pattern as a wrapper around SqlClient.SqlConnection and SqlClient.SqlCommand instead of an actual ORM (or, in a better case scenario, has created his own ORM); the thought of using LINQ or Entity Framework or really anything other than his own hastily homebrew solution has never occurred to him.  He doesn't understand TDD and considers “testing” to be using the .NET debugger to step through code, or simply loading up an app and entering some values to see if it works.  He doesn't really understand SOLID, and he doesn't care to.  He's worked as a programmer for years, and that's all that counts.  Right?  WRONG. Who would you rather trust?  Someone with years of experience and who writes books, creates well-known software and is akin to a celebrity, or someone with no credibility outside their own minute environment who throws around their clout and company seniority as the "proof" of their ability?  Joe Everyman may have years of experience at Initrode as a programmer, and says to do things "his way" but someone like Jeremy Miller or Ayende Rahien have years of experience at companies just like Initrode, THEY know ten times more than Joe Everyman knows or could ever hope to know, and THEY say to do things "this way". Here's another way of thinking about it: If you wanted to get into politics and needed advice on the best way to do it, would you rather listen to the mayor of Hicktown, USA or Barack Obama?  One is a small-time nobody while the other is very well-known and, as such, would probably have much more accurate and beneficial advice. NOTE: The selection of Barack Obama as an example in no way, shape, or form suggests a political affiliation or political bent to this post or blog, and no political innuendo should be mistakenly read from it; the intent was merely to compare a small-time persona with a well-known persona in a non-software field.  Feel free to replace the name "Barack Obama" with any well-known Congressman, Senator or US President of your choice. DIY Considered Harmful I will say right now that the homebrew development environment is the WORST one for an aspiring programmer, because it relies on nothing outside it's own little box - no useful skill outside of the small pond.  If you are forced to use some half-baked, homebrew ORM created by your Director of Software, you are not learning anything valuable you can take with you in the future; now, if you plan to stay at Initrode for 10 years like Joe Everyman, this is fine and dandy.  However if, like most of us, you want to advance your career outside a very narrow space you will do more harm than good by sticking it out in an environment where you, to be frank, know better than everybody else because you are aware of alternative and, in almost most cases, better tools for the job.  A junior developer who understands why the SOLID principles are good to follow, or why TDD is beneficial, or who knows that it's better to use NHibernate/Subsonic/EF/LINQ/well-known ORM versus some in-house one knows better than a senior developer with 20 years experience who doesn't understand any of that, plain and simple.  Anyone who disagrees is either a liar, or someone who, just like Joe Everyman, Lead Developer, relies on seniority and tenure rather than adapting their knowledge as things evolve. In many cases, the Joe Everymans of the world act this way out of fear - they cannot possibly fathom that a “junior” could know more than them; after all, they’ve spent 10 or more years in the same company, doing the same job, cranking out the same shoddy software.  And here comes a newbie who hasn’t spent 10+ years doing the same things, with a fresh and often radical take on the craft, and Joe Everyman is afraid he might have to put some real effort into his career again instead of just pointing to his 10 years of service at Initrode as “proof” that he’s good, or that he might have to learn something new to improve; in most cases the problem is Joe Everyman, and by extension Initrode itself, has a mentality of just being “good enough”, and mediocrity is the rule of the day. A Thorn Bush is No Place for a Phoenix My advice is that if you work on a team where they don't use the best practices that some of the most famous developers in our field say is the "right" way to do things (and have legions of people who agree), and YOU are aware of these practices and can see why they work, then LEAVE the company.  Find a company where they DO care about quality, and craftsmanship, otherwise you will never be happy.  There is no point in "dumbing" yourself down to the level of your co-workers and slinging code without care to craftsmanship.  In 95% of these situations there will be no point in bringing it to the attention of Joe Everyman because he won't listen; he might even get upset that someone is trying to "upstage" him and fire the newbie, and replace someone with loads of untapped potential with a drone that will just nod affirmatively and grind out the tasks assigned without question. Find a company that has people smart enough to listen to the "best and brightest", and be happy.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste away in a job working for ignorant people.  At the end of the day software development IS a craft, and a level of craftsmanship is REQUIRED for any serious professional.  When you have knowledgeable people with the credibility to back it up saying one thing, and small-time people who are, to put it bluntly, nobodies in the field saying and doing something totally different because they can't comprehend it, leave the nobodies to their own devices to fade into obscurity.  Work for a company that uses REAL software engineering techniques and really cares about craftsmanship.  The biggest issue affecting our career, and the reason software development has never been the respected, white-collar career it was meant to be, is because hacks and charlatans can pass themselves off as professional programmers without following a lick of good advice from programmers much better at the craft than they are.  These modern day snake-oil salesmen entrench themselves in companies by hoodwinking non-technical businesspeople and customers with their shoddy wares, end up in senior/lead/executive positions, and push their lack of knowledge on everybody unfortunate enough to work with/for/under them, crushing any dissent or voices of reason and change under their tyrannical heel and leaving behind a trail of dismayed and, often, unemployed junior developers who were made examples of to keep up the facade and avoid the shadow of doubt being cast upon them. To sum this up another way: If you surround yourself with learned people, you will learn.  Surround yourself with ignorant people who can't, as the saying goes, see the forest through the trees, and you'll learn nothing of any real value.  There is more to software development than just writing code, and the end goal should not be just "shipping software", it should be shipping software that is extensible, maintainable, and above all else software whose creation has broadened your knowledge in some capacity, even if a minor one.  An eager newbie who knows theory and thirsts for knowledge can easily be moulded and taught the advanced topics, but the same can't be said of someone who only cares about the finish line.  This industry needs more people espousing the benefits of software craftsmanship and proper software engineering techniques, and less Joe Everymans who are unwilling to adapt or foster new ways of thinking. Conclusion - I Cast “Protection from Fire” I am fairly certain this post will spark some controversy and might even invite the flames.  Please keep in mind these are opinions and nothing more.  A little healthy rant and subsequent flamewar can be good for the soul once in a while.  To paraphrase The Godfather: It helps to get rid of the bad blood.

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  • Table Variables: an empirical approach.

    - by Phil Factor
    It isn’t entirely a pleasant experience to publish an article only to have it described on Twitter as ‘Horrible’, and to have it criticized on the MVP forum. When this happened to me in the aftermath of publishing my article on Temporary tables recently, I was taken aback, because these critics were experts whose views I respect. What was my crime? It was, I think, to suggest that, despite the obvious quirks, it was best to use Table Variables as a first choice, and to use local Temporary Tables if you hit problems due to these quirks, or if you were doing complex joins using a large number of rows. What are these quirks? Well, table variables have advantages if they are used sensibly, but this requires some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. You can be hit by a badly-performing join involving a table variable. Table Variables are a compromise, and this compromise doesn’t always work out well. Explicit indexes aren’t allowed on Table Variables, so one cannot use covering indexes or non-unique indexes. The query optimizer has to make assumptions about the data rather than using column distribution statistics when a table variable is involved in a join, because there aren’t any column-based distribution statistics on a table variable. It assumes a reasonably even distribution of data, and is likely to have little idea of the number of rows in the table variables that are involved in queries. However complex the heuristics that are used might be in determining the best way of executing a SQL query, and they most certainly are, the Query Optimizer is likely to fail occasionally with table variables, under certain circumstances, and produce a Query Execution Plan that is frightful. The experienced developer or DBA will be on the lookout for this sort of problem. In this blog, I’ll be expanding on some of the tests I used when writing my article to illustrate the quirks, and include a subsequent example supplied by Kevin Boles. A simplified example. We’ll start out by illustrating a simple example that shows some of these characteristics. We’ll create two tables filled with random numbers and then see how many matches we get between the two tables. We’ll forget indexes altogether for this example, and use heaps. We’ll try the same Join with two table variables, two table variables with OPTION (RECOMPILE) in the JOIN clause, and with two temporary tables. It is all a bit jerky because of the granularity of the timing that isn’t actually happening at the millisecond level (I used DATETIME). However, you’ll see that the table variable is outperforming the local temporary table up to 10,000 rows. Actually, even without a use of the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint, it is doing well. What happens when your table size increases? The table variable is, from around 30,000 rows, locked into a very bad execution plan unless you use OPTION (RECOMPILE) to provide the Query Analyser with a decent estimation of the size of the table. However, if it has the OPTION (RECOMPILE), then it is smokin’. Well, up to 120,000 rows, at least. It is performing better than a Temporary table, and in a good linear fashion. What about mixed table joins, where you are joining a temporary table to a table variable? You’d probably expect that the query analyzer would throw up its hands and produce a bad execution plan as if it were a table variable. After all, it knows nothing about the statistics in one of the tables so how could it do any better? Well, it behaves as if it were doing a recompile. And an explicit recompile adds no value at all. (we just go up to 45000 rows since we know the bigger picture now)   Now, if you were new to this, you might be tempted to start drawing conclusions. Beware! We’re dealing with a very complex beast: the Query Optimizer. It can come up with surprises What if we change the query very slightly to insert the results into a Table Variable? We change nothing else and just measure the execution time of the statement as before. Suddenly, the table variable isn’t looking so much better, even taking into account the time involved in doing the table insert. OK, if you haven’t used OPTION (RECOMPILE) then you’re toast. Otherwise, there isn’t much in it between the Table variable and the temporary table. The table variable is faster up to 8000 rows and then not much in it up to 100,000 rows. Past the 8000 row mark, we’ve lost the advantage of the table variable’s speed. Any general rule you may be formulating has just gone for a walk. What we can conclude from this experiment is that if you join two table variables, and can’t use constraints, you’re going to need that Option (RECOMPILE) hint. Count Dracula and the Horror Join. These tables of integers provide a rather unreal example, so let’s try a rather different example, and get stuck into some implicit indexing, by using constraints. What unusual words are contained in the book ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker? Here we get a table of all the common words in the English language (60,387 of them) and put them in a table. We put them in a Table Variable with the word as a primary key, a Table Variable Heap and a Table Variable with a primary key. We then take all the distinct words used in the book ‘Dracula’ (7,558 of them). We then create a table variable and insert into it all those uncommon words that are in ‘Dracula’. i.e. all the words in Dracula that aren’t matched in the list of common words. To do this we use a left outer join, where the right-hand value is null. The results show a huge variation, between the sublime and the gorblimey. If both tables contain a Primary Key on the columns we join on, and both are Table Variables, it took 33 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and the other is a heap, and both are Table Variables, it took 46 Ms. If both Table Variables use a unique constraint, then the query takes 36 Ms. If neither table contains a Primary Key and both are Table Variables, it took 116383 Ms. Yes, nearly two minutes!! If both tables contain a Primary Key, one is a Table Variables and the other is a temporary table, it took 113 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and both are Temporary Tables, it took 56 Ms.If both tables are temporary tables and both have primary keys, it took 46 Ms. Here we see table variables which are joined on their primary key again enjoying a  slight performance advantage over temporary tables. Where both tables are table variables and both are heaps, the query suddenly takes nearly two minutes! So what if you have two heaps and you use option Recompile? If you take the rogue query and add the hint, then suddenly, the query drops its time down to 76 Ms. If you add unique indexes, then you've done even better, down to half that time. Here are the text execution plans.So where have we got to? Without drilling down into the minutiae of the execution plans we can begin to create a hypothesis. If you are using table variables, and your tables are relatively small, they are faster than temporary tables, but as the number of rows increases you need to do one of two things: either you need to have a primary key on the column you are using to join on, or else you need to use option (RECOMPILE) If you try to execute a query that is a join, and both tables are table variable heaps, you are asking for trouble, well- slow queries, unless you give the table hint once the number of rows has risen past a point (30,000 in our first example, but this varies considerably according to context). Kevin’s Skew In describing the table-size, I used the term ‘relatively small’. Kevin Boles produced an interesting case where a single-row table variable produces a very poor execution plan when joined to a very, very skewed table. In the original, pasted into my article as a comment, a column consisted of 100000 rows in which the key column was one number (1) . To this was added eight rows with sequential numbers up to 9. When this was joined to a single-tow Table Variable with a key of 2 it produced a bad plan. This problem is unlikely to occur in real usage, and the Query Optimiser team probably never set up a test for it. Actually, the skew can be slightly less extreme than Kevin made it. The following test showed that once the table had 54 sequential rows in the table, then it adopted exactly the same execution plan as for the temporary table and then all was well. Undeniably, real data does occasionally cause problems to the performance of joins in Table Variables due to the extreme skew of the distribution. We've all experienced Perfectly Poisonous Table Variables in real live data. As in Kevin’s example, indexes merely make matters worse, and the OPTION (RECOMPILE) trick does nothing to help. In this case, there is no option but to use a temporary table. However, one has to note that once the slight de-skew had taken place, then the plans were identical across a huge range. Conclusions Where you need to hold intermediate results as part of a process, Table Variables offer a good alternative to temporary tables when used wisely. They can perform faster than a temporary table when the number of rows is not great. For some processing with huge tables, they can perform well when only a clustered index is required, and when the nature of the processing makes an index seek very effective. Table Variables are scoped to the batch or procedure and are unlikely to hang about in the TempDB when they are no longer required. They require no explicit cleanup. Where the number of rows in the table is moderate, you can even use them in joins as ‘Heaps’, unindexed. Beware, however, since, as the number of rows increase, joins on Table Variable heaps can easily become saddled by very poor execution plans, and this must be cured either by adding constraints (UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY) or by adding the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint if this is impossible. Occasionally, the way that the data is distributed prevents the efficient use of Table Variables, and this will require using a temporary table instead. Tables Variables require some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. If you are not prepared to do any performance monitoring of your code or fine-tuning, and just want to pummel out stuff that ‘just runs’ without considering namby-pamby stuff such as indexes, then stick to Temporary tables. If you are likely to slosh about large numbers of rows in temporary tables without considering the niceties of processing just what is required and no more, then temporary tables provide a safer and less fragile means-to-an-end for you.

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  • Who writes the words? A rant with graphs.

    - by Roger Hart
    If you read my rant, you'll know that I'm getting a bit of a bee in my bonnet about user interface text. But rather than just yelling about the way the world should be (short version: no UI text would suck), it seemed prudent to actually gather some data. Rachel Potts has made an excellent first foray, by conducting a series of interviews across organizations about how they write user interface text. You can read Rachel's write up here. She presents the facts as she found them, and doesn't editorialise. The result is insightful, but impartial isn't really my style. So here's a rant with graphs. My method, and how it sucked I sent out a short survey. Survey design is one of my hobby-horses, and since some smartarse in the comments will mention it if I don't, I'll step up and confess: I did not design this one well. It was potentially ambiguous, implicitly excluded people, and since I only really advertised it on Twitter and a couple of mailing lists the sample will be chock full of biases. Regardless, these were the questions: What do you do? Select the option that best describes your role What kind of software does your organization make? (optional) In your organization, who writes the text on your software user interfaces? (for example: button names, static text, tooltips, and so on) Tick all that apply. In your organization who is responsible for user interface text? Who "owns" it? The most glaring issue (apart from question 3 being a bit broken) was that I didn't make it clear that I was asking about applications. Desktop, mobile, or web, I wouldn't have minded. In fact, it might have been interesting to categorize and compare. But a few respondents commented on the seeming lack of relevance, since they didn't really make software. There were some other issues too. It wasn't the best survey. So, you know, pinch of salt time with what follows. Despite this, there were 100 or so respondents. This post covers the overview, and you can look at the raw data in this spreadsheet What did people do? Boring graph number one: I wasn't expecting that. Given I pimped the survey on twitter and a couple of Tech Comms discussion lists, I was more banking on and even Content Strategy/Tech Comms split. What the "Others" specified: Three people chipped in with Technical Writer. Author, apparently, doesn't cut it. There's a "nobody reads the instructions" joke in there somewhere, I'm sure. There were a couple of hybrid roles, including Tech Comms and Testing, which sounds gruelling and thankless. There was also, an Intranet Manager, a Creative Director, a Consultant, a CTO, an Information Architect, and a Translator. That's a pretty healthy slice through the industry. Who wrote UI text? Boring graph number two: Annoyingly, I made this a "tick all that apply" question, so I can't make crude and inflammatory generalizations about percentages. This is more about who gets involved in user interface wording. So don't panic about the number of developers writing UI text. First off, it just means they're involved. Second, they might be good at it. What? It could happen. Ours are involved - they write a placeholder and flag it to me for changes. Sometimes I don't make any. It's also not surprising that there's so much UX in the mix. Some of that will be people taking care, and crafting an understandable interface. Some of it will be whatever text goes on the wireframe making it into production. I'm going to assume that's what happened at eBay, when their iPhone app purportedly shipped with the placeholder text "Some crappy content goes here". Ahem. Listing all 17 "other" responses would make this post lengthy indeed, but you can read them in the raw data spreadsheet. The award for the approach that sounds the most like a good idea yet carries the highest risk of ending badly goes to whoever offered up "External agencies using focus groups". If you're reading this, and that actually works, leave a comment. I'm fascinated. Who owned UI text Stop. Bar chart time: Wow. Let's cut to the chase, and by "chase", I mean those inflammatory generalizations I was talking about: In around 60% of cases the person responsible for user interface text probably lacks the relevant expertise. Even in the categories I count as being likely to have relevant skills (Marketing Copywriters, Content Strategists, Technical Authors, and User Experience Designers) there's a case for each role being unsuited, as you'll see in Rachel's blog post So it's not as simple as my headline. Does that mean that you personally, Mr Developer reading this, write bad button names? Of course not. I know nothing about you. It rather implies that as a category, the majority of people looking after UI text have neither communication nor user experience as their primary skill set, and as such will probably only be good at this by happy accident. I don't have a way of measuring those frequency of those accidents. What the Others specified: I don't know who owns it. I assume the project manager is responsible. "copywriters" when they wish to annoy me. the client's web maintenance person, often PR or MarComm That last one chills me to the bone. Still, at least nobody said "the work experience kid". You can see the rest in the spreadsheet. My overwhelming impression here is of user interface text as an unloved afterthought. There were fewer "nobody" responses than I expected, and a much broader split. But the relative predominance of developers owning and writing UI text suggests to me that organizations don't see it as something worth dedicating attention to. If true, that's bothersome. Because the words on the screen, particularly the names of things, are fundamental to the ability to understand an use software. It's also fascinating that Technical Authors and Content Strategists are neck and neck. For such a nascent discipline, Content Strategy appears to have made a mark on software development. Or my sample is skewed. But it feels like a bit of validation for my rant: Content Strategy is eating Tech Comms' lunch. That's not a bad thing. Well, not if the UI text is getting done well. And that's the caveat to this whole post. I couldn't care less who writes UI text, provided they consider the user and don't suck at it. I care that it may be falling by default to people poorly disposed to doing it right. And I care about that because so much user interface text sucks. The most interesting question Was one I forgot to ask. It's this: Does your organization have technical authors/writers? Like a lot of survey data, that doesn't tell you much on its own. But once we get a bit dimensional, it become more interesting. So taken with the other questions, this would have let me find out what I really want to know: What proportion of organizations have Tech Comms professionals but don't use them for UI text? Who writes UI text in their place? Why this happens? It's possible (feasible is another matter) that hundreds of companies have tech authors who don't work on user interfaces because they've empirically discovered that someone else, say the Marketing Copywriter, is better at it. And once we've all finished laughing, I'll point out that I've met plenty of tech authors who just aren't used to thinking about users at the point of need in the way UI text and embedded user assistance require. If you've got what I regard, perhaps unfairly, as the bad kind of tech author - the old-school kind with the thousand-page pdf and the grammar obsession - if you've got one of those then you probably are better off getting the UX folk or the copywriters to do your UI text. At the very least, they'll derive terminology from user research.

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  • Should I choose KVM/XEN over OpenVZ or use them together?

    - by Krystian
    I've got a dual xeon e5504 server, with [for now] only 8GB of ram. Storage is'n impressive either: 3x 146GB sas in raid5 + 500GB sata drives. Currently it works as a development server, but it's over speced for our needs and since our development methods changed through last 2 years we decided it will work as a production system for some of our applications + we would like to have a separate system for testing/research. Our apps are mainly web apps deployed on tomcats [plural as some of the apps require older versions] and connected to Postgres. I would like to have a production system, where only httpd+tomcat+db are setup and nothing else runs there. Sterile system. Apart from that, I would like a test system, where I can play with different JVM settings, deploy my test apps, play with tomcat/httpd settings and restart them without interfering with the production system. Apart from that, I would like to be able to play with different linux flavors, with newer kernels to test how they work etc. I know, this is not possible with OpenVZ and I would have to choose KVM for that. I am thinking about merging the two, and setting up a KVM to be able to work with different systems [linux only to be frank] + use openVZ to setup separate machines for my development needs. I would simply go with that, but reading here and there about the performance impact full virtualization has over containers and looking at the specs of my server makes me think twice about it. I don't want to loose too much performance, especially because of the nature of my apps [few JVMs running at the same time]. It will be my first time with virtualization, apart from using desktop virtualbox/vmserver. Although I am a fast learner I don't want to mess with the main system so much that it will break the production apps or make them crawl. Although they are more or less internal apps and they don't produce much load, they need to be stable. I've read, that KVM host is a normal linux installation and it allows to run normal processes on it. If that is so, does it allow to run openVZ as well? I mean... can I have KVM and OpenVZ running on the same system/kernel? Or do I have to setup another system to run OpenVZ containers? How much performance impact can this have for me? Will my hardware suffice? oh and one more thing... unfortunately I'm quite limited with the funds... I'm looking for a free solution only :/

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  • Windows Phone 7 Prototype 001: Speech Recognition on WP7

    At some point in the future it will be awesome when you can just tell your computer what to do and it does it - without typing to help those of us with a blistering 11 WPM hunk and peck technique. Siri, a mobile digital assistant using speech recognition was voted best tech at SXSW. I dont know about that one. Although, I'm sure it will get better when Apple rebuilds it and  bundles on iPhone 5. So how would you do that on WP7? There have been some videos floating around showing Bing with some voice control so obviously the phone has speech recognition. So what options are there: System.Speech? Not included in WP7/SL Nuance software like Siri? No WP7/SL version yet. Invoking the SAPI dlls on the phone? No automation factory in WP7 SL. Web services using System.Speech and mic on the phone? YES! The last one was my least favorite but that works for now. I built a quick sample app to show how to do text-to-speech and speech recognition on WP7.   @eklimczak will not be happy with the developer designed UI. In this sample there is web service with provides access to the system.speech APIs in .NET. Basically its just passing around byte arrays. On the phone its using the XNA audio frameworks to play the text-to-speech stream and to record using the microphone. The code is pretty simple and you can download from the link at the end of this post. The only things to note are adjusting the WCF config to handle larger byte uploads and the Microphone API is a little weird with that 1 second buffer. It would be nice if you could just to mic.start and mic.end which would return an array of bytes instead of managing your own stream inside the buffer ready callback. Couple of downsides to this approach: Recoding from the phone has some static. Could be my code or the my mic is bad / not calibrated right. Having to make web service calls instead of local access is not ideal (Microsoft, please add an API for the SAPI dlls) Although in the context of an app like Siri its not so bad since you need to do web service lookups to get data back Speech recognition quality really depends on either a) a limited grammar set like that pizza grammar in the sample or b) training the recognizer. For the latter it would be annoying to have users train the system. Using the System.Speech stuff youd have to have a profile for each user. So until Microsoft adds some speech client APIs on the phone or Nuance releases a wp7 product, this is a decent workaround. In the future Id like to build something similar to Siri. I shall call it Iris in homage. Im a big fan of mobile speech apps because frankly its just not safe to Google while driving. Since some of my designer co-workers have been posting UI sketches for WP7, Id like to start posting some code prototypes for things I try out on the phone. That will probably last 2 weeks, but for the moment I have like 10 posts in the queue. Sample Code 100% guaranteed to work on my emulatorDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Batman

    - by Pinal Dave
    Batman is one of the darkest superheroes in the fantasy canon.  He does not come to his powers through any sort of magical coincidence or radioactive insect, but through a lot of psychological scarring caused by witnessing the death of his parents.  Despite his dark back story, he possesses a lot of admirable abilities that I feel bear comparison to developers. Batman has the distinct advantage that his alter ego, Bruce Wayne is a millionaire (or billionaire in today’s reboots).  This means that he can spend his time working on his athletic abilities, building a secret lair, and investing his money in cool tools.  This might not be true for developers (well, most developers), but I still think there are many parallels. So how are developers like Batman? Well, read on my list of reasons. Develop Skills Batman works on his skills.  He didn’t get the strength to scale Gotham’s skyscrapers by inheriting his powers or suffering an industrial accident.  Developers also hone their skills daily.  They might not be doing pull-ups and scaling buldings, but I think their skills are just as impressive. Clear Goals Batman is driven to build a better Gotham.  He knows that the criminal who killed his parents was a small-time thief, not a super villain – so he has larger goals in mind than simply chasing one villain.  He wants his city as a whole to be better.  Developers are also driven to make things better.  It can be easy to get hung up on one problem, but in the end it is best to focus on the well-being of the system as a whole. Ultimate Teamplayers Batman is the hero Gotham needs – even when that means appearing to be the bad guys.  Developers probably know that feeling well.  Batman takes the fall for a crime he didn’t commit, and developers often have to deliver bad news about the limitations of their networks and servers.  It’s not always a job filled with glory and thanks, but someone has to do it. Always Ready Batman and the Boy Scouts have this in common – they are always prepared.  Let’s add developers to this list.  Batman has an amazing tool belt with gadgets and gizmos, and let’s not even get into all the functions of the Batmobile!  Developers’ skills might be the knowledge and skills they have developed, not tools they can carry in a utility belt, but that doesn’t make them any less impressive. 100% Dedication Bruce Wayne cultivates the personality of a playboy, never keeping the same girlfriend for long and spending his time partying.  Even though he hides it, his driving force is his deep concern and love for his friends and the city as a whole.  Developers also care a lot about their company and employees – even when it is driving them crazy.  You do your best work when you care about your job on a personal level. Quality Output Batman believes the city deserves to be saved.  The citizens might have a love-hate relationship with both Batman and Bruce Wayne, and employees might not always appreciate developers.  Batman and developers, though, keep working for the best of everyone. I hope you are all enjoying reading about developers-as-superheroes as much as I am enjoying writing about them.  Please tell me how else developers are like Superheroes in the comments – especially if you know any developers who are faster than a speeding bullet and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Developer, Superhero

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  • More SQL Smells

    - by Nick Harrison
    Let's continue exploring some of the SQL Smells from Phil's list. He has been putting together. Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) This is a great example poking holes in the whole theory of "If it works it's not broken" Queries will this probably will generally work and give the correct response. In fact, without careful analysis, you probably may be completely oblivious that there is even a problem. This subtle little problem will needlessly complicate queries and slow them down regardless of the indexes applied. Consider this example: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Page](     [PageId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [Title] [varchar](75) NOT NULL,     [Sequence] [int] NOT NULL,     [ThemeId] [int] NOT NULL,     [CustomCss] [text] NOT NULL,     [CustomScript] [text] NOT NULL,     [PageGroupId] [int] NOT NULL;  CREATE PROCEDURE PageSelectBySequence ( @sequenceMin smallint , @sequenceMax smallint ) AS BEGIN SELECT [PageId] , [Title] , [Sequence] , [ThemeId] , [CustomCss] , [CustomScript] , [PageGroupId] FROM [CMS].[dbo].[Page] WHERE Sequence BETWEEN @sequenceMin AND @SequenceMax END  Note that the Sequence column is defined as int while the sequence parameter is defined as a small int. The problem is that the database may have to do a lot of type conversions to evaluate the query. In some cases, this may even negate the indexes that you have in place. Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) There are two main problems here. The first is a little subjective, since this is a non-standard way of expressing the query, it is harder to understand. The other problem is much more objective and potentially problematic. You are taking much of the control away from the optimizer. Written properly, such a query may well out perform a corresponding query written with traditional joins. More likely than not, performance will degrade. Whenever you assume that you know better than the optimizer, you will most likely be wrong. This is the fundmental problem with any hint. Consider a query like this:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , ( SELECT EffectName FROM dbo.Effect WHERE EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId ) AS EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId  This can and should be written as:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId INNER JOIN dbo.Effect ON dbo.Effects.EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId  The correlated query may just as easily show up in the where clause. It's not a good idea in the select clause or the where clause. Few or No comments. This one is a bit more complicated and controversial. All comments are not created equal. Some comments are helpful and need to be included. Other comments are not necessary and may indicate a problem. I tend to follow the rule of thumb that comments that explain why are good. Comments that explain how are bad. Many people may be shocked to hear the idea of a bad comment, but hear me out. If a comment is needed to explain what is going on or how it works, the logic is too complex and needs to be simplified. Comments that explain why are good. Comments may explain why the sql is needed are good. Comments that explain where the sql is used are good. Comments that explain how tables are related should not be needed if the sql is well written. If they are needed, you need to consider reworking the sql or simplify your data model. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Calling a function in the where clause will often negate the indexing strategy. The function will be called for every record considered. This will often a force a full table scan on the tables affected. Calling a function will not guarantee that there is a full table scan, but there is a good chance that it will. If you find that you often need to write queries using a particular function, you may need to add a column to the table that has the function already applied.

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  • Reconciling the Boy Scout Rule and Opportunistic Refactoring with code reviews

    - by t0x1n
    I am a great believer in the Boy Scout Rule: Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out." No matter who the original author was, what if we always made some effort, no matter how small, to improve the module. What would be the result? I think if we all followed that simple rule, we'd see the end of the relentless deterioration of our software systems. Instead, our systems would gradually get better and better as they evolved. We'd also see teams caring for the system as a whole, rather than just individuals caring for their own small little part. I am also a great believer in the related idea of Opportunistic Refactoring: Although there are places for some scheduled refactoring efforts, I prefer to encourage refactoring as an opportunistic activity, done whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever. What this means is that at any time someone sees some code that isn't as clear as it should be, they should take the opportunity to fix it right there and then - or at least within a few minutes Particularly note the following excerpt from the refactoring article: I'm wary of any development practices that cause friction for opportunistic refactoring ... My sense is that most teams don't do enough refactoring, so it's important to pay attention to anything that is discouraging people from doing it. To help flush this out be aware of any time you feel discouraged from doing a small refactoring, one that you're sure will only take a minute or two. Any such barrier is a smell that should prompt a conversation. So make a note of the discouragement and bring it up with the team. At the very least it should be discussed during your next retrospective. Where I work, there is one development practice that causes heavy friction - Code Review (CR). Whenever I change anything that's not in the scope of my "assignment" I'm being rebuked by my reviewers that I'm making the change harder to review. This is especially true when refactoring is involved, since it makes "line by line" diff comparison difficult. This approach is the standard here, which means opportunistic refactoring is seldom done, and only "planned" refactoring (which is usually too little, too late) takes place, if at all. I claim that the benefits are worth it, and that 3 reviewers will work a little harder (to actually understand the code before and after, rather than look at the narrow scope of which lines changed - the review itself would be better due to that alone) so that the next 100 developers reading and maintaining the code will benefit. When I present this argument my reviewers, they say they have no problem with my refactoring, as long as it's not in the same CR. However I claim this is a myth: (1) Most of the times you only realize what and how you want to refactor when you're in the midst of your assignment. As Martin Fowler puts it: As you add the functionality, you realize that some code you're adding contains some duplication with some existing code, so you need to refactor the existing code to clean things up... You may get something working, but realize that it would be better if the interaction with existing classes was changed. Take that opportunity to do that before you consider yourself done. (2) Nobody is going to look favorably at you releasing "refactoring" CRs you were not supposed to do. A CR has a certain overhead and your manager doesn't want you to "waste your time" on refactoring. When it's bundled with the change you're supposed to do, this issue is minimized. The issue is exacerbated by Resharper, as each new file I add to the change (and I can't know in advance exactly which files would end up changed) is usually littered with errors and suggestions - most of which are spot on and totally deserve fixing. The end result is that I see horrible code, and I just leave it there. Ironically, I feel that fixing such code not only will not improve my standings, but actually lower them and paint me as the "unfocused" guy who wastes time fixing things nobody cares about instead of doing his job. I feel bad about it because I truly despise bad code and can't stand watching it, let alone call it from my methods! Any thoughts on how I can remedy this situation ?

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  • Tuning Red Gate: #3 of Lots

    - by Grant Fritchey
    I'm drilling down into the metrics about SQL Server itself available to me in the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor to see what's up with our two problematic servers. In the previous post I'd noticed that rg-sql01 had quite a few CPU spikes. So one of the first things I want to check there is how much CPU is getting used by SQL Server itself. It's possible we're looking at some other process using up all the CPU Nope, It's SQL Server. I compared this to the rg-sql02 server: You can see that there is a more, consistently low set of CPU counters there. I clearly need to look at rg-sql01 and capture more specific data around the queries running on it to identify which ones are causing these CPU spikes. I always like to look at the Batch Requests/sec on a server, not because it's an indication of a problem, but because it gives you some idea of the load. Just how much is this server getting hit? Here are rg-sql01 and rg-sql02: Of the two, clearly rg-sql01 has a lot of activity. Remember though, that's all this is a measure of, activity. It doesn't suggest anything other than what it says, the number of requests coming in. But it's the kind of thing you want to know in order to understand how the system is used. Are you seeing a correlation between the number of requests and the CPU usage, or a reverse correlation, the number of requests drops as the CPU spikes? See, it's useful. Some of the details you can look at are Compilations/sec, Compilations/Batch and Recompilations/sec. These give you some idea of how the cache is getting used within the system. None of these showed anything interesting on either server. One metric that I like (even though I know it can be controversial) is the Page Life Expectancy. On the average server I expect see a series of mountains as the PLE climbs then drops due to a data load or something along those lines. That's not the case here: Those spikes back in January suggest that the servers weren't really being used much. The PLE on the rg-sql01 seems to be somewhat consistent growing to 3 hours or so then dropping, but the rg-sql02 PLE looks like it might be all over the map. Instead of continuing to look at this high level gathering data view, I'm going to drill down on rg-sql02 and see what it's done for the last week: And now we begin to see where we might have an issue. Memory on this system is getting flushed every 1/2 hour or so. I'm going to check another metric, scans: Whoa! I'm going back to the system real quick to look at some disk information again for rg-sql02. Here is the average disk queue length on the server: and the transfers Right, I think I have a guess as to what's up here. We're seeing memory get flushed constantly and we're seeing lots of scans. The disks are queuing, especially that F drive, and there are lots of requests that correspond to the scans and the memory flushes. In short, we've got queries that are scanning the data, a lot, so we either have bad queries or bad indexes. I'm going back to the server overview for rg-sql02 and check the Top 10 expensive queries. I'm modifying it to show me the last 3 days and the totals, so I'm not looking at some maintenance routine that ran 10 minutes ago and is skewing the results: OK. I need to look into these queries that are getting executed this much. They're generating a lot of reads, but which queries are generating the most reads: Ow, all still going against the same database. This is where I'm going to temporarily leave SQL Monitor. What I want to do is connect up to the server, validate that the Warehouse database is using the F:\ drive (which I'll put money down it is) and then start seeing what's up with these queries. Part 1 of the Series Part 2 of the Series

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  • Book review (Book 6) - Wikinomics

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here. The book I chose for November 2011 was: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott   Why I chose this Book: I’ve heard a lot about this book - was one of the “must read” kind of business books (many of which are very “fluffy”) and supposedly deals with collaborating using technology - so I want to see what it says about collaborative efforts and how I can leverage them. What I learned: I really disliked this book. I’ve never been a fan of the latest “business book”, and sadly that’s what this felt like to me. A “business book” is what I call a work that has a fairly simple concept to get across, and then proceeds to use various made-up terms, analogies and other mechanisms to fill hundreds of pages doing it. This perception is at my own – the book is pretty old, and these things go stale quickly. The author’s general point (at least what I took away from it) was: Open Source is good, proprietary is bad. Collaboration is the hallmark of successful companies. In my mind, you can save yourself the trouble of reading this work if you get these two concepts down. Don’t get me wrong – open source is awesome, and collaboration is a good thing, especially in places where it fits. But it’s not a panacea as the author seems to indicate. For instance, he continuously uses the example of MySpace to show a “2.0” company, which I think means that you can enter text as well as read it on a web page. All well and good. But we all know what happened to MySpace, and of course he missed the point entirely about this new web environment: low barriers to entry often mean low barriers to exit. And the open, collaborative company being the best model – well, I think we all know a certain computer company famous for phones and music that is arguably quite successful, and is probably one of the most closed, non-collaborative (at least with its customers) on the planet. So that sort of takes away that argument. The reality of business is far more complicated. Collaboration is an amazing tool, and should be leveraged heavily. However, at the end of the day, after you do your research you need to pick a strategy and stick with it. Asking thousands of people to assist you in building your product probably will not work well. Open Source is great – but some proprietary products are quite functional as well, have a long track record, are well supported, and will probably be upgraded. Everything has its place, so use what works where it is needed. There is no single answer, sadly. So did I waste my time reading the book? Did I make a bad choice? Not at all! Reading the opinions and thoughts of others is almost always useful, and it’s important to consider opinions other than your own. If nothing else, thinking through the process either convinces you that you are wrong, or helps you understand better why you are right.

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  • Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2003

    The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2003 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann and Armin Neudert. Track: Visual FoxPro and Linux This track consists of 4 sessions presented on one day in one sequence. Originally the Linux portion of this track was to be presented by Whil Hentzen, the well-known publisher, book author and confer-ence speaker. Unfortunately some illness prevented him from joining this DevCon. Rainer got the bad news only on early Friday morning. It was definitely to late to find a replacement among the already invited speaker on such a short notice. So Rainer decided to take over these "three sessions in a row" by himself with "a little help from his friends". He hired a coach for him for the weekend and prepared slides and sessions by himself - the originally planed slides and session material were still in USA. Rainer survived barely an endless disaster of C0000005's due to various wrong configuration settings... At the presentation Jochen Kirstätter helped massively with technical details regarding Linux whereas Rainer did the slides and the presentation. Gerold Lübben then presented the MySQL part - as originally planned. This track concentrated on the how to run Visual FoxPro applications on Linux machines with the help of a Windows emulator like Wine. As more and more people use Linux machines in production (and not just for running servers), more and more invitations to bid for a development job includes the requirement to run the application in a Linux environment. If you would like to participate in such submissions, then you should get familiar with the open source operating system Linux and the open source Data Base system MySQL. [...] These sessions provided a broad, complete overview of where Linux fits into the current computing landscape from the perspective of a VFP developer, where VFP can be used with Linux, and a conceptual plan for how to approach the incorporation of Linux into your day-to-day work. In order for you to be able to work with a Linux back end, you're going to need to know something about how Linux works. The best way involves a two-step process: First, plunk down a Linux workstation on your desk next to your Windows machine and develop some experience with the new OS.Second, once you have a basic level of comfort with Linux, gained through your experience on a workstation, leverage that knowledge and learn to connect to a Linux server from your Windows machine. This track showed both of these processes: What you can expect when you set up your Linux work-station, how to set it up, how to connect to your Windows network, how to fit VFP into the mix, and even how you could use it to replace your Windows workstation in some cases. Also this track demonstrated how to connect to an existing Linux server, running MySQL or an another back end, and how to get your VFP apps talking to that back end data. This track also showed both of the positions you can take. Rainer disliked it wholeheartedly (the bad guy position in these talks) and Jochen loved it (the good guy and "typical Linux techie"-position we all love). These opposite position lasted for three sessions and both sides where shown with their Pros and Cons in live and lively discussions of the speakers (club banging was forbidden). Gerold Luebben showed how Visual Foxpro and MySQL can work together. MySQL is as one the most well known open SOURCE databases for nearly all platforms available. Particularly in eBusiness MySQL is well positioned and well known for its performance and its stability. Still we like Visual FoxPro more - for sure . [...]

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  • How to convert my backup.cmd into something I can run in Linux?

    - by blade19899
    Back in the day when i was using windows(and a noob at everything IT) i liked batch scripting so much that i wrote a lot of them and one i am pretty proud of that is my backup.cmd(see below). I am pretty basic with the linux bash sudo/apt-get/sl/ls/locate/updatedb/etc... I don't really know the full power of the terminal. If you see the code below can i get it to work under (Ubuntu)linux :) by rewriting some of the windows code with the linux equivalent (btw:this works under xp/vista/7 | dutch/english) @echo off title back it up :home cls echo ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» echo º º echo º typ A/B for the options º echo º º echo ÌÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͹ echo º º echo º "A"=backup options º echo º º echo º "B"=HARDDISK Options º echo º º echo º º echo ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍŒ set /p selection=Choose: Goto %selection% :A cls echo ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» echo º º echo º typ 1 to start that backup º echo º º echo ÌÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͹ echo º º echo º "A"=backup options º echo º È1=Documents,Pictures,Music,Videos,Downloads º echo º º echo º "B"=HARDDISK Options º echo º º echo ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍŒ set /p selection=Choose: Goto %selection% :B cls echo ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» echo º º echo º typ HD to start the disk check º echo º º echo ÌÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͹ echo º º echo º "A"=backup options º echo º º echo º "B"=HARDDISK Options º echo º ÈHD=find and repair bad sectors º echo º º echo ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍŒ set /p selection=Choose: Goto %selection% :1 cls if exist "%userprofile%\desktop" (set desk=desktop) else (set desk=Bureaublad) if exist "%userprofile%\documents" (set docs=documents) else (set docs=mijn documenten) if exist "%userprofile%\pictures" (set pics=pictures) else (echo cant find %userprofile%\pictures) if exist "%userprofile%\music" (set mus=music) else (echo cant find %userprofile%\music) if exist "%userprofile%\Videos" (set vids=videos) else (echo cant find %userprofile%\videos) if exist "%userprofile%\Downloads" (set down=downloads) else (echo cant find %userprofile%\Downloads) cls echo. examples (D:\) (D:\Backup) (D:\Backup\18-4-2011) echo. echo. if there is no "D:\backup" folder then the folder will be created echo. set drive= set /p drive=storage: echo start>>backup.log echo Name:%username%>>backup.log echo Date:%date%>>backup.log echo Time:%time%>>backup.log echo ========================================%docs%===========================================>>backup.log echo %docs% echo Source:"%userprofile%\%docs%" echo Destination:"%drive%\%username%\%docs%" echo %time%>>backup.log xcopy "%userprofile%\%docs%" "%drive%\%username%\%docs%" /E /I>>Backup.log echo 20%% cls echo ========================================"%pics%"=========================================>>backup.log echo "%pics%" echo Source:"%userprofile%\%pics%" echo Destination:"%drive%\%username%\%pics%" echo %time%>>backup.log xcopy "%userprofile%\%pics%" "%drive%\%username%\%pics%" /E /I>>Backup.log echo 40%% cls echo ========================================"%mus%"=========================================>>backup.log echo "%mus%" echo Source:"%userprofile%\%mus%" echo Destination:"%drive%\%username%\%mus%" echo %time%>>backup.log xcopy "%userprofile%\%mus%" "%drive%\%username%\%mus%" /E /I>>Backup.log echo 60%% cls echo ========================================"%vids%"========================================>>backup.log echo %vids% echo Source:"%userprofile%\%vids%" echo Destination:"%drive%\%username%\%vids%" echo %time%>>backup.log xcopy "%userprofile%\%vids%" "%drive%\%username%\%vids%" /E /I>>Backup.log echo 80%% cls echo ========================================"%down%"========================================>>backup.log echo "%down%" echo Source:"%userprofile%\%down%" echo Destination:"%drive%\%username%\%down%" echo %time%>>backup.log xcopy "%userprofile%\%down%" "%drive%\%username%\%down%" /E /I>>Backup.log echo end>>backup.log echo %username% %date% %time%>>backup.log echo 100%% cls echo backup Compleet copy "backup.log" "%drive%\%username%" del "backup.log" pushd "%drive%\%username%" echo close backup.log to continue with backup script "backup.log" echo press any key to retun to the main menu pause>nul goto :home :HD echo finds and repairs bad sectors echo typ in harddisk letter (C: D: E:) set HD= set /p HD=Hard Disk: chkdsk %HD% /F /R /X pause goto :home

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  • installArchives() failed: perl: warning: Setting locale failed.

    - by Alwin Doss
    I get the following error while updating ubuntu 12.04 LTS installArchives() failed: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory Preconfiguring packages ... perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory Preconfiguring packages ... perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory Preconfiguring packages ... perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory Preconfiguring packages ... (Reading database ... (Reading database ... 5%% (Reading database ... 10%% (Reading database ... 15%% (Reading database ... 20%% (Reading database ... 25%% (Reading database ... 30%% (Reading database ... 35%% (Reading database ... 40%% (Reading database ... 45%% (Reading database ... 50%% (Reading database ... 55%% (Reading database ... 60%% (Reading database ... 65%% (Reading database ... 70%% (Reading database ... 75%% (Reading database ... 80%% (Reading database ... 85%% (Reading database ... 90%% (Reading database ... 95%% (Reading database ... 100%% (Reading database ... 430284 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace libxml2-dev 2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.1 (using .../libxml2-dev_2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.2_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement libxml2-dev ... Preparing to replace libxml2 2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.1 (using .../libxml2_2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.2_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement libxml2 ... Preparing to replace gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad 0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2 (using .../gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad_0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2.1_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad ... Preparing to replace libgstreamer-plugins-bad0.10-0 0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2 (using .../libgstreamer-plugins-bad0.10-0_0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2.1_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement libgstreamer-plugins-bad0.10-0 ... Preparing to replace ubuntu-keyring 2011.11.21 (using .../ubuntu-keyring_2011.11.21.1_all.deb) ... /var/lib/dpkg/info/samba4.postinst: 14: /var/lib/dpkg/info/samba4.postinst: /usr/share/samba/setoption.pl: Permission denied dpkg: error processing samba4 (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 126

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  • Inside Red Gate - Experimenting In Public

    - by Simon Cooper
    Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem!

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